Pitch the Lunch

To continue our ongoing look at agents, here’s an article from The National about those dwindling agent/editor lunches. More and more, the failing economy is cutting into the lunch budgets of agents. They're having coffee instead or drinks after hours. This article, however, is an explanation of why the networking lunches are so important to agents and editors (and, thus, to writers).

“The idea of the lunch is that you’re looking for the place where your passions overlap,” said the literary agent Larry Weissman. … It’s the job of the agent to match the product with a suitable editor.

Mel Flashman, an agent with Trident Media Group, says that he’s made deals over lunch.

Flashman likens the lunches to dates. “Publishing is really a matter of taste, and taste is subjective. If someone debated in high school they might be more susceptive to a policy book as opposed to a meandering narrative. … “People will spend most of the time just talking about other things. I generally don’t talk about business for 95 per cent of the lunch. I let business arise organically, but maybe that’s just the Mel Flashman way of doing things,” said Flashman.”

If you’re an author invited to lunch, though, you need to know the rules and etiquette apparently.

Authors, however, are usually worse lunchers than agents. “Agents work in the business world, so they have to be at least borderline acceptable. Authors are often freaks. Often, they mistake my interest in their manuscript for my interest in them as a person, so they hit on me or provide too much information about things like failed marriages, extramarital affairs, or childhood trauma.

Eater beware.

P.S. I’m in Key West today.