Nadine Rubin Nathan
“If this were a story, it would open in
New York at the point when my husband, a Kiwi, and I made the decision to move to Auckland…
I’d worked as an editor for Harper’s Bazaar and for the New York Post and in book publishing, at Assouline, but I wasn’t too sure what work would look like for me in New Zealand. Enter, American literary agent Daniel Myers. He was living between Santa Fe and Whangarei at the time and he convinced me to join his agency, Wordlink Literary. Nine months later, Dan told Vicki Marsdon and me that he was retiring. That was the beginning of High Spot Literary and my partnership with Vicki.
As literary agents, our job is to help writers to sell rights to their work – to enable the manuscripts they’ve written to be published in as many countries as possible, and so other creators can adapt their work into new formats (like films or TV series). We work closely with a few smaller New Zealand publishers on international rights too. At the moment, for example, we’re working with Mākaro Press, to help sell international rights to Becky Manawatu’s multiple award-winning novel Auē.
New Zealand publishers often work directly with authors, but international publishers won’t look at a manuscript unless it’s been put on their desk by an agent. So, Vicki and I focus on books by talented New Zealand writers that have the potential to find an audience overseas. Our agreement with writers is simple: we’ll do our best to secure the best possible publishing deal. We don’t take upfront fees but once we have a deal, our commission is 15%. Once the editorial process is underway, we often work alongside the writer and editor as an intermediary. Then, on release, we do everything we can to promote the book, to get it into readers’ hands.
I’ll never forget reading the first page of Wife After Wife. Vicki and I were running a Pitch Perfect workshop on how to pitch to publishers and agents. We asked attending writers to send us their first page as part of a pitch. There were so many ideas and among them, Wife After Wife by Olivia Hayfield (Sue Copsey’s pen name). She had reimagined Henry VIII as a womanising media mogul. That first page was smart, funny and utterly compelling. It was clear that it had the right ingredients to be a novel that people would want to read – and that we could help. We told Sue we would love to see a complete first draft. Then, we waited. When Sue completed her full manuscript, we made some suggestions to help get it to a point where we knew editors would leap at the chance. And publishers were as excited as we were. Piatkus (Little, Brown) in the UK picked it up quickly and the US rights sold to Berkley, a Penguin Random House imprint. It’s available as an e-book and audio book too.”
Nadine Rubin Nathan is a literary agent and co-founder of High Spot Literary