“I became a person who took those kind of risks”: Alia Hanna Habib on her career as a literary agent and an author

The publishing industry occupies a unique space in our cultural landscape: it is ubiquitous in its influence, and yet persistently opaque in its operations.

Alia has been working to change that. In addition to representing some of today’s most successful authors as a literary agent, she has also taken on the task of demystifying the world of publishing with her debut book, Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch.

In it, she details each step of the process with characteristic generosity of insight. Her account offers precisely the kind of peek behind the curtain that will interest even those who aren’t themselves in publishing, revealing, as it does, an insider’s perspective into how the books we love make their way into the world.

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IN THIS EPISODE, we talk about... 👇

• Learning the unwritten rules of her profession
• How she reads as a literary agent
• Why she advises everyone to ask more questions
• The value of knowing when to quit
• The goals she worked towards as she was writing her debut book
• What she learned from booking a one-way ticket to live in Italy for a year
• Her love of 19th-century novels
• The importance of after-work rituals and embracing slower seasons
• How to establish boundaries around emails
• What she’s looking forward to
• .... and so much more!

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Alia Hanna Habib is a literary agent and Vice President at The Gernert Company, which she joined in 2017 after starting her publishing career as a publicist at HMH and working as an agent at McCormick Literary. She is the author of Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Career from Scratch and of the publishing-themed Substack Delivery & Acceptance. Among the New York Times-bestselling and prize-winning clients she represents are Clint Smith, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Lauren Oyler, Nathan Thrall, Merve Emre, Adam Serwer, and Hanif Abdurraqib. She is on the board of n+1 literary magazine and on the creative council of Aspen Words. She was profiled by New York Magazine for their special issue on “The 49 Most Powerful New Yorkers (You’ve Never Heard Of).” She lives in Brooklyn.

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Song: “Walk Through the Park,” by TrackTribe