Meet The Agents Who Will Decline To Represent Your Debut Novel
Sophia Pagliacci is a graduate of Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Columbia, where she edited all their literary journals. She offices in her Manhattan penthouse and has worked in the publishing world for over forty years. She manages the international rights and backlist for Hemingway, Kesey, and De Beauvoir. She currently represents Anna Wintour, Roxane Gay, and Gore Vidal — who is actually still alive. However he only speaks to Sophia and the other New York Times best-selling authors she represents. Certainly you can understand why she won’t respond to your query.
Jane North represents upmarket women’s fiction. She graduated Fordham the weekend you were at your twentieth reunion at a state school. She’s looking for authors who write like Virginia Woolf and sell like James Patterson. She’s interested in reading #ownvoices, but not acquiring it. She enjoys books with protagonists who are funny and real and confound every stereotype in the Western World but they should be 20-something single white women or Harry Potter. She prefers witty thrillers she can’t put down with a love story so epic it makes her fall in love with the concept of love (think The Girl on the Train meets The Hating Game). She’s currently reading spec fiction with mainstream appeal by Pushcart-winning authors who have outsold Dan Brown.
