Literary agent Elizabeth Wales

What she does: Places manuscripts with publishers and looks after the interests of more than 65 writers, including local luminaries Bruce Barcott, Julia Boyd, Rebecca Brown, Dan Savage, Eric Scigliano and Seattle Times investigative reporter Duff Wilson.

Where she does it: In a skylit loft in an apartment building on Capitol Hill, where one paid assistant and five interns — mostly from the University of Washington English department — help her out.

What she's like: Wales, 51 is soft-spoken, yet talks a mile a minute. She often turns questions about herself into opportunities to talk about her authors, jumping up to fetch copies of books as they come under discussion.

Her background: Wales grew up outside New York City, and started her publishing career in sales at Oxford University Press in 1980. She then worked at New York's legendary Strand Bookstore for a couple of years, before going back into publishing with Viking Penguin (again in sales and marketing). In 1983, she and her husband, the late Tom Wales, moved with their two young children to Seattle. She was on the Seattle School Board for four years, but she quickly found she didn't enjoy public life: "I just wasn't thick-skinned enough, I think."

Soon after, she noticed that while she might officially be out of the book business, the book business wasn't out of her: "I think it's like a Rorschach test when you pick up The New York Times. What do you read first? I always pull out the Book Review."

Getting started: "I have no idea where the idea came from," she says, "but I suddenly felt: You could be an agent. You could sell manuscripts to New York."

With that idea in her head, she contacted Dan Levant, head of Seattle's Madrona Press, to query him about "how to launch myself as an agent in the world." In 1990, they wound up going into business together, as Levant & Wales.

Wales notes that when editors make career moves in publishing, they tend to move "sideways" to other publishers: "So I had initial excellent contacts who knew that I had publishing under my skin."

Levant retired in the mid-'90s, and the agency became Wales Literary Agency.

Has manuscripts, will travel: Over the course of year, Wales makes three or four trips to New York and attends half a dozen or so literary conferences.

The advantage Wales has in working outside New York: "There's a great big East Coast media/political/educational/journalism talk group, and they're not always connected to the West Coast. They just aren't. There are things here that I can see before New York sees them," she says. "So they expect me to come to them with some exciting new things from outside their easy vision."

How manuscripts find their way to Wales?: Wales gets roughly 250 submissions per week, and scores of e-mail queries as well. While some manuscripts come with recommendations from writers and publishers ("That's nice because they're honing in on your taste — it's sort of like being a gallery owner"), others arrive unsolicited. Wales says she looks at those just as carefully, because she knows there's bound to be something worthy among them.

Her tastes: In nonfiction, she leans toward books that are "pushing a progressive agenda." Longtime favorite literary authors include Robertston Davies, Milan Kundera and E.L. Doctorow, especially his historical fiction, featuring real-life characters. "I like a certain amount of concept in my novels," she says.

When she reads: Evenings, weekends — and, on rare occasions, during a weekday, when she can put office duties on hold.

What are all these office duties, then?: There's a lot of phone work, e-mail and communication involved in discovering writers, taking them on as clients and getting their work ready for submission. Much effort goes into contract follow-up and granting permissions, including foreign rights: "It's a lot of work, but it's fascinating — and can really pay off. Foreign rights can equal or even exceed your domestic sales."

What about leisure reading? Is there any such thing for a literary agent?: Wales looks surprised at the question, and then says, yes, she's been reading Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" and Elaine Pagels' "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas."

Does she follow her own tastes in accepting manuscripts, or try to guess what's commercially viable?: "I really do first read the work and let my response carry the day. Most of the time if I'm really enthusiastic, I figure I can find a market."

How she sees her business and her vocation: "I'm proud of this list. I think it's an interesting list. I'm not a writer myself, but I feel I'm definitely one of the caretakers of the literary trade. When you sit down with a book, you're committing a couple of hours to it. Just think of that. In a society of sound bites and sensational news and the rest of it, somebody's spending $15 to $25 to commit to two to three hours of reading. That's a lot of influence. And I think to be a part of that, out here, is exciting. It's fun."