Martin Literary Management

Hello. My name is Andrew Wetzel. I'm a relatively recent transplant to the West Coast and I join the Martin Literary Management team after spending three years in the New York publishing industry, first with a brief spell at Soft Skull Press and later as a junior literary scout for Aram Fox, Inc. I've also been an attendee at the Frankfurt Book Fair and Book Expo America.

Literary scouts are a lesser-known (and lesser-populated) part of the book industry but an essential component of helping a book go from National Bestseller to Worldwide Bestseller. They are in charge of looking for American books for their clients, who are usually foreign publishing houses trying to complement their homegrown talent with authors from other countries. Since it is not unusual for a thousand-plus pre-publication manuscripts to go through a scouting office each year, it is essential that literary scouts are familiar with the list of every major literary agency and publisher in the country and dozens of smaller houses and agents. It's a lot of juggling but when you love to read it comes easy.

In addition to publishing behemoths like HarperCollins UK, one of my favorite clients to read for was Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions. The intersection of the book and film/TV world is one of my favorite aspects of working in the industry and I always keep an eye out for properties that would lend themselves to that treatment.

Speaking of my tastes, the areas I'd most like to carve out for myself with Martin Literary Management would be "Literary with a capital L" fiction (think Eugenides, Houellebecq, Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis) as well as the dark corner of the literary list that is slightly less pretentious and slightly more commercial (think Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Johnson). That's a very "male" list and it is definitely where my personal tastes lie. I love a great story but style is just as important to me sometimes. I'm also very interested in reading Young Adult novels, specifically those with a macabre sensibility or a fascinating dystopian or fantasy setting.

As well, I'm deeply interested in pop-nonfiction (think Mary Roach, Legs McNeil and, admittedly, gimmicky books based on popular blogs/Tumblrs) and that area of the industry my old coworkers called "Nonfiction for boys": funny books by comedians, pop culture oral histories (!), books by-or-about criminals, memoirs of all sort and stripe, though instead of the inspirational memoir side of it, it would be a mix of warts-and-all athlete/musician/comedian memoirs (or possibly even the sleazy memoir, like Tucker Max/Neil Strauss, if someone had an interesting new angle to that type of book). Lastly, I have a deep nerdy love for graphic novels, though I realize how hard that market is to crack.

Query me at Andrew@MartinLiteraryManagement.com