The Very Personal Philanthropic Motives of Literary Agent Irene Goodman (Online Exclusive)
Two-and-a-half years ago, when her son, Rob, began to experience vision loss, Irene Goodman was shocked. Rob had hearing loss since age five, and now a second major sense was challenged. Rob was diagnosed with Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder which adversely affects both vision and hearing.
When Rob's hearing loss was first discovered, the Goodmans were told that their hope would be found in technology. The future might bring better hearing aids, for example, that would ameliorate hearing loss. It was unlikely, though, that there would be a medical cure for hearing loss. Today, however, Irene Goodman has reason to be optimistic that a medical cure for both vision and hearing loss is within the realm of possibility.
She is encouraged by research like that of Stanford University's Stefan Heller, Ph.D. Heller, a former Deafness Research Foundation (DRF) grantee and member of the DRF Council of Scientific Trustees, and his colleagues may succeed in restoring hearing in mice in the foreseeable future. Similar progress is also being made in restoring vision.
This kind of research costs a lot of money, Goodman says. However, she is so convinced that there is tangible hope for a cure that she urges people to donate to the foundations that make this kind of research possible. A well-known, successful literary agent for 25 years as well as a sought-after speaker, Goodman does her part by auctioning off professional partial manuscript reviews on eBay.com, the Internet auction site, with the proceeds going directly to DRF and the Foundation Fighting Blindness.
When asked how she became a literary agent in the first place, Goodman laughs, noting that "literary agent" probably isn't a very common aspiration for a young girl. Initially, she wanted to go to New York to be an editor. Once in the business, she saw what literary agents did and realized she'd be good at it. There were no agenting courses to take or degrees to get. She began her career as the assistant to the agent who represented Stephen King, and established her own agency a year later. She cut her teeth in the romance-novel boom of the 1980s. Four years ago, she reinvented herself as more than a women's fiction representative. She's now interested in "historical fiction with a hook" and popular or narrative nonfiction, as well as female-driven thrillers. She has hired three young people to work with her and sees herself as mentoring the next generation of agents.
Goodman and her staff sometimes find themselves wishing that commercial publishing wasn't quite so commercial. They've all had the experience of falling in love with a book that they knew simply wouldn't sell. But, Irene says, publishers and agents can be wrong. As an example, she describes a writer's first novel that she took on, a thriller having to do with Noah's Ark. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code had recently taken the reading world by storm and unfortunately the market was flooded with similar stories. Undaunted, the Noah's Ark writer published his story in an electronic-book format that could be read via Kindle, Amazon.com's electronic-book-reading device. The Ark, by Boyd Morrison, proved to be a number-one Kindle bestseller. Armed with that track record, Goodman was then able to get Morrison a publisher. The Ark will soon be published in print form by Touchstone, a Simon and Schuster imprint. Goodman sums up the experience by saying, "People will find a good story." As for e-books in general, Goodman says they are still a very small percentage of the market and that most people still want a traditional, printed book. "It's the next generation of readers who will determine the e-book's future."
For more information about the Irene Goodman agency visit http://www.irenegoodman.com/index.php. Read about Irene Goodman's eBay manuscript review auction at http://www.irenegoodman.com/ebay.php. A video about Stefan Heller's research can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZPClxxLGmE.
