LIVING P rofile
M
Books
The
BUSINESS of
BY MARY TAGGART PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK HOLLERON
40 ottawaathome.ca WINTER 2020
ost of us pick up a book, check out the jacket cover, and read a few pages to decide if it’s something that will capture our attention or not. When we find one that really draws us in, we can’t wait to discuss it in book groups, on social media, or just in casual conversation. Reading offers an escape from the everyday, and for readers there is little to no thought about anything beyond the words inside the pages. However, books are a business just like any other product and one of the biggest influencers on the business side of reading is the literary agent. Carly Watters, a 32-year-old mother of one and expecting a second child in February, has always had a passion for books. She reads about 20 published books per year, just for pleasure, and then another few hundred for work. Her mother was a librarian and implanted a love for reading in Carly at a young age. While in school, working on her BA in English at Queen’s University, Carly started to wonder about how a book was made. This led her to grad school at City University in London, England where she received an MA in Publishing Studies. Today, Carly is a top literary agent with P.S. Literary Agency, based in Toronto, with some big names in her roster. A literary agent’s greatest challenge is finding a book that will make an impact on the market. Just as with any form of popculture, trends influence readers. That may come through the look of the cover design or a twitter-trending news topic. Book trends aren’t always easy to predict. Carly, who gets pitched approximately 10,000 projects each year (from which she requests about 3–400 manuscripts), says that more significant than being on trend is to be “the book that starts the trend just because it’s a phenomenal read and it’s unique—the copycats come after that.”
