AGENT SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW WITH MARK GOTTLIEB AND QUERY CRITIQUE GIVEAWAY

Today I’m thrilled to have agent ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Mark Gottlieb here. He is a literary agent at Trident Media Group.

Status: Open to submissions.

Hi­ Mark! Thanks so much for joining us.

About Mark:

1. Tell us how you became an agent, how long you’ve been one, and what you’ve been doing as an agent.

Unlike many people who choose book publishing as somewhat of an accidental profession, it was always expected of me that I would one day work at Trident Media Group, a family-owned and operated literary agency. I think it comes as a comfort to many of my clients that I’m not leaving the literary agency, nor book publishing anytime soon. Anyway, you could say I was sort of groomed for the position at a young age. That’s why I chose Emerson College in Boston, as they were one of the only schools at the time offering an undergraduate study in publishing. My company bio expresses my professional journey from my time at Emerson College, onward:

Mark Gottlieb is a highly ranked literary agent both in overall deals and other individual categories. Using that same initiative and insight for identifying talented writers, he is actively building his own client list of authors. Mark Gottlieb is excited to work directly with authors, helping to manage and grow their careers with all of the unique resources that are available at book publishing’s leading literary agency, Trident Media Group. During his time at Trident Media Group, Mark Gottlieb has represented numerous New York Times bestselling authors, as well as award-winning authors, and has optioned and sold books to film and TV production companies. He previously ran the agency’s audiobook department, in addition to working in foreign rights. Mark Gottlieb is actively seeking submissions in all categories and genres and looking forward to bringing new and established authors to the curious minds of their future readers.

About the Agency:

2. Share a bit about your agency and what it offers to its authors.

Trident Media Group (TMG) is a prominent literary agency in New York City dedicated to championing authors throughout their careers. Founded in 2000, TMG represents a wide range of bestselling and distinguished authors, as well as newly emerging authors. Our clients have won major literary awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the P.E.N. Faulkner Award, the P.E.N. Hemingway Award, and The Booker Prize, among others.

Our diverse group of literary agents are skilled in all genres of fiction and nonfiction. With an eye toward innovation, our clients are supported by dedicated departments in all areas of rights and career management. TMG’s robust Foreign Rights Department leads the industry in sales of both fiction and nonfiction abroad. Our author services include Digital Media & Marketing, Business Affairs & Administrative services, and Film & Dramatic rights sales.​

What He’s Looking For:

2. What age groups do you represent—picture books, MG, and/or YA? What genres do you represent and what are you looking for in submissions for these genres?

We represent all genres, generally excluding poetry, short stories, novellas, and textbooks.

We are always seeing a high demand for commercial fiction, genre fiction, thrillers, women’s fiction, romance, YA, literary/general fiction, high-end nonfiction and health books written by authors with major platforms in the areas of history/politics/current affairs, business books and celebrity nonfiction.

3.  Is there anything you would be especially excited to seeing in the genres you are interested in?

An ideal project would carry an important social message or moral to the story, and while not only being beautifully written, it should be accessible or have some aspects of commercialism to the writing, even if it is literary fiction. I also look for authors that have good writing credentials such as experience with writing workshops, conferences, or smaller publications in respected literary magazines. Having awards, bestseller status, a strong online presence/platform, or pre-publication blurbs in-hand for one’s manuscript is also very promising in the eyes of a literary agent.

What He Isn’t Looking For:

4. What types of submissions are you not interested in?

I am not interested in cozy mysteries, erotica, urban fantasy, horror, paranormal romance, and personal (non-celebrity) memoir.

Agent Philosophy:

5. What is your philosophy as an agent both in terms of the authors you want to work with and the books you want to represent?

In the case of literary fiction, lending some accessibility is what I find to be important. The literary community as a whole tends to be very insular and the books themselves also read like they're too cool for school. Uncompromising literary fiction often contains prose that are more concerned with being stylish and flowery, thereby torturing the narrative and losing the reader in the poetics. A piece of advice I tend to share with clients in such a pitfall is a famed quote from the author Charles Bukowski: "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." That will help the moral of the book shine through, which is ultimately what attracts me to a manuscript, since many of the books I represent are concerned with important social messages.

For genre fiction and commercial fiction, it is important to be aware of the genre conventions and tropes, in order to either generally avoid them, or spin them in a new and interesting way. For instance, I find it the strangest thing that in most every zombie novel, the protagonist wakes up in a hospital bed from a coma, to suddenly realize they're in a world full of zombies. I'm sure that was a neat trope when it started out, since the motif of dreaming/waking kind of plays with the zombie theme in reverse (our protagonist wakes from the world of the living to the dead, whereas his antagonists have fallen asleep from the world of the living to a dream-like state in the world of the dead). Nowadays that trope is just old hat to most readers of zombie books.

In nonfiction, I mainly make an evaluation based on the author’s platform.

A manuscript that recently spoke to me that I decided to take on, and subsequently sold to a publisher, is World Fantasy Award-nominated author Christopher Brown’s TROPIC OF KANSAS. Description: on the front lines of a revolution whose fuse they are about to light, a fugitive brother and sister are harboring explosive government secrets; pitched as a novel of political dissent akin to the Americana of THE ROAD, the brave new corporate world of JENNIFER GOVERNMENT, or a post-9/11 MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE; the story of ordinary people seeking to refresh democracy in a mirror America ruled by a telegenic dictator of a businessman. The famed and award-winning editor David G. Hartwell of Tor Books had bought the book in his very last book deal, but suddenly passed away in a terrible freak accident. We were able to move the project over to David Pomerico of Harper Voyager where the project now happily resides and is slated for publication in 2017.

What initially drew me to the project was that the author not only had a lot of “street cred” as an award-nominated author and short story writer—he had already collected pre-publication blurbs from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow, as well as trade reviews from Locus, Boing Boing, Tangent, and many other trade review sites and notable authors. Christopher had also tapped into the heart of near-future sci-fi with an important social message—a hot topic for right now in SF. 

Christopher’s writing focuses on issues at the nexus of technology, politics, and economics and often fit within the literary subgenre sometimes denominated avant-pop—"pulp fiction for smart people," in the words of the author, answering questions such as “Whatever happened to the guest appearance of Jorge Luis Borges on The Love Boat?” or “What if Beltway psychological warfare operatives co-opted Saddam’s Frazetta-dealer?”

Harper Voyager has also compared TROPIC OF KANSAS to READY PLAYER ONE, STATION ELEVEN and HIGH-RISE.

Editorial Agent:

6. Are you an editorial agent? If so, what is your process like when you’re working with your authors before submitting to editors?

If interested in a manuscript, I tend to offer representation upfront, with the expectation that an author will remain open to editorial discussion, if need be. Every manuscript is different; I have read manuscripts that read very tightly and needed few if any editorial comments from me. In those instances I might provide just a few bulleted points or so for the author to keep in mind. In other instances I have written ten or twelve-page editorial letters. While that may seem like overkill, it expresses my firm belief in an author’s career growth.

Query Methods and Submission Guidelines: (Always verify before submitting)

7. How should authors query you and what do you want to see with the query letter?

My advice to authors along the querying process is to really nail the writing of that query letter. A query letter that reads well is usually a good indication to the literary agent that the manuscript will similarly read well, inclining the literary agent to request a manuscript. Oftentimes the query letter can go on to become the publisher’s jacket copy, were the publisher to acquire the manuscript via the literary agent.

A good query letter is: upfront in one-two sentences what the book is about in hook or elevator pitch fashion (should mention the title, lend a sense of genre, and contain one-three competitive/comparative titles that were bestsellers or award-winners, published within the last few years. If the author has pre-publication blurbs, those can appear before those first two sentences. Next is a couple of body paragraphs detailing some of the plot details without too many spoilers and in that space the literary merits of the manuscript can be mentioned. The last paragraph is usually reserved for a short author bio, mentioning relevant writing experience/credentials, and a link to an author site or social media page(s) can be included there.

In addition to what I mentioned above in terms of what attracts a literary agent to an author, once an author has gone as far as they can go with the writing / editing of the manuscript and honed in on a knock-out query letter / hook, then it is time to begin the process of querying a literary agent.

The Trident Media Group literary agency prefers to be queried by authors via our website at http://www.tridentmediagroup.com/

Our query letter instructions are there.

8.  Do you have any specific dislikes in query letters or the first pages submitted to you?

There are many mistakes that I’ve seen in query letters, but I will name just a few that would absolutely deter me from requesting the manuscript from an author.

-Submitting queries for novellas, short story collections, poetry or textbooks will usually turn a literary agent off, as most literary agents do not represent such things. Publishers tend not to buy from literary agents in those areas in the first place.

-Word count is also very important. Traditional book length is 80-120K, and commercial fiction tends to be in the 80-90K-word range. Going outside of normal book-length will not produce good results for an author querying a literary agent for a shot at going into major trade publishing.

-Writing within struggling genres such as cozy mysteries, erotica, or urban fantasy is also another way to turn a literary agent off in the querying process. We tend to be weary of that at Trident Media Group.

Response Time:

9. What’s your response time to queries and requests for more pages of a manuscript?

Literary agents differ in their response time to a manuscript. This will also depend on the length of the manuscript, how full the literary agent’s plate is already, etc. I think a reasonable response time is within a month’s time, though. Of course this is a hurry-up-and-wait sort of business, so it could take longer as it takes time to read. In my case I prefer to read within the first few days or week of receiving a manuscript from an author in order to express my level of enthusiasm, rather than just sitting on my hands.

Self-Published and Small Press Authors:

10.  Are you open to representing authors who have self-published or been published by smaller presses? What advice do you have for them if they want to try to find an agent to represent them?

The self-publishing/indie sphere has become something of what the farm league is to major league baseball, but the odds of that success can be lower than were an author to try and approach a literary agent as an author attempting to make their major debut in trade publishing. The bar is quite high in terms of self-publishing to attract an agent or publisher. An author usually needs to have sold at least 50,000 copies at a decent price.

If an author is involved in the writing community at a grassroots level with conferences, workshops and has published in esteemed literary magazines, then that can help. As far as an insider tip goes, it’s great to see an author that comes to us with pre-publication blurbs from bestselling and award-winning authors. So it certainly doesn't hurt to reach out to well-known authors and ask them to review your work, if they're interested and if they indicate they do like it, see if they'll provide a short blurb.

Also Listing a few competitive / comparative titles that were bestsellers and / or award-winners, published within the last few years, is also key for a literary agent’s consideration.

At the end of the day, though, the manuscript must be an amazing read.

11. With all the changes in publishing—self-publishing, hybrid authors, more small publishers—do you see the role of agents changing at all? Why?

Yes, it is all too easy for an author to feel discouraged and turn to self-publishing or small indie publishing. However, many successful self-published authors eventually go into traditional publishing in order to take advantage of having a team of professionals who help them take their work to the next level.

A literary agency with industry knowledge and expertise can bring a huge value add to the table for an author, evidenced by many of the success stories we’ve created for our clients, the bulk of which are award-winning and bestselling authors. We’ve actually built a lot of self-published success stories into mega-bestsellers, giving authors a Godzilla-like footprint in the industry.

Trident Media Group is a full-service literary agency for authors, handling accounting, legal review, management, foreign rights (books in translation), book-to-film/TV, audio books, etc. We’re also a literary agency with tremendous clout in the industry, so we can get many things for authors from publishers and film / TV buyers that an author otherwise would not be able to get on their own.

I’d like to think that a literary agency would save an author a lot of headaches in order to help the author focus in on their own writing, thereby allowing the author to become more prolific. Meanwhile, the literary agent would work in concert with their subsidiary rights people and departments within the literary agency. In looking at a literary agent and considering paying them a commission on a deal, an author should be asking what they stand to gain in having a literary agent.

The digital landscape has seen our literary agency evolve. Thanks to the tremendous resources available to our company and our Digital Media and Publishing department, Trident Media Group often helps our clients in their marketing/publicity efforts. We also try to put the publisher on the hot seat in encouraging them to perform marketing/publicity tasks for the author, by sharing ideas and having in-depth meetings with publishers.

Trident will also make recommendations to our clients on how they can think about improving their social media presence and look to online efforts to market / promote their books. Otherwise, book publishers normally devote their marketing dollars and other resources toward authors that are huge successes or are making a major debut.

We at Trident might even recommend a private book publicity firm to a client, but that doesn’t come cheap. An author should still know that their role in marketing and promoting the book is integral to the process since, at the end of the day, readers / fans will want to hear from the author.

Clients:

12. Who are some of the authors you represent?

The Trident Media Group literary agency’s client list is viewable here: http://www.tridentmediagroup.com/

Interviews and Guest Posts:

13. Please share the links to any interviews and guest posts you think would be helpful to writers interested in querying you.

Mark Gottlieb | Literary Agents in NYC | Trident Media Group

www.tridentmediagroup.com/agents/mark-gottlieb

Publishers Marketplace: Mark Gottlieb

www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/gottliebm/

Literary Agent Spotlight: Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group ...

www.writersdigest.com/...literary-agents/literary-agent-spotlight-mark-...

Michelle4Laughs- It's In The Details: Query Questions with Mark Gottlieb

www.michelle4laughs.com/2014/10/query-questions-with-mark-gottlieb.html

The Grim Tidings Podcast » Talking Literary Agents with Mark Gottlieb

thegrimtidingspodcast.podbean.com/e/talking-literary-agents-with-mark-gottlieb/

Unicorn Bell: Agent Interviews

unicornbell.blogspot.com/2016/03/agent-interviews.html

Interview with literary agent Mark Gottlieb. | Amy M. Newman

https://theliterarymom.wordpress.com/.../interview-with-literary-agent-mark-gottlieb/

Update on 2/2/2023

Mark Gottlieb website

Podcast at Alexander Pennington (08/2022)

Podcast at Middle Grade Ninja (04/2022)

Podcast at Wordsmith Academy (03/2022)

Podcast at the Witty Writers Show (01/2022)

Do's & Don'ts of Querying Podcast at Witty Writers Show (11/2021)

Podcast at Rick Bleiweiss 09/2021)

Interview at Cardinal Rule Press (01/2021)

Interview at Writer's Bone (04/2020)

Podcast at Thriving Authors (03/2020)

Podcast at diyMFA (05/2017)

Links and Contact Info:

14. Please share how writers should contact you to submit a query and your links on the Web.

The Trident Media Group literary agency prefers to be queried by authors via our website at http://www.tridentmediagroup.com/

Our query letter instructions are there.

Additional Advice:

15. Is there any other advice you’d like to share with aspiring authors that we haven’t covered?

The most important advice I can give to writers just starting out is to learn and grow from constructive criticism and rejection, rather than being discouraged by that feedback. It is not an editor or literary agent saying the author’s writing is not good—we’re saying the writing is not good enough, at least not yet. So, hang in there…

Thanks for sharing all your advice, Mark.

­Mark is generously offering a query critique to one lucky winner. To enter, all you need to do is be a follower (just click the follower button if you're not a follower) and leave a comment through 1/28/2017.  If your e-mail is not on your Google Profile, you must leave it in the comments to enter either contest. If you do not want to enter the contest, that's okay. Just let me know in the comments.

If you mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or your blog, mention this in the comments and I'll give you an extra entry. This is an international giveaway.

Last Updated: 2/2/2023.
Agent Contacted for Review? Yes
Last Reviewed By Agent? 2/8/2023

Have any experience with this agent? See something that needs updating? Please leave a comment or e-mail me at natalieiaguirre7@gmail.com.

Note: These agent profiles and interviews presently focus on agents who accept children's fiction. Please take the time to verify anything you might use here before querying an agent. The information found here is subject to change.