Rebecca Stead Quotes

In so many ways, being a literary agent is an irresistible job to me. Not only does it involve all the things I love - being an advocate for others, problem solving, and going to meetings - yes, that's true, I love meetings, though everyone says it's bizarre! - but most importantly, I love working with people whose writing excites me.

Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It's an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.

Publishing is not my world.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

I think you have to have a publishing house that offers you some support.

Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.

I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do.

As I see it, my job has always been to champion the work of the authors I publish.

At Knopf, we look at each book on a case-by-case basis... in some cases, we think a writer might get a boost from an endorsement by a fellow writer, but in other cases, a new book will be better served by other means, such as publicity and reviews.

I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.

I'd only been in the business three or four years, but I told myself that someday I'd like to be Mort Janklow.

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

I realized very young that I loved reading and wanted to do something related to books/reading for a living. I didn't think of publishing, really, until I was out of college.

In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

I call myself a literary agent simply to distinguish myself from actors' agents.

You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he's very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me.