HOT AUTHORS SERIES // Part 5: Literary Agent Erin Hosier Gives Us the Insider Scoop

If you're keeping track, you know we've already featured four of the panelists who'll be joining us tonight for our panel discussion and party team-up with Canteen Magazine.

To recap, we've got Christopher Kouloris, Tao Lin, Fiona Maazel, and Stephen Pierson. Now we bring you our fifth and final: Literary agent Erin Hosier.

Hosier's been an agent for 10 years now, with four years at Dunow, Carson & Lerner so she's witnessed significant changes in the industry. Recently, she decided to put some of her industry knowledge to work and publish a memoir of her own: "It's about the death of my father, and daddy issues, and daddy-daughter, and relationships"--but she found time to talk to us about what she does as an agent and how it became her path.

"I moved to New York, like everyone does, and I got a job at Ms. Magazine," Hosier says. "It was crazy! It was so much drama and so stressful. They paid us in galleys of books, so I picked up Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner. It's a book about writing and editing. I read it and thought, I really want to be working with books." Hosier went on to work for Lerner herself before become an agent. 

She works mostly with nonfiction, particularly memoirs. "I'm a total voyeur," she says. She loves the little glimpses into other people's lives that the genre provides, from the benign to the traumatic. And luckily for her, it's an area that's faring a little better than fiction. "The industry changed after 2008," she says. "For a novel, if you're lucky, you get a $10,000 advance. It's really hard." Hosier says the days of the superstar editor are no more, and money is hard to come by. She says a lot of the good writers are going to TV, and the books that are making money are those that are celebrity-driven or prepackaged, ghost-written series. "It's all so Hollywood now." 

Although she may sound jaded by industry, Hosier's respect for writers has gone unchanged--even moreso now that she's in the process herself. She talks about the immense talent that comes into her agency, and how frustrating it is that not everyone can get a deal, even if they do everything right. "I think the Hot Authors panel is about how to sex things up a little. The industry needs to be a little sexier," she says.

Hopefully having passionate insiders fighting the good fight on behalf of writers will help a little too.

--Layla Schlack