An Interview with Agent Sean McCarthy

The blog welcomes Sean McCarthy.  He’ll be sharing his insights about revising — a subject we all need to know more about! If you want to hear Sean and the other astounding faculty, there’s still time to register for the fall conference. Click on this link for more information.

Sean McCarthy founded his own full-service literary agency in 2013. He began his publishing career as an editorial intern at Overlook Press and then worked at the Sheldon Fogelman Agency as the submissions coordinator and permissions manager before becoming a full-time literary agent. He works on children’s books for all ages, and is actively looking to build his client list. His clients include New York Times Bestseller Zachariah OHora, Jamie A. Swenson, Hyewon Yum, Mark Fearing, Dana Wulfekotte, Andrea Offermann, Kurt Cyrus, and Judith Robbins Rose, among others. Sean graduated from Macalester College with a degree in English-Creative Writing, and is grateful that he no longer has to spend his winters in Minnesota.

You encourage writers to “stop being polite and start getting real about your manuscripts.” What do you mean by polite? Is that true for ALL writers — or just those of us from the Midwest who are known to be too nice?

Although it took me a couple of years to adjust to “Minnesota Nice” when I first moved to St. Paul for college (I couldn’t understand why everyone was smiling at me when I walked by them on the sidewalk), I think this is applicable for all writers (and if anything, I’ve found Midwestern writers to be super pragmatic when it comes to their work). When I was first thinking of this workshop, I had in mind a quote that Lucy Ruth Cummins   (Author/Illustrator extraordinaire and executive art director at S&S) uses in one of her talks – “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a long time making it.” I think that’s an invaluable skill to have as author – to be able to detach yourself from your work, in a sense, and look at it with a cold and clinical eye to see what’s working and what isn’t working, and then be ruthless in your revisions. So “polite” would be skipping over those sections of your manuscript that you know aren’t 100% working (either because you love them too much or have spent a lot of time on them), even though there’s a part of you that knows something is wrong, because you don’t want to further disrupt your manuscript.

Clearly you have a great sense of humor! You said in an interview that you are looking for project where the humor comes from character development. Can you elaborate on that?

Sometimes in children’s books there’s a tendency to do wacky/zany humor that is totally dependent on the plot (it’s almost similar to how children will tell stories themselves – “and then this happened, and then this other thing happened, and then this other crazy thing happened!”). My issue is that sensibility doesn’t usually hold up on multiple readings (which is particularly essential for picture books), and once you’ve learned how the story goes, the humor will start to fall flat. But if you give me comedy that derives from a character’s personality and how they see the world, I can take hold of that perspective and make it my own. I love to see manuscripts where I could take the main character, transport them to an entirely different story, and still have a good idea of how they’d react (and the hilarious things that they would say and do).

What else do you look for in a manuscript?

The longer that I work in publishing, the more broad my taste becomes. Although it sounds vague (and not that helpful, I realize – sorry!), I’m always looking for a manuscript that will demand my attention and make me keep reading. I’ve found myself drawn into stories that I never would’ve expected to enjoy if the voice is strong enough, or if the narrative arc is so compelling and dynamic that I’m dying to see what happens next. But it’s usually a combination of these factors – unforgettable voice, wholly original plot and concepts, and pitch-perfect characters – that will make me want to request more work. Easy, right?

The theme of our conference is Reality Check: Exploring the Truth.  Is there a truth about your job as an agent that you can share with us?

One of the truths about agents is that we’re not all alike (other than that most of us have aggressively hip eyewear), and that finding the right agent for your work is the most important thing. We have different ways of working and communicating with our clients, as well as different submission strategies and negotiation tactics. I also can’t represent everybody (this was a favorite saying of my former boss, Shelly Fogelman), so sometimes if I pass on author, it doesn’t mean that I don’t think they’re talented or that they’ll never publish a book, it just means that I’m not the right match at that particular time to take their work to the next level.  

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, Sean. It will be an honor to have you as part of our SCBWI-WI community at Green Lake.

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Jane Kelley is the new blog editor for SCBWI-WI. She is the author of many middle-grade novels, including The Desperate Adventures of Zeno and Alya, which was honored by the CCBC in 2014. Her most recent work is the chapter book series, The Escapades of Clint McCool. For more information, see http://janekelleybooks.com