Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts on the Day-to-Day Job of a Literary Agent

My goal is to be a published author—it’s one of the main reasons why I went to a creative-writing MFA program. And yet, during my program, my understanding of the job of literary agents didn’t exactly advance beyond what I had already previously known before enrolling. Sure, you need to query them, and there are dos and don’ts that can save or kill your query letter, and the agents’ goal is to secure book deals for their clients. But what else do agents do? What does an agent’s day-to-day job look like? How does one even become an agent? Craft and writing are important, but understanding how the industry works should also be essential. How many writers even get the opportunity to talk with an agent before the querying process? Considering how some of my peers at the MFA program have never even heard of a query letter or tried to compose one, I felt the need to educate both myself and, hopefully, my fellow writers on the subject of literary agents. What better way is there than going straight to the source?

Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts is a Brooklyn-based literary agent from HG Literary, where she’s been working since 2017. She also fills the role of vice president of foreign rights at her agency. I knew Soumeya thanks to a workshop session she had hosted about pitches and query letters in the fall of 2021 (courtesy of Slice magazine), so I reached out to her with an interview request. We met in a Zoom session, during which she gave me more insight on the world of literary agenting. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

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Guy Bigel: What led you to agenting?

Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts: I was initially on the editorial side. I started my career at a small academic publishing company, and then I got a full-time job at a small independent publishing company. When I got laid off as part of the recession, I really wanted to get back into editorial. I was working and living in California at the time, and everyone told me I needed to come to New York. Jobs were pretty scarce, as they always are in publishing, but particularly then, so I started working as a literary scout. That put me on the agency side, because the scouting agency I worked for was within a literary agency.

From there, I kind of realized that I’d had a few jobs on my résumé and the corporate ladder is very rigid and hard to move up in, and agenting gave me a little bit more flexibility in terms of my next step. I also realized that coming from the independent model where you really work very closely with authors, agents actually do a lot of the things that I was doing as an editorial assistant in an independent publishing house. I really liked the idea of having a little bit more autonomy and just being able to work with authors on the ground. So, after my literary scouting period, I got a job at an agency and that’s where I started taking on my first clients.

GB: What does a normal workday look like for you?

SBR: One of the things I enjoy about my job is that my days can really vary, but I’d say an average day is usually split between correspondence about existing projects—so things that are in development with a publishing company. My authors always take priority, and that can be anything from a phone call about a publicity plan or working with my author on how to phrase a difficult email—like if they don’t like their proposed book cover—or contractual stuff and back-and-forth money tracking. Submission management is the other big portion, so either preparing a submission for one of my clients or following up on existing submissions.

When a book is out on submission, sometimes it can be quick, but usually, since editors need a good deal of time to read—and if they want to make an offer for a book they have to get additional people within the company to read, including maybe their sales representatives and their bosses—I spend quite a bit of time reaching out to editors to see where they are with things. Probably the smallest portion of the day—although I wish it were inverse—are any editorial concerns, like crafting editorial letters or notes for my clients on edits that I’m suggesting. Other tasks include tracking the number of manuscripts I have to read, writing rejection letters for books that I’ve read on submission that I don’t think I have room for in my list, and corresponding with potential authors. So that’s kind of a breakdown of the most frequent tasks, but there are a lot of surprises and that’s kind of fun too.

GB: What’s one thing you think people should know before they get into agenting?

SBR: I guess the financial structure is probably the hardest thing to figure out because it’s not uniform; a lot of agencies work with different models of paying their agents. In some, it’s sort of like a hub for a bunch of almost-freelance people, and you get a portion of your commission and you give a portion of your commission to the agency you work for to basically provide services for your clients. And in some places, you get a full salary, but you don’t receive commissions, and there are places where there’s a mix. For all entry-level positions, for people who want to get into this career, the model is that you work a full-time job—doing something for the agency. Usually, it’s assisting—or in my case, it was being a foreign-rights manager—which sort of allows you to build the beginning of the list and start a revenue stream.

Another important thing to note is that revenue streams can take a few years to start building because of the way authors are paid: They’re paid in several payments, across several years sometimes, and because the average commission an agent receives is 15 percent, it can take a long time. So, as a new agent, it’s important to have mentors, and it’s important to have stamina and patience and also to not stand for bosses that don’t allow or encourage you to build your own list, because that’s really the only way to support yourself down the line.

Most agencies won’t allow you to begin building your list for the first two years or so, simply because you won’t know enough about how to be an agent—you don’t have enough real-world experience, and since you’re working with people and their livelihoods, their lives and their hopes and dreams, a responsible boss won’t just let someone practice on somebody else. But after a reasonable amount of time, you should be able to start growing, so I think that’s the biggest thing a lot of people don’t understand and feel challenged by. Ultimately, agenting is a commission-based job, and I think that’s important to know from the beginning.

Ultimately, agenting is a commission-based job, and I think that’s important to know from the beginning.

GB: You mentioned that you also handle foreign rights. What does that process usually look like?

SBR: There are a bunch of different subsidiary rights to every book deal, and that can be stuff like audio rights, film/TV rights, and large-print rights, and all those subsidiary rights are sold separately from the deal. Translation rights are one of those things. We essentially work with a team of coagents across the world in every major territory where translations are significantly sold. Not all agencies use coagents, but the majority of them do because of cultural specificity, and because the market and the landscape are always changing.

We prepare materials and submissions on behalf of our coagents, and we talk to them at book fairs. There’s a big book fair in Frankfurt every year, and a big book fair in London, and there’s one in Bologna, Italy, specifically for children’s books. There are additional ones, but those are the three major foreign-rights fairs. Our coagents then go out into their individual markets and they do the actual submissions and sales, and we work together as a team to pitch those books. During the book fairs we have an opportunity to meet the international editors face-to-face, so it’s a really enjoyable job. It allows me to work closely with my agent colleagues on their projects because I handle it on behalf of the whole agency. Any opportunity to share ideas and literature throughout the world is always a really special thing.

GB: Are there any common issues with international versions that sometimes need to be addressed, like covers that your clients don’t feel comfortable with or weird translation choices, etc.?

SBR: Yeah, I mean, we take it pretty seriously, but at the same time, we also know that each territory has its own reasons for doing things, especially with covers and titles. If you require somebody to translate a title verbatim, it can lose most of the nuance and the meaning that it has in English. We also recognize that translation is expensive and publishers have to pay not just for the translator, but also for the right to translate the book, and they’re not doing so lightly, so we have to treat them with respect. But we do a lot of things in the contract that protect the author by giving them approval over things, so the author is always ultimately the person who has the last word. But yeah, sometimes you do get a cover and it just seems absolutely strange, or like, “What is this?” But usually, as long as it’s not offensive or the author doesn’t feel that it’s misrepresentative, we try to understand that things that feel natural to us may seem strange to them too. One thing we do require in all of our contracts is a full complete translation, so there can be no additions or no removal of text. We require them to translate as closely as possible to the meaning of the author’s original work.

GB: Regarding querying, what’s the most common mistake or issue that you see in query letters?

SBR: I think my number one is querying too soon or taking the querying process too informally. You should treat it pretty much almost as seriously as job searching. It shouldn’t just be like, “Oh, I just finished the draft, why don’t I just send it out?” Or writing a query letter that’s too conversational, too familiar, doesn’t really give me anything to go by. ’Cause, you know, I come to work every day. It’s a profession for me, and I think for everyone I take on, and although I don’t expect them to not have a day job, I do want my authors to treat [writing] as if it is their profession—or at least that they hope that it will become so. The number one thing that I see authors do that is kind of an automatic no is treating it like a conversation rather than an application.

GB: What’s the fastest it ever took you to offer representation to a writer, and what’s the fastest it ever took you to get a client a book deal?

SBR: I can’t totally recall off the top of my head, but I know that I’ve offered representation overnight. And then the fastest book deal . . . I think if you’re talking about a debut submission, maybe within a week. I’m thinking of one specific instance where we had a very high preempt, which is when an editor attempts to take a book off the table before other editors can have a chance to make an offer. So that’s always very exciting. Yeah, I think that like within a week was probably the fastest, although that is by far not the average experience.

GB: Do you feel MFA programs prepare writers well enough for publishing, and specifically for querying?

SBR: It seems to vary widely between programs. I know that’s not a very satisfying answer. It also seems to vary a lot on the student, because sometimes people start their MFA program pretty early and they may not query for several years, so anything that they might have gathered as information about the publishing process or the querying process might not be as fresh. I think, overall, MFA programs are much better and more welcoming to introducing the concepts of querying than they used to be. The focus used to be so much on craft that even the mention of something as crass as making money was really looked down on. Now there’s a big change in that mindset, but I do think it relies a lot on the initiative of the students to seek out and ask questions. Some places open doors and really focus on it, while others are just much more concerned with craft and writing critique.

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