"The biggest fish in the dumbest pond."
Interview with Jennifer Udden, former literary agent, currently a freelance editor. Hire Jennifer at Marketplace - Jennifer U. (reedsy.com).
How long have you been working as a freelance editor?
Since December 2020, so just under a year.
Did you leave agenting because of COVID?
It was a lot of different things. I was feeling burnt out before the pandemic hit and I realized it wasn’t sustainable for me or fair to my authors. You want your agent to be on the ball, and it was increasingly clear that I wasn’t operating at 100%.
It’s a really emotionally involving job. You are intimately involved in people’s artistic lives. I’ve been enormously lucky, I maybe had one bad experience with a client. The rest of the negativity came from authors who were querying. There is a sense of entitlement, like people have put in all this work, which is great, but then they feel like they are owed something. Nobody deserves a big publishing deal. Maybe you poured your heart into a book and it’s just not commercial. It’s not your fault, but it’s also not my fault.
This is supposed to be a source of fun, entertainment for the reader and a creative outlet for the author. But people get really mean about it.
As an agent, you want to do a good job for everyone. Every publishing professional I know is incredibly burnt out.
How did you get started as a literary agent?
I had no idea what I was doing in college, I thought I wanted to be a diplomat. That aspiration died quickly when I realized, “Wow I do not perform well under pressure at all.” When I graduated, I worked as a fundraiser for a theatre company. Looking back on it, the only thing more stressful than being a literary agent was nonprofit theatre fundraising. The money is even less, and the workload was incredible.
I ended up getting an internship at the Maass Agency. I will never regret being an agent because helping authors bring their stories to life and giving them a platform was immensely rewarding.
Are you in NYC? Are you safe from #hurricaneIda? Did your home/apartment suffer any damage?
I’m in Brooklyn; I’ve lived here since 2008 when I graduated college. Our basement flooded, but the damage wasn’t too bad. We didn’t have hot water for four days because the pilot light on the boiler went out. I grew up in Houston, so I’m used to hurricanes. I saw people walking around in the flood water and I wanted to scream at them, like “Get out, that’s garbage water!”
Can we talk about racism? A lot of agents are asking for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) writers. But it’s my belief that the industry remains mostly white. Is this true or do you feel that agents and publishers are appropriately diversified? Do you feel that the push for BIPOC writers is having the desired affect? Do you think there is anything more that can be done?What I’ve noticed is that there is a sincere desire to level the playing field. I used to joke that I was a statistical average of a publishing industry executive because I am white, I had bangs, and I live in Brooklyn. Seriously, everyone looked exactly like me. But I think there is a sincere desire to rectify the numbers imbalance. For every white guy who is like, “It’s too diverse,” the numbers tell a different story.
For writers, in most genres men are overrepresented, especially white men. In the industry, BIPOC are underrepresented at every level. There are a few exceptional leaders, but the upper levels are mostly white. The people on the bottom are being ground down; every nonwhite professional that I know is very burnt out.
Readers really want good stories to be out there. The idea that the way is closed for some people is disheartening. There are certainly more books by underrepresented authors than there have been in the past. We’re seeing really good sales. It’s clear that the market is there from a purely monetary point of view. And if you publish the books, people are going to read them. It is having an effect, but I’m not sure if it’s enough for it to be sustainable as an industry. We have to make sure that the changes aren’t superficial.
I actually heard the phrase “We’ve already got one Black book.” Like they were going to buy this book and it would be the ‘Black book’ for the year. That kind of racism is unfortunately very much alive.
What was your experience like in NYC during the COVID lockdowns?
Ironically, I wasn’t even here. Very suddenly on March 10, my uncle passed away, (non-covid related) so my sister and I flew to Texas. We were in our parents’ apartment in Houston when the first series of lockdowns began. My dad was like, “It’s going to get bad in New York, why don’t you stay here?” I was able to do my job from anywhere, so I stayed with my parents for seven months. Their apartment is bigger than mine, and they have a pool in their building. Being able to be with my family was great, everyone felt weird and terrible all the time and it was nice to feel weird and terrible together.
The only thing I didn’t like about Texas was that not everyone was onboard with prevention. Here in New York, people are pretty much vaccinated if they can be. They wear masks inside and on the subway.
A lot of people died, and I get very frustrated with the narrative that it’s a hoax. It’s not a hoax; people are dying.
The movie Contagion became my happy watch, because it presented the vision of a competent government dealing with a pandemic. That wasn’t something that I felt we had in real life.
How much are traditionally published authors expected to push their own work?
Increasingly a lot, that was another frustration with the industry. Authors are expected to put in a lot of work on the marketing end, which is not entirely unreasonable. But increasingly it’s like “Who do you know?” Instead of, “Who does the gigantic publishing company know?” Not every book can be a big deal. My advice to authors is to decide what comfort level you have with social media and establish those boundaries early. All authors are asked to share a lot of themselves, but you don’t have to share as much as the publishing company may want you to.
Are you a writer?
I wrote before I was an agent, I wrote fan fiction, and other stuff just for fun. But when I was an agent, I had some strong ethical qualms with also being a writer. I didn’t want to compete against my own authors. Now that I’ve been freelancing, I’ve been dipping my toe back in. It’s been exciting to experience that creative side of things again.
Writing has become over professionalized. Writers think that they have to have a business goal in mind, but sometimes it can be just a fun thing to do. I just want to enjoy it and not put too much weight on what happens next.
That’s advice I gave to my authors all the time: just write, and then you can worry about the fame and fortune afterwards.
What’s a typical day like for a literary agent?
There wasn’t really a typical day, they were all different. But I guess it depended on what was more pressing. I would wake up and triage the email, figure out “What do I have to deal with?” You deal with money stuff first: contracts, payments, and royalty statements. There would be meetings. And finally, if there was any time at the end of the day, I would edit.
I didn’t realize that literary agents edit.
Literary agents edit, yeah. That is one of the reasons I am able to do this now, because I had so much experience as an editor in my previous job. Most of the time, if I read something at the querying stage that was really good, it needed another push. There was just one thing that wasn’t working, and we would work on it for a couple months and then send it to the editor. The author only has the one chance at a first impression, and the manuscript needs to be in good shape.
Wait a minute. The manuscript goes from the author to the agent and then to the editor? Not the editor first?
Basically all of the big five publishing companies, (soon to be big four if Penguin Random House buys Simon & Schuster), only accept agented submissions, with a couple of small exceptions. The agents filter stuff out, and then we send it to the editor of whichever company. The editor will acquire the book if they like it. So that way, the manuscript flows to the editor, but the money flows to the author. I was salaried, but I didn’t get commission unless my clients made money.
If anybody says, “It will cost you $50 for me to read your submission,” know that’s a scam.
As a querying author, it seems like you guys do a lot of work for free.
We are doing a lot of front-end work that pays off in the long run. If you can get an author started, situated in a good editorial relationship, in a good house, hopefully that will pay dividends down the road.
One of the most frustrating things about being a writer are these dreams of grandeur. Do agents & editors go through the same thing, or are you able to keep both feet on the ground?
We all sort of do, but we all understand that authors can have a kind of fame and recognition that we will never have. To be the most successful literary agent is to be the biggest fish in the dumbest pond. Our brand of fame is being someone buzzy who works in the industry. But authors could be so big that my mom knows who they are. That’s the kind of fame that gets you a house in the Hamptons. Everyone knows who James Patterson is, and there are authors who have cowritten a book with him who went on to fame on their own merits. I couldn’t tell you who his agent is though.
--Gretchen Lovett
