The relationship between a literary agent and an author is a collaboration, not a hierarchy. The author is responsible for the contents of the book, and the agent handles the business aspects of the partnership. Maintaining the balance can be complicated.
This chapter is somewhat longer than others in this series, reflecting the importance of the topic and my sense of the confusion about the respective roles of authors and agents.
The focus here is on what are known as “trade” books meaning that they are sold in retail outlets (or, as this market was once known, the “trade”), as distinct from books destined for sale primarily to academic, religious, and other niche readerships.
The large majority of trade books, but not all, are represented to the publishers by literary agents, or occasionally by lawyers with a discerning eye and selling skills. These representatives enable authors to find a home that will nurture and eventually market the books they write. Agents almost always work on a commission of the author’s earnings, now generally 15 percent of all monies received from the publisher.
There are exceptions to this financial practice, the most prominent of which was the late Washington superlawyer Bob Barnett, who charged by the hour. For an author receiving a multimillion-dollar advance, that could mean the difference between paying 15 percent of a fortune in the millions or tens of thousands of dollars for a lawyer’s fee, which at that level was a significant difference.
For example, Barack Obama’s first book contract, for Dreams from My Father, was with an agent, to whom he paid a standard commission, but for his campaign book, The Audacity of Hope, he was a client of Barnett. And when he and Michelle signed a contract with Penguin Random House for their post-presidential writings, for an advance that was said to be $65 million, they used Barnett.
How agents choose their clients or how authors find their agents, and what that means in practice, can feel substantially different from the perspective of the authors, the agents, and the publishers. Here, then, are my considered views on what an author needs and should expect from a literary agent. And how publishers, in my experience, usually deal with agents.
To be an author requires some measure of daring, ambition, motivation, and determination. This is almost always accompanied by elements of vulnerability, insecurity, and frustration.
Authors should remember that without them, there is nothing for an agent to represent. Agents work for authors, although in many cases an author defers to the agent’s judgments and preferences because of a lingering insecurity about the process.
Agents tend to see publishers as adversaries in a tug of war over details in contracts and attention to authors.
An agent wants to secure the best possible deal for the client. That is usually embodied in the upfront guarantee — the advance. No other payments are made to the author until the book’s sales generate enough royalties (the author’s share of revenues, as stated in the contract) to recoup the advance that the publisher has already paid. When that milestone is reached, the book is said to have “earned out” its advance.
In general, books earn out only when the advance is relatively small, or if the book becomes an unexpected bestseller or a perennial seller. Steady-selling “backlist” titles are a mainstay of publishers’ balance sheets.
The advance is the principal signifier of a book’s projected value. It used to be that a “six-figure” advance ($100,000 or higher) was considered a good goal. That label means less today than it once did because of the relentlessness of inflation. But the principle is still valid.
A six-figure advance has to be diagrammed this way: from a total of $100,000, the agent receives a commission, and there will be taxes to be paid. The author’s net income therefore comes to around $60,000. For the author, a year’s work at that level doubtless seems small.
But the publisher takes on the entire $100,000 as a balance sheet expense, which means that if the book’s earnings are less than the advance, the publisher records a loss.
So the author actually receives less than the big round number, while the publisher is carrying the whole sum. Therein lies the conundrum of frustration: The author invariably wants to have more to spend, and the publisher may conclude that if the book does not sell enough to cover the advance, it has overpaid.
Authors will sometimes tell their agents that they don’t care about the size of the advance, thinking that this will be an incentive for a publisher to take on the project. An agent, on the other hand, recognizes that selling a book for $1 can be as time-consuming as for $100,000, and obviously will always prefer the bigger return on time invested. By instinct, and in the author’s own self-interest, agents will prioritize the advance, usually over any other issue, in placing a book with a publisher.
With the advent of copying machines decades ago, and more recently as book proposals could be easily sent by email, agents submit proposals to a number of editors simultaneously — this is known as a “multiple submission” — with the expectation that competition will produce momentum, leading to higher offers. There are other submission strategies, for instance an “exclusive” submission, in which one publisher is offered the book before it is sent elsewhere, in the hope that the favored publisher will pay a large enough advance to convince the agent not to solicit other offers.
A multiple submission often leads to an auction, in which several publishers make offers for the project. Rules for auctions can vary; they can be conducted in rounds, in which each publisher has the opportunity to increase its earlier offer in response to higher offers from other publishers, or through “best bids,” In which a single offer is taken from each publisher, and one bid is chosen.
More often than not, the outcome is determined by which publisher makes the highest offer. There are some instances where an author (in consultation with the agent) chooses an offer that is not the highest because of a belief that a particular editor or publisher is better attuned to the book.
Some established authors will work with the same editor on multiple books, simplifying the submission process. In contemporary publishing, editors often move from one job to another, more so than they did in the past, leaving behind books for another editor to publish.
This has added a level of uncertainty to the author-editor partnership, which can be a complicating factor in a book’s progress. This tendency of editors to change jobs, or to be laid off, has weakened the editorial relationships that are central to how a book evolves. An author may want to follow an editor to a new publishing house, but changing horses in midstream can be tactically vexed.
As a result, an author often considers the agent as his or her strongest and most reliable supporter, rather than the editor.
*****************************
Authors also need to understand the publishing rights that the agent is selling. Books can appear in many formats, languages, and territories.
For example: a world rights deal grants to the publisher the right to license the book around the globe, sharing that revenue with the author and agent. There are geographically defined rights, as in North American rights; linguistically defined rights, as in world English-language rights; or rights that exclude a country or a region for some reason. When certain territories or languages are excluded from the contract, it is the agent rather than the publisher who will sell those foreign licenses. In such cases, the author usually receives a larger share of the money than when a publisher licenses the rights on his or her behalf.
Whoever handles the various rights, other than the initial U.S. publication of the book itself, is a source of negotiation between agents and publishers.
Rights to pre-publication magazine or newspaper excerpts were in the past a potentially lucrative addition to the upfront advances. In the heyday of magazines, “first serial” rights — the publication of an excerpt from the book prior to its publication — could be worth as much as the advance. Those days are over, as the internet has significantly reduced the financial largess of the traditional magazine and newspaper industry; few digital sites will pay as much as those outlets once did.
The Book-of-the-Month Club and other book clubs were also once a significant source of rights revenue to authors and their publishers. These clubs have been greatly diminished over time; today’s celebrity book clubs, most famously Oprah Winfrey’s, do not pay for books that are chosen. The upside for authors from celebrity clubs is the attention the book receives and the resulting sales.
And finally, in the past publishers tended to keep the hardcover rights to their books and then license reprint rights — paperback rights — for large sums if the books had been especially successful. Now most books are acquired “hard-soft,” and the advance covers the book in all formats: hardcover, paperback, ebooks, and audio. Publishers recognized that publishing the books themselves, in all formats, was a better policy than licensing them to someone else.
Bundling subsidiary rights puts additional emphasis on the advance guarantee. The more rights the publisher owns, the more the agent will expect it to pay.
Over the years, agents have generally insisted on retaining dramatic rights, including film and television rights, on behalf of the author. This can be an important issue. Michael Crichton’s thriller Jurassic Park, for example, was published as a book by Knopf and sold well. But then the movie became a blockbuster, and the film rights and the merchandising rights became especially lucrative.
Had Knopf possessed even a fraction of the film rights, the publisher would have made a fortune. Why publishers let the dramatic rights get away reflects a bygone attitude, from the time before publishers became larger businesses and were owned by conglomerates. Publishing is no longer the “gentlemen’s business” it was once thought to be, in which acquisitions were rarely cutthroat and the numbers tended to be relatively modest.
Returning to the real value of an advance, to be understood by authors. In planning strategy with agents, authors should consider their own projected budget for completing the project and accept that the advance alone will likely not provide sufficient funding for all the expenses required. Authors almost always have to be their own fundraisers, approaching philanthropies or academic institutions for additional support.
In publishing, as in most transactions involving an exchange of monies, it is important not to be casual. Books are creative products. They are also commodities, with all that means about business realities.
Self-agenting is not common, except for authors whose relationship with a publisher is so established that all they require is a lawyer to review a contract. John Updike, in his many and very successful years as a Knopf author, did not use an agent.
There is inevitably a tug-of-interests between authors and agents. Agents should be savvy about the business aspects of publishing but must also offer a sense of encouragement and appreciation for their clients.
Agents, however, cannot afford to be selfless. Their incomes and reputations depend on the success of their clients. I am sometimes surprised at the degree to which authors with standing and track records become almost childlike in their relationship to their agents. “Leave the business to me” is the common refrain, with a condescending undertone, that the author does the writing and the agent is actually in charge.
The agent who recognizes that there is no product to sell without the author’s talent, energy, and fortitude can forge a partnership of respect with clients. Authors need support for the effort they are making, and over the decades I have seen that support provided on a scale from invaluable to intimidating to ruthless.
Over lunch, I once asked a successful agent, whom I had known since my early days in publishing, what he says to a client who insists, “I don’t really care about the advance.”
“Never say that to me again” was the agent’s emphatic response.
In summary, to understand how agents view the publishing process, consider a range that extends from a commitment to supporting the creative process and enhancing literacy and knowledge and extending to a complete focus on the bottom line.
Here are two of the tendencies I have noted among agents as regards publishers, editors, and authors:
(1) They have respect for selected editors and major imprints like Knopf, Random House, Simon and Schuster, and Harper and a group of independent publishers like Grove Atlantic or Greywolf that have shown they can compete with the bigger houses for visibility and prizes.
(2) Authors, no matter how gifted on the page, are rarely equipped to look after their own well-being.
My justification for this dry-eyed assessment is the slings and arrows I have encountered. Publishers are meant to dole out money to authors, and in too many instances, according to agents and authors, they fall short in the imagination and energy to support a book to unexpected success.
On the whole, agents believe that authors can count on them completely and that this can rarely be said of publishers. As I said, editors who once joined a publishing house and stayed for decades are now much less likely to have longevity in one place.
Very few editors can achieve the status of invulnerability in holding on to authors or their jobs. Agents know this all too well, which is why, alas, condescension toward editors is common.
Books that are “orphaned” when an editor moves on are inevitably seen as disadvantaged. As publication approaches, agents will often recommend hiring an outside publicist rather than rely on the publisher’s own team. That by no means assures success. Meaningful publicity is hard to get.
And there are the cases where the author and agent decide to retain and pay a freelance editor to do the editorial work that the in-house editor either has neither the time nor the inclination to perform. A manuscript that has been years in preparation and is twice as long as it should be will require meticulous effort to be crafted into shape. Who does that work? And whose responsibility is it to underwrite the cost?
To emphasize, an agent’s responsibility is to find a publisher for the author. Few authors are committed to remaining with a single publisher for all their books. Submissions are tactical. Is it best to send the proposal widely or exclusively? What information is necessary to include in the proposal?
I asked Paul Golob, my own editor, with decades of acquisition experience, to comment on what authors should remember in developing a proposal:
“Very long book proposals can sometimes be off-putting to the largest commercial publishers, but less so for more intellectually oriented houses like Basic Books and W.W. Norton, or for the leading academic presses. If the overview and chapter summaries are well written, a sample chapter is often extraneous for trade publishers. If an author can’t make the case for his or her book in the opening pages of the proposal, the acquiring editor is likely to set it aside, no matter how long and impressive it is.
“It’s worth remembering that a book proposal is a selling tool for the agent to pitch the editor, for the editor to pitch his colleagues, and for the editorial team to pitch the sales department. It needs to succeed on those terms, regardless of length.”
The Association of American Literary Agents has a code of ethics on what agents can charge authors for their services in preparing a proposal before they are accepted as clients.
For first-time authors, even distinguished people of reputation and standing, agents may urge the author to hire someone to help draft the proposal. There are some agents who themselves will shape, edit, and frame the book persuasively in their submission letters. There are others who have sufficient clout to assume the publisher will want the deal in order to retain access to the agent’s impressive client list.
Andrew Wylie, a literary agent who for many years had perhaps the most formidable array of clients and was ruthless in acquiring clients from other agents, told me that in his considered view, “if the publisher earns back the advance paid, I have failed my client.”
For what it is worth, I found this notion candid, blunt, and obnoxious.
***************************
Similarly to the consolidation of publishing imprints, agents have been banding together under the aegis of enormous entertainment conglomerates. ICM was a powerhouse literary agency founded about fifty years ago. It is now embedded in CAA, where agents can represent authors across the board: books, movies, speeches. WME has also absorbed a number of agents of reputation.
Predictably, these behemoths do not have much interest in deals that are modest. One CAA agent told me that a boss complained, “We are still doing too many five-figure deals,” meaning less than $100,000. Agents working for a mega-agency will now hire their own lawyers to hammer out contracts that protect them.
Midsize and independent agents are numerous, but they also consider smaller advances problematic in terms of time and results. Author preferences also are variable: valuing the personal touch of an agent versus the immense clout of a giant.
My experience suggests that there are agents willing to consider less conventional arrangements.
When I was at Random House, with the resources of a major publisher to pay very large advances, I interacted regularly with the most celebrated agents. At PublicAffairs, where our policy and capacity was never to pay more money than we could reasonably risk on any book, I was much less a target for submissions that were likely to be expensive acquisitions.
That makes sense, of course. But that is also how I came to recognize the differences among agents. The most sophisticated understood that there were clients whose needs transcended the size of an advance to having a publisher and editor who really appreciated the book — and who would make it work even if the money were less than might have been promised elsewhere.
Here is one such example: For many years, Mort Janklow was at the top of New York publishing power, representing famous, celebrated, bestselling novelists; public figures; historians; and journalists. But Mort recognized that PublicAffairs could handle a certain kind of book better, perhaps, than other publishers who could underwrite the big ticket.
One of Mort’s clients, General Wesley Clark, had had a distinguished U.S. Army career, culminating in his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, where he was responsible for what was considered a major victory in Kosovo in 1999, ending the Balkan wars, which had been Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War II.
Clark was acclaimed and decorated, but he was controversial at the Pentagon for what was deemed his brashness. When he had been relieved and retired, Mort Janklow became his agent. PublicAffairs was almost certainly not the first publisher that Mort contacted.
Together Mort, General Clark, and I devised the concept of the book that became Waging Modern War, in which Clark explained how the Balkan conflict reflected the changed formula for conducting military operations. Our maximum advance at PublicAffairs was $75,000, and so we offered $70,000 on signing the contract and $5,000 when the manuscript was completed.
The book was a success, as was a sequel — so much so that Clark became a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
Now, it has to be said that most authors don’t have the earning potential that it turned out Clark had.
In other cases, I could acquire the book with an assurance of unusual editorial support. For one presidential biography, we retained the services of a highly respected retired editor of The Atlantic, who worked on the manuscript for eleven months. Andy Rooney, the much-beloved columnist and commentator on CBS’s 60 Minutes, stunned his agent by agreeing to a single-page agreement for his books, in which all proceeds were split evenly with PublicAffairs, a measure of remarkable trust.
***************************
I would not be surprised if agents find my description of their role too critical. I did have friendly relationships with agents, recognizing that they were usually transactional. Perhaps my attitude reflects a belief that in the balance of power that surrounds the work of authors, power has tilted away from publishers — whose role is essentially functional — toward literary agents who deliver the cash.
It is the morning after…
Americans used their votes to demonstrate the meaning of democracy. To be hoped now is that victorious Democrats choose recovery and restitution over instincts for retribution and revenge.
Israel and Russia will have to accommodate a different United States while they remain the same, unwilling and unable to make make essential changes in their policies and leadership.
And China reaps the benefits of its autocracy and immense powers.
*********************************
This is not an exact number, but there are thought to be about seven million Jews in the United States and a comparable number of Israelis who are Jewish.
They share an identity in religious terms, but they are not identical.
The latest elections in Israel make that clear. Watching the returns on i24, an Israeli English-language news channel, I heard about the influence of anti-Zionist parties (which repudiate the state of Israel) in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and whether the surging number of Arab voters makes them “kosher” enough to participate in a government.
Let’s agree that a traditional Jewish-American vision of Israel evolving over time into a Western-style democracy embedded in the tumultuous Middle East and inclined to social justice and humanism is completely out of date.
Celeste Marcus, an editor at the journal Liberties and a 2019 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, provided commentary before the election last week that I found persuasive. She wrote that the aggressive policies Israel has pursued on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in southern Lebanon are the only Israel that her generation has ever known. By contrast, “many of our elders still see the [Israel] they were raised to believe in, and those who register the awful contemporary transformation of the Jewish state suffer a pain that I and my peers must recognize and respect. The gulf between us is of epic proportions.”
Whatever makeup the new government in Israel will have, the election showed that a belief among American Jews that Israeli attitudes will fundamentally change, making them less belligerent than they have become over recent decades, should finally be recognized as wrong.
************************
Vladimir Putin’s Russia held legislative elections in September, once again demonstrating the autocracy that the czars and the Soviets also embraced throughout Russian history.
So what is different in today’s Russia? I just read the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s book, This Cursed Beautiful Land, a vivid account of his 491 days in Russian imprisonment, accused of being a spy, before he was brought home as part of a large prisoner swap that included a Russian convicted of murder in Germany, who is said to be close to Putin.
Most of that time Gershkovich spent in Lefortovo, Moscow’s most famous penitentiary, built in 1881.
I recently called my friend Natan Sharansky, the one-time Soviet dissident and former Israeli politician. My purpose was to ask him what to expect from the upcoming Israeli election, but our conversation also turned to Gershkovich and his book. (Sharansky’s views on the balloting in Israel were private, but based on what he told me, I believe the outcome of the election would not have surprised him.)
What did amaze him was that the cell in Lefortovo that Gershkovich shared with a Russian prisoner had a television with thirty channels and a radio station called “Relax” that played soothing music.
When Sharansky landed in Lefortovo in 1977, beginning what became a nine-year sentence in the Gulag, he was charged with treason, stripped naked, and told that he faced the death sentence. He was held in solitary confinement and punishment cells for years.
My sense of Putin’s Russia is that while the Communists were taken out of power, the country clings to past practices in most realms, even if a prison cell has thirty television channels and “Relax” on the radio.
*******************
I recently attended a session in which foreign policy experts and former high-ranking government officials simulated a crisis with China over Taiwan.
This involved a possible confrontation involving warships from the U.S. and China, reminiscent of the 1962 situation when the United States announced a blockade of Soviet vessels bound for Cuba.
Then it was the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. on the brink of Armageddon.
The threat was nuclear. In 2026, the immediate consequences of a U.S.-China conflict would most likely be that the superpowers inflict massive damage on each other — and to the world more generally — with economic and cyber warfare.
Progress of a sort.
This is not an exact number, but there are thought to be about seven million Jews in the United States and a comparable number of Israelis who are Jewish.
They share an identity in religious terms, but they are not identical.
The latest elections in Israel make that clear. Watching the returns on i24, an Israeli English-language news channel, I heard about the influence of anti-Zionist parties (which repudiate the state of Israel) in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and whether the surging number of Arab voters makes them “kosher” enough to participate in a government.
Let’s agree that a traditional Jewish-American vision of Israel evolving over time into a Western-style democracy embedded in the tumultuous Middle East and inclined to social justice and humanism is completely out of date.
Celeste Marcus, an editor at the journal Liberties and a 2019 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, provided commentary before the election last week that I found persuasive. She wrote that the aggressive policies Israel has pursued on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in southern Lebanon are the only Israel that her generation has ever known. By contrast, “many of our elders still see the [Israel] they were raised to believe in, and those who register the awful contemporary transformation of the Jewish state suffer a pain that I and my peers must recognize and respect. The gulf between us is of epic proportions.”
Whatever makeup the new government in Israel will have, the election showed that a belief among American Jews that Israeli attitudes will fundamentally change, making them less belligerent than they have become over recent decades, should finally be recognized as wrong.
************************
Vladimir Putin’s Russia held legislative elections in September, once again demonstrating the autocracy that the czars and the Soviets also embraced throughout Russian history.
So what is different in today’s Russia? I just read the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s book, This Cursed Beautiful Land, a vivid account of his 491 days in Russian imprisonment, accused of being a spy, before he was brought home as part of a large prisoner swap that included a Russian convicted of murder in Germany, who is said to be close to Putin.
Most of that time Gershkovich spent in Lefortovo, Moscow’s most famous penitentiary, built in 1881.
I recently called my friend Natan Sharansky, the one-time Soviet dissident and former Israeli politician. My purpose was to ask him what to expect from the upcoming Israeli election, but our conversation also turned to Gershkovich and his book. (Sharansky’s views on the balloting in Israel were private, but based on what he told me, I believe the outcome of the election would not have surprised him.)
What did amaze him was that the cell in Lefortovo that Gershkovich shared with a Russian prisoner had a television with thirty channels and a radio station called “Relax” that played soothing music.
When Sharansky landed in Lefortovo in 1977, beginning what became a nine-year sentence in the Gulag, he was charged with treason, stripped naked, and told that he faced the death sentence. He was held in solitary confinement and punishment cells for years.
My sense of Putin’s Russia is that while the Communists were taken out of power, the country clings to past practices in most realms, even if a prison cell has thirty television channels and “Relax” on the radio.
*******************
I recently attended a session in which foreign policy experts and former high-ranking government officials simulated a crisis with China over Taiwan.
This involved a possible confrontation involving warships from the U.S. and China, reminiscent of the 1962 situation when the United States announced a blockade of Soviet vessels bound for Cuba.
Then it was the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. on the brink of Armageddon.
The threat was nuclear. In 2026, the immediate consequences of a U.S.-China conflict would most likely be that the superpowers inflict massive damage on each other — and to the world more generally — with economic and cyber warfare.
Progress of a sort.
Bob Woodward’s memoir, Secrets, is not yet on sale but it has already been excerpted in The New Yorker and has had its contents excavated by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Woodward has a lot to say about many things. My sense is that his thoughts on Jeff Bezos have been quoted enough to know what he thinks about the owner of the Post, where Woodward is still, officially, an associate editor.
He is, he writes, “disillusioned.” After feeling “relief” when Bezos bought the Post in 2013, because the Amazon founder “would provide the finances” enabling a “courageous” future, Woodward reconsidered in 2024, when Donald Trump was elected to a second term and Bezos’s actions made it look as if he and the newspaper “were capitulating to Trump.”
Hundreds of thousands of subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, and one-third of the staff was eventually fired. Many of the Post’s stars left for the Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker.
Ouch.
******************
Woodward and I overlapped at the Post in the 1970s and early 1980s. We were friendly and were among the young men considered as potential leaders of the future. Bob’s likelihood of being executive editor, he writes, ended with the Janet Cooke scandal, in which she had to return a Pulitzer Prize for a story he had overseen.
I left the Post for Random House in 1984 and have been rarely in touch with Bob since then. But I have continued to be a great admirer of his persistent brilliance in journalism.
When Bezos bought the Post, he had an executive editor in Marty Baron with a record of great investigative leadership. And in Trump he had a presidency so outrageous that it guaranteed a major increase in readership.
But in the early 2020s, when Joe Biden was elected president and Baron retired soon afterward, the Post was again losing money in the millions, in part because of sloppy business management. In Bezos’s words, the asset had become a “complexifier” for his vast portfolio.
So why is it that Jeff Bezos, an unquestioned business genius, has mishandled the Washington Post?
The Jeff Bezos who bought the Post in 2013 was a fundamentally different person from the one he has become. In The Atlantic, Josh Tyrangiel has detailed Bezos’s transformation, reinventing himself personally with a new wife and a strikingly new physique, and leaning into his longtime fascination with space and now the intense competition for preeminence with Elon Musk.
Everyone who is interested probably already knows that reason. Here is the one I believe is at least as important:
Bezos thought he was buying a news organization with global-reach reporting and interpreting the dominant superpower that is the United States.
But this is also the Washington Post, whose financial and readership base was the 6.5 million people who live in “the DMV” — the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. That proved of virtually no interest to Bezos or to the people he hired to run the business.
Today’s Washington Post, with a smaller staff, has recovered ground in its coverage of politics and the world. Its website is livelier and newsier than before.
But everything else about the news output is just this side of pathetic. There is almost no local reporting, and the once great Style and sports sections use wire services to supplement their coverage.
Meanwhile, the residents of this metropolitan area of scale and prosperity have nothing like the news resources they deserve, and the potential base of readership and advertising is essentially ignored.
From my own experience with Bezos (I published his book Invent and Wander) and from my conversations with Post insiders, I have concluded that the overriding challenge is to get Jeff Bezos to listen. He is busy and understandably arrogant.
Maybe Bob Woodward can get his attention.
Bob Woodward’s memoir, Secrets, is not yet on sale but it has already been excerpted in The New Yorker and has had its contents excavated by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Woodward has a lot to say about many things. My sense is that his thoughts on Jeff Bezos have been quoted enough to know what he thinks about the owner of the Post, where …
Representative Steny Hoyer will leave Congress at the end of this term, after forty-five years representing Maryland’s Fifth District, covering Prince George’s, Calvert, Charles, Anne Arundel, and St. Mary’s counties. He will definitely be missed.
“There’s No One That Doesn’t Love Steny” was the headline on the story in Maryland Matters, a state nonprofit news site, when he announced his retirement in January.
After a sixty-year career in politics, there must be Hoyer critics. There certainly were opponents in his congressional races. But the positive consensus eased his personal sense of sadness at the ending.
“When you do something for a long time and you like it, and you decide to walk away voluntarily . . . it has an emotional tug on you,” he said.
I met Hoyer in the late 1960s. He was already in the State Senate, having been elected at the age of twenty-seven. (He would become the chamber’s youngest-ever president a few years later.) I was a reporter for the Washington Post assigned to cover Prince George’s County, which had a raffish blue-collar reputation. It was always called “PG,” and as Hoyer observed, nobody called staid neighboring Montgomery County “MC.”
There have been scores of Washington Post reporters who covered Hoyer over the decades, but when I learned that he remembered me, I asked for an interview about his experiences. We had two sessions, including a taped one in his office that will be aired on C-SPAN later this fall. (That is where Hoyer will speak for himself. A link will be posted here as soon as it is available.)
Lest it be considered unusual to remember by name a reporter from more than a half-century ago, a former aide told Maryland Matters: “It was really hard to staff him because I’d run up and say, ‘Mr. Hoyer, I’d like to introduce you to so-and-so,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, of course I know them.’”
In the four hours or so we spent together, my objective was to understand how he maintained his hold on his constituency as it underwent a fundamental racial transformation and he became a leader — but never the leader — of the Democrats in the House.
Alongside the celebrated two-time speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hoyer seemed less colorful and decidedly less a party force. Which raises the question: Do controversy and notoriety assure a legacy of distinction in politics?
It was Newt Gingrich who as speaker when the GOP took control of the House in 1994 embraced the cutthroat style of today’s personality-driven and divisive approach to leadership — which has reached its apogee in the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Gingrich’s tenure crashed in scandals, but his toxic tactics have endured. Pelosi was proof that cutthroat doesn’t have to be mean and cynical.
Hoyer’s strategy, by contrast, secured a position of stability and fortitude and, as time went on, mentorship. Former Senator Ben Cardin, who first met Hoyer when they were state legislators, told Maryland Matters:
“We have so many new members in the Maryland congressional delegation. He wanted to be able to help them as they started their congressional careers. Steny gives of himself every moment. And is effective in representing his people and in doing a lot of really good things. That’s a combination that’s going to be hard to duplicate.”
But as the great pundit Finley Peter Dunne intoned in 1895, “politics ain’t beanbag.” You must get elected.
*************
The core of Hoyer’s district is Prince George’s County, which according to the 2020 census is about 60 percent Black, and another 25 percent is Hispanic. The white population is about 10 percent, although much higher in the smaller southern counties. Hoyer, whose father was Danish and whose mother had deep American roots is, at eighty-seven, still blond-ish and most emphatically Caucasian.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Black population of Prince George’s County surged as tens of thousands of residents from the adjoining District of Columbia moved in for the benefits of suburban living and better schools. Whites in the areas close to Washington moved deeper into Maryland, where they tended to preserve the characteristics of the state’s traditional conservative vibe.
In 1981, as that transformation was well underway, Hoyer was elected to Congress. He had previously run unsuccessfully for Prince George’s county executive and for lieutenant governor.
He says he was the beneficiary of those losses, because once he was in the House of Representatives he never wanted to leave or considered running for another office.
How did Hoyer gain and hold the support of Black voters? Without their solid backing and turnout, he might have been defeated by opposition in the southern counties.
The explanation that follows reflects Hoyer’s own views rather than a canvass of Black voters.
Beginning with his first congressional race, Hoyer prioritized personal contacts, going door-to-door. Over time, he believes, voters improbably considered him “one of them,” genuinely working on their behalf on the issues that counted.
Hoyer’s annual breakfast featuring Black leaders and public figures was a signature local event. And for many years, Hoyer would join his closest congressional friend, John Lewis, on a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where Lewis, as a young activist, had been savagely beaten by white police in 1965.
So aside from getting elected to Congress and achieving the second-highest position in the House Democratic leadership, what does Hoyer consider his greatest legislative achievement? It was sponsorship of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bipartisan measure signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
Working well across the aisle in politics is a practice honored but exceedingly hard to achieve.
What inspired Steny Hoyer to enter politics? He says he wasn’t much of a student at the University of Maryland, when he heard John F. Kennedy’s summons for Americans to do what they could for their country.
Hoyer heeded that call and deserves the thanks he is now receiving.
Reporting and research have the same purpose: the assembling of facts. Reporting is associated with journalism and the practice of obtaining information for use in many ways. As a term, research suggests more depth, the excavation of facts with enough range to support narratives or render judgments.
Reporting and research make up the core of every fact-based book. And like all other aspects of writing, the way that this work gets done can range from cursory to prodigious.
Reporting means asking or raising a question. The proposition is straightforward. The practice is more complicated. The place to start is to ask what it is you want to know, and in what detail.
For example: Who struck John? Where, when, and why? What was the result? According to whom? How do you know the answers are true? Can you list the sources? By name? And how did you go about getting all of the above?
Good reporting is an acquired skill. The more of it you do, the better the outcome is likely to be.
State the proposition: John was struck. You want to know everything about the incident. The perpetrator should be identified, and if there was a wrong or a reason, what was it? If there is a complete answer to the question, what would that mean?
And after the first round of questions and results, be prepared to go back, and back again.
Reporters should be relentless. Don’t succumb to comforting satisfaction. Great reporters are curious to begin with and suspicious by nature in their quest for accuracy and, ultimately, truth.
Then there is note taking and organization. Every reporter and researcher has to devise techniques that work for their individual style. The universal mantras are trial and error, patience and persistence.
Simultaneously writing notes by hand while interviewing a person can lead to illegibility. But there are now an array of devices that will retain whatever is being heard or discovered. Relying on technology for taking notes and retrieving them can be efficient, but only after you have made sure to know what you are doing and how not to make a mess of it.
The traditional way to do this was to employ techniques like touch typing and shorthand, at one time a reporter’s best tool. I never conquered either skill. It is amazing how much you can get done with two fingers on a keyboard.
People are inherently unreliable. That is human, often excusable, and mistakes once revealed can be rectified. Crossing out, revising, and updating are honorable. My determination has always been to find the best way to preserve and decipher what my reporting has produced.
The transition from primarily analog reporting and research to digital has obviously made a massive change in the amount of material accessible without really ever leaving a chair. That is an enormous asset, especially to research.
But technology can be unforgiving. Hitting the wrong key in moments of inattention can cause material to be sent to the wrong recipient or to disappear altogether.
Like learning a language or playing an instrument, knowing how to use digital file systems takes time. For most people transitioning from analog methods, it is not automatic or intuitive.
The rules of technology are not always logical. When, a very long time ago, I realized that to turn OFF my Windows program, you click on START, I got the drift.
By comparison, analog note taking and organization is cumbersome. And what if all those notes get lost in a flood or a fire?
Here is my suggested solution. Whether you go digital or analog, make a copy of everything and put it in a safe vault, or with instructions for retrieval shared with a reliable backup. That way, if all hell breaks loose, the material can be found and printed out.
Belt and suspenders.
*********************
Reporting is required for any story. Investigative reporting and writing is a specialty, like rocket science or complex surgery.
The investigative reporters I have known and edited are fierce — not necessarily angry, although that can help. They will pursue a story until the revelations are convincing enough to withstand challenges and denials.
Investigative reporters deploy skills at accounting, deciphering small print, and obscure data discovery with a determination to gain the trust of sources, recognizing that almost always there are people who don’t want you to find out what they have hidden or, more often, covered up.
They need to be prepared for what at the Washington Post we called “non-denial denials,” which dispute but don’t refute the facts. Those on the receiving end of investigations rarely want to accept or confirm the disclosures.
Investigative writers need to be self-confident, just this side of arrogant, and need to have editors and publishers who will support them.
And this: investigative books have very little latitude for making mistakes. Fact checking is obligatory, down to the spelling of every name and the precision of dates. The smallest error requiring a correction tends to undermine everything else.
Investigative reporting has a distinguished history. The early twentieth-century “muckrakers” transformed whole industries with their work. It was later in the century when writers like Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, and Jane Mayer dissected politics and politicians that books became a crucial factor in exposing corruption and, along the way, leading to the erosion of trust of leaders and the institutions of government.
I will choose one book to exemplify the best of investigative writing and publishing: John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which appeared initially as a full issue of The New Yorker in 1946 and then as a book from Alfred A. Knopf.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is credited with bringing World War II to a close and opening the nuclear age, in which it became possible to use weaponry to obliterate entire cities and beyond.
In the months after the attacks, the U.S. political and military leadership were able to limit the information and public awareness of how devastating the bombs had been on the civilian population of the two Japanese cities. To some extent, relief that the war had ended made it easier for the American people to ignore the suffering of a defeated enemy.
Hersey, already an admired war correspondent, got access to Hiroshima, where he focused on six survivors of the bombing. The writing was unadorned, which actually increased its impact.
The establishment recoiled.
Many millions of copies have been sold, and eighty years after it first appeared, the book is still for sale in seven formats. At Amazon it is often number one in the category of Japanese history. Nuclear weapons have never been used again.
**********************
Occasionally, one example explains a much broader insight. That was my reaction when I heard the historian Craig Fehrman on a panel talking about his well-received book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark. Here is what he said:
My number-one tip on research is to just follow every lead, every single lead. Don’t worry about how long it’s taking. Don’t worry about the story; follow every lead. . . .
I’ll give you a really quick example; [William] Clark’s college notebook. That’s one of the biggest things I found in my book — that Clark actually went to college. Most books about Lewis and Clark would make fun of him. And that’s not true; he was very well educated.
I found that out while I was doing research for York [a Black slave accompanying the expedition], because York wasn’t able to read or write, so I was trying to read everything related to York I could, and I knew that there was an autobiography written by a white person who had a Black slave in Kentucky. And so I was like, I’m going to read this, just to find out about that Black slave in Kentucky, so I can understand York. . . . And on the first page, the guy says, “I headed back with my good friend William Clark.” And I’m like, That William Clark?
So I had to do a little bit of research to verify it, but because I was looking at every single thing I could find about York, I found something really big and new about Clark, because that autobiography talked about him going to college, and that started me down a really long process.
So in terms of when you have enough, you never have enough. You’ll never feel like you’re ready. But what you need to do is chase down every single lead, because you never know. The one question that you’re trying to answer, that might open up something else.
Reporting and research have no designated boundaries or limitations. Rendering what you learn and then writing it to be understood and appreciated are actually different parts of the process. Great material in the rough can lose the intended meaning.
This takes us back to where we started, the writing process. Taking the information that you have amassed and producing a publishable work deploys an array of skills. Ideally, a writer develops all the necessary ones. My sense is that wherever you start, you’ll want to continue to refine the ability to attract readers — which, after all, is the objective of writing.
The debates over abortion and the racial integration of schools have long been at the center of American life and politics. On that we can all agree.
In 1973, the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. In 2022, the court ended that federal mandate for access to abortion, returning the issue to the states.
In 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education banned official segregation in schools and in an implementation decision the following year said that integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed.”
Well, it turns out that since the 2022 decision, the number of abortions per year in the United States has increased by about 21 percent, compared to the Guttmacher Institute’s statistics from 2020.
And by all accepted measures, the number of American public schools where the student body is 90 to 100 percent non-white has tripled over the past three decades. In Mississippi, for example, the number of racially integrated schools is statistically negligible.
In major cities like New York and Chicago, public school enrollments are drawn overwhelmingly from Black and Hispanic minorities.
I had been hearing about these figures for some time, but I only recently looked into them and began to wonder why the realities were so different from what these judicial decisions would have them be.
It is safe to conclude that while court rulings and legislation set the official terms for society, they plainly cannot overrule popular will and preferences.
********************
According to the Guttmacher Institute, seventeen states have now banned abortions in almost all cases. Overall, thirty-six states have rules that deal with the circumstances and timing around abortions.
The main reason for the substantial increase in abortions is the widespread use of medication, as distinct from surgery, to end pregnancies — a choice that more women are making today because they live in states where surgical abortion has become difficult to obtain. Almost two-thirds of abortions involve the drug mifepristone. Medication abortion has been unsuccessfully challenged in court by anti-abortion activists, though it remains banned in those states whose laws mandate against abortion induced in any way.
It has been more than forty years since mifepristone was developed in France, and it is now widely prescribed around the globe and is regarded as safe and effective.
Yet the divide between anti-abortion activists and supporters of a woman’s right to choose remains enormous, despite the reality of how many abortions are performed and how the procedure has evolved.
And to be clear, for women in the seventeen prohibitive states, the issue of abortion is incomparably worse than it was.
The considered judgment among those qualified to make one is that the issue of abortion has always been much more a spiritual matter about the definition of when life begins than it is about the medical risks and consequences.
In the 1990s, the essayist Roger Rosenblatt, at the instigation of the editors at Times Books, extensively surveyed the subject for a book called Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind. His conclusion (with which I have come to agree) is that whatever your opinion on the politics of abortion, the consensus is:
“Give abortion five seconds of thought and it quickly spirals down in the mind to the most basic questions about human life to the mysteries of birth and our relationship with our souls. . . . To create a society in which abortion is permitted and its gravity appreciated is to create but another of the many useful frictions of democracy. Such a society does not devalue life by allowing abortion; it takes life with utmost seriousness, and is, by the depths of its conflicts and the richness of its difficulties, a reflection of life itself.”
And so it seems that this insight is the reality, rather than the laws.
*************************
On the matter of school integration, it has become clear over time that despite the benefits of racial balance, it is only possible if everyone involved can agree on how to make it happen. From the outset, there have been clashes over school busing and the redrawing of school districts that eventually overwhelmed the advocacy and virtues of integration.
There are other factors, aside from access, that have defined the way integration has largely failed.
While the population in the United States has undergone a racial transformation over the years, group identity remains strong. Legal discrimination has largely disappeared (on voting rights, the recent record is terrible), but major segments of the population prefer their “own kind.”
African-Americans have been notable in their pride in Black institutions and organizations, colleges, businesses, and bookstores, as well as their prevalence in music and culture, football, and basketball. I am in no position to explain how and why this has happened, but from my perspective it has.
Nominally, everything is open to all comers, but the numbers show that integration on a mass scale has fallen far short of its optimistic projections.
Schools are a particularly complicated issue. A lengthy, heartfelt piece in the New York Times by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a leading Black writers, recounts her daughter’s experiences fulfilling her parents’ ambition to support schools where minority and students from poorer homes dominate. Hannah-Jones reflects the conundrum faced by all urban parents committed to public education: What is the best choice for the child that is also supportive of society’s broad belief in schools integrated by race and family background?
So many years after the end of segregation by law, it is still a reality in schools. As has happened regarding abortion, it remains true that you cannot override what the people choose when they can.
*********************
Do I have an answer to the problem that Hannah-Jones and her husband confronted? No, because I was never tested. Here, with acknowledged humility, is a possible approach:
They could have offered their daughter the opportunity to transfer to a different school, to get the education she said she wanted. Also, they could have devoted their own time and resources to improve the school that was left behind.
Would that have made a difference? Certainly to her daughter and possibly also to a school that so badly needs help.
Publishers Marketplace, founded in 2001 by Michael Cader, is an invaluable resource for the world of books. A full subscription costs $30 a month, and thousands of people choose that. (There is a free option, with limited information.)
Being the impresario, Cader sets the tone — occasionally acerbic — and makes the rules for what gets covered or listed. But Publishers Marketplace is considered as accurate as it is possible to be in a data-driven universe.
The venerable Publishers Weekly maintains a print magazine and a daily newsletter with a variety of price options. Choosing the one that will meet your needs can add up to almost $300 a year at full price. Both publications report the news and comings-and-goings in and around book publishing.
A major feature of Publishers Marketplace is a list of the latest acquisitions, submitted by literary agents and publishers, with each entry containing a brief description and an estimate of the size of the advance, which is an imperfect measure of the book’s expected sales potential. A “nice” deal is an advance of up to $49,000, growing to a “major” deal of $500,000 and higher. Every Monday, subscribers receive an email listing the previous week’s new acquisitions, often numbering in the hundreds.
These deal listings are divided into multiple categories. For fiction, they range from literary to romance and sci-fi; children’s books are classified by age group (picture book, middle grade, young adult); and poetry is its own classification. This is the nonfiction category list, to provide a sense of the spectrum of genres.
Advice/Relationships/Self-Help
Anthology
Biography
Body, Mind & Spirit
Business/Finance/Economics
Culture/Pop Culture
Diet
Food/Beverage
General/Other
Health/Medicine
History
How-to
Humor
Illustrated/Art
Lifestyle
Memoir
Narrative
Parenting
Politics/Current Affairs
Reference
Religion/Spirituality
Science/Technology
Sports
True Crime
The purpose of this chapter is to give writers a sense of the many definitions of what can be considered a book. Writing is a creative act, and as with all creations (meaning to produce something that starts from an idea or vision) there is a genre to be chosen — for instance, abstract painting as opposed to works of art that are figurative or representational, like portraits and landscapes.
Confusing categories can undermine the content. So, consider this list a guide to the many genres of nonfiction.
At my request, Cader agreed for me to use five examples of submissions, chosen from the deals posted in January 2026. These are drawn from categories that are different from those like memoir, biography, and history that I am dealing with in detail. They provide a glimpse of the range of writers’ interests and hopes.
Advice/Relationships/Self Help
Artist and founder of the Introvert Drawing Club Beth Spencer’s untitled guide to accessing creative joy — thereby sharpening focus, lifting one’s mood, and even banishing anxious thoughts — using prompts, mindse, check-ins, and illustrations, to Katie McClimon at Simon Element, in an exclusive submission, by Laurie Abkemeier at DeFiore and Company (world).
Body, Mind & Spirit
The team behind the newsletter, podcast, and community The Small Bow’s THE SMALL BOOK: RECOVERY STORIES FOR EVERYONE, essays and reflections on sobriety, mental health, and whatever else is bringing you down, to Madeline McIntosh at Authors Equity, in an exclusive submission, for publication in January 2027 (world)
Culture/Pop Culture
Columbia University professor of English and comparative literature and author of SCREAM WITH ME Dr. Eleanor Johnson PhD’s MOTHER OF FRANKENSTEIN, a series of close readings of elements of Mary Shelley’s novel FRANKENSTEIN to highlight how and why this novel has such enduring and uncanny purchase on the American imagination, again to Kate Napolitano at Atria, by Charlotte Cohen Sunderland and Celeste Fine at Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management (world).
Food/Beverage
International Oyster Sommelier and cofounder of the Oyster Master Guild Julie Qiu’s THE OYSTER PALATE, a guide to understanding the complexities behind the flavors of oysters from all over the world, blending firsthand tasting experience and marine science, revealing how geography, water chemistry, time, and climate shape the taste of every shell, to Nicole James at Rock Point (world).
Health/Medicine
Today Show fitness expert Stephanie Mansour’s DO WHAT YOU CAN, pitched as ATOMIC HABITS for feel-good health, a guide for anyone who has ever abandoned a lofty wellness goal — from fitness to nutrition, sleep and even emotional regulation — offering science-backed “mini win” strategies for lasting holistic health, to Ashley Di Dio at Putnam, at auction, for publication in spring 2027, by Abby Walters at CAA (world).
Authors clearly come to the process with varied intentions. The point, again, is that each of these projects begins with a writer whose ambition is to publish a book that will make an impact, hopefully endure, and make money, where that is the objective.
In 2025, more than four million books were published in the United States, the majority of which were “self-published” or “hybrid,” meaning that the author paid at least in part for the print run and digital presence. While these books have become an increasingly important part of the publishing universe and can sell in large numbers, Publishers Marketplace and the review media have yet to fully recognize their importance, a reflection of the outdated notion that this is “vanity” publishing, a topic I’ll address in a later chapter.
More than a half million general-interest, or “trade,” books were released by publishing companies, small, medium, and large, which acquire, edit, and market the books.
Among these, the number of successes measured by sales, acclaim, and full author satisfaction with the results and with the publisher’s efforts, is actually a small fraction of the total.
But they all have a common origin: a writer, an idea, and persistence through the writing process. Reporting and research are the essential components of composition, no matter the subject or the publishing format in which they will ultimately appear.
That will be the focus of the next chapter.
************************************
Thursday Oct. 8 at Politics and Prose 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW 7 pm. In conversation with Kenneth Feinberg, Special Master of the September 11th Victiim Compensation Fund and author of “What Is Life Worth.”
The podcast “The Rest Is History” does for history what “Car Talk,” a much-loved and much-missed NPR program, did for automobile mechanics — a conversation between experts, as erudite as it is entertaining.
The hosts are Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, historians who share the skill of combining storytelling with detail that supports but does not overwhelm the narrative.
The podcast was launched in November 2020, has released roughly eight hundred episodes, and has had tens of millions of downloads. It is a certified blockbuster, as described in this admiring feature in the New York Times.
After multiple recommendations, I started listening to it in the car over the summer and have now added it to my daily intake of added knowledge.
I have been through the Battle of Trafalgar, the Battle of Hastings, the destruction of Carthage, various chapters on the rise and fall of the Roman empire, and, as a sort of change-of-pace, the sinking of the Titanic.
The preponderance of conflict and violence in these sagas is more than coincidental. Civilization is framed by the eternal competition for power, territory, religious and cultural primacy, and by the transience of eras.
One notable aspect of the episodes are apocalypses of one kind or another and the destruction of civilizations — or potentially even the human race. Historical deaths in individual or aggregate numbers are almost always mentioned.
Death counts are also a staple feature of local broadcast news — “if it bleeds it leads” is the mantra — while mayhem and annihilation dominate on the movie screens, especially over the summer.
Children in the 1950s (I was one) were trained in “duck and cover” school drills in preparation for a nuclear attack. We wore dog tags with our names on them. Civil Defense shelter signs were everywhere.
The potential for a nuclear war seems to have receded over the decades, although the amount of weaponry maintained by the United States, Russia, China, and a half dozen other nuclear powers is massive. The arms control treaties that have been negotiated, beginning in the 1960s, have largely lapsed or have been overtaken by real and prospective nuclear proliferation in, among other places, North Korea and Iran.
In 2026, the probability that artificial intelligence agents could bring about the end of humanity has been estimated at a 10 percent likelihood. Regulation of this phenomenon has yet to be established by governments or by the companies that have developed what amounts to weaponry.
So the civilizational peril and violence that represent so much of the content of “The Rest Is History” reflects reality.
And yet history also provides a timeline of progress. Over the centuries, the conditions of life have evolved for the better in almost every respect. One of my favorite lines about these improvements is that among the greatest achievements in medical science was soap and water for sanitation, a very long time ago.
We know so much about the past because we have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of preserving the record. AI seems to be the latest iteration of this, perhaps further than it will turn out to be safe to go.
One of the reasons that Sandbrook and Holland are so popular is their ability to relate history to the present — how, for example, the politics of imperial Rome align with the twenty-first century.
They remind us that scandals, corruption, rage, and sex have deep roots in human nature. So it is that violence also is a recurring theme down the generations. In many places (although not yet in the Darfur region of Africa), terrifying men on horseback have been replaced by swarms of drones that kill with little risk to those deploying them, progress of a sort.
Podcasts are proof of continuity in history. Listening to people talking and telling stories is an experience as old as time.
Events then and now are on a continuum. “The Rest Is History” makes that connection, and it is definitely working well.
