19
on the work instead of concentrating on trying to get the
next egg salad sandwich.”
When Wylie started representing Philip Roth, for ex-
ample, Roth was initially doubtful that he could sell any
more books. “He said to me, ‘Let me tell you how the Roth
business works,’” Wylie remembers. “‘I don’t know a lot,
but I know about Roth. I have 40,000 readers. Some of
them get old and die, younger ones come up. Sometimes
it goes to 41,000; sometimes it will dip to 39. Basically the
number is 40,000. Those are my readers.’”
After a short while under Wylie’s representation, Roth
was approaching 800,000 readers and continues to sell.
The credit cannot all go to
Wylie; after all, Roth has
written some amazing
books. But as Wylie
explains, “it was about the
structure of the presen-
tation of what he was doing.”
In other words, Wylie was
able to present Roth in such
a way that got publishers and
readers more interested in
the quality that had been
present from the beginning.
He uses Roth’s terminology
to give an overview of the
events: “The business hadn’t
been constructed properly,”
Wylie says. “Once the busi-
ness was constructed prop-
erly, the value was released.”
In a similar reconstruction
of a writer’s “business,”
Wylie was able to rescue
William Burroughs from
a tough financial spot by
selling the rights to un-
published archival work. At a dinner party, Burroughs
lamented to Wylie that he couldn’t pay his American
Express bill, so Wylie went to his house in Kansas to see
if there was anything they could publish. “He brings me
into the bedroom and there’s this big trunk,” Wylie recalls.
“And I say, ‘What’s in the trunk?’ He opens it and there
are guns and bludgeons to hit people with and various
things. So I take them all out, and then there are letters
and manuscripts. In that trunk was enough material for
a five-book contract.”
He has also performed similar operations with authors
published in translation. Writers such as Roberto Bola
ñ
o
and W.G. Sebald, producing complex books in Spanish and
German, respectively, had remained relatively obscure in
the American market until Wylie began to represent them,
after which they became widely acclaimed and seemingly
overnight financial successes, continuing to sell after
their deaths. More recently, Wylie took on Norwegian
author Karl Ove Knausg
å
rd, author of the six-volume
autobiographical novel
My Struggle
, which Wylie calls
“an immortal masterpiece.”
Knausg
å
rd had found limited success in the United
States because his books were being published by a
virtually unknown press. Random House, which pub-
lished his work in the United Kingdom, feared he wouldn’t
sell in the States. Wylie called an editor at Random House
and argued that if he actually read the book instead of
making profit-based calculations about it, it would be
obvious that
My Struggle
’s
literary merit justified its
acquisition.
“Try to remember why
you got into publishing,”
Wylie said to him. “Don’t
talk to me about busi-
ness. Read the [expletive]
book!” Random House
didn’t bite, and Wylie
remains convinced that
they never actually man-
aged to read it. He next
called Jonathan Galassi,
president and publisher of
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
who accepted Wylie’s offer
“within literally 15 seconds”
and led the writer to his
current status as one of the
most talked about authors
of the year.
Despite its artistic incli-
nations, publishing, like
any industry, is ruled by
the bottom line. Commer-
cially oriented books are a sure source of money for
publishing houses, while difficult texts rarely turn
a profit. This means best-
selling authors typically receive much larger contracts
regardless of the quality of their work. But for Wylie, the
current gap between liter-
ary and monetary value is not necessarily a fixed constant.
“It’s important for the publishing world to recognize
that Shakespeare is more interesting than Danielle Steele,
and that the economics of publishing should be adjusted
accordingly to recognize the value of work that will last
over time and give it greater value than work that is going
to sell for 10 days then disappear,” Wylie says. “I think
that this agency has played a part in trying to bring the
publishing world toward a better assessment of value,
which is tied to what’s good for the culture.”
Our job is to try
to help writers to
get paid enough
so they can
concentrate
on the work
instead of
concentrating on
trying to get the next
egg salad sandwich.
6
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