Welcome to "Agent Advice," a series of quick interviews with agents who talk with Guide to Literary Agents about their thoughts on writing, publishing, and just about anything else.
This installment features Laurie McLean, a literary agent with Larsen/Pomada Literary Agents in San Francisco. McLean is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives (AAR).
GLA: What’s the most recent thing you’ve sold?
LM: A romance called Extra-Sensory—a paranormal romance—to Harlequin.
GLA: Bottom line: What attracts you to a book?
LM: It’s got to be the writing—the quality of the writing.
GLA: Do you think beyond the project when you consider it, in terms of foreign rights, film rights and stage rights?
LM: Absolutely. I try to keep as many rights as I can myself because I have a whole network of subagents; also, I have 25 years of marketing and public relations experience, so I really feel like I can have my authors go for movie deals and go for merchandising deals.
GLA: Can that influence your decision to take on an author? If the work isn’t as good as it should be, but you see potential down the line in terms of rights across the spectrum?
LM: Absolutely. When I ran my own business, the thing I did most was edit. If I think someone has a lot of promise but there’s a problem with the plot, characters or writing, I tell them where they should go to get help—to a conference, buying a book, whatever—or I edit it myself. I’ll edit the first couple chapters, then I give it back to them to finish it out.
GLA: You were part of the Writer’s Digest Books conference Agent Pitch Slam. What do you think is the most common mistake writers make when they give a short in-person pitch to an agent?
LM: They get into too many details right off the bat. They should think of a pitch like a movie trailer. So as they’re going to blockbuster movies this summer, they should look at the trailers ahead of time—not for entertainment, but for education. How do the trailers get the message across about what that movie’s going to be about?
Laurie McLean represents adult genre fiction—romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, Western, mysteries, etc.—and graphic novels, as well as children’s fiction and nonfiction. She loves quirky, dark, edgy fiction and prefers her queries and submissions via e-mail. Check out her blog at agentsavant.com.