The Bookseller’s Alison Bone chats with Gillon Aitken agent Clare Alexander, one of the first in the UK to leave her publishing career – including time at Viking Penguin and later, Macmillan – behind to move to the other side after realizing that “Very few people are called editor-in-chief any more. It’s not a very enjoyable job. All the editors report to you and I feel editors have all the problems of authors but none of the talents.”
That’s the kind of woman she is – saying provocative things and making sure Bone (or any interviewer) writes them down. Take her view on Mark Haddon‘s sucess with THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME: “One thing I learned early on is that I’m not usually wrong, but I’m not always right straight away.” Or when the book was published simultaneously by adult and children’s publishers. The publisher now says it was their idea, but I’d like to see how they’d explain the fact we sold the book simultaneously to Dan Franklin and David Fickling.”
And aside from repping more than 100 clients, Alexander’s taken on a new task: presidency of the Association of Authors’ Agents (AAA), which puts her at loggerheads with publishers about territorial and digital rights. “I don’t find it helpful when publishers say the answer is to give them world rights,” she says, adding that although she will support UK publishers, her job “is to do what is best for the author, not only in the UK”.
In other words, this job is very, very personal for Alexander. “What I do, I do with passionate intensity. When it doesn’t work, I feel sick.”