We recently connected with Alice Speilburg and have shared our conversation below.

Alice, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

We have always been a remote-based company, from when it was just two agents, back before COVID, to now, when we have five literary agents. But I always knew that collaboration was a core value for Speilburg Literary Agency, so we’ve been careful to build in routines and technology that help us feel connected.

This actually became a lot easier during the pandemic, because suddenly there were all of these tools for remote-work that either didn’t exist before or weren’t being used by the rest of our industry colleagues. We have a weekly Zoom meeting for our team, and most of the rest of the time, we use our agency’s Slack workplace. On Slack, we can do a quick check on whether an offer we’ve received sounds reasonable, or what to do when a relationship between one of our clients and their publisher just got tricky. We share feedback on cover designs and pitch copy, all in Slack. On the financial side, we’ve found Airtable to be so useful. We use it to log new contracts and track payments, but also to keep a record of what rights we have available to license, and where we’ve submitted our clients’ books.

But I still find it valuable to see each other in person from time to time. We just had our first full-team retreat in May, where I flew all of our agents to our headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. It was amazing to interact and simply hang out, without a set agenda (and to see facial expressions instead of just emojis!).

To me, the benefits of remote work are obvious. It eliminates the cost of an office space, and it allows my agents to work on their own schedules. We each have our own clients and projects, so that makes sense, but we also know we can lean on each other whenever we need to. Perhaps the non-obvious benefit is that everyone else is working this way too, so we don’t have to fly to NYC to have a face-to-face meeting with an editor. We’ve found Zoom calls have been so much better than phone calls in terms of making strong networking connections in the publishing industry.

Alice, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a literary agent, so I represent authors whose books are published by traditional publishing houses. I grew into this business the same way most literary agents do: through apprenticeship. I started as an editorial assistant at a publishing company, and then moved over to agenting, which felt like a better fit for me. I work closely with the authors every step of the way, from manuscript draft to contract, to published edition and royalty statements, so I wear many hats. I learned from an agent who’d been in the business for 30 years or so. I slowly started building my own client list, and then launched my own agency, Speilburg Literary Agency.

As a group of five agents, we represent a wide range of commercial titles, from picture books to wellness guides to romance novels. But we each have our specialties. My own clients are writing commercial fiction for adults (think murder mystery and historical novels) and narrative nonfiction (environmental journalism and culture histories). For our agency, it all comes back to our authors and their career goals. We’re here to make the business process smoother (including contracts, foreign editions, even squabbles with the publishing team), and guide the author along a path to their own success, however they might define it. It might be a moving target, and that’s OK! Author goals tend to change as they become more familiar with the industry. Along the way, we make sure that we’re keeping that line of communication open, listening for those shifts in what our clients need.

We’ve been in business for 10 years now, and we’ve seen our clients grow their readership from 0 to NYT Bestselling, which is so rewarding. There’s that moment when I read a manuscript and know that the world NEEDS this book, and it just never gets old. So every time we see our authors’ books get printed and shelved, reviewed in the news and raved about on TikTok, it feels like a huge win, that we’re a part of that journey.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I always planned on launching my own agency, but I admit I did it a bit sooner than I had expected. I was just starting to build my client list and submit projects as an agent working at a boutique agency in New York, when Hurricane Sandy hit. My home, just off the Hudson River, was badly flooded, and it was soon clear that I needed to move. My partner’s company offered to let him work remotely, so we left New York, moved back to the midwest, and I was suddenly an agent without an agency. At the time, working remotely for a literary agency wasn’t commonplace, and I started applying for other jobs locally. But in my heart, I knew I didn’t want to give up my agenting career.

So I threw up a website.

Here’s the thing: anyone can be an agent. You don’t need a certificate or degree. But to be successful, you need a strong reputation in the industry, a good eye for brilliant writing, and a marketer’s sense of what will sell. I knew I could do the work, and while I was still a baby agent, I had a decent number of contacts to start building a reputation. So I hustled. I reached out, scheduled phone calls, paid my way to conferences, made frequent trips back to New York. Little by little, I started selling books. I know now that I was essentially starting with nothing, having never sold a book when I launched Speilburg Literary Agency. But I was determined, I believed in my authors and I worked hard to make sure that other people would believe in them too. And ten years later, I’m still building on that belief in a big way.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Selling books–novels in particular–is a subjective business. I’m pitching stories to editors who are looking for two things: a story that they feel emotionally drawn to and inspired by, and also a product that their sales team can place in retail stores, with a decent profit margin for the publisher. Agenting is a career that is constantly on the line between art and business.

An author sent me a collection of stories a while back. I loved them, but they felt a bit nostalgic to me, a little dated for the current market and a little too literary. So I rejected them, but told her to come back to me if she every wrote a full novel. A year later, she sent me a murder mystery by a supposed lake monster in Kentucky, and god I loved that premise! I see that balance of commercial story, unique setting, and a somewhat magical visual element that gives it a nice hook. We polished it up and sent it out. Fingers crossed, breath held…and no one bought it. Like my initial response to the collection, publishers liked the writing but weren’t quite sure how to sell that particular novel. But this is a typical submission experience. Every rejection is a step towards finding that ideal publishing home. So we tried again. Meanwhile, the author had written another book. This time, something a little more on the straight and narrow in terms of which shelf it belonged on: a private investigator mystery novel. No monsters, just a myth about a witch in the hills and a few missing girls. We’d hit a wall with the lake monster story, and we started collecting rejections for the PI novel as well.

Sometimes on submission, we begin to see reasons why a book might not sell, but that wasn’t the case here. Everyone loved the novel, just not enough to buy it. Something wasn’t clicking yet. A few months in, I revised my pitch for a short list of editors who hadn’t seen the PI novel yet. And suddenly, three years after I read that initial collection of stories that the author sent me, we had editors from three separate publishing houses who wanted to buy this book! I set up a small auction for them, and we sold it to the highest bidder.

Like so many publishing stories, this author found a home for her work when the timing was right, with just the right pitch and the right people reading. The right story for the right time. It may seem like it comes down to luck, but I wouldn’t discount undeniable talent as playing the biggest role, followed closely by belief in that talent and a determination to keep going.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.speilburgliterary.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/speilburgliterary/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/alicespeilburg
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/alicespeilburg

Image Credits
Jolea Brown Megh Zahrndt