Bill Clegg’s Debut Novel Is ‘Did You Ever Have a Family’

The literary agent Bill Clegg is renowned in the publishing world as a ruthless negotiator who routinely wrings fat six- and seven-figure advances out of editors for experimental debut novels from unknown authors.

But he still gets a pit in his stomach every time he sends out a manuscript. “Until there’s actually an offer on the table, I’m a nervous wreck,” he said.

His anxiety became especially acute last year, when the book he was shopping was his own debut novel, “Did You Ever Have a Family,” about a middle-aged woman struggling to recover from an accidental explosion that destroyed her home and killed her family.

This time, the master salesman was selling himself. And to Mr. Clegg, the odds seemed as long as for some of the other debut novels he had pitched over the years. Mr. Clegg, 44, had never published a work of fiction before, and the book had taken him seven years of sporadic but obsessive work squeezed around his day job as a superagent.

Writing his own fiction hasn’t seemed to distract Mr. Clegg from his role as a literary agent. Starting in 2007, he wrote on weekends and during vacations, chipping away at a 300-page manuscript even as he landed deals for best-selling memoirs by Anjelica Huston and Diane Keaton, and novels by promising new writers like Matthew Thomas, Rivka Galchen and Daniyal Mueenuddin.

He founded his own agency in August. He has closed more than 20 deals in the last year, including a $2 million, three-book deal for the debut novelist Emma Cline with Random House. In 2013, he sold Mr. Thomas’s debut novel, “We Are Not Ourselves,” to Simon & Schuster for a reported seven figures. He sold film rights for both novels to the producer Scott Rudin.

“So much of my day job is occupying the ambitions of other people’s writing,” Mr. Clegg said. “To just occupy my own feels almost brazenly selfish.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Literary Agent Writes His Own Novel . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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