In our newest series, The Future of Publishing, we’re reintroducing alumni of UNCW’s publishing program, including former Ecotone and Lookout staffers, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of W.W. Norton’s Nicola DeRobertis-Theye.

Fiction editor of Ecotone while in the MFA program at UNCW, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye currently serves as the subsidiary rights manager for W.W. Norton and formerly worked as a foreign rights agent for Trident Media Group.

“On the foreign side, which is most of what I handle at Norton, we’re trying to place the translation rights to our books with foreign publishers,” she says. “It is a match-making process, knowing editors’ and houses’ tastes, and who can do well with what kind of book.”

“I’ve had really gleeful meetings at the book fairs in Frankfurt and London, where you get to celebrate in person this thing that has crossed borders and found readers,” she says. “It’s a similar process with the other rights, but knowing the book, knowing the ecosystem, that’s what it comes down to, and I do find that it takes both imagination and knowledge.”

DeRobertis-Theye speaks highly of Norton, which, as the largest independent and employee-owned publisher in the world, has “a pretty fantastic and admirable office ethos.” For her, the thrill of the work doesn’t stop with the initial sale of the book—it extends to seeing how the book is received in different countries years later.

“I’ve had really gleeful meetings at the book fairs in Frankfurt and London, where you get to celebrate in person this thing that has crossed borders and found readers,” she says. “It’s a similar process with the other rights, but knowing the book, knowing the ecosystem, that’s what it comes down to, and I do find that it takes both imagination and knowledge.”

It is this combination of imagination and knowledge that can be traced back to DeRobertis-Theye’s time both as a fiction editor of Ecotone and staff member of Lookout Books. She’s appreciative to publishing faculty members Emily Smith, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, and Beth Staples, as well as creative writing mentors Bekki Lee, Robert Siegel, and David Gessner.

In particular, the Lookout publishing practicum gave DeRobertis-Theye a foundation in publishing, including acquisition, marketing, and distribution. Joining Lookout the year after Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision was nominated for the National Book award, DeRobertis-Theye describes the energy in the class as joyous, optimistic, and energizing. She appreciates how the skills she learned at UNCW, such as navigating InDesign or threading a text, help her contextualize and understand her current environment.

“Lookout’s mission really honed my eye, and I deeply feel like I carry all its values throughout my career. I once heard this expressed as ‘when it’s your turn, it’s your turn.’ I work on much larger lists now, but I try to bring that idea of concentration to each title—when it’s time to work on that book, I try to turn my full attention and do the best I can for it as it makes its way into the world.”

“Lookout’s mission really honed my eye, and I deeply feel like I carry all its values throughout my career. I once heard this expressed as ‘when it’s your turn, it’s your turn.’ I work on much larger lists now, but I try to bring that idea of concentration to each title—when it’s time to work on that book, I try to turn my full attention and do the best I can for it as it makes its way into the world.”

Of all the pieces she worked on during her time at Ecotone, “A Self-Made Man” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway, in Issue 15, has left a lasting impression. During her first semester working for the magazine, DeRobertis-Theye pulled it from the slush pile, impressed by the author’s ability to articulate not only trauma but also the myths and guilts of our culture.

“After considering hundreds of stories that are submitted to Ecotone each semester,” she says, “we found one where the story was really something special, where the author really put in the time.”

DeRobertis-Theye’s attention to craft and detail has been useful in her own writing as well: earlier this month, her debut novel sold to Mary Gaule at Harper at auction. Set for publication in 2021, The Vietri Project follows a young bookseller who travels to Rome in the hopes of tracking down a customer who has placed mysterious orders over the years, only to find that she must face the complicated history of her family, and of Italy itself.

Thank you to Lookout staffers Katherine O’Hara and Ireland Headrick for their contributions to this profile.

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