W
ALKING into Gaonnuri,
the posh Korean restau-
rant on the thirty-ninth
floor of a skyscraper just
south of the Empire State Building,
I’m reminded of the first time I had
the very New York experience of riding
an elevator to what I assumed would
be a hallway leading to the apartment
where a cocktail party was in full
swing, but when the elevator doors
opened, I was staring at the inside
of the apartment, and all the guests
turned their heads and stared. For
an introvert this is the stuff of night-
mares. But the panoramic view of the
Manhattan skyline that greets me this
afternoon when I step off the elevator
is something else entirely, and as I’m
shown to a table by the windows, I do
not resist the urge to snap a photo with
my phone. Fortunately, Julia Kardon,
an agent at Hannigan Salky Getzler
(HSG) Agency, hasn’t yet arrived to
witness my touristy act.
When Julia does arrive she tells me
why lunches with editors are so impor-
tant for agents. “You just learn things
about them that you can’t learn from
their Publishers Marketplace write-
up. You find out that Emily Graff at
Simon & Schuster has a twin sister. So
then you might think about how you
would pitch a book about siblings to
her. Molly Turpin [at Random House]
is a beautiful artist, so in addition to
the kind of history, nonfiction, that she
focuses on, if you have a project that
has to do with art history, you would
definitely want to send that to her.”
Born and raised in New York City,
Julia studied comparative literature as
well as Slavic languages and literature at
the University of Chicago, then moved
to Prague to teach English for a year.
Back in New York, after a brief intern-
ship at the Wylie Agency, she started
her career at Sterling Lord Literistic,
where she was an assistant to Philippa
(Flip) Brophy, who showed Julia the
ropes, including the art of the phone
pitch. “She was on the phone constantly.
Her handset smelled like her perfume,”
Julia recalls. “I learned from her, and
that made me want to pitch that way.”
In addition to e-mailing a pitch letter to
editors, she adds, “I, unlike some of my
millennial peers, always call editors to
pitch a project.”
Julia worked at Sterling Lord for
just under three years before moving
to Mary Evans, a boutique agency (a
fancy term for a small, specialized
agency), where she worked on foreign
rights while building a list of clients for
herself before moving to HSG. Among
the first clients she signed was John
Freeman Gill, whom Julia reached out
to after reading an op-ed he had writ-
ten in the New York Times titled “The
Folly of Saving What You Kill,” about
preserving the city’s old buildings. His
bio stated that he was working on a
novel about architectural salvage. In-
trigued, she invited him to lunch. “He
knew that I was young, but the way you
position yourself when you’re young
is that you’re very hungry but you’ve
also worked on great things, like ‘I’m
working with Michael Chabon to some
degree. I worked on James McBride’s
National Book Award–winning novel,’
things like that. Obviously I didn’t
agent it, but I know what the publishing
process looks like. I know how it’s done
and how it should be done.” In other
words, there was some salesmanship in-
volved, but the two connected, and she
ended up selling his novel, The Gargoyle
Hunters, at auction to Knopf.
I ask Julia how an auction works,
specifically a round-robin-style auction
like Gill’s, in which there were four
bidders. “You send the auction rules to
everyone, and basically you tell them
what rights they’re bidding on. If you
have a lot of attention, you’d want to
make that North American rights
only,” she says, and I remember Emily
Forland’s smart decision to retain for-
eign rights for her big sale. Julia contin-
ues: “In the first round everyone makes
their first bids, and then you call the
lowest bidder and tell them what the
highest bidder’s number was, and they
have to become the new high bidder or
they have to drop out. And then you
call the next-lowest bidder and tell them
what the new high bid is. And they have
to beat that or they drop out. And it goes
around like that. It can be pretty exas-
perating because sometimes the lowest
bidder will improve the highest bid by
$2,500 or $5,000. So you can go from
$100,000 to $200,000 over the course of
two days, and it’s like, ‘I’m going to lose
my mind if I have to keep doing this.’”
To avoid a prolonged auction, agents
sometimes dictate a minimum incre-
ment by which a bid can be raised. “You
can also at any point in the auction call
for best bids,” she adds. “Theoretically
that is just getting everyone’s best, final
bid, and you don’t go back to negoti-
ate.” But agents can and often do go
back to negotiate certain aspects of the
agreement, such as the payout of the
advance—traditionally a third at sign-
ing, a third when the publisher accepts
the final manuscript, and a third on
publication, but that can be adjusted to
quarters, with the final 25 percent due
on paperback publication. The agent’s
standard cut is 15 percent of the author’s
gross domestic earnings, including the
advance (and 20 percent for foreign
rights deals).
Writers often think of agents sitting
in well-appointed offices and waiting
for a query or proposal to strike their
fancy. But the path to a literary agent is
not a one-way street. Agents are actively
looking for potential clients too. This
is how Julia found John Freeman Gill,
and it’s also how she found Brit Bennett
special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTS
JULY AUGUST 2019 56
Thursday
12:30
PM
Gaonnuri
1250 Broadway, 39th floor,
corner of West 32nd Street
▪ Black Cod Gui: white kimchi,
chive, doenjang, gochujang,
served with white rice,
banchan, and seaweed soup
▪ Marinated Galbi: marinated
prime beef short rib, served
with white rice, banchan, and
seaweed soup
