Yes. In agents, I look for knowledge and enthusiasm. Mr. Zack may be a respected and capable agent in his previous genres, but he'd be way down my list for his 'added' genres. Until I saw his performance.
I did some more looking there too, and he has the same deal listed, just different wording, twice as well. When he first hit my radar, I saw that he had 2 recent deals, and had been in business for over a decade.Well, I was curious, and since I have a Publishers Marketplace account, I thought I'd take a look.
Now, not every agent posts every deal, so it's just data points.
In the last 12 months, Mr. Zack has had two deals listed.
One was a three book "very nice" deal to Orbit (SF/F imprint of Hachette). This is a very normal (and reasonable... "very nice" means the deal was for $50,000 to $99,000) trade deal with a well-known SF/F imprint of a big 5 publisher. It's somewhat odd that the deal was posted the date the book came out, though (Aug 5 this year). Deals happen in advance of publication by a pretty good piece, especially for paper books, so the actual deal probably took place in 2015 or 2014.
The other was for a memoir in a "nice" ($1-$49,000) deal to Vantage Point. There's a couple of hinky things with this one. First is though the deal was posted in August of 2016, it's for a deal that happened sometime before Spring of 2012, because the deal lists that the book is due to be published in Spring 2102. The books did come out in 2012, BTW. BUT, Vantage Point, who published it, was a vanity press that went out of business in January of 2013. Now, the book in question was republished (in 2013) with a different press, Quadrant Books, which is an imprint of Endpapers Press, which is a Division of Author Coach, LLC., which is owned by Andrew Zack.
So, there's some info. You can take what you will from it.
Any recent dealings or news about this agent? I hear he still requires hard copies of manuscripts which, in 2020, seems a bit odd to me.
There's a thread about the Zack Company and Mr. Zack here. It makes for...interesting reading.
Twitter feed of TZC is also interesting to browse. e.g. advice to not use the word 'was' more than 100 times in your entire manuscript. <puzzled>