But it’s comical, because frequently these people don’t understand the difference between selling a widget and selling a good novel. Do you find yourself having to communicate differently with those people? I think that a number of publishing companies have brought in businesspeople to help them in a futile effort to become more distinctly profitable. My sense is that the publishing world used to be run and populated largely by people who liked books and were interested in literature, and now there’s a cohort of people who work in publishing who might be interested in data analytics, and they’re paying attention to spreadsheets and online search terms. That’s what living a charmed life is all about.ĭenial? Selective memory? Having things happen the way you intended to have them happen. What’s an example of when a publisher or someone else in the business disagreed with you and they turned out to be right? I don’t think that’s ever happened. The author sometimes will say, “Jesus, Andrew, what do you think of this?” And I say, “It’s transparently ugly, it has nothing to do with the book, so I think we should ask them to try again.” They always love the measly result of their ineffectual aspirations. The number of times I’ve heard that is obscene. Could you either hire someone with a brain or attempt to redesign?” The response in every single case for 40 years has been, We’ve shown it all around the house, and everybody loves it. Then you say: “Thank you, that’s ghastly and inappropriate. No disrespect intended for my brilliant colleagues in the business, but usually what happens is the publisher puts forward a ghastly and inappropriate cover design. They deserve to live, but they don’t need to come to my house for supper.Īre there ever instances in your work where advocating for the writer is at cross purposes with things that might lead to their books being more widely read? An example might be, I don’t know, the writer wants a particular cover or title, but the publisher says other ones would be better for sales. There are some people I don’t want to have join the dinner. Do you want everyone to arrive? Or do you want a select number of intelligent people who are amusing and understand what you’re talking about? The latter, I think. Let’s say you’re inviting some people to your house for dinner. It’s not directly connected to popularity. One, the goal of the people we represent is not to be Beyoncé.

How do you understand the contradiction that the crappy books that sell so well are what allows for the publishers to pay big advances to your writers? You need the crappy stuff to do well, right? That is the publishers’ view.Įxplain the difference. “That led me to understand, I think correctly, that best sellers were overvalued and works that endured forever were undervalued.” “I thought, Well, I wonder if you can build a business based exclusively on what you want to read,” he says, understatedly. That fearsome reputation, along with actual paradigm-shifting changes in his approach to agenting (namely his focus on exploiting the value of authors’ backlists and his determination that publishers pay fat advances for work of high literary quality - even if it might not sell in the short term), have also been factors in making Wylie, who is 76 and a famously forthright speaker, a legendary figure in the publishing world. (Several New York Times journalists are also represented by Wylie.) Such voracious acquisition of clients at one point led to Wylie’s being called the Jackal, presumably for his ruthless pursuit of other agents’ authors. (All of whose estates, along with those of other luminaries like Borges and Calvino, are now represented by the agency.) Wylie’s roster of contemporary authors includes Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its blue-chip multitude. Over the years, the Wylie Agency’s clients have included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and John Updike.

Once there, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s crowd, behaved in various ways like a wild man and then, in 1980 and in need of steadier work, began transforming himself into a hugely successful literary agent. Paul’s School, from which he was dismissed, and Harvard, where he insulted one of his thesis advisers, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s to become a poet and interviewer. The raw material is certainly worthy: Wylie, whose father was a high-level editor at Houghton Mifflin, grew up a privileged young scalawag, attending St. I wonder if any of the many literary greats represented by Andrew Wylie ever considered using his story.

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