Trident Media Group's impressive roster of author clients includes: Deepak Chopra, Stephen Coonts, Catherine Coulter, Janet Evanovich, Allan Folsom, Elizabeth George, DUNE and the Estate of Frank Herbert, Dean Koontz, and Jerry Oppenheimer. The agency has also represented some of the biggest and most prestigious book deals for celebrities, including Jerry Seinfeld, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Mel Brooks, Aretha Franklin, Drew Barrymore, Paul Reiser, Brian Wilson, Tony Curtis, Carl Reiner, Mariel Hemingway, and Tony Bennett.

GLASS: I grew up here and my first job in publishing right out of college was at the old Putnam Berkley on Madison Ave., so it was a homecoming. And after all that time doing academic and nonprofit work, I felt I could accomplish a lot more, and faster, back on the commercial side of things. Those $20K taxable grants the NEA was awarding creative writers started to seem smaller and less meaningful. I imagined that getting innovative, talented writers into mainstream, commercial publishing and helping them find a long-term readership would be a much more effective way to get worthwhile creative writing out into the world and help writers earn a living.

NEFF: : You are creating a stable of really professional and artistic first-time authors. Is it your intent to nurture their careers? Are you their champion?

GLASS: I’d like to think so. It’s a great thrill for me to see writers whose heart is in their work find enthusiastic publishers. And yes, I intend to manage their careers for the long-term. That’s a huge part of it—it cannot just be about the sale, I work with my authors on all aspects of the publishing process—all in an effort to make sure they’re protected as much as possible for the long-term. It’s much harder to sell a second novel these days than a first one, and so much strategy and planning goes into nurturing authors’ careers so they have the best chance of earning a living as writers and staying in a strong, committed relationship with a publisher into the future.

NEFF: : How do you get your leads on writers who might have manuscripts with real potential? Tips from others? Fiction journals? Submissions?

GLASS: When I started out, I pored over the literary journals looking for stories with voice and style and ability to engage the reader. I found several talented fiction writers that way and those relationships translated into great book deals. Once that starts happening, you get busier and it gets harder to stay on top of the lit mags. More and more new clients start coming through referrals from clients, friends, editors, other kinds of agents, occasionally from cold submissions.

NEFF: : Given your background in writing and the arts, do you strive to bring a unique sensitivity to the business, to the relationship with your authors?

GLASS: Especially considering the reason I got into this, it’s important to me to represent material that I feel strongly about and makes me feel something and that I feel would be a valuable addition to book publishing. Of course, agents are businesspeople at heart and we do have to care about salability and be aware of the vicissitudes of the market. Having said that, I do care very much about the writing I work with, and my editorial relationships with my clients are very important to me.

NEFF: : How do you see the current first novel market? Better than five years ago? Same? Becoming more difficult?

GLASS: I think the first novel market is very strong right now. Publishers are always looking for the next big thing, and a first time novelist, maybe a relative unknown with the right kind of pedigree and connections and a great story, can provide them their best shot at striking gold. It’s the second novel market that’s hard. The business now is driven by sales figures, and publishers will be quick to drop an author whose first book did not perform up to par. Then the agent’s task is finding another publisher to take a chance on that author’s second novel, an author who brings with him or her a poor track record. Always difficult to overcome in this market. Part of the problem is that publishers are producing more books than ever before, which means more sales of first novels, but also more great books that fall through the cracks.

NEFF: : Following on the previous questions, do you calculate potential film rights in your decision-making process?

GLASS: No. If I love a novel, I will take it on even if I’m not sure there’s film potential. Plus, the book-to-film world is so varied and constantly changing, that it’s always hard to say what directors and producers will be looking for.

NEFF: : Can you define a "literary commercial" or "literary mainstream" novel? Obviously, it's a "literary" novel that actually makes money for the publisher, but what are it's characteristics?

GLASS: I don’t know what any of these words mean anymore. There are novels with literary writing but commercial plots, which they’re now calling “faux-literary”. I think historically “commercial” novels have always been the breadwinners for publishers, but books like The Secret Life of Bees and The Lovely Bones, label them any way you want, show that we’re headed in the right direction.

NEFF: : Is this the type of literary novel you are looking to represent? Would you represent a great first-time literary novel to an independent press, if you strongly believed in it?

GLASS: As I mentioned, I like literary novels that can ‘get me’ in the end. I also like experimental novels that use device and trickery to play with narrative without distancing the reader too much from the plot or characters. If the novel has a particular type of plot or setting that could be a ‘hook’ that might attract the attention of a publisher, all the better. It is not always good for an author’s career to publish with a small independent press. Sometimes it can be worthwhile. It depends on the situation.

NEFF: : Which particular sub-genres of the literary or genre market do you see staying "hot" over the next several years? Memoir? Literary mystery/thriller? Chick Lit? etc?

GLASS: Chick Lit feels like it’s dying down a bit. They’ve been saying memoir has been dying down for ten years but it won’t go away. Mystery/thriller remains strong. It’s all academic because these genres and subgenres constantly rotate in and out of favor. Women’s fiction and detective novels will never go away. The one change I see happening is less emphasis on mass-market ‘rack-size’ paperbacks for commercial fiction. I think US publishers are going to be relying on the ‘trade paperback’ format more and more and across many genres, as the European publishers have already been doing for years. A lot of literary fiction is being published in original trade paperback, I think sometimes for smart reasons, and I think the same thing is going to start to happen in the mystery/thriller genre, as well as certain kinds of nonfiction.