LiteraryScout
New York, NY
Female, 0
Literary scouts work with foreign publishers to help determine which American books they should acquire. We spend our days (and nights!) reading manuscripts, writing reports, meeting with agents and publishers, and speaking with clients to keep them apprised of developments. Scouts don’t make much money, but the perks and fun help make up for that.
It’s really the agent or editor’s job to provide a strong synopsis to a scout and convince us that of the huge pile of manuscripts to get through, theirs is a priority. A manuscript definitely does not need to start off with a punch to the gut if the writing is good. If the writing is bad, then it just needs to have a commercial enough synopsis that we know it will probably do well. For example, after The Da Vinci Code there were a ton of similar thrillers being read, after Kite Runner everyone was reading heart-wrenching novels about that region, and after Twilight it was a scout’s job to look for the next great vampire/werewolf book. Whether the writing is good or not, there has to be some commercial element to it. If no one is going to read it, then our clients are not going to acquire it. Because we work with an international audience, we also need to know what different regions love or hate, plus the individual tastes of the editors we work for. For example, Germans do not want outsiders writing about the Holocaust, the French are sick to death of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and Italians do not think anyone can write about their country as well as they can.
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We get all of our manuscripts from agents and publishers. Scouts do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. Unless it’s definitely being printed in the US, it is not part of our scope.
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Scouts work for foreign publishing houses, but can also work for film companies to assist them in deciding what books might do well as movies.
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Scouts are only reading book manuscripts, but if there is a really notable piece of media that is preceding a likely book (like Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture video or the Dragon Mother’s media buzz), that’s certainly important to be aware of as well. Scouts need to be plugged into what topics are hot and what people are hungry for more of.
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Sitcom Writer
Is reality TV here to stay?
Air Traffic Controller
What was it like in the tower on 9/11?
Fashion Forecaster
Are people in the fashion world as rotten as those in Devil Wears Prada?
Like any job in publishing, step one is an unpaid internship. Publishing is a competitive field (despite the low pay) and the only real way in is to offer your services for free until you find someone willing to pay for them. Many people find themselves taking on a string of unpaid and then eventually paid internships before being able to land a full-time job. The best thing to do is start as early as possible during college. Although you may be able to intern at a university press, really to have a career you must live in New York or California, but New York is really preferable. This is a networking heavy industry, even though it’s populated by bookworms. If you love books, but aren’t up for schmoozing, it’s not the right industry for you.
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There is the very rare story of a breakout self-publishing hit like The Shack, but it’s atypical. There are so many self-published books out there that it is almost pointless to spend time trying to weed out the good from the bad. This is why we really only work with agents and publishers. For example, scouts started reading The Shack only after it had been acquired by a large publishing house.
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That’s probably something a literary agent could answer better for you. My understanding is that you certainly should succinctly include information about other writing in your cover letter to an agent, but the process is to write a strong submission letter about your novel and enclose the first ten pages of the manuscript. Agents (or really the unpaid interns reading through the unsolicited submissions) will ask for more if they’re interested. The best thing of course is if you know someone in the industry. You’d be shocked if you saw the number of manuscripts agencies receive every day. The goal is to look at everything through fresh eyes, but we’re only human.
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