10. Suzanne Gluck: “I'm a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things”

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0:49Suzanne Gluck is one of my absolute favorite people. I just admire her so much. When I first met her, I was prepared not to like her. She's a literary agent, and she approached me to try to convince me to write a popular book. But I had zero interest in writing a popular book. I mean, I was dead set against it. I only took her call grudgingly out of courtesy. But I have to say, By the time we hung up 30 minutes later, I was in complete awe of Suzanne. Using some sort of black magic that I simply can't explain, she had convinced me to co-author a book with Stephen Dubner, someone who I barely knew and I didn't even like.

1:29So how much has my admiration grown for Suzanne over the years? When my oldest daughters were teenagers, I flew them to New York for a weekend, the only purpose of which was to have them meet Suzanne, because I just couldn't think of a better female role model. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. Often I'm worried before an interview about whether it'll go well or not, but with Suzanne, I'm not really worried because she's so naturally social. The only shred of concern I have is that she's hardly ever been interviewed before, and sometimes people act really differently when you put a microphone in front of them.

2:06But hopefully that won't be an issue today.

2:15Now, just to get any conflicts of interest 100 % out in the open, if you had to choose your all-time favorite author among the many authors you've represented, given that this is my podcast, and you've represented me for the last 15 years, I'm guessing you would probably say me, right? I'd have to say you and Stephen are tied. I'd have to say that. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. So cutting aside, let's just make that clear to anyone who cares about it that you represent me. And I am a proud client of yours for many, many years. Before we do anything, what's your official job title? Official job title is Partner at WME, William Morris Endeavor.

2:57Great. And this would be a literary agency that you're part of? No, it's a multifaceted talent and entertainment agency that stretches from books, which of course we think is the be-all and end-all, but we have theater, we have television, we have motion picture, we have podcasts. So it's a very diversified company. But what you do is literary. You work on the literary side of things. I am books beginning, middle, end. And just to anchor people who don't know too much about this industry, in terms of literary agencies, are you the biggest and the best in the world? In terms of just metrics, we're the single largest supplier of books to the big five publishers.

3:38So I would say we're not the only very big and very successful agency in the business, I only wish, but we're definitely an industry leader here in the States and internationally. Who are some of your better known authors? Well, of late, one of the novels that I'm very proud of is Pachinko by Minjin Lee, which I assure you many people you know have read and loved. This year at the National Book Awards, I was very excited because I had to duck and run between tables because Sarah Broom, who wrote the memoir The Yellow House, was up for a National Book Award, as was my other client, Julia Phillips, who wrote Disappearing Earth, which she was up for fiction.

4:33So I had to run between tables because I wanted to sit with each of them when the award was announced. And Sarah actually won the National Book Award. Judy Blume, right? Judy Blume, who's written so many books that we all love so much. She has adult, she has young adult, she has children's books. She definitely in the aggregate has sold way in the tens of millions. It seems like a big part of the job of a literary agent is being able to identify books that people will like. And I assume you just get sent hundreds or thousands of books. How do you figure out who you're going to take on as a client?

5:14Yes, we definitely get dozens and dozens of requests a week. First of all, you eliminate everyone who doesn't say, Dear Suzanne. You'd be surprised how many of them say, you know, Dear Eric. So that's easy. And the query letter has to be one of many things. Either has to be putting forth an idea I've just discovered new historical research about, something that just hasn't existed before, or a point of view. I'm going to tell the story about this school for delinquent boys in Alabama that you've never heard before, or if it's a novel, the query has to be extremely well-written and feel like a book that you really would want to read.

6:07A lot of it has to happen in two paragraphs, but agents read those queries as often as they can, and people come in out of the slush pile. I have people come in that way a couple of times a year. The bigger trade publishers at this point get about 95 % through agents. Our slush pile is relevant. You know, we are the point of entry. So we do take it seriously. Let's see, if you get a thousand inquiries out of the blue, how many of those will you end up reading some part of the manuscript? I would say 20. So 20 out of 1 ,000. And how many of those 20 do you get more than five pages into it? Let's say 10.

6:56Now, some of them I'll get a few pages in and think, ah, this is really good. This is not for me. This is for my colleague. And redirect. So the odds are really stacked against someone who cold calls a literary agent. So maybe one in a hundred of those folks could get enough of your attention to have a shot. It's a tough place to be for the authors. However, the easiest thing for people to do is to go to a bookstore or go online now and look at books, not books that you admire and love necessarily, but books that you think speak to the same reader, that your book will speak to. Nine times out of 10, they'll mention the agent.

7:42And you can put together a query list that is pretty focused in terms of the kind of work that a particular agent is drawn to so that you're not just flying blind. So what advice do you give to those people? Well, first of all, for decades, I would ask myself, why is it that every single year at Thanksgiving. It's four o 'clock. I'm elbow deep in trying to figure out how to make gravy, which I really can't make and I must give up trying. And invariably, I get queries from authors. And I couldn't figure it out. And two years ago at a writer's conference, a young man was very, very helpful in setting me straight.

8:27He said, yes, you go to Thanksgiving with your family. And even though you always said you wanted to be a writer, you have this job in marketing and they start needling you like, hey, Seth, when are you going to get that agent? When are you going to move ahead with that novel? And finally, just because you want to shut them up and just because you're a little embarrassed, you hit send on that query, thus explaining why I get queries every year on Thanksgiving. I would say don't do that. I would say business hours and I would say do as much homework as possible before you send the query because you really have a very small window of an agent's time to get somebody's attention.

9:12I go even farther in my advice when people ask me about writing a book. What do you say? I say, don't write a book. Please don't write a book. For sure, don't write a book if your reason for writing a book is you want people to read it. I say, if you're going to enjoy the process, if you've got an idea, a book burning inside of you that you need to let out, then by all means, go ahead and write that book if you're going to be happy at the end of the day if nobody reads it. But I think that people who start out on book writing with the idea that they're going to get famous or they're going to be bestsellers or they're going to do this or that, I think the chances of that happening are so low that it really leads to disappointment so often.

9:50And my mother wanted nothing more her entire life to be a bestselling author. And my whole life growing up, she sent out packages of manuscripts to agents like you and was always frustrated by it. So I lived in this world where I had seen people who had that desire. Well, many times a year, writers will come to me, good writers, and say, look, I'm now willing to write whatever it is to write a bestseller. You know, just give me the guidance in terms of what kind of book can I write that's going to be a bestseller. And the truth is very disappointing, which is you have to write the book that you're passionate about or you have no chance of it being a bestseller.

10:34There is unfortunately very little way to architect a bestseller.

10:43You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with top New York literary agent Suzanne Gluck. They'll return after this short break.

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12:21So do you remember the circumstances surrounding our very first phone call, the first time we ever spoke? No, we're fresh. Yes. So there had been an article Dubner had written about me in the New York Times magazine, and probably a half dozen publishers had called me and said, hey, we've read this piece. We'd like you to write a popular book for us. And I had zero interest in writing a popular book. And I gave them all the same answer, which is, why don't you spend some time reading some of my academic papers? And if you still think I'd be an interesting person to write a popular book, come in and be in touch.

12:56And I will, for the record, say that none of them, having read my academic papers, thought I would be a good person to write a popular book. But I know that you had reached out to Stephen, who you represented, Stephen Dubner, and you had an idea and you wanted to bring us together to write a book together. And that's what brought you to call me. So you don't have any recollection of that phone call, right? I remember that very, very clearly because this was over a vacation and smack in the middle of summer. And I read the profile that Stephen did. And even though he was a longtime client and he was in the middle of a two book contract with his publisher.

13:36Interestingly, the second book was supposed to be on the psychology of money, a book that never got written, or shall we say yet. And I called him and said, Stephen, this should be your next book. And then as you remember, there was a very colorful back and forth with our publisher. So before we get to the negotiation, I want to start with that first phone call because you and I come from such different worlds, Susanna. And just being completely honest about what I had been doing for the 15 years preceding the phone call we had, I literally had been penned up in my office in front of a computer, one of the most antisocial people on the planet.

14:12And you said you wanted to have a phone call. I said, grudgingly, yes, I would talk to you because I really didn't think it would go anywhere. And then what I remember distinctly is that when I picked up the phone, instead of talking to you, it was your assistant. And I had never known anyone who was important enough that her assistant would do the calls, and she would only jump on once the other person was on the other end. So that's the first thing that struck me about you. So then we talked, and I have to say it took all of your persuasive powers, not even to make a book like Freakonomics happen, but even to get Dubner and me to talk on the phone, because I would say that we left that New York Times piece not particularly cordial, because again, I was super antisocial at the time and didn't really want to be written about.

15:04and I think he found it a lot of work to write that piece and maybe not that rewarding. But you convinced us and it probably took a half an hour for you to get me to even be willing to do that phone call. And then I got on the phone with Dubner and we talked and we actually came to a kind of meeting of the minds because neither of us wanted to write this book that you were dreaming up. But a happy coincidence was that Dubner and I had the same price roughly in mind. And we told you that if you could get a deal, then we would write the book. So do you remember what happened to the bargain? The bargain was one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed in my life.

15:37You probably don't remember the details because you do this all the time. Well, I do do it all the time, but I remember it really clearly because it was a lot of fun. And I remember that Stephen's editor started off with a kind of aggressive posture. And as we were starting to negotiate, I was also getting feedback from editors and publishers around town who also loved the piece and thought this could be something very cool. So some funny agent antenna went off. And by the time she came back and met it for us, we went up higher and higher because part of what I see as my role is to fully exploit the market for whoever the client is.

16:22So let me tell it even more explicitly. So you went to our eventual publisher and you told them, I think something like, I don't know, 500 ,000. And I think they told you that was ridiculous. Were you crazy? No one's ever heard of this economist guy. We're never going to do it. And you called me back and said, well, they weren't happy about it. So we're going to have to shop it to other publishers. I said, okay, that's fine. But as I remember it, the next day, they called you back and said, okay, fine. This is totally ridiculous, but we'll take the deal. to which you said, which really shocked me, you said, nope, that was yesterday's deal.

16:58Today's deal is$750 ,000, not$500 ,000, to which, if I remember correctly, there were many expletives sent your way and they slammed down the phone and said, you're a horrible person. And I think it was no more than an hour or two later, they called you back again and said, okay, you're a horrible person and you're taking everything from us, but we accept. to which, again, to my complete and total shock, you said, sorry, the deal's off the table. Now the deal is 750 ,000, but only for North American rights, not for worldwide rights. And I refuse to sell you the worldwide rights no matter what.

17:34Okay, and the ending of the story is we did better than that. Listen, there are publishers who also make some very good decisions and have great negotiations also. But in this particular case, I think that they were chasing our excitement. I had a very, very, very strong sense of ballast about what the project could be and what the response could be outside of that house with other U.S. houses, but also around the world. And it turned out that this was a huge international success. But it's interesting. I'm not sure how you saw that because I know Dubner couldn't see it. I know I couldn't see it.

18:21I know my own father, when I called up my dad to tell him that we had signed this contract, he was furious. And he demanded that I give the money back because no person in their right mind would ever want to read the stupid stuff I wrote about. And it would be immoral to take the publisher's money. I remember your father's response very well. I remember your father's response. So somehow you had the vision, but in some sense we wrote the book very differently than we would have otherwise because we didn't expect anyone to read it and it really freed us up. We just thought, let's have fun writing it.

18:55And I think that really helped. It fits with exactly what you said. A hundred percent, which is why it can be very frustrating to be a career author and be extremely smart and accomplished and a very fine writer and yet have a limited audience. And I understand the impulse to be willing to negotiate the subject, the style of writing, other things, if you think it'll get you that wider audience, but it generally doesn't work that way. There's a famous story where some decades ago, HarperCollins hired McKinsey to do a study on how to change their business. They wanted them to consult on how to be more profitable.

19:36And at the end of it, they said, here's our advice. Just publish the bestsellers. Of course, everybody in publishing laughed. If we only knew, give us that second report now. How do we know which ones they are? So in the same spirit, I think your best tactic, as frustrating as it might be, is to write the best book and the book that seems most authentic. Exterior Remodels, Inner Monologues, brought to you by Power. The house looks good, like really good. That siding, stunning. The roof, elevated. Windows, I mean, wow. The process, smooth. The neighbors, jealous. Choose Power Home Remodeling and remodel how you think about remodeling.

20:24Schedule your free quote on windows, siding, roofing, and doors at powerhomeremodeling.com. Power. Our work shows. The new LinkedIn Hiring Pro can't undo your last hire. The lone wolf. Who you thought was a good collaborator because you didn't have the right candidate insights. But once you hired them, it was all hoarding info, declining meetings, and howling at the full moon? but LinkedIn hiring pro can go deeper than just the resume to find you a perfect fit by using insights from the LinkedIn network to give you a short list of best fit candidates hire right the first time with LinkedIn hiring pro post a free job today at linkedin.com slash all new drinks are now at McDonald's like the strawberry watermelon refresher and the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba you've got ice cold drinks for every moment refreshers contain caffeine so i thought the first part of the interview went pretty well but i also felt like suzanne was holding back a little bit the best interviews are the ones where the interviewee is a little bit braggy eager to paint a picture of how important they are how clever how awesome And if anything, I think Suzanne was doing the opposite, downplaying her own accomplishments just a bit.

21:42Okay, so my challenge for the second half of this interview is to see if I can get her to toot her own horn a little bit more. And I think my best shot at doing that is to get her talking about the subject of negotiation, because I've never met a better negotiator. Let's go back to the negotiation. So what you did was fearless and really ruthless in a way that I'm not really accustomed to. Does that just feel natural to you? I mean, not in a bad way. I mean, it's amazing. What you did was amazing. But it's really, you know, most people live in fear and most people worry a lot about what other people think of them.

22:19And you just seemed completely confident and untroubled by anything around you. I'm not fearful about what other people think of me. And I honestly think that people need advocacy. I learned early on from a very funny example, don't be afraid to ask, you actually might get it. Back in 91, when I was a baby baby agent, I represented Michael Jackson's sister, LaToya. And the book was a huge bestseller. And I had to call the UK publisher and ask for an additional budget so Latoya Jackson could travel on her UK publicity tour with her pet snakes. In today's parlance, we would probably call them therapy animals, but boy, was that a crazy phone call.

23:11And yet I kind of wrapped my mind around it and why she might need that to happen because she was my client. And I called them and guess what? they gave her a snake budget. So that was a really interesting moment for me to think, you know what, as long as you can figure out the rationale behind, go ahead and ask, because you often get. There's such a sway in terms of how publishers value a book, so that in my business, where you largely have a bunch of English majors who are, in some cases excellent business people, but they are intuitive business people. They move from your head to your gut very, very quickly.

23:56And because it's virtually impossible to predict what kind of book is going to succeed, publishers are also very influenced by other people's enthusiasm, mine, but also other publishers' enthusiasm. So economists write endless academic papers that are aimed at bargaining, but you're a world-class, real-world bargainer. What kinds of strategies or approaches do you use when you enter a negotiation? So I am largely an intuitive negotiator, meaning that I don't use the same strategies over and over again, and they work a certain percentage of the time. I have a variety of strategies, and I'm mindful of the fact that in some ways, book publishing is a little bit different than other industries.

24:49Rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly, all of us in book publishing think, we really could have made more money doing something else, but we wanted to be in an area that in some way was making the world a better place. So you're dealing with an industry that is, despite the Freakonomics negotiation example, it's less ruthless than a lot of industries. There's not a lot of industries where a competitor will email me or call me up and say, I saw your book hit the bestseller list. Good for you. So I'm dealing with a slightly different population. And if anything, I think my superpower is that I'm an emotional influencer.

25:32So if I'm excited about something, I can get other people excited about it. So there are a lot of tactics that you have in publishing, but mostly like out and out aggressiveness without context isn't as effective as helping a publisher to see where their success can lie, how big this thing can be. Also to play a little on the loss aversion. How are you going to feel if you don't get it? So there are very specific things that people might do or not do in negotiations. Do you try to make the first offer? no i know that classic negotiating 101 says that if you lay down the first number it's a marker in a neighborhood where you're going to live um i often find that if i just give very good arguments other books that have sold this way why has there never been another book like this?

26:35What is the platform of the author? I find that I can actually nudge people beyond a number, even that I would feel comfortable laying down as the marker. So I wait to see what the marker needs to be. It often can go further than you're thinking at the outset. Sometimes things get bigger as you think about them. And in fact, one of the strategies that I find incredibly effective is to make the other person feel like they are saying yes from their own volition. If you can make that happen, it's a very good negotiation and you will get a lot further than if you push without stopping. But what you're really relying on is mistakes in some sense that the person on the other side is pulling from some completely different distribution than you have in mind.

27:30And so by letting them make the first offer, you have the possibility of getting into some realm that you weren't even imagining when you started with, but you can get there. Yeah. And if somebody, by the way, comes back in the wrong neighborhood, I absolutely have no problem saying can't even take that to the client. You're very far out of the neighborhood we need to be in. And that doesn't seem to have a negative effect. So I don't feel like there's a downside, but it really depends. It depends if you are somebody who already has a track record. And by the way, in our industry, in the book industry, unlike many other industries, most other industries, they start you at a certain number, a fairly low gettable number, and then they creep you up and up.