AustLit
Gaby Naher, from Left Bank Literary, is a literary agent with over 30 years experience in the book industry. Her clients include Stella-prize-winning Heather Rose, New York Times # 1 bestselling author Candice Fox and Dr Norman Swan. Prior to establishing The Naher Agency in May 2008, Gaby worked as a literary agent, publicist and bookseller in Sydney, London and New York. She is the author of four books and has a Doctorate of Creative Arts. She is former President of the Australian Literary Agents Association and a Patrol Captain at Bronte Surf Life Saving Club.
This conversation took place between Gaby and Beth Driscoll on 24th February, 2017.
(I: Interviewer. GN: Gaby Naher.)
I: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about Peter Corris, who you represent. Could you describe to me your first encounter with him?
GN: Not long after I set up my agency, back in 2008, he approached me. His long-term agent Rose Creswell had retired, and he had the option of staying there at that agency to be represented by whoever they appointed to carry on working with books, or to try and strike his own relationship with a new agent. I think it’s important to say that the author-agent relationship is quite personal—it’s not like going to a company where you know you’re going to deal with whoever they give you to work with. The author-agent relationship is really about two people; it’s not about a brand. Peter had heard good things about me, and left his former agency and came to me, and it was great; it was a really good thing for my business, so early on.
I: So, you would have been quite well known in the industry, do you think, already?
GN: Most of my book-publishing career was in the UK, but I came back to Australia, and my first publishing job in Australia was as an agent with Jill Hickson. I worked with a number of quite high-profile Australian writers then.
I: Do you think your experience in the UK has helped with the work you do here? Do you have enduring networks, or a knowledge of the market over there that’s been useful?
GN: I do have networks; it doesn’t make it any easier to sell to those people because basically they react to what’s on the page. It does mean that I can get the book, the manuscript in front of the right readers, but it doesn’t mean they’ll buy it. I think that one of the great skills that I acquired as a publicist was learning to pitch a book, and I think that it’s helped me phenomenally as an agent. I make prospective authors pitch their book to me, which they think is very unfair, but there’s got to be a premise that is pitchable and can be conveyed in two-or-three sentences.
Some publishers will say that I’m one of the few agents who actually phones to pitch them the manuscript that I’m offering at the time. I know how important it is; I need to be able to pitch to the publisher, and the publisher needs to be able to pitch to the sales and marketing department, and sales and marketing need to pitch to booksellers, and then I also need to be able to pitch the book when I’m talking to international agents or film producers.
I: You’re an agent for authors who work in a lot of different genres, including crime. I was wondering if you think there’s anything particular about crafting a successful career in crime. For example, do you think successful crime writers tend to have more long-term relationships with a single publisher, are less likely to move around?
GN: Not necessarily less likely to move around, but if they’re working on one series, it’s pretty common that they will stay with the publisher for that series, and the only reason they might move is either because the series hasn’t been successful and the publisher hasn’t wanted to continue, or the series has been very successful, and the author feels that they’re not being adequately paid by the incumbent publisher.
I: When you read a crime novel, how do you go about finding a suitable home for it? Are there particular editors and publishers that you approach?
GN: That’s very much what being an agent is all about—knowing the taste and peccadillos of each individual editor. Most agents will have editors who they really know, who they share common taste with. They will consequently have a number of clients being published by that same editor. I don’t think that I really treat a crime novel any differently than I would general fiction. I just go to the editors who I know like the genre, and who I particularly think will find some sort of resonance with the material.
I: Have you ever hesitated about whether a novel should be pitched as crime or as something else, or do you find the genre markers are always clear?
GN: They’re not always clear, nor do I think they have to be. It is somewhat easier if they are, though. I represented a novel by a writer called Sylvia Johnson, called Watch Out For Me, that was published as a literary novel, but could quite easily have been in the crime genre as well. We are in a time where publishers are trying to publish more in the area of general fiction, putting their crime and their noir there as well.
I: Do you think that at the moment, you’re more likely to present a novel as, ‘This is crime, but it could also be general fiction?’
GN: I think if it’s ambiguous, I would present it as general fiction, and if it’s crime, then crime. But, I have said on my website for some time that I’m not taking on new crime authors, and that was the case when Candice approached me, and I said, ‘No, no, no, I’m not taking on new crime writers at the moment,’ because publishers were telling me that it was too hard to launch them. Too hard to launch them because of the incredible competition from the international brand-name authors. So, I said, ‘No ,’ to Candice, but somehow, she persuaded me to read a little of it, and I didn’t need to read much before I was absolutely hooked.
I: Can you describe for me your first encounter with Candice Fox?
GN: I believe it was by email. I think she introduced herself as having been recommended by a mutual colleague. It was a persuasive email, but I did say to her that I wasn’t taking on crime fiction. I believe she didn’t want to take no for an answer and told me a little bit about the manuscript. I agreed to read it, and very, very quickly, as I just mentioned, was hooked.
I: The book that I’m looking at for the case study is Eden, her second book. Can you remember when you first encountered that book?
GN: We started with the one-book deal, and then we sold the subsequent book, from memory, before the first book was published. She is productive. Now she’s trying to write two books a year, including the Patterson collaboration, which is very demanding.
I: And how did you think about finding a publisher for her books—did you have an editor in mind that you thought would like them?
GN: I hadn’t worked with Beverley Cousins before, Candice’s publisher, but she had a good reputation. I believe that I submitted it to a number of publishers who work in crime fiction, and Beverley loved it immediately, because we had an offer within two weeks of submission, which is pretty unusual.
I: Candice has won several awards for crime fiction, including those back-to-back Ned Kelly Awards. How helpful do you think those have been for her career?
GN: I think they’ve been particularly helpful getting her international attention. Even though the Ned Kelly Awards are not as well known internationally as the Miles Franklin, or as the Stella is becoming known, just the fact that she’s won two back-to-back awards for Australian crime writing, and there aren’t lots of awards for Australian crime writing, you know, it just helps everyone work out what they should pay attention to. So, I do think it’s helped her find an international readership, and international publishers.
I: Were you involved in pitching the book to overseas publishers as well?
GN: I managed to appoint a subagent for her in the US, to sell rights in America. It’s not easy; we Australian agents pitch many of our clients’ works to New York agents, and invariably they say, ‘No.’ So, it’s not as straightforward as: you already have a business relationship with an agent, therefore they will represent your client’s work.
I: Where do you see Candice Fox’s book in terms of other Australian and other international crime authors? Who do you think she’s like or unlike?
GN: I think she’s unique, I think she’s got a very, very rich, distinctive, unique voice, so I’m loathe to try and compare her. There’s nothing formulaic about her work, which I love. She has a real fascination for society’s misfits and damaged people, and they’re not always the baddies. So, I wouldn’t say she’s like that one or that one. She is Candice Fox; she’s unique.
I: Never Never was co-authored with James Patterson. Were there any stages where you were involved in that?
GN: Really only in the deal. It’s something that Random House Australia orchestrated, and I was involved in the contract for Candice, and I can take no credit for making it happen.
I: How did the experience of working with Never Never differ from the way you work with Candice’s other novels?
GN: It’s incredibly different: there’s a particular arrangement for how the Patterson books work contractually. Obviously, the editorial process is very different. With the standalone books, in some instances I will have read one or two drafts before we actually offer it to the publisher, or I will have read, say, 40,000 words, twice before it gets offered to the publisher, and will have quite a bit of editorial input. I mean, I don’t copy edit, but I do work with the author on narrative arc and character development.
Never Never was very, very heavily planned before the writing started, so there wasn’t that sense of, ‘Oh, could that happen?’ It’s not as though you’re reading the story and you come upon something and you say, ‘Oh, should that be there?’ It’s like, it’s all there in the storyline. So, in a way, it’s much easier to focus on things and go, ‘Oh, that sounds implausible.’
I: Is that unusual?
GN: It is unusual. It’s fascinating, I always feel fairly impotent, as the agent, in that process. Unless the author has started the editorial discussion with me, I really accept that once the editors and publishers are involved, my voice is fairly small and insignificant.
I: Can you tell me any more about how the international rights for Candice’s books were negotiated? Have you done separate rights deals for separate territories and different formats?
GN: Yes, different translation subagents of mine have sold rights for German-language and French-language, I sold Hebrew rights direct, and Japanese rights direct. There was also a Spanish-language deal, again, through my subagents. We have not done a separate, standalone deal for Candice in the UK, so she’s being published by Random House in the UK as well, which is very nice, but it is definitely connected to the local deal. They’re two separate deals, but the fact that the publishers can work together is really helpful financially.
I: And is it linked to the same financial deal that she has in Australia?
GN: No, separate deals. I should clarify: the Hades series we sold world ex-ANZ rights to the American publisher, so despite the fact that it was Random House Australia that did all the cheerleading for Candice in the UK, Random House UK bought British rights from the American publisher. Whereas with the two Crimson Lake books, and there are contracts for Crimson Lake one and two, we split up the territories.
I: I’ve been really interested in this research to watch some of the routes that books take: it sometimes feels like they’re global products, but behind the scenes, it’s quite intricate.
GN: It’s rare that they genuinely are global products, very rare. Geraldine Brooks has been a very interesting case in point, as she seems to have been very successfully published by Harper Collins around the world, but I think she’s one of the rare few.
I: Do you think there’s anything distinctive about Australian crime fiction? How connected is it to the international trends?
GN: Successful Australian crime fiction must feel very rooted in place, and its texture is almost certainly distinctively Australian. I don’t know that it is particularly connected to the international market. I think that some of the success, very often, the success of Australian crime writers, internationally, is because of the feeling of the exotic in their work.
I could suggest that it’s been harder for Peter Corris to find an international readership because his novels are urban novels, set in the back streets of Sydney, and in the US and the UK, they have plenty of urban crime novels set in their cities by their local authors. Whereas, someone like Peter Temple, whose work often really has the landscape in it, think of The Broken Shore, I think has travelled better. Interestingly, Candice Fox’s new novel, Crimson Lake, has been more enthusiastically greeted by US publishers than the Hades series, and I’m sure that it’s got to do with the location. The collaborations she does with James Patterson do seem to need to have the exotic location. Our sense is that the Patterson team don’t want them set in cities; they want them to feel like there’s a wonderful Australian landscape there.
I: We’ve got some research from the AustLit database that suggests that the rate of production of crime fiction by Australians has grown significantly in the last couple of decades. Would that be your sense, too?
GN: I think that there are just more and more Australians writing and producing any sort of book now. I don’t have a clear sense that local crime fiction has expanded. I just think there’s been a real blossoming of Australian writing, and I think that has been very much encouraged by a really strong local publishing scene.
This interview was undertaken as part of the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.
For more information on the project, go to the home page.