Jade Wong-Baxter, 25, a New York-based junior agent and foreign rights associate at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents sat with Weekday Writer to talk about her experience entering the publishing sphere. Here’s how she did it:
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you find agenting?
Wong-Baxter: I first found agenting sort of by accident… I had just finished, I think it was my freshman year of college, and I thought I wanted to be a writer, realized that I wanted something that was a little more social -or a lot more social- and thought that publishing was the natural next step, especially because I think when I was reading or working in my classes, the part I liked the most was really editing other peoples’ work. So I applied to a lot of the big places that felt obvious to me because they were well-known; PRH, Simon & Schuster; all of that, but also went to literally just bookjobs.com and searched around for internships and found agencies. I kind of figured out from the internet what an agency was and thought it might be a little easier and a little less competitive.
Q: You previously interned and worked at Writers House as an assistant. What has the experience of going from these roles to becoming junior agent been like?
Wong-Baxter: Definitely an interesting learning curve because going into an agency, it takes a while to get your feet wet — especially at a smaller agency like MMQ, where the assistants really are handling so many different things; like you can’t just pass off the contracts to a different department, you have to do it yourself. It takes a while to get the admin aspect under you and when I moved up to becoming a junior agent, I was also starting to take on foreign rights responsibilities that my coworker had been doing.
So I think that I had definitely had this idea that I would be allowed to acquire and suddenly I would have all of these projects and I would sell them. But it’s a slow burn as a junior agent because you have to figure out all of your admin and then figure out the time that you’re gonna have for your own projects on top of that. And, you know, additionally, writers are just slow… You can be reaching out, but you have to wait for them to write their manuscripts, you have to put yourself out there on Manuscript Wish List, you have to do a little more hustling than you do in the later stages of your career because no one knows who you are, so you’re not getting that many queries and you really have to try and make more of a name for yourself… There was no way for me to know what worked until I tried it.
Q: What did a typical day look like for you pre-pandemic?
Wong-Baxter: Honestly, pre-pandemic it sort of looked like what I’m doing now, except I was in an office and I was talking to more people… You come in at the beginning of the day, there are a lot of emails — always, I usually try to deal with foreign rights in the morning because so many of our co-agents are in Europe and they’re ending their days, so it’s nice to get stuff to them first. I would also have to deal with any money things that came in; any clients that lost their checks or weren’t sure where their royalty statements were; things like that. Our interns would come in usually around 10 and we help assign them to their duties for the day and you know, a lot of it is just sort of long stretches of email correspondence, broken up by some meetings. On a busier day, I might be going out to lunch with an editor – usually, it was more like drinks with an editor, especially for younger editors where you don’t quite have the time to take two hours in the middle of the day… There really wasn’t any reading in the office for me unless it was a really slow day, just because it’s hard to have that time and space.
Q: How do you balance reading for fun with reading for work?
Wong-Baxter: It’s definitely hard… Some weeks you’re just going to have a ton of work reading… I once had a week where four other offers of representation came in and I had all of those manuscripts for maybe two days, it was horrible. At that point, there’s no room for anything else, but most of the time, I, and especially when we were in the office… I was trying to limit my work reading to mostly the weekdays and to my commuting hours, which gave me a solid two-ish hours a day reading, which is pretty good, and then have the weekend to read a book for fun. And you’re also reading books for fun because you wanna read, but also because you’re trying to have a sense of the market and also because you’re trying to remind yourself what a published book actually looks like. Like I don’t think you could just read manuscripts or your sort of internal compass gets all screwed up.
Q: What advice would you give to any students who want to become a literary agent?
Wong-Baxter: Read widely and also read books that are recent. I think that a common issue I run into with a lot of the intern applicants I have is that they really like sort of older books; like nineteenth-century British literature, which is good, but it’s not helpful if you want to go into publishing, because publishing and being in an agency just really requires a knowledge of like what’s out there in the market and what are people talking about and whether that’s the latest Sally Rooney discourse or whether that’s a conversation about race in publishing, I think it’s helpful to be on top of a lot of that discourse. And then, obviously, internships are helpful… At agencies, but also at other places within publishing so that you can be sure you want to go to an agency. I think that it’s often helpful to just have a perspective of what it looks like to work on all sides of the publishing process.