Behind the Scenes of a Literary Agency
Lucinda Halpern shared her latest publishing insights from this month. Read on to see her latest news, and if you’d like to receive her monthly newsletter directly in your inbox, sign up here.
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One of the questions I’m often asked is: what happens behind the scenes of a literary agency? The answer to that question has changed so drastically for Lucinda Literary in recent years. Our firm and the publishing industry—the way we work, the way we find talent—has shifted astronomically in such a short amount of time.
On March 19th of 2020, I was sitting in our midtown Manhattan office, surrounded by my colleagues much as I had been every day for the ten years before. We reviewed our inboxes for new talent, we corresponded with clients and publishers, we met editors for lunch, and called other editors afterwards to follow up on our submissions. On the best of days, we submerged ourselves in the heady process of book auctions—glued to our desks awaiting news of a deal. We vented the frustrations and humor of the job in person and with good measure.
After the line went dead on March 20th of 2020, agents and publishers—particularly those of us in New York City where sirens blared and emergency hospitals began to sprout up everywhere—feared for our health and our livelihoods. But the publishing business, it turns out, would change and grow in fascinating ways.
Authors were no longer on the road speaking or meeting with people. They were sitting at home, minds stirring over the message they wanted to share with the world, thinking now would be the right time to write a book. And many experts, including ones who would become our authors years later, began building social media platforms as a virtual way to connect with and serve an audience.
Readers spent more time reading, and they also engaged their children in the activity. Editors and agents, initially bearish on book buying, ended up buying books at high levels just as before. Publishers and agents found that they could collaborate just as much, if not more, from their homes. Many publishers ditched their midtown offices and T&E accounts while editors scattered outside of New York City.
We all learned a thing called Zoom! While it personally scared me at first, I soon found myself able to meet with writers all over the world, coaching them in virtual classes through a new educational division of the agency. It was the manifestation of a longing I’d always had: to turn the exclusive, opaque, and antiquated publishing industry on its head, and begin to impact writers at scale.
I even wrote a book based on those courses, which eventually became Get Signed. I had incredible supporters and role models for this: my authors at Lucinda Literary.
Nowadays, my agency looks very different in the best of ways. We’ve grown our number of agents—and therefore diversified our client list—with the ability to have a global team rather than just a New York one. Despite the absence of my wonderful teammates in the room with whom to share the rollercoaster ride, we mine for talent online together, seeking out emerging voices that are primed to make an impact on an audience.
This scouting includes researching self-published books that had first found audiences online, which we then sold in major deals. Books like Connecting Questions for Married Couples and Black Girls Must Die Exhausted had followed this route!
Referrals remain our bread and butter as they do for all agencies, which is why most of our ambitious first-time authors who got signed formed connections with others in our network. They found their way in through the side door, in addition to applying the traditional approach of blind querying.
Here’s what the pie chart of where we find talent looks like now:
In addition to our talent scouting efforts, we realized that ghostwriters, many of whom we now represent, became our greatest allies. And beyond the rewarding challenge of editing, selling, and nurturing our authors’ careers, we are still creating impact for thousands of writers through our workshops and consultations.
After the lessons learned in launching Get Signed, I continue (in the language of my beloved author Paul Jarvis) to “teach everything you know,” whether on social media or at our live events in an effort to offer the unprecedented opportunity to spend time with a New York agency, teaching writers what’s desirable for new authors in today’s market and how to develop your biggest ideas.
When you peek behind the curtain, there’s so much that my agency and those in the industry are keeping up with as time goes on. But most of all, as we arrive at the final quarter of 2024, my utmost respect lies with writers like you.
I am personally witnessing your own progress, the leaps of improvement in the queries we see in our inbox, and the ways in which you are talking about your books. We’ve celebrated you with our recent Race to Query Contest! (Keep following us as we plan to have it again next year!) We’re thrilled to announce our winners and why they were chosen on our blog.
Stick with it, writers. Come meet our new agents and talent scouts. Improve your craft as you improve your pitch. You are the creators who have always inspired me.
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