A world of rhyme and reason, even faith … from Pace, Weather Eye)

Anita Pyke

Isobel Dixon is a literary agent working in London, where she represents several prominent South African authors. She was the winner of the 2000 Sanlam Literary Award, and was recently in the country to launch her debut collection of poetry, Weather Eye. Anita Pyke caught up with her in Cape Town.

South Africa’s publishing industry is relatively small, and usually involves close contact between the author and publisher. What is the role or function of a literary agent, and why are they deemed a necessary part of the larger industries of Britian and the United States?
As a literary agent, you really manage the author’s career. You are the author’s right hand man, or rather right hand woman (there are more female literary agents than males). The job requires incredible multi-tasking, you have to keep juggling the different aspects of handling an author’s career — you have to be a bit of a midwife, in bringing the book out into the world, a bit of a matchmaker, matching the author and the publisher, and a bit of a diplomat in solving crises that are an inevitable part of any creative industry. There will always be differences of opinion, crises in the choice of cover, title, translators, objections to editorial decisions. You have to have literary acumen as far as the writing goes, but you also have to be business-like and strategic in terms of thinking ahead for the author’s whole career. Nowadays this is increasingly important — publishing is no longer a quiet, gentlemenly profession. It is a rapidly changing environment where publishing companies are often owned by large media conglomerates whose other media enteprises’ profit margins are bigger, so there is greater pressure on the publishers to make money, which may shift focus from the creative side. Editors also move around a great deal more, so the agent becomes the one, steady anchoring point of an author’s career. I have a number of authors who started their publishing careers with me and who are working on their second novels, and quite a large number of those are already on their second editor. Obviously this can be quite an unsettling experience — you need an agent to be the eye of the storm for you .

So has working through an agent really become the norm overseas?
It does happen that publishers work directly with the authors, especially in academic publishing but on the whole, working through an agent is definitely the norm. Many mainstream publishers also prefer to work with an agent — they don’t always have time to deal with every small query that an author may have and they want to know that the negotiation and the contract are going to be handled by a professional. I have spent a lot of time with first-time authors, explaining to them what contract clauses mean, and how the whole publishing process works. It is time-consuming. Editors want to buy the book and be involved in the editorial aspect of the book, but not necessarily the business side of it — they also have other demands being made on their time and just cannot devote that much time to the author. I have often had publishers refer authors to me, telling the author that they should get an agent. But obviously there will always be some publishers who prefer to work directly with the author, because they may want to try and negotiate terms more beneficial to themselves — they know the agent will always be looking after the author’s best interest.

If you then become a type of gateway between publishers and authors, do you take on traditional publishing functions, such as selection?
Yes, agents are the first phase of the filtering process, and many publishing companies no longer look at unsolicited material, only what they receive from agents. We get about 100 to 150 manuscripts sent to us a week, cold. So we have a rather large ‘slush pile’, as it’s known in the trade. My assistant will sift through those and reject the completely mad and bad and the pornographers, then I take a look at all the rest. If a manuscript hasn’t been sent specifically to Carole Blake (co-founder, with Julian Friedmann, of the agency) or myself we will decide between us who will handle it, or may pass material to each other if we feel a particular manuscript will appeal to the other one’s taste more. I take about five or seven manuscripts home every week to look at more closely, to read in greater detail out of the office because with literary work you really need that kind of time to consider the work properly. If I find something that really gives me that ‘aha’ feeling and makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I see how I could sell it (because given the market, there are wonderful things which are still very hard to sell), I may decide to take on the author. We work on a commission basis so I have to feel there’s a good chance I’ll be able to sell the manuscript, to pay the rent, to pay the bills. I would then approach the writer, and tell them I am interested in their work. I would almost always — unless they are on a different continent — meet them before I take them on as a client to see whether we have a rapport. I wouldn’t take someone on if I didn’t feel we would get on and would think very hard before taking on someone who is arrogant or unpleasant or has unreasonable expectations . The agent-author relationship is often a very close one. Many of my writers become friends You can develop a pretty intimate working relationship because writing is a very personal thing, and the author may have to go through a lot before he or she becomes successful — rejection, bad reviews etc. Being on the author’s side, the agent feels it too!

Often, if necessary, I’ll do a fair bit of editorial work before I send a manuscript out to a publisher The book has to be in the best form that it can be, because nowadays editors have less time to edit. The manuscript has to come to them almost fully-formed so that they can then justify its publication to the MD of the publishing house, the sales and publicity departments and the export department and convince them that it will be a valuable aquisition for the company. Editors can’t just decide on their own initiative to buy a book. In the present publishing climate, a whole team has to be persuaded.

While editorial work on a manuscript is going on, I talk to publishers all the time, letting them know that I have this particular book coming up, trying to get them interested. When it is ready, I would usually send the book out to three or four editors to start off with — if it is a sure-fire big seller I may make more submissions and hope that we get a bigger auction. And then you wait for someone to make an offer, and go through the process of negotiating the best deal possible and sorting out the contract.

Is the agent then also involved in the book production process itself?
The agent is still involved in tracking the whole editorial process. Once a book has been acquired we, along with the author, approve the cover design, and often have to mediate when editors and authors disagree about certain changes to the text. The agent is also increasingly involved on the publicity side. There are over one hundred thousand new titles published in the U.K. each year and publicity departments are usually overworked. As the agents we have to think creatively about publicity for our authors and we liaise with the publicists and make suggestions.

A lot of this job also involves the flow of information, keeping all the publishers, all the press people you’re involved with and all the sub-agents in other countries informed of any exciting new developments in an author’s career, just to keep the awareness high and to ensure that people remain interested and likely to buy.

Do you always handle your author’s foreign rights as well?
Unless it involves a particularly large amount of money for the author, we wouldn’t sell world rights in a book to a publisher. We may sell foreign rights to a novel after it has gone out of print in the U.K., or many years after a book has first been published. Selling the Estonian rights, for instance, may not bring in a lot of money, but every bit of money a writer gets adds up — and of course there is also the additional pleasure of knowing that the book has reached a new market.

What is the profile of your client list? Is it influenced at largely by personal taste?
I’m quite eclectic. I’ve always read very widely. I represent a commercial women’s fiction writer, a couple of crime writers (among them Deon Meyer), but on the whole I have more literary fiction, or upmarket non-fiction. My taste is quite quirky, often with a touch of dark humour, I realised the other day that dysfunctional families feature quite strongly in several of my authors’ books — I don’t know what that says about me and my family! But ‘literary’ or ‘commercial’, these categories concern me less than the fact that for me to love a novel the writer must be a storyteller, be able to weave a good plotline, and also be able to create convincing characters.

I represent some excellent non-fiction writers, but it must have a strong narrative element to it, or deal with history or politics, like Allister Sparks, whose new book I have sold in the UK and Holland.

You are in a unique position in that, being fluent in Afrikaans you can take on work from Afrikaans authors. Do you ever actively seek foreign authors, to represent a more ‘niche’ list?
The agency’s client base is primarily in the U.K., which makes sense as we do need that close contact with the markets we sell to. I have an unusual list in that many of my clients are South African. I do have one Australian client and one American client, but I won’t go out and look for authors who are not from the U.K. or South Africa. My client list is actually quite full at the moment, and I won’t take on someone unless their work is wonderful, or requires very little extra work — I have to be fair to my other clients, not take on more than I can handle well.

Are there special considerations when you do take on work from, say, Afrikaans authors. Do you then pay special attention to the ‘translatability’ of their work in addition to literary quality?
Absolutely, if something is not written in English I have to think more than twice about taking it on. There is always some loss in the conversion ofthe original to the translation. Having done translations myself, and been involved in the editing of many, I know that so much that can go wrong when trying to translate a brilliant Afrikaans work into a brilliant English work. Taking on an author who writes in Afrikaans is more challenging and will take a lot more work than for a writer who works in English — almost twice as much. Even if I do find a publisher willing to take the risk, and we can find an appropriate translater, the translation take longer to be published, so the income will be slower, and the publisher will probably pay less, because they have to pay for the translation, or the author will have to pay a translator. Also, you have to work harder to overcome the psychological barriers of English or Manhattan publishers who may not be that interested in what is going on on the tip of the African continent. You really have to convince them that it is a brilliant book that deserves all the effort of translation, that it does contain elements that are universal — and, thankfully, we have managed to do that with quite a few authors.

Have you found that there is a particular interest in African or South African work?
There are a lot of people who are looking very specifically for the new young black writers, like Sello Duiker. I’ve just sold Zakes Mda’s last two books in the States, and I am negotiating a Dutch auction right now. Obviously that is something that’s fresh — we’ve not seen that many high profile, black South African novel writers. Playwrights, poets and short story writers yes, but not many accomplished novelists. At the moment, I find that editors are not interested in anything pre-1994, unless it is something really special. They want books about the new South Africa, dealing with today’s problems and opportunities they feel that all those years of the struggle have been done to death — of course they could be open to a wonderful new take on it, but it would have to be something really fresh.

With a rather small and limited local market, the U.K. often seems like the land of milk and honey for authors and publishers. How is the literary culture different from the one we have here?
More people read! The reviewing culture is also different, but it is a bit of chicken and egg situation. I spend about four or five hours every Sunday in a little Italian coffee shop in Cambridge just skimming all the broadsheet papers and spending a lot of time reading the reviews because there are literally hundreds of new book reviews every week. There is a lot more exposure for the books, people are aware of them and read the reviews. But of course the books are reviewed because there is such a large market for them.
I do think the reviewing culture in South Africa has a long way to go, but it is of course hard to justify the review space if books just don’t sell. There will probably be a gradual improvement as literacy levels rise, but there is a lot of work to be done in promoting books here.

They also seem to have more space for smaller independent publishers that can concentrate on less ‘mainstream’ titles.
There is definitely scope for niche publishing. It’s not going to be an easy ride for any independent publisher in the years I’ve been working as an agent I have seen several independent publishers go under but I have also seen some rise and go from strength to strength. I have just sold the U.K. and South African rights to Tatamkhulu Afrika’s latest novel, Bitter Eden, to Arcadia. They’re a small publishing house, but they did have a Booker shortlisted novel last year and they have managed to sell more than 30 000 copies of three of four of their front-list titles, which even a big publisher would be proud of. So yes, given the right niche and the right focus, the smaller publishers can do very well, but a large part of it is actively promoting the books, getting those reviews. A great book on the shelf will remain a great book on the shelf if people don’t know about it. So again, making sure people notice the book remains an important part of my job, as well as the publishers’.

And what are your favourite aspects of the job?
I love the editorial work, I love working closely with my clients. Of course, the most satisfying and exciting part of being an agent is when you can phone one of your authors and say: I’ve got good news for you, you’ve had an offer or, there is going to be an auction. There is nothing that compares to that. Or when you’ve got a manuscript on your lap on the train on the way back to Cambridge that looked interesting, and as you start to read you realise that you’ve read the first forty pages and you haven’t looked up once. That feeling of yes, you’re on to something — it’s wonderful.

And I also appreciate the interaction with like-minded publishing people. There is this cliche about agents always lunching — and though publishing lunches certainly aren’t the long drawn-out affairs they were years ago, it is still important that you meet people in a non-office environment to get them to relax and get to know them. Knowing an editor is very important, because only through knowing that someone has a particular interest can you sell them a book on that subject. A client of mine, Sandy Balfour, is writing a wonderful book called Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) — the title is a cryptic crossword clue and the book is about crosswords and falling in love with Britain — and though in this particular case I can’t really take credit for making the match being author and editor, as they knew each other before, the editor’s interest in the English obsession with crosswords, and Sandy’s knowledge of the subject made the perfect partnership for the project, and it’s part of my job to see the potential for those partnerships, to help make it happen. So you have to have rapport with the editors, as well as knowing your clients. It’s all about matchmaking. So, although it’s work too, I love that social interaction with like-minded people who could be making a lot more money as merchant bankers but are choosing to work in publishing because they have a passion for words. That sense of common purpose is always very fulfilling and motivating.

Any personal highlights?
When a book gets into the Bestseller Lists, like Billy Hopkins’ memoir Our Kid or Sian Rees’s historical non-fiction book The Floating Brothel did recently, that’s wonderful. It’s a very public affirmation that your instinct right at the beginning was true. Often it takes a while for you to be proved right, and you have to keep believing — so that kind of affirmation is very special.

There are so many great moments .. I think of completing the deal for Tatmkhulu’s book. I finalised the royalty levels for this deal in a second-hand bookstore in Melville a couple of weeks ago, and of course Tata is eighty now, so its been very important to sell this book for him, that he should get this affirmation from abroad. That is going to remain one of my personal highlights. It’s that kind of thing, things coming to fruition after long hard graft. A large part of publishing is just long hard graft, it can takes year sometimes, for the author’s career to gain momentum.

You have just had your first collection of poems published. Was it at all difficult for you, knowing the inner workings of industry so well, how tough it can be, to then approach it from the other side, as an author?
I think working in the industry made me feel quite ... pragmatic about writing. I think it made me bolder about submitting work to journals, because I knew how often wonderful people get rejected — so of course you don’t feel as down-hearted when that rejection letter plops onto your own mat, you’ve seen it happen to better writers too. You know it is just part of the process, being rebuffed and sending it to someone else and having it turned down again. You also know that people turn down things for such a variety of reasons: timing, their list may already be full, and of course, the vagaries of personal taste. I think, if anything, working in publishing gave me more confidence in submitting poetry to journals and of course this lead indirectly to the publication of this collection.

The poems in your collection are very strongly informed childhood experiences in South Africa, and by a longing for the country. You manage to retain strong links with the country, both your career as an agent and as a writer.
I do feel very gratetful, working in Britain but at the same time being in a position where I have one foot very firmly in South Africa, in the sense that it is the anchoring point of my personal life, my family life, my formative years, and also that my continuing professional life is so much an ongoing flow from South Africa, that I can feel I make some kind of a contribution. I always joke that I’m in export, I export intellectual property. The fact that there is income going into South Africa for several authors and that I could play a role in the promotion of several wonderful South African authors — that makes me very happy. And I feel it every time I come back home — which I do often — that this is home, and that it is my creative source as well.

Did your move to the U.K., that distance from South Afica, help to focus your creative efforts more? Did it drive the writing to a degree?
I have always written, but to I degree I suppose, yes. You don’t write about childhood as a child, you write about it as an adult when you look back, and you certainly look back at a country you’re not living in at present with different eyes, appreciative eyes. Marlene van Niekerk, who is also one of my clients, is of course also a fine poet and she describes poetry as a ‘soort andagtigheid’, a kind of attentiveness — which I thought was a wonderful way of describing the attention to detail and the attention to meanings of things you find in poetry. And hopefully that inspires in others, those that read the poem, a similar kind of attentiveness, not just to the words on the page but to things around them. Being away from South Africa is like looking through a magnifying glass, a burning glass at things that were routine and mundane, and that take on a vivid new significance.

Being aware of the fairly limited local market — especially for poetry, are you hoping to see work published in the U.K. as well?
I would like to reach a wider audience eventually, but I’m in no particular hurry. I am completely thrilled and honoured that Gus wanted to publish Weather Eye here, and it’s right that it should have been a South African and local publication. I’m very aware of the conflict and tension between international and local and wanting to support the local industry while recognising that the local industry is very limited in terms of the size of the readership — there are only so many copies that you can sell in a small market like South Africa.

It was very special to have the launch and the first readings from the collection in Grahamstown, which had always been my cultural mecca, with the festival and the Eisteddfodds I used to take part in when at school. Just before my reading there was a memorial tribute to Guy Butler, the Eastern Cape writer, academic, and poet, who I had met several times, and who was inspiring in that he too came from a small Karoo town, and showed that you didn’t have to be from some huge metropolis to write, to have something to say. It was very special to me, as a young writer, to follow on from that tribute.

I am very aware, and in awe, of people like Guy Butler, who founded New Coin, who encouraged many writers and who got South African writing recognised on literature courses here. People like Gus Ferguson, who started Snailpress with the R350 he won as a Vita Award for poetry- people who put back into the country and its culture. It’s something I carry with me, the awareness of those figures, the awareness of this country and then wanting to do the same, make similar contributions, both in my job and in my writing.

Weather Eye is published by Carapace Poets, an imprint of Snail Press.

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