Andrew Wylie

Never one to bear a grudge or indulge in overly aggressive, unreflective self-promotion, Andrew Wylie can’t seem to forgive Amazon for the failure of his Odyssey JV with them – or in general, for failing to acknowledge that nothing moves until Andrew Wylie says so. And now he’s blaming Amazon for depriving writers of a […]

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Andrew Wylie’s withering dismissal of Amazon Publishing as ‘characterized by its idiocy” seems to have left his target distinctly unwithered. At least if the reports in The Bookseller of its plans for a UK publishing program of 500 titles in 2014 alone are anything to go by. The report, quoting an Amazon internal memo shared [...]

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Long on invective, short on logic. That’s how you want your book trade jackals to be, it seems. Especially when they make “millions off highbrow.” Highbrow, eh: whoo, classy. Well, Andrew Wylie‘s brow certainly looks pretty high in the photo from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that graces his latest interview with the German journal about his [...]

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George Packer’s epic 12,000-word piece on Amazon and the publishing industry in the current issue of The New Yorker is full of memorable reported bits—the culture clash between Amazon’s editorial staffers and its programmers, insider accounts of the company’s hiring process, the story of an Amazon employee who was handed a printout of a Slate article about Amazon’s stingy philanthropy with the words “Fix This” scrawled at the top in Bezos’s hand. But for a wide-ranging survey of the new publishing landscape, its cast of characters is a notably familiar one.

Veteran literary agent Andrew Wylie, who sports the charming sobriquet “The Jackal,” recently gave vent to some spleen against Amazon and developments in the modern book world, in a New Republic interview that has already garnered ire from Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader and quite a few others. In an extended Q&A, much of whose tone [...]

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Among literary agents, Andrew Wylie is as old school as they come. Dubbed "the Jackal" for his aggressive poaching of other people's clients, his distaste for commercial fiction and his disinterest in social media is legendary. He is the reigning king of the backlist, profiting mainly off classic titles rather than taking risky bets on new ones. His only criterion is enduring quality, and his client list is eye-popping: Amis, Nabokov, Bellow, Rushdie, Roth. 

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