ANOTHER internship available

We are now looking for two or even three interns, people who like to read books by authors like:
Tana French
Eleanor Brown
Jacqueline Sheehan
Jodi Picoult
Gillian Flynn
Lori Roy
Laurie Notaro
Celia Rivenbark
Elin Hilderbrand
Kristin Hannah
Jeannette Walls
Kate Atkinson

This is an eclectic list, so obviously you don't need to like everyone on it! But basically, you should like at least one of the following genres: humor, memoir, upmarket women's fiction and literary suspense


I should say, because I forgot to say it in regard to the other internship posting, that you do not need to have any kind of publishing experience or even publishing aspirations. We are just looking for people who love books and love to read.

Please send e-mail to intern@thebentagency.com. Please put "internshiptwo" in the subject line. Tell us why you want the internship, attach a resume if you have one although it's not essential, and list the last ten books you read and your ten favorite books.

Please do not apply if you are primarily a young adult/middle grade reader. It's fine if you do some of that, but we already have our young adult/middle grade specialists in place.

If you have applied in the past you are more than welcome to apply again.

And don't forget to apply for the romance internship! We are looking for obsessive romance readers. Also send to intern@thebentagency.com

Regrets? I've had a few.

I did an #askagent session on Twitter the other day and someone asked the agents participating if we ever regretted passing on a project.

I think I said that the short answer was "sort of," and that it was complicated and I should probably blog about it, so here I am.

This is a tough one. I can't speak for other agents but I know personally that this is a hard question to answer honestly. Put it this way: intellectually speaking, do I ever regret passing on a book? No. I do not. Rationally, I know that if I didn't see the book's potential then I wouldn't have been a good advocate for it. Or if it wasn't a good fit for my list then I wouldn't have known how to sell it--what the competition was or which editors to send it to.

But emotionally? In the middle of the night when I can't sleep? Do I regret passing on a book that someone else sold for a lot of money or that is now on the bestseller list? Well, what do you think? OF COURSE I REGRET IT.

Let's go back to the rational Jenny who is now soundly kicking the ass of emotional dark-night-of-the-soul Jenny. "Listen to me, and suck it up you sniveling pansy," she says.
For there is not one agent on the planet that likes every single book on the NYT bestseller list. For every book on that list there are agents who passed on it and editors who passed on it and it's just part of the business. There's even a "fun" game we agents and editors like to play called "Well, I passed on X." The bigger and more successful X is, the more you up the ante. It's not a game you really like to win of course, but it sure makes you feel better to play.

So do I regret it? Sort of. Not really. Kind of. Mostly no.

And why am I sharing this, you ask? I guess it's all part of my continuing efforts to show you that agents are people too.

Happy Wednesday!

internship available

We're looking for an intern who loves to read all kinds of romance from historical to paranormal and suspense from authors like Mary Higgins Clark, Linda Howard, Tami Hoag, Lisa Gardner.

Send us an e-mail to intern@thebentagency.com. Tell us about yourself, include a resume if you have one, but it's not necessary. Include two lists: the last ten books you read and your ten favorite books of all time. We ask for a ten hour a week commitment at the minimum.

We usually get a great many applicants and so I close the application period fairly quickly: watch this space and also twitter for details.

You Can Only Buy One Book Today

I think this topic has been done to death, but just in case some of you were wondering why I wouldn’t want to represent a book that was certainly of publishable quality, or by most standards a “good” or “very good” book, here is a very short analogy.

You are at a bookstore. You pick up a book. You like it. It seems like a good book. It seems like a book that deserved to be published, at least in your opinion.

But today, you are only buying one book. You have a great many books at home already and you love them all. You have very limited shelf space and you don’t want to get rid of the books that you do love to make room for a book that you might not love as much. And so today, you will only bring home one, because that is what you have room for. Tomorrow, you might have more room. Perhaps you will have a new bookcase even. But today, there will only be one.

So you put back the book you really like, a little wistfully, because you know someone else will probably take it home, and you pick up the next book on the shelf. And you keep going, until you find the one that you love.