Completely Booked

Sandra Dijkstra, founder of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency in Del Mar, may be the West Coast’s most powerful literary agent. She has propelled unknown authors to the top of bestseller lists, and transformed Amy Tan and Susan Faludi into household names.

As testimony to that clout, her office is aflutter with papers--publishing contracts, file folders and notes of things to be done. Books line the walls as do multitudinous works of art. Stacks of manuscripts lie on the floor. The phone lines are buzzing.

“People think you read a lot, but agents are making deals and taking care of clients. It’s more a telephone job,” says Dijkstra, 57, known in New York publishing circles as “a nag, a noodge.”

Del Mar isn’t the first place that pops into someone’s mind in connection with book publishing, but Dijkstra says being based in California has its advantages. New York literary agents listed with the Assn. of Authors’ Representatives outnumber California agents nearly 10 to 1. Outsiders here are more easily remembered in comparison with the crowded East Coast scene.

“There’s that old quote ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,’ ” says Dijkstra, a New York native who works an East Coast schedule, beginning her day at 6:30 a.m. “Out here, I’m not partying with [publishers] in the Hamptons. I can more easily remember for whom I work, and I work for the author.”

She adds, “The job is not just about selling books. The job is really about career management, and career management when who you’re managing is talent is about getting these talented people the peace of mind to be able to write.”

A self-declared full-service agent, she has a reputation for going the extra mile for her clients, for being worth the additional $50,000 an author will pay her to have a book that sells well.

“She regards her clients as a mother hen regards her chicks, with that sort of all-nurturing zeal,” says John Baker, editorial director of Publishers Weekly and author of “Literary Agents: A Writer’s Introduction” (MacMillan). “She involves herself very actively in promotion and publicity. She’ll fly coast to coast for somebody’s publication party, which is more than most agents would dream of doing. She’s extraordinarily supportive in that way.”

With the publication of Susan Faludi’s new book, “Stiffed,” Dijkstra was criticized for shopping the manuscript instead of offering it to Crown, which had published the author’s bestselling “Backlash.”

But, Dijkstra explains, “there was a certain constellation of things that needed to go into that deal, and we weren’t getting that from Crown.”

Dressed in a navy blue blazer with flashy gold buttons and a hot pink sweater, Dijkstra’s manner of dress reflects her business style: bold. Some call it spunk. She calls it chutzpah. Whatever it is, it’s what helped her get a foot in the door when she established her business in 1983.

Dijkstra began her career as an academic. In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, she was a professor--at the University of Virginia, UCLA and UC San Diego--teaching history and literature.

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In 1979 she accidentally entered the agent world. She had traveled from Del Mar to New York to meet with publishers about turning her dissertation into a book. She recalls, “They all said, ‘We don’t want to read a dissertation. Get a book proposal, thank you very much.’ ”

Despite the rejection, she pitched a friend’s idea to those same publishers--Lillian Faderman’s feminist work of nonfiction, “Surpassing the Love of Men.” Published by William Morrow in 1981, it was Dijkstra’s first sale.

“I came from nowhere,” Dijkstra says. “I had never worked in a bookstore. Never worked in a publishing house. So I had to sort of imagine the whole thing. I think that served me well because I wasn’t bound by any of the received wisdom of the industry. And so they viewed me as a maverick, but I was a creative maverick.”

Baker, of Publishers Weekly, sees her professorial background as a plus. “I think she’s probably, should we say, more widely read than some agents,” he says. “It gives you comparative standards and it also enables you to see the favorable virtues in books that other people might think were too different or too difficult.”

It was Amy Tan’s “Joy Luck Club”--which originated as a short story that Dijkstra read in a magazine and later pursued in the hopes of turning it into a book--that put her on the map. It was Dijkstra’s third sale.

“I doubt that many agents would have been persistent on the basis of not all that much evidence at that point,” Baker says.

Published by Putnam in March 1989, Tan’s book spent nine months on the New York Times bestseller list. Dijkstra, who takes a 15% cut, devotes an entire 3-by-6-foot bookcase to Tan’s work. Its shelves hold a single copy of each edition--both domestic and foreign--of Tan’s three books.

Tan is one of roughly 100 authors Dijkstra represents. Her A-list clientele includes a mix of novelists and nonfiction writers such as Mike Davis, Lisa See and Peggy Orenstein. The bulk of her authors live west of the Rockies, with the largest enclave in San Francisco.

Some, though few, of the writers she represents are unsolicited and come from the slush pile. Many more budding authors are recommended by her current clients.

“It always helps for an author to have someone illustrious recommend them,” says Dijkstra, who just closed the deal on a novel by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, who studied with Maxine Hong Kingston and Christina Garcia and whom Dijkstra calls “a major new writer.” “However, we’ve rejected at least as many of those or more than we’ve taken on. A lot of it may be completely writerly perfect but then have no soul, no reason to be a book.”

Dijkstra is hesitant to reveal how many manuscripts she receives each week (“I don’t want to discourage new people.”) but with a little prodding she says it’s about 150--even more during the high season, the period between Labor Day and the holidays, and at the beginning of the year. She adds, “What writers don’t realize is that [publishers] need product. They need your intellectual property. Their lifeblood is new material. They cannot continue to be in business without it.”

It’s true for Dijkstra, who says she always is looking for “new ideas and people who speak with credibility, authority.” At least two of her four staff members read each submission and determine whether it makes the first cut, at which point it goes to Dijkstra. While she doesn’t read nearly as much as she did when she first founded the agency, Dijkstra “steals the time at night and on weekends” and takes at least one day each weekend to “read like a demon” for nine hours straight.

“I love a good read,” she says. “I love a good writer. I love politically charged and important books like Mike Davis’ ‘Ecology of Fear.’ On the other hand, I love great fiction. I just choose that based on how I respond to it.”

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Still, she has missed things.

“One of my authors just called to say there was a book he recommended that we didn’t take on and it went for $500,000,” she says without a trace of regret. “I take a more philosophical look on it. If I don’t get the book, then it’s not meant to be here.”

She says she has never calculated the acceptance rate of the manuscripts she sends to publishers.

“An agent’s credibility is really based on how many times you knock with stuff that’s worth paying attention to. If you keep knocking with stuff, crying wolf, there are agents whose envelopes go back pretty much unopened because they do it in a scattershot way. They don’t read the stuff they’re sending out or they don’t pay attention to who buys what.”

She attributes her success primarily to instinct, timing and packaging. But, she adds, “there’s always a dose of luck.”

And she admits that it’s knowing what interests each representative at each publishing house and targeting them with the proper package. “We’re paid to make them crazy for something, to make them spend wildly and irrationally, based on their passion for that book.”