Rob Weisbach is a literary agent with Creative Management. Rob attended Phillips Academy Andover and Stanford University, where he studied American literature and poetry. Weisbach began his publishing career as an editorial assistant at Bantam Doubleday Dell in 1989 and was named Senior Editor in 1992. There he published three consecutive #1 New York Times bestsellers: Seinlanguage by Jerry Seinfeld; Couplehood by Paul Reiser; and My Point…And I Do Have One by Ellen DeGeneres. His other titles at BDD included Feeling the Spirit by New York Times photographer Chester Higgins, Jr. and Alice, an urban fairy tale by Whoopi Goldberg.
In 1996 Weisbach was named President and Publisher of Rob Weisbach Books at William Morrow, where he oversaw the editorial, publicity, and sales strategy for a list of highly original fiction and nonfiction. The imprint’s first title, The Tenth Justice, launched the career of lawyer turned novelist Brad Meltzer and became an instant New York Times bestseller, as did Babyhood by Paul Reiser and Book by Whoopi Goldberg. Other bestselling and critically acclaimed writers Weisbach published at the imprint included The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart; literary fiction stars A.M. Homes, Dale Peck, and Amanda Davis; director and screenwriter Ethan Coen; humorist Sandra Bernhard; painter and nature writer James Prosek; and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.
Rob Weisbach Books received industry honors for innovation in marketing and jacket and catalogue design. The imprint also became known for reaching the next generation of readers through its Virgin Fiction series for first-time writers and cutting edge visual books including The Pop-Up Book of Phobias; Tim Burton’s cult classic The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy; and the companion to Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent. Other imprint titles included The Nazi Officer’s Wife, the Holocaust memoir by Edith Hahn; Openly Bob, the award-winning collection of essays by pioneer gay comedian Bob Smith; and Use Me, the acclaimed literary fiction debut of Vanity Fair contributor Elissa Schappell.
In 2002 Weisbach was named Vice President and Editor-at-Large at Simon & Schuster. There he developed cross-platform projects with other divisions of parent company Viacom and published select fiction and nonfiction titles with the Simon & Schuster adult trade division, among them the New York Times bestsellers The Know-It-All by Esquire contributor A.J. Jacobs; The Funny Thing Is…by Ellen DeGeneres; and Without You by Anthony Rapp.
In 2005 Weisbach was named to the dual role of President and CEO of Miramax Books and President and CEO of The Weinstein Company’s new book division. There he oversaw the publication of the existing Miramax Books list and built a new infrastructure and publishing program for Weinstein Books. Miramax Books titles he published included the New York Times bestsellers The Debutante Divorcee by Plum Sykes and Ptolemy’s Gate by Jonathan Stroud as well as Lighting the Way by Karenna Gore Schiff, My Father’s Secret War by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks, and SPY: The Funny Years by Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis, and Kurt Andersen. Weinstein Books titles included the Giller Prize-winning Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Dr. Vincent Lam; the New York Times bestseller Quantum Wellness by Kathy Freston; The Gift of Rain, the Man Booker-nominated literary debut by Tan Twan Eng; We Bought a Zoo, a family memoir by Guardian columnist Benjamin Mee, and The Journal of Helene Berr, the recently discovered Holocaust diary published in fifteen countries in fall 2008.
In 2008, Weisbach represented his first project as agent, the literary survival memoir Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad, selling world rights to HarperCollins’s Ecco imprint. Ollestad’s extraordinary book became a New York Times bestseller, has been sold around the world, was chosen by Starbucks as their summer selection and by Amazon as one of the Ten Best Books of 2009, and was optioned by Warner Brothers for film.Over the course of his twenty-year career in entertainment Rob Weisbach has developed and published a diverse list of high-caliber talent including New York Times bestselling authors Jon Stewart, Brad Meltzer, Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Paul Reiser, A.J. Jacobs, Bob Schieffer, Anthony Rapp, and Kathy Freston; US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Pulitzer Prize-winner Lucinda Franks; literary stars A.M. Homes, Bruce Wagner, and Elissa Schappell; filmmakers Tim Burton and Ethan Coen; rights advocates Karenna Gore Schiff and Evan Wolfson; photographer Chester Higgins, Jr., painter and nature writer James Prosek, and chef Padma Lakshmi.
“My mother and father, a psychologist and an editor, instilled in me the importance of marshalling one’s intellect, compassion, and will to help others achieve their aspirations. For twenty years, my professional life as a publisher has been devoted to promoting my authors’ talents. That hands-on experience, along with relationships I’ve built in national media, film, and television, now will enable me to offer my clients sophisticated, broadly informed representation from the other side of the desk.”
“In these times, more than ever, creative artists will need to become the architects of their own success. Over the years I’ve experienced great satisfaction from helping authors shape their work, focus on what they can do independently to ensure exposure in the marketplace, develop opportunities for themselves beyond the book page, and think beyond the traditional limits of publishing to build an audience in the digital age. Now, I’m looking forward to discovering and developing a new stable of distinctive, dynamic talent and empowering them to marry a rich creative life with good business strategy.”