Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Emma Dries is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Outside, Lit Hub, Bookforum, and Dwell. As an agent for Triangle House, her clients have published at imprints including. Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday Books, and Ecco. The first book she sold was the debut breakout The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis.
We dug into what stands out in query letters, her approach with editorial as an agent, and why climate fiction is so important.
What types of projects are you most interested in right now? What feels oversaturated in your inbox?
I’ve always wanted to have a pretty even split of fiction and nonfiction on my list. When I started agenting, I was very fiction-heavy, but now the majority of writers I’ve signed and projects I’ve sold in the last year or so have been nonfiction! Which I love: I love my journalists and academics and their brilliant, brainy projects. That said, I’m really hungry for some good fiction now. I’m admittedly mostly a realist at heart — I love a meaty, dysfunctional family saga — though have a weakness for light speculative and dystopian. I can get down with something claustrophobic and creepy. I am probably not the best person to query with magical realism or surrealism or very experimental novels.
Kate McKean recently told me, “I want to forget I’m reading a query.” What makes you gobble up a submission? What makes you stop dead in your tracks once you start?
I don’t think I can top that advice, because it’s true and because it puts into words what is so ineffable about the querying and agenting process, and something that I think can be understandably frustrating for a writer to really understand.
So I’ll pivot and talk about what gets me paying attention in a query letter. These days? Intention and specificity. I swear in the last couple of months the uptick in AI slop or copy-paste queries has proliferated: I’m getting at least a dozen queries a day, and a lot are nonsensical and not personal or in a genre I have never worked in (trust me, you do not want me repping your middle grade fantasy). I know it’s already a numbers game for querying authors and asking them to personalize every letter when they’re querying 40 agents is a lot of additional labor. But when it’s clear someone has at least researched and noted one particular thing about me or my interests, that letter will inherently stand out.
What should all first-time authors know about the publishing industry? Either submitting, or selling, or marketing, or… anything!
Back when I worked in-house at several publishers, I would sometimes attend “post-mortem” meetings in which, a year or so after publication of a book, you would gather and talk about why it did or did not “work” (i.e., sell well). While there are plenty of metrics that determine how well a book will do, efforts you and your agent can and should fight for — publicity and marketing budgets, bookseller pushes from sales reps, big mouth mailings, etc — sometimes there is no clear, quantifiable reason for how well or poorly it performs. A book can be set up perfectly and flop or, a tiny indie pub with no resources might blow up on BookTok. These days, particularly, our collective attention is so fractured and the industry, like all industries, is in such tumult, that trying to predict how the winds will turn is a losing game. I think the only way to not make yourself insane is to really just believe in the project itself. I love and am so proud of my books that have been successful. But I am equally proud of and in awe of those that didn’t necessarily find a huge audience, or those that maybe didn’t even sell. You just have to keep moving forward.
Who are some recent debut clients you represented in the last few years? Any upcoming ones you can brag about?
The first book I ever sold as an agent was The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis. That book ended up being critically lauded and an indie bestseller, and continues to go. Just the other day I got an email from my preschool teacher telling me she read it, loved it, saw my name in the back and had to reach out. This from a woman I haven’t seen in 30 years, who’s had literally thousands of students. When I hear from people outside publishing that they’ve read and loved a book I’ve represented or worked on, nothing feels as good as that.
Coming up this June I’ve got Lifeguard, a memoir by the first chief female lifeguard in New York City, Janet Fash, who worked at Rockaway beach for nearly half a century. It’s visceral and delightful and also has a lot to say about union corruption and sexism—It’s just such an unapologetically New York story, which I love. Also this summer is False Prophet, a novel by Afsheen Farhadi, which manages to make a story about Jonestown feel totally refreshing and fascinating and new. And then to round out the year in November we have Nanny Nanny by K. Chiucarello, a stunning debut I cannot do justice to in a limited word count other than to say that this novel has been one of the great privileges of my career to work on and that none of you are ready!!!
How ready does a debut query need to be for you to be interested? Near perfect? Or is it more about the vision and potential
On a big picture level, this question will range from agent to agent, but I am a pretty editorial agent because I am an editor at heart. When I first started agenting, this meant I might sign someone even if I knew the project needed six rounds of edits before it went out, because I love doing that work. But when you’re unsalaried and working solely on commission, you’re betting on the fact that you will hopefully make money from this project at some point. Obviously, part of the job is assuming that risk and being okay if it doesn’t always literally pay off. That said, as much as we love the work — and we do — we also need to pay the bills. I’ve tried to mostly stick to a rule now that I will sign someone if I think I can send something out after two rounds, a big picture edit and then a line edit. If a project needs more work than that but I’m still interested, I’ll suggest we hop on a call for an hour to talk through some revision ideas and ask that they resubmit. But I’m a work in progress — I break that rule all the time because I can’t help but love books and believe in them.
On a technical level, the project does not need to be perfect, and I always tell writers not to stress if you send out a query and have a typo on page 2. Obviously, that’s not ideal, but it happens. That said, if there are several basic mechanical issues early on (lots of tense confusion or POV slips, for example) it signals to me that, regardless of whether or not they have a fresh idea, the author has not spent enough time honing their craft and learning the rules. You learn the rules so that you can learn how to break them!
You list you’re interested in climate fiction, which I think is a new subgenre. I’d just love to hear about your interest in it, and… are there any new genres that haven’t cracked through yet that you’re dying to read?
Every single contemporary issue we face has, for lack of a better word, a climate “angle.” AI data centers sucking up water from rural communities; CO2 emissions and skyrocketing oil prices from our nonsensical wars in the Middle East; affordable housing crises in coastal communities in the midst of FEMA cuts, etc. I don’t necessarily need projects to be specifically, plotwise, about climate change; that said, it feels notable to me when contemporary fiction, in particular, doesn’t address it. Climate change has fundamentally altered the fabric of our lives, even in the developed world, that to not address it feels like as much of an omission as omitting any other basic worldbuilding details. And then, of course, when it comes to speculative fiction, I think there is limitless possibility. It’s been a few years, but I will wax poetic about Ministry for the Future forever, because I think Kim Stanley Robinson nails a perfect blend of tone — enough despair to feel realistic, but enough hope to not descend into nihilism.
Loved this interview!!