RB: You’ve been an agent for William Morris, head of international literary operations for William Morris, President of William Morris, and I’m sure there are other titles I’m missing. Your client list includes such heavy hitters as Dominick Dunne, Susan Isaacs, Judy Blume, William Diehl, James Michener, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, and the estate of Margaret Mitchell – to mention only a few – and among Editorial Department clients we’ve matched with a William Morris agent, you personally represented Allen Ballard. You don’t seem to have slowed down, but over the forty years we’ve known each other we’ve commiserated about changes in the industry that make it harder and harder to get good fiction published, especially first fiction, and hard for it to succeed assuming it does get published. So my first question is: Why did you leave—not just the literary agency but the entire industry? Well, what I’m really asking is did you leave because you were fed up?

OL: I wasn’t fed up, I thought it was time to go.  I was still at the top of my game, and if you’re going to go, that’s the time to do it. I will say that I wasn’t as enamored with the publishing business as I was for many years. It’s more efficient. Its priorities are also radically different from what they were years back.

OL: Yes, but it’s not just that. There are only three or four companies in existence today that have retained anything resembling what they were twenty or thirty years ago. There’s Knopf, even though it’s part of Farrar, Srauss. There’s Norton. They’ve changed but they’ve still kept something of what they were.

RB: But overall, it’s the bottom line that counts. A decision about what to publish is essentially a marketing decision rather than an editorial decision, and that’s been true for a long time.

OL: If you think about it, business in America has changed generally the way the publishing business has changed--you’re either a hit or a failure, there’s no middle ground any more. And the scale of things has changed dramatically. The dollars have changed—I retired a much wealthier man than I would have under the old system. James Michener when I became his agent was doing six hundred, seven hundred thousand a year. Now it would be more like ten million. I have to say, I went with it, I benefited from it, my big authors were huge, the hits were megahits.

RB: One problem we’ve seen with mainstream publishers is bringing novels out and dropping them down a well. Naturally they don’t sell well since nobody knows they’ve been published. We’ve had three clients whose novels—and two of them were first novels—got six-figure advances from big publishers who did absolutely nothing to let the world know that these books existed. Of course it was the writers, not the publishers, who were blamed for the terrible sin of not earning out the advance. Their poor track records derailed their careers.

OL: It happens a lot. You’d think self-interest would encourage publishers to push a book they’ve paid a lot to publish, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. And a first novel—as hard as it is for an agent to find a publisher for it--has a better chance than a second novel following a first one that sold poorly or even just sold modestly. Especially if it didn’t earn back its advance. Look, Mario Puzo would never have made it in today’s market. His first three novels before The Godfather went nowhere. 

RB: You’re either a success or a failure.

OL:  He was a failure. His career would have been over.

RB:  What about smaller publishers?

OL: They don’t have much money, aren’t capable of investing much for advances or promotion. But sometimes. Sometimes you catch a break. I represented David Benioff, a first novel, The Twenty-Fifth Hour. I submitted it to major publishers all over town. Everybody said he’s talented, he has a voice, I don’t know how I’m going to sell this book. I finally placed it with Carroll & Graf for a $7,500 advance. So it got a terrific review in The New York Times, gets made into a Spike Lee movie, because of the movie gets a half-million-dollar book deal for the paperback rights—even though the hardcover only did 12,000. Thirty publishers had turned it down.

RB: I love that story. We get a lot of “He’s talented,” “She has a voice,” “I don’t know how we’re going to sell this book.” Thirty, forty years ago they’d have signed it up and knocked themselves out figuring out how to sell it. But that was then, and this is now. What do you see in store for writers? :

OL: Somehow it will go on. Your profession will be even more important—it didn’t exist, really, until you started it. Today a book had better land on the editor’s desk pre-edited. It’s still hard even when that’s the case.

RB: What about agents? How polished does it have to be before they see it?

OL:  Agents are being forced to be less willing to take on a talented writer with potential.

Unless that potential is right there, in their face. Pre-edited for the agent. Every time I went out to people, the question was how do I get an agent to read? It’s got to be a magnificent presentation by the writer. The truth is, it’s just so much easier to go with a recommendation than a well presented letter. When you called me, Renni, and you were excited about a book, it was very different than my getting a Dear Mr. Laster letter. You people were a short cut.

RB: Do you want to weigh in on the recent Times article about publishers not knowing their market?

OL: I can’t tell you what anybody’s looking for, because I don’t know and I don’t think publishers have a clue. I think you have to go with your gut feeling and when you connect with a book go with that and see what you can do. If you really connect, maybe just maybe an editor you know is going to connect too. It’s a lot harder than it used to be but it still happens.