The life of a literary agent

In her Booker Prize acceptance speech, Banu Mushtaq thanked her literary agent for believing in her story. Anish Chandy offers an insider view of a profession that bridges talent and publishing

In 2018, I saw Jane Borges’s name on the cover of a very successful book called ‘The Mafia Queens of Mumbai’. It was being sold by a book pirate on the pavement in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Borges sounded Portuguese, so out of curiosity, I googled ‘Jane Borges’.

She was a journalist with an Indian daily. Her personal blog popped up where she had written a short melancholic piece about an elderly gentleman, her friend who lived in her locality called Cavel in south Mumbai. I had grown up a few kilometres from Cavel but I hadn’t heard of it. The piece stayed with me but I was more interested in the fact that she was the co-author of this true crime book.

I emailed Jane asking her if she would be interested in writing another crime book, this time with me as her literary agent. We had a nice meeting in Mumbai where she flatly refused to delve into crime again. But as we were about to part ways, she asked me if I’d be interested in reading a manuscript of interconnected short stories with the caveat that it was written a while ago and had been sitting untouched since. I offered a counter-caveat that books of short stories didn’t sell but I would read it anyway.

Anish Chandy works with a team of in-house editors, freelancers and co-agents.

The next day, I was scheduled to meet a crime journalist from another publication at a café. He was late or I was early — I began to scroll through my inbox on my phone. Jane’s manuscript had arrived. It was called ‘Tales from Cavel’. I was sipping a mid-afternoon beer when I opened it, speed-read a few chapters, and decided I wanted to collaborate on this quirky series of stories set in a sliver of Mumbai no one knew existed. I emailed Jane saying “Let’s do this”. She was quickly on board.

We went back and forth to fine-tune the manuscript and then I pitched it to all the publishers of repute who were publishing short stories. Everyone turned it down citing poor genre sales except Westland Books. Over the next year or so, Jane changed the title of the book to ‘Bombay Balchao’. I didn’t think non-Goans would get what ‘Balchao’ meant but was outvoted. The cover design managed to evoke a gentle nostalgia, set in a small Catholic enclave in Mumbai. Originally planned as a paperback, just before going to print, the publisher decided it was good enough to be released as a hardback.

‘Bombay Balchao’ was quietly launched in 2019. Initially it sold in Mumbai and Goa, then the word spread, reviews began to appear and the first print run sold out. Her readers began to write to Jane insisting on a tour of Cavel. We received movie adaptation offers; we accepted one from one of the world’s largest studios. An audiobook was made. Jane pulled off the ultimate flex — she quit her day job because of her income from the book. Georgetown University invited Jane for a conference in Rome, as part of a group of authors who were making important contributions to Catholic literature. They later got an audience with the Pope at the Vatican. The day she met the Pope, Martin Scorsese was there researching his own movie on the life of Jesus.

An Italian publisher is now translating the book into ‘I Gamberi Di Bombay’ (‘The Shrimp of Bombay’) — Jane had distributed a few copies of the book to people she met at the conference; one of those copies made its way to a small Italian town called Trieste, where someone at the publisher’s office chanced upon it.

While our strategic decisions may have shaped the destiny of Jane’s debut novel, it was serendipity and human connections that kicked off this journey — as so happens in the world of publishing.

Jane’s writing her second book, this one’s called ‘Mog Asundi’. This time I am not fighting her over the funny sounding title. Success buys creative leeway.

‘Everyone has a story’

I didn’t start out aspiring to become a literary agent. In fact, I didn’t know the first thing about publishing until I stumbled into the Penguin office in Delhi’s Shahpur Jat in 2012. Dissatisfied with my corporate existence in Chicago I had had my Eat, Pray, Love sabbatical journey for about 18 months and was looking for something new to do. After learning the ropes of the business from leading names like Chiki Sarkar, Ananth Padmanabhan and Udayan Mitra, I decided to turn entrepreneur-literary agent because of one simple insight — everyone has at least one story in them; if they knew how to tell it properly, it could become a book.

In the narrowest Western world sense of the term, a literary agent identifies a talented writer with a story and places that story with a publisher at the highest possible price that the market can afford. The publisher then receives a clean manuscript, and edits, promotes and sells it as a book. This is what happens in large, organised markets.

In India, ground realities are different. Most writers have good ideas but are unable to express them effectively — everyone is multilingual, which can be a gift or curse. Publishers are hamstrung by India’s low bookstore-to-population ratio. Our rote learning-centric education system hammers out the love of reading out of children by the time they are 15. Meanwhile, an untalented writer with a strong social media presence offers the assurance that at least 0.5% of their followers will buy the book before everyone realises it’s a poor product. And when a book begins to burn up the sales charts, pirates quickly get in on the game chewing on publisher profits and author royalties. In spite of all this, book sales in the English trade publishing market are constantly trending upwards.

The International Booker Prize in a sense is one of those bridges connecting both worlds. This year’s winner Banu Mushtaq acknowledging her literary agent, Kanishka Gupta, for believing in ‘Heart Lamp’ at an early stage of its journey was important.

Protecting the author

Literary agents in India play consigliere to the author. They perform any or all of these functions — identify talent, edit or ghostwrite the book, pitch the book to publishers, explore other formats like audio-visual or audio, have it translated to or from English, draft contracts, work on publicity and sales strategies, and follow up on payments. They are compensated in the form of commissions or flat fees. Commissions typically range from 15% to 25% of author income generated from the book. An agent may work with in-house editorial staff or freelancers, or even solo.

Sometimes the literary agent has to protect the author from themselves. When the debut author is presented with a publishing contract, their initial euphoria gives way to fear and doubt. India is a low-trust business environment where an author may quickly become convinced that a greedy publisher is out to exploit them. Most authors will squabble over receiving 15 free copies of their book instead of the 10 that’s mentioned in the contract, but will happily sign away subsidiary rights like film adaptations, translations, and international territories. That’s akin to fighting over free coriander at the grocer’s but investing Rs 10 lakh based on a WhatsApp penny stock tip. The literary agent has to walk the author down from the cliff.

Literary agents offer an implicit guarantee that the author’s proposal will be considered seriously by the publisher. It won’t die unread in a slush pile. They will pitch the proposal to the right acquisitions editor. And if the proposal is of significant creative or commercial value, the agent will auction it across multiple publishers to drive up the price. The literary agent will convey to the author, feedback from the publisher to improve the proposal and repitch it if the original version isn’t working. Publishers will reach out to agents checking if an author in their stable would be open to switching publishers.

Literary agents have existed in India for over two decades, but the profession has gone mainstream only in the last 10 years with the growth of the publishing market. I suspect that in the future, 90% of proposals will come through agents, as in the case in  Western markets, as opposed to about 60% now. Because, it frees publishers from the grunt work of rewriting manuscripts for authors. Instead, the author-publisher relationship will become a creative partnership, with thorny financial issues becoming the domain of the agent and publisher.

Any prominent literary agent receives hundreds of cold pitches every week, in addition to scores of manuscripts via referrals from existing clients. I have had people show up unannounced at my home, office, and even my parents’ residence in a small town in Kerala. In Delhi, at every dinner party at some point, a budding author or two will accost the agent. When a major celebrity is involved (a business titan, cricketer, actor, or politician), they might invite pitches from multiple agents, who will put forth their credentials as the best choice to shepherd the book and extract maximum value from the publisher.

However, only about 0.1% of the authors make it to Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy’s level of financial success and have their reputations cemented as world famous.

Being a literary agent, thus, means juggling a little bit of everything. My mornings are spent receiving feedback from my editors on manuscripts and film adaptations, sending contracts to authors, and creating social media buzz about a new book. Afternoons are for chasing Bollywood folks for payments and lining up new collaborations, besides pitching to publishers and strategising book publicity over Zoom. Evenings take a social turn: meeting authors to shed tears into drinks, catching up with publishers for industry gossip and new book ideas, attending book launches if there are any, and winding down with a book I’m not obligated to read.

Signing up

The criteria of signing up authors varies widely across literary agents. I tend to look at talent level, hotness of the genre, adaptability for screen, the author’s temperament and online following, ability to market the book, and my personal preferences.

And authors come in all shapes and sizes. On one hand, Dr Thomas Mathew made an impromptu dash from Delhi to Maasai Mara on his own dime to source a single photograph for writing Ratan Tata’s biography. On the other hand, a romance novelist asked her publisher for taxi money to attend her own book launch. An emotional poet harangued the owner of an independent bookstore in his shop, beseeching him to stock more copies of her non-selling book. The next day, he returned all the copies of her book to the publisher. In social media lingo, she was shadow-banned. A corporate CEO asked his publisher what it would take to get a bestseller tag on his book. “25,000 copies” came the response. He then asked his office to buy 25,000 copies. The publisher had only printed 3,000 copies. The company kept buying, and the publisher kept printing. 

Western agents often use a system of scouts who are paid to read and recommend manuscripts to the agent. So in a way they are agents to agents. The Indian market is too shallow for this three-tier system to work right now. An agent here could work with a co-agent or sub-agent in other countries to pitch books in those territories.

Postscript

The literary agent trade is a cottage industry within a cottage industry. It attracts a colourful cast of characters — the rapscallion (they’ll take your money and ghost you), the pious (they have a lot of godmen clients), the gossip guru (they know what the publisher’s production guy had for lunch), and the newbie (after a few frustrated months, they’ll be selling an AI course on making YouTube Videos from home).

Some agents have worked in publishing houses; others haven’t. Some read books; some don’t. Some are abrasive; some sound kind. For some, it’s a full-fledged business; others take on projects they are passionate about on a part-time basis. There’s no template. 

Most author-agent-publisher relationships are as delicate or robust as the personalities involved. Authors are convinced their agent can do more for them, while the agent is juggling scores of projects and micro-decisions within projects. An author would love for the agent to be as emotionally invested when they excitedly call at 3 pm on a Wednesday to discuss a character in their thriller, just as the agent has received a report from the publisher’s lawyer saying three chapters of a political biography need to be deleted. The author will wax eloquent about how good their editor is, while the agent has just received a call that the editor has put in her notice and is taking a mental break from work.

Then there are authors who defy expectations. I passed up a cliched business book manuscript even though I had a hunch it might work. I thought the book was "dumb" and couldn’t overcome this bias. The author was diligent. He found a publisher via cold-emailing and got paid a pittance, but the book sold over 1,00,000 copies.

Despite the constant chaos, I like the business because I feel alive when someone talented pings on WhatsApp with, “Hey, I have this idea…” 

(The author is the founder of Labyrinth Literary Agency.)