An Interview With Andrew Wylie

Andrew Wylie

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New York literary agent Andrew Wylie seems perfectly happy to be known as "the Jackal"—the nickname that sticks even though he obtained it years ago in Britain during a publishing dustup whose baroque details have largely faded from memory. He's equally unruffled when book editors and rival agents call him an "evil madman," a "cold-eyed predator," and a "monster."
           
The 59-year-old Wylie, more famous than many of the 600-plus authors he represents, has devoted his career to shaking up the once-genteel book business on both sides of the Atlantic by doing things that just weren't done—stealing writers from fellow agents, demanding and receiving outrageous advances, and otherwise making a huge pain of himself in the service of his clients. (He became the Jackal in the course of securing a previously unheard-of $750,000 advance for Martin Amis, who—in  an alleged act of betrayal that was the stuff of tabloid melodrama—retained Wylie after dumping his longtime agent, the wife of his best friend, fellow novelist Julian Barnes.)

Today Wylie's stable of thoroughbreds, living and dead, also includes Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and many others who constitute a who's who of the planet's best writers.

Wylie grew up as the son of a respected book editor in an old-money Boston family, studied French literature at Harvard, and entered the publishing game relatively late in life, when he was already in his 30s, after a misspent youth of Bohemian excess, which included hanging out with Andy Warhol, writing dirty poetry, and partaking of all manner of dangerous drugs.
     
Today he's an unapologetic snob. In his droll way, with an upper-class accent that sounds more English than American, Wylie is an evangelist for the principle that nominally noncommercial literary authors—whose work will stand the test of time, he believes—deserve at least as much consideration and cash as the likes of John Grisham and Stephen King. Rewarding elitism is only good business, he argues.

The secret of his success?

"When you represent someone's work, if you're passionate about it, and that passion is sincere, it's conveyed," Wylie told Portfolio.com this week in an exclusive interview. "And it's hard to resist passion."

Lloyd Grove: Well, you look like a perfectly nice man. How did all these nasty names attach themselves to you?
 
Andrew Wylie: I think that if you're building an agency from scratch, it's a difficult thing to do. If you're building an agency from scratch that is, by design, focused exclusively on the upper end of the market in terms of quality, it becomes exponentially more difficult, because the margins—which are thin anyway in publishing—will get thinner as the quality increases. And what we were trying to do was to represent quality with the same kind of discipline that had been brought to the representation of bestsellers.
 
L.G.: You're talking about the publisher's margins.
 
A.W.: Yeah, agency margins as well.
 
L.G.: Do you still charge 10 percent?
 
A.W.: No, 15.

L.G.: When did you raise it to 15?
 
A.W.: We were the last in the industry. I think it was about 18 months ago.
 
L.G.: That was a big deal because, oh, my God, there are some people charging 20 percent now.
 
A.W.: Yeah, we were holdouts. I really do think we were the last.

L.G.: Why did you hold out so long?
 
A.W.: We could.
 
L.G.: But was that a matter of principle? You just liked that idea?
 
A.W.: Well, the people we represent are not writers who make the most money in the business. The greatest advances are paid either to disgraced politicians or to failed novelists. We don't represent either category.
 
L.G.: By failed novelists, do you mean people who write bad novels? They're commercially successful, but literarily they've failed?
 
A.W.: Yeah, in my view. But the key point in the business is that the investment is made in the wrong areas in the business, and I think that quality—which is more valuable over time—has been undervalued, and quantity—which is less valuable over time—has been overvalued. And I think this is a reaction to the dominance of the influence of the chains. In England right now, this is a catastrophe. The retail side is leading the business by the nose, and publishers have not reacted with sufficient strength, and they should have. And so the business in England is just in the tank basically.
 

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