2 2 THE RISE OF LITERARY AGENTS
The origins of the literary agent
The second factor shaping the evolution of English-language trade publishing in recent decades has been the growing power of the agent. The literary agent is not a new figure in the publishing field: the first professional agents appeared in London in the late nineteenth century.1 The mechanization of printing technologies in the nineteenth century and increasing literacy had helped to create an expanding market for newspapers, periodicals and books, thus creating a growing demand for written material. Informal literary agents began to appear in the 1850s and 1860s, posting advertisements in periodicals like the Athenaeum soliciting stories for newspapers and other publications. But the first professional literary agent is a designation usually reserved for A. P. Watt, a Scotsman from Glasgow who began his career as a bookseller in Edinburgh before marrying the sister of publisher Alexander Strahan and moving to London to work as a manuscript reader and advertising manager in Strahan’s publishing firm.2 When Strahan’s firm ran into difficulties in the mid-1870s, Watt began working as an advertising agent, a role that gradually evolved into a literary agent. His work as a literary agent appears to have begun around 1878, when he was asked by a friend, the poet and novelist George MacDonald, to sell his stories for him. He did so initially as a friendly favour – something that others had done before him – but he soon saw the commercial possibilities. By 1881 Watt was advertising himself both as a literary agent and as an advertising agent. He began by charging his clients a fee for specific tasks but soon decided to switch to the system he used as an advertising agent, charging a 10 per cent commission on the money earned by his clients for the transactions he completed. For two decades Watt had the field pretty much to himself, and by the end of the nineteenth century he was representing some of the leading writers of the time, including Walter Besant, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. But by this time other enterprising individuals – notably Albert Curtis Brown and J. B. Pinker – had seen the opportunities and entered the field, advertising their services and competing with Watt to act as authors’ agents.
It was not uncommon for the early agents to act for publishers as well as authors – they were often, in effect, ‘double agents’, seeking to find publishers and outlets for their writers’ work, on the one hand, and seeking to dispose of serial or book rights for publishers, on the other. Watt conceived of his job as that of selling or leasing copyrights, and he was content to act in this capacity for publishers as well as authors. The fact that Watt occasionally worked for publishing houses did not, however, endear him to all publishers, some of whom saw the agent as a threat who would disrupt the traditional relationship between the publisher and the author and debase literature by emphasizing the commercial aspect. It was undoubtedly A. P. Watt whom the publisher William Heinemann had in mind when he penned his scathing portrait of the literary agent in 1893: ‘This is the age of the middleman,’ wrote Heinemann. ‘He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular business. In it he calls himself the literary agent.’3 Heinemann’s contempt notwithstanding, by the beginning of the twentieth century publishers in London were forced to come to terms with the existence of literary agents – they had become a reality in the publishing field. By acquiring a specialist knowledge of the different publishing houses, newspapers and periodicals that were interested in acquiring written material and willing to pay for it, agents were able to provide a range of services to authors – including placing material with suitable publishers and periodicals, negotiating terms and contracts and collecting payments and royalties – that were valued by many authors, including some of the leading writers of the time.
Literary agents began to appear in the United States at roughly the same time as their English counterparts. Among the most important of the earliest American agents was Paul Revere Reynolds, who began his career working for the publisher Lothrop in Boston before moving in 1891 to New York, where he was offered a job working as the American agent for the English publisher Cassell.4 While his main duties were to look for American publishers who might be interested in publishing Cassell’s books in America and advise Cassell on American books that might be of interest to them, he soon began to look for American authors who might be interested in publishing with Cassell. By 1895 he was acting for authors independently, offering their books to publishers and charging a 10 per cent commission on the business he transacted. Like Watt, Reynolds was working as an agent for both publishers and authors. He thought of himself as a middleman, a broker in the literary marketplace, arranging deals between the buyers and sellers of literary properties regardless of who they were.
From their beginnings in late nineteenth-century London and New York, literary agents gradually grew in number and their roles became more sharply defined. Agents increasingly came to see that their interests lay with their authors, and the ambiguous role of the double agent gradually evolved into the modern conception of the literary agent as an intermediary whose primary allegiance was to the authors who, in effect, employed them. This did not mean that agents were uninterested in the well-being of publishers. They needed to work with publishers and to maintain cordial relations with them, even if they were no longer working directly for them. For the most part they saw their role as one of mediating between authors and publishers, serving their authors by negotiating deals that both parties – authors and publishers – would regard as fair and reasonable. As Curtis Brown put it in 1906, the literary agent ‘stands between the author and the publisher, and he ought to uphold better than either of them the importance of the greatest truism in trade, viz., that no bargain is ever really sound and honest without being profitable to both parties to it.’5
This modern conception of the literary agent continued to shape the development of the profession throughout the twentieth century, but in the 1960s and 1970s new factors came into play that helped to increase the power of agents and altered the way in which some agents understood their role. The most important of these factors was the massive expansion of the market created by the rise of the retail chains. Beginning with the mall bookstore chains in the US and then the superstore chains in the US and the UK, books were increasingly made available to consumers in ways and on a scale that had simply not been possible before. Books were sold like other commodities in shopping centres and high streets, and the chains used the same retailing principles to sell books as they used to sell music, videos and other goods. As a result, they were able to sell a much greater volume, and books that were commercially successful were successful on a scale that was unprecedented. With the stakes increasing significantly, especially for bestselling authors, agents were in a stronger position to negotiate a growing share of an expanding revenue stream for their authors. And the more their authors earned, the more agents earned too, enabling them to expand and grow their own businesses.
A second factor that came into play was the growth of opportunities to exploit the rights associated with a work. Hollywood was hungry for material that could be turned into movies and the publishing industry was providing a steady stream of well-plotted stories that lent themselves to screen adaptations. Moreover, the global dominance of the English language meant that books written and published in English had the potential to be exploited in a multiplicity of markets around the world, both by selling English-language rights into different territories (most commonly, selling North American rights separately from UK and Commonwealth rights) and by selling foreign language rights (which again, in some cases, could be split in territorial terms – Spanish rights for Spain could be sold separately from Spanish rights for Latin America, for example). But to exploit rights effectively required specialist knowledge of different markets and a good deal of administrative support. Many publishers lacked this specialist knowledge and were simply unable or unwilling to provide the kind of concerted effort required.
A third factor was the appearance in the 1970s and early 1980s of a new breed of literary agents who came into the publishing field from outside and were not in any way attached to the traditional practices of publishers and agents. They understood the role of the agent differently, not so much as a mediator between author and publisher but as an unadulterated advocate of the interests of their authors – whom they thought of as their clients. Traditional agents, in their view, were too imbued with the ethos of the publishing world; they took for granted the traditional ways of doing things and preferred moderation and compromise to the kind of forthright advocacy that might run the risk of rocking the boat. The new agents had no such compunction. Some, like Morton Janklow and Andrew Wylie, rose from nothing to become some of the most powerful players in the field; their rise is both a symptom of and a testimony to a profound shift in the nature of agenting and in the relations of power that structured the publishing field. Without too much exaggeration we could describe the emergence of this new breed as the rise of the super-agent.
The rise of the super-agent
Morton Janklow came into the publishing industry by accident. He was a lawyer by training and was working as a corporate lawyer in a large New York law firm in the early 1970s when an old college classmate, Bill Safire, called one day and asked if he could help him publish a book he wanted to write about Richard Nixon. Safire had been working as a speech writer for Nixon and, with his insider’s knowledge of the workings of the White House, he was aware that there was more to the Watergate scandal than had become clear at the time; he wanted to leave the Administration, become a journalist and write a book. Janklow didn’t know anything about publishing, but he agreed to represent his old friend and try to find a publisher for him. He knew two people in New York publishing and he called them up, took them to lunch and asked them to send over a copy of their standard publishing contract. ‘I called each of them after having read their agreement and said to them, “Let me ask you one question: does any right-minded author sign this agreement?” And they said, “Everyone signs this agreement. What don’t you like about it?” “Almost everything,” I said. “The date and the parties are fine but after that it’s a mess.” So I did some research, not because I intended to be in the business – this was a one-off as far as I was concerned – but because Bill was an important friend and I wanted to make sure he was properly represented.’ Safire produced an outline for a book on Nixon, Janklow invited a number of different publishers to his office to see the outline, a bidding war developed and they sold the rights for around a quarter of a million dollars – at the time, an exceptionally high advance for a non-fiction book.
By the time Safire finished writing the book, Watergate had become a full-fledged scandal and American politics was consumed by the affair. The political climate had changed and the publisher, who had bought the book with such enthusiasm a year or so earlier, got cold feet; they decided they didn’t want to publish the book after all and they wanted their money back. Janklow was incensed. He threatened to sue the publisher. ‘No one ever tries to force a publisher to publish a book,’ the publisher said. ‘“Oh,” I said, “I’m not trying to force you to publish the book, I’m only trying to force you to pay for it. You don’t have to publish it. Just give me the quarter of a million dollars and don’t publish it, and I’ll find someone else to publish it.”’ Janklow served the publisher with papers, it went to arbitration, he won and they ended up keeping the money and selling the book to another publisher. ‘My client was happy, his reputation had been preserved, his book was getting published and I could go back to my law practice. And then the floodgates started to open. People started calling me and said, “You know, my agent never would have done that. My agent is a mediator between me and the publisher, he doesn’t advocate my interest.”’ More and more authors came to him and asked him if he would represent them, and pretty soon this was crowding out his other work in the law practice. So he decided to change professions and set up a literary agency.
At the same time, he became increasingly aware that many authors were more important than publishers in encouraging people to buy books. ‘I walked into a bookstore one day just to get a sense of the retailing side of the business and I realized that nobody goes in and says, “What’s the latest from Knopf?” “What’s the latest from Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins?” They say, “Where’s the new Crichton?” “Where’s the new Tom Wolfe?” So the writer is the star, much like the movie business. Nobody goes to see a Paramount movie, they go to see a new Tom Cruise movie. So I began to negotiate from the perspective of someone who thought he was in control of the negotiation. That had never been done before in publishing, as simple as it sounds.’ He didn’t feel constrained by the traditional practices and courtesies of the publishing world, since this was not a world in which he himself had been brought up or to which he felt any particular affinity. ‘The other agents at the time tended to be old-timers. They considered themselves partners of the writer; they were literary people, not lawyers. The writer would say “I want this” and they’d say, “You can’t have it, the publisher would never give it to you,” and that was the end of it. The last thing in the world they did was advocate. They just advised.’ By contrast, Janklow took the view that the author, not the publisher, was in the position of strength and that his job as literary agent was to act as the author’s advocate, revising contracts if he felt they were unfair to the author. For instance, Janklow was unwilling to accept that the publisher, once it had entered into a contract with an author, should retain the unilateral right to reject a manuscript delivered by the author on the grounds that it was unacceptable:
I developed a clause where I insisted that a standard be applied to the acceptability of a manuscript. The publisher couldn’t just decide on its own, it was unacceptable. So you pick books when you went into a contract. The author is the author of these three books and the publisher agrees now that if the book under contract is written to that standard it will be deemed acceptable, and that no change in economic circumstance between contract and delivery date can affect the acceptability. That was an entirely new concept, never been done before. People were outraged at this, and for two or three years some publishers wouldn’t sign the contracts. ‘Fine, don’t take the author,’ I said, ‘I’ll sell him somewhere else. I’ll break this system.’
Thanks in part to the actions of outsiders like Janklow, the traditional pattern of relationships in the publishing field was disrupted. The rights of authors were championed more vigorously by agents who thought of themselves less as intermediaries, mediating between author and publisher, and more as dedicated advocates of their client’s interests. They conceived of their task primarily in legal and financial terms, and they displaced the centrality of the publisher by asserting control over the rights of their clients’ work and deciding which rights to allocate to which publisher and on what terms. In their eyes, the publisher was not the central player in the field but simply a means to get what they wanted to achieve on their clients’ behalf, which was to get their work into the marketplace as effectively and successfully as possible. The traditional relations of power between author and publisher were gradually overturned. ‘It went from the publisher being king and the author being grateful for the opportunity to have his work presented to the public, to the author being king and the publisher being used by me and my author as a tool to get the book into the marketplace.’
Morton Janklow built up an extremely successful agency on the basis of a no-nonsense legal and commercial attitude that paid little heed to traditional publishing practices. His agency typically retained dramatic as well as foreign rights and devoted a great deal of attention to managing these rights as effectively as possible – ‘We orchestrate the use of these rights and how they are going to relate to one another. The day I finish a deal, every part of that transaction is a symphony, and every segment has to play on key and in time.’6 Foreign rights, film rights, serial rights – all are part of the symphony that, if carefully managed, can help to make a book a commercial success. He increased the commission to 15 per cent to help cover the cost of running a large office with numerous staff working in foreign rights and royalty rights management – a commission that has now become more or less standard in the industry. The clients of Janklow & Nesbit, as the agency is now called, include some of the world’s most successful writers of commercial fiction, like Danielle Steele, Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins, as well as many well-known writers of literary fiction and serious non-fiction.
Like Janklow, Andrew Wylie entered the world of publishing with the attitude of an outsider. Commonly referred to by journalists as ‘the jackal’, he is famous, if not infamous, for his willingness to poach authors from other agents and for his tough-minded pursuit of high advances, practices that have earned him the wrath and respect of his colleagues in roughly equal measures. When he decided to set up a literary agency in 1980, he had no background in publishing; his father was an editor at Houghton Mifflin and he had studied romance languages and literature at Harvard, but he was a novice when it came to the business of publishing. Given his academic background in comparative literature, he wasn’t particularly interested in bestselling works of commercial fiction. What interested him were works of enduring value that would sell over time, and the question he asked himself was whether he could build a viable business by representing the authors who were writing works of quality. When he looked at the big agencies in New York at the time, he was struck by the cosiness of the relationships they sustained with the publishing houses:
When I looked at the big agencies I saw that the money goes from the publisher to the agent to the author. And because of that process and the direction of the revenue, the big agencies had very close relationships with the publishers, they were basically in bed with the publishers, and these people over here, the writers, were uneducated, uninformed, sentimental, self-interested fools, children. And they were employed by the agencies to keep the agencies going with the publishing companies. There were examples I came across that were jaw-dropping examples of agencies feeling a primary fealty to the publishing companies. And what I realized, which was at the time revolutionary – it sounds strange to say it but it’s true – was that I was employed by the writer. And my job was to become strong enough by virtue of my employers – not by myself, my employers’ strength – so that I could act directly in their interests with the publishing community who could do nothing except do what I wanted because of our strength, because of who we represented. So I needed a large number of employers. They had to be very high quality; we would corner the market on quality, as it were, and we would drive up the price.
The three key components of Wylie’s strategy were to build up a critical mass of quality writers; to be extremely attentive and aggressive in pursuing their interests; and to be international. Unlike Janklow, Wylie self-consciously positioned himself at the quality end of the literary marketplace, partly because it concurred with his own literary tastes (‘I wanted to enjoy my life, so I didn’t want to read Danielle Steele’), partly because there was less competition and partly because he believed it was a better way to build a business in the long run. There was less competition because at that time, around 1980, most agents and publishers were pursuing bestselling authors whose books could be sold in large quantities through the retail chains. Tom Clancy, Stephen King and Danielle Steele were in great demand while Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Salman Rushdie were, relatively speaking, neglected. It was a better way to build a business in the long run because it was backlist oriented: the sales were lower but they lasted longer, and therefore they delivered a more stable, less risky form of revenue in the long term. ‘The best business is to have on your roster one hundred authors who will be read in a hundred years, not two authors who will be read in a hundred days. So I’m sorry but we’re going to demand a better deal, a more accurate appreciation, of the value of the contribution being made to the bottom line of a publishing house by someone like Roth.’
So Wylie set out to build up a large client base of authors who were writing what he thought of as quality work, both fiction and non-fiction. Some were not represented but many were, and this is where his controversial practice of poaching authors came into play: he would call up authors whom he knew were already represented by other agents and point out the shortcomings of their current arrangements, calling their attention, for example, to the fact that some of their earlier books were out of print and that, with the concerted effort of an agent, they could all be brought back into print, or that their books were not available in languages and countries where there could be a substantial market. For many agents, this practice was regarded as beyond the pale: it infringed the norms to which they believed the community of agents should adhere. ‘It’s gross,’ said one agent, clearly incensed by the practice; ‘it’s like stealing someone’s girlfriend.’ But Wylie had no truck with moral compunctions of this kind:
I think it’s lazy or quaint or both to assume that one doesn’t poach. It is pretending that publishing is a business peopled by members of a social elite who have a sort of gentlemanly game going, and the gentlemanly game was played to the disadvantage of the writer. If a writer as an independent contractor is paying an agent a fee to look after his or her business properly and that business is not being looked after properly, then it seems to me that the writer deserves to know this. They deserve to know the difference between an agency that is not aware that the writer’s rights in the Netherlands are unexploited and one that is. They should be paying the agent who knows that these rights are available in the Netherlands and can sell them with one phone call, not the agent who doesn’t have the systems to figure out that their books are not available in this country. So to hell with them frankly.
Wylie was not in business to make life comfortable for other agents but to improve the position of authors who were writing the kind of quality work he wanted to represent, and if he ruffled the feathers of other agents in the process, as indeed he did, then so be it.
The second aspect of Wylie’s strategy was to be extremely attentive and aggressive in pursuing his client’s interests. The needs and wants of each client had to be carefully understood, since each person has a different set of requirements, and their wishes then executed as efficiently as possible and to their satisfaction. And the stronger his client base as a whole, the more able he would be to achieve what any individual client wanted. ‘If a new writer says, “I want to jump over the wall,” I can say to them, “That can be arranged.” And they say, “But I’m this little person, how can you put me over that wall?” I can say, “Well, you know, there are five hundred other writers we represent and you’re going to climb on all their shoulders.”’ Wylie was also unapologetic about pursuing his clients’ interests aggressively, especially when it came to negotiating advances. ‘We get criticized as an agency for being aggressive in getting Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag paid a lot of money. But they’re not paid a lot of money at all. Paid a lot of money is Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy. Tom Clancy is getting $35 million a book. Michael Crichton is getting $22 million a book. Philip Roth is getting $22 million a lifetime. But 20 years from now the only one who will be selling is Philip Roth.’
So why was Wylie so determined to secure high advances for his authors? Like many agents, Wylie believes that the only thing that will ensure that a publisher gets behind a book and publishes it energetically is the size of the advance they pay: the more they pay, the more they will get behind the book, prioritize it, put resources behind it and try to make it a success – ‘It’s an iron law.’
The only pressure a publisher reacts to is the pressure of the profit and loss statement that they sign up to when they acquire a book. And so if you’re trying to sell a book you have to get a high advance. The number of copies printed is in direct relation to the advance paid to the author, not to the experience of reading the book and deciding, ‘Ah, this is The Magic Mountain and this is not’ but rather ‘Ah, I paid Thomas Mann a million dollars and I paid him $100,000.’ If I paid Thomas Mann a million dollars I’ll print 200,000 copies. If I paid him $100,000, I’ll print 30,000 copies. Everything is set based on the P&L, which is based on the price.
Many publishers would disagree with this cold assessment of the way that publishers determine their publishing priorities and allocate their resources, and editors and sales directors will cite numerous examples that appear to defy Wylie’s iron law. But the fact that some agents proceed on the assumption that this law holds – and undoubtedly there are aspects of the way large publishing houses work which lend support to this assumption, as we shall see – means that the aggressive pursuit of high advances has become a guiding principle for some sectors of the agenting world.
The third strand to Wylie’s strategy was to develop the agency on an international level. This was important because ‘quality sells over time and it sells internationally’, and if you have the systems in place to exploit rights effectively in the international arena then you can generate substantial additional revenue streams both for the author and for the agency. But most agents did not have good systems in place to exploit international rights. They either handled these poorly and inefficiently, or they relied on sub-agents who acted on their behalf in foreign language markets, or they ceded foreign rights to the publisher who acquired English-language rights. In Wylie’s view, neither sub-agents nor English-language publishers are likely to be incentivized in the same way as the agent who is working closely with the author. ‘If you understand the writer’s aims you can actually make things happen around the world with the same level of commitment that you can make things happen here in the US.’ So, for example, when Philip Roth writes a new book, an agent who is on the ball can do a foreign rights deal in Spain or Italy, not for one but for 27 books. By carefully managing the copyrights, he can ensure that, once the licences for the existing Spanish or Italian editions of his books have expired, the licences can be assigned to a new publisher. ‘The new publisher now has 27 Roth books to publish and I can’t tell you how incentivized they are. They paid a whole lot of money for the new book and a whole lot of money for all the old books. And all of a sudden you’ve got enough mass so that Philip Roth is approaching, in terms of the publisher’s commitment to Roth, the level of Tom Clancy or Danielle Steele. All of a sudden the playing field is level, and if the playing field is level, Shakespeare wins.’ As manager of his clients’ copyrights, the agent is usually in a position to determine which rights to assign to which publishers. A publisher may want to acquire world rights in all languages and may signal their wish to bid for them, but it is the agent who has the power to decide, in consultation with the author, whether to cede world rights or to fragment the rights into different markets by language and region of the world. Doesn’t this lead to fights with publishers? ‘There are skirmishes,’ says Wylie, ‘but they are not of a seriousness that would allow you to distinguish their intention by calling it a fight.’ The large publishing houses have become global corporations with subsidiaries operating in many different countries and languages, as we shall see; but in this new globalized arena of the printed word it is the agent, not the publisher, who controls the keys.
Andrew Wylie remains something of an outsider, a pariah even, in the world of literary agents, and his willingness to poach authors from other agents is viewed with contempt by many of his contemporaries. But even those agents who despise some of his methods are inclined to concede that he has changed the rules of the game. ‘Andrew is completely outside the establishment,’ observed one senior agent. ‘He’s a brilliant man and he’s been brilliantly successful. He’s operated outside the system and I think he’s had a great influence, particularly on the way some younger agents operate. He’s probably changed the landscape of agenting more in the past 15 years than any other single individual.’
The proliferation of agents
Morton Janklow and Andrew Wylie epitomized a new breed of literary agents who entered the field in the 1970s and 1980s as outsiders and developed an approach to the advocacy of their clients’ interests that was much more assertive and aggressive than the approach that had been adopted by many agents in the past. Not all agents followed their lead or approved of their methods, but as their agencies grew in size and strength, it was difficult for other agents to ignore them. They were models – albeit controversial – of a new kind of literary agent and a new style of agenting, many of the features of which would become increasingly commonplace in the course of the 1980s and 1990s.
At the same time, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed an explosion in the numbers of agents operating in the metropolitan centres of English-language trade publishing – in New York and London. Surprisingly, there are no accurate statistics on the growth in the number of agents over the last couple of decades. The Association of Author Representatives – the professional association of literary agents – listed 424 members in 2008 but this tells us very little, since many agents and agencies, including some of the largest and most powerful agencies, are not members. One New York agent reckoned there were 1,500 agents in America, ‘97 per cent of them being based in New York which is where the heart of mainstream publishing is’, but this was just a rough guess. The absence of accurate statistics is partly a reflection of the fact that literary agenting always was, and still remains, an unregulated profession. Anyone can set himself or herself up as a literary agent – all you need to do is call yourself an agent, hook up a telephone (and now an internet connection) and display some knowledge, however slight, of how the industry works.
While there are no accurate data on the numbers of agents operating in the US and the UK today and on how these numbers have changed over time, we can get some sense of the increase in numbers by examining the names of agents and agencies used in book deals in recent years. Publishersmarketplace.com – on online service that is well known for hosting Publisher’s Lunch, a popular newsletter for publishers and agents – has monitored the names of agents and agencies used in deals in the US, Canada and the UK since 2004. Their data are not comprehensive: they cover only deals reported to them by a party to the transaction, plus a small number of deals gleaned from third-party publications, so agents doing small deals on the margins of the field are unlikely to show up in their figures; but their data represent the only large-scale compilation of information we have on book deals in the English-speaking world. Table 5 shows the number of agents and agencies involved in the book deals monitored by publishersmarketplace.com between 2004 and 2008. In 2004, 811 agents’ names were used in deals; by 2008 this number had risen to 1,018 – an increase of 25 per cent. In 2004, 471 names of agencies were used; four years later this number had risen to 569 – an increase of 20 per cent. Even though the data are not comprehensive and relate only to a brief period between 2004 and 2008, they attest to a significant growth in the numbers of agents and agencies in the field.
Table 5 Numbers of agents and agencies in recorded deals, 2004–2008
So why has the number of agents grown significantly in recent years and decades? Part of the explanation lies in the increasing supply of well-qualified individuals in the publishing field who found themselves either without a job or dissatisfied with the direction their career was heading. The increasing supply was due largely to the changes that were taking place at this time in the publishing houses themselves (changes that will be examined more closely in the following chapter): in essence, the growing consolidation of publishing houses forced out many publishers and managers – including some very senior and experienced publishers who were very knowledgeable about the industry. There were others who were not forced out but who found themselves working for large corporations that were requiring them to work in new ways, and some chose to leave and set up shop as agents rather than adapt to a new set of practices with which they had little sympathy. ‘There were many publishers like me who became agents in the 90s,’ explained one London-based agent.
And we became agents partly because we were casualties of the consolidation of the industry and there weren’t as many jobs for people like us, and partly through inclination. I wanted to see what it was like being an agent – that was 15 years ago and I can say that it’s pretty good. You have a remarkable degree of freedom of action. You don’t have to enlist the support of your colleagues for what you want to do. We do not, as agents here, consult each other about the authors we take on. In a publishing house, an editorial meeting has to make a collective decision. Here, provided you’re paying the bills, provided you’re paying for yourself, there is complete freedom of action. There’s almost none of the bureaucracy which plagues publishing these days. And the other thing is that you’re close to the source. I’m in publishing because I like working with authors, and as the agent you are, generally speaking, the first point of contact with the author.
But the increasing supply of well-qualified individuals is only part of the explanation: the other side of the story is that there was a growing demand for agents. There were various reasons for this but two stand out as particularly important. First, with the consolidation taking place in the publishing houses, editors became increasingly mobile. Some were forced out and some chose to leave; some were headhunted by the new corporations seeking to develop their publishing programmes and others moved to new companies in search of better salaries and better jobs. It was a time of turbulence and change and the traditional bonds between authors and editors were breaking down. ‘Writers saw that their interests weren’t being protected,’ observed one agent. ‘They either had to stay with the publishing house and lose their editor or they had to move with the editor and lose their backlist. So they needed someone who was really on their side.’ The agent increasingly became the writer’s primary point of contact with the publishing world. Most writers had neither the time nor the inclination to try to stay abreast of all the changes that were taking place in the industry – most were, as the same agent explained, ‘absolutely clueless about this business they were tangentially involved in’. They needed an agent to look after their interests and deal with a world that was becoming less personal and more corporate, more complex and more businesslike, by the day.
There was another reason why writers increasingly needed agents: they did so because, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the agent effectively became the necessary point of entry into the field of trade publishing. In the 1970s and before, an agent was an optional extra for a writer; there were many authors who published with trade houses and worked directly with editors, without the mediation of an agent. By the late 1990s, however, an agent was a necessity: a writer who wanted to publish with a major trade house now needed an agent. Of course, there were exceptions. Even in the large corporate publishing houses in the early 2000s, there were cases of authors who signed contracts directly with the publishing house and didn’t have an agent, though these cases were rare (and have become increasingly so). ‘I only have one or two authors that I can think of who don’t have agents and both of those are now getting agents,’ said one senior editor at a major New York house. ‘If I have a hundred books under contract, maybe 3–5 per cent would be without an agent or lawyer.’ In fact, most of the major houses in New York and London will no longer accept submissions from authors who don’t have agents, and if they do get submissions from unagented authors – perhaps passed on to them from one of their other authors – they will usually suggest to the author that they get an agent.
At first glance this may seem surprising: why should editors and publishers encourage authors to get agents when they know that agents are likely to up the ante and drive a harder bargain than most authors, left to their own devices, would be inclined to do? Part of the answer is that most editors and publishers don’t want to negotiate financial and contractual details with authors. They prefer to differentiate between the creative process of writing and editing, on the one hand, and the business aspects of negotiating advances and contracts, on the other, and they find it easier and less awkward if the business aspects are handled by agents who, like them, are professionals in the business of publishing. The agent may be sitting on the other side of the table but they are at least sitting at the same table and they know the rules of the game. Dealing with agents simplifies the negotiation process even if it raises the stakes, because agents have been through the negotiation process many times before and they ‘know what to ask for’, as one senior editor put it. It is less likely that time and effort will be wasted discussing contractual niceties that are of little import. It also protects the editor from having to become too involved with authors in a day-to-day way. ‘They don’t have time these days,’ explained one agent, ‘so they don’t want someone calling them up at night, they don’t want someone calling them up in the morning and they don’t want to listen to the ins and outs of someone’s divorce. The agent filters out what can be relayed, explains some of the things that need explaining, and the editor gets a concise version of whatever the issue is rather than another 45-minute conversation with someone. I feel like I have the long conversations with authors so that the editors don’t have to.’ Many editors and publishers also recognize that a good agent can help an author to develop their ideas in ways that will improve the quality of the work, adding real value – something that may be of particular importance for new writers who are still finding their way. ‘It’s often better to have three heads working on it than two,’ the same editor continued. But there are other reasons, more profound than either of these, that help to explain why publishers and editors in the major houses tend to prefer their authors to be agented.
As publishing houses have become increasingly consolidated, the workload of individual editors has tended to increase and they have come to rely increasingly on agents to provide the initial screening of projects: editors have, in effect, outsourced the initial selection process to agents. ‘Publishers look at us as being their first readers,’ said one senior agent, ‘and they assume that if something is coming from this agency then it’s going to be worth their while to look at it whether they make an offer or not.’ This simplifies the editor’s job in certain ways, as it means that they can rely on agents to do the initial scouting for new talent by scouring the pages of the literary magazines, travelling to conferences and literary festivals, visiting college campuses and so on. Just as importantly, it can be left to agents to wade through the slush piles of letters, emails and manuscripts, trying to find the occasional gem among the mind-numbing quantities of unsolicited dross. Agents provide the first filter in the system of selection through which new book projects get channelled into the publishing business. For the most part it is agents, not editors or publishers, who are expected to discover new talent, to find new writers whom they think are promising and to work with them to turn an idea or draft manuscript into something that an editor or publisher would recognize as an attractive project and potentially successful book. This can be a very demanding and time-consuming process. Often it leads to nothing, though occasionally a manuscript may turn up that, with a certain amount of guidance from the agent, can result in a project that will be taken on by publishers and may even turn out to be a great success.
However, the outsourcing of the initial selection process to agents is not simply a matter of reducing the workload for editors and publishers: it’s also a matter of spreading the risks of judgement. As we shall see in a later chapter, one of the key characteristics of trade publishing is that, for a large part of the frontlist (leaving aside the brand-name authors), no one really knows how well a new book is going to do. It is a high-risk business in which serendipity plays a large role. Hence editors and publishers are constantly looking for ways to back up the risky judgements they have to make every time they decide to take on a book by a new author, or a book by an author who does not have a clear track record and established readership. In this context, the fact that an author and a book project have been taken on by an agent is in itself important, and who the agent is matters greatly, because editors and publishers come to trust certain agents as reliable sources of content. At the heart of trade publishing there is what I shall call a web of collective belief and, in the absence of clear-cut evidence to support judgements, the backing of a trusted agent lends credibility to authors and books. In a business where judgement is inherently risky and success is often dependent on a host of intangible and unpredictable factors, sourcing your new books from agents with whom you share similar tastes and sensibilities and who have a track record of success in spotting new talent is an entirely understandable – though eminently fallible – way of spreading the risks.
So while at first glance the interests of publishers and agents would seem to be diametrically opposed, in practice they are locked together in a system of reciprocal interdependency and mutual benefit that has certain advantages for both. Agents need publishers and ideally a multiplicity of them, so that they can place their authors’ books, secure sizeable advances and ensure – or try to ensure – that their books are effectively marketed and sold. But editors and publishers have also come to see agents as necessary players in the field to whom they can outsource certain tasks which they no longer have the time or inclination to do, and whose judgements and track records provide them with a valuable resource for their own decision-making processes. Authors, for their part, are pretty much obliged today to try to find an agent if they want to be published by a mainstream trade house, since they have little chance of placing their book with a major publisher unless they have the backing of an agent (though this does not apply to authors who are content to publish with a small independent press on the margins of the field, as we shall see).
Agents and agencies vary greatly in terms of their size, power and influence: like the publishing world more generally, the world of agenting is hierarchically structured. Agencies range from well-established, multimedia agencies with numerous divisions, of which book publishing is only one, like ICM (International Creative Management) and Curtis Brown, to small boutique agencies run from small offices or even from the agent’s home or apartment, with many variations and gradations in between. Even the largest agencies are, however, relatively small concerns, and few have more than a dozen agents dealing specifically with books, though with support staff their numbers will be more. (The total staff of Curtis Brown, one of the largest and most diversified agencies in London, comes to only 65, which includes 33 agents, 10 of whom are book agents.)7 Just as with publishing houses, the standing of any agency in this hierarchical world is dependent on the kinds and quantities of capital they possess – on their economic capital (in most cases quite small), their human capital (their staff and especially their agents), their social capital (their networks and contacts), their intellectual capital (the rights and copyrights they control) and their symbolic capital (their prestige and the respect accorded to them by other players in the field). Any individual agent will be able to leverage some of the capital accumulated by the agency for which he or she works – not only its financial resources but also its networks and contacts and the reputation that the agency has acquired in the field – and this undoubtedly makes his or her job easier. But all agents, regardless of their standing, are expected to generate a revenue stream of their own by cultivating their own contacts, building their own client list and establishing their own reputation in the field. How do they do this?
Building a client list
The world of agenting is very diverse – there is no single, agreed set of procedures. The ways that agents operate vary from agent to agent and from agency to agency, and the problems they face depend on who they are, their background, their experience and the kinds of books they are selling. In some cases individuals with some standing in the industry are invited to join an agency by the existing owner or partners – this was often the case with successful editors who were either forced out by the consolidation within the industry or who became dissatisfied with their jobs and were looking for a change. These individuals brought with them a great deal of social capital, since they had been in the business for a long time and had many connections with editors and authors. They also brought with them a great deal of insider knowledge about the business of publishing, and a good feel for what editors and publishers were looking for. When an individual like this joins an agency, they may inherit some clients from an agent who is overloaded or one who has retired or is about to retire, but they will also need to go out and actively search for new clients. One agent who had previously been an editor described the process like this:
When I came here, I inherited about a dozen authors that were already here from an agent who had retired. That was really good for me because I had something to start with, but it wasn’t enough. So I went out to look for more. I went to the creative writing schools, I used a contact that I had with the director of one of these schools and I would say to him, ‘Can I come up and talk to the students?’ and we would go out to dinner afterwards and he would tell me who was good and so on. Well, you know, everyone’s playing that game. I wrote to promising people who I thought were writing interesting things. One of my favourite clients is someone I wrote to when he’d written a piece in a magazine and I wrote to him and said, ‘You look to me like somebody who should be writing a book,’ and out of that came a very successful book and the author is now an established novelist and so on and so forth.
In addition to finding clients through active initiatives of this kind, many agents will get new clients by taking on authors who are referred on to them by their established clients, who act effectively as scouts for them, or by other agents who are too busy to take on new clients, or even by publishers who refer authors to them. ‘Publishers who feel that authors should have agents will say, “Ah, so-and-so has been at that agency for a couple of years, he’s building his list – why don’t you talk to him?”’ added the agent quoted above. ‘I think they think it’s inevitable that these authors will have agents and that they’d like these authors to have the kind of agents they’d like them to have rather the kind of agents they wouldn’t like them to have.’
The individual who becomes an agent after having been an editor or publisher will usually find it much easier to build a client list than the young agent who starts as an assistant and then slowly works his or her way up the ladder, although this is how many agents begin. The publishing industry – both in literary agencies and in publishing houses – remains largely an apprentice-based industry. ‘You really have to work under a mentor in order to make inroads,’ explained one young woman who started as an assistant and had been working as an agent for about a year. ‘So much of it is connections. You can’t take a class on how to become a literary agent. You have to work at an agency to learn it.’ By joining an agency and working as the assistant to an established agent, an individual learns how the business works and picks up the tricks of the trade. They also tend to imbibe the ethos of the particular agency in which they are working or of the particular agent for whom they are working, learning their distinctive ways of doing things and making them their own. Each agency has a character and culture of its own, often shaped by the personal views and values of the founder or founders who remain active in many agencies, and the younger members of staff who aspire to become agents will tend to take their bearings from the agent or agency for whom they are working. While much of their time will be taken up by dealing with correspondence and handling contract work for their boss, promising assistants are often given some scope to start building a client list of their own. In addition to their basic salary, they may be given a small commission on any sales they make. Some of their clients may be overspill clients whom their boss passes on to them, some may be clients who have written to them or whom they’ve discovered in the slush pile and some may be clients they have actively sought out by going to writers’ conferences or reading articles or short stories in magazines or newspapers. Aspiring agents of this kind are particularly hungry to find new talent because it is the only way that they will be able to advance their career in the world of agenting.
For some assistants, the opportunity to progress and become an agent in the agency where they are working will eventually come, though it may be a long apprenticeship. ‘From the time you walk in the door and sit down as an assistant I truly believe that it’s going to be five years before you can fully and confidently call yourself an agent,’ explained one senior agent who had herself risen through the ranks and who has trained many younger agents. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’ve sold five books or fifty books by then, it’s five years before you get the nuances down.’ Some assistants stick with it and are gradually given more latitude to build their own client list, but others find that they have to move elsewhere in order to create the time and space to develop their own career. ‘I was making so little money and I wasn’t able to figure out a way to fully have my own list,’ explained one young agent. ‘If one of my former boss’s big clients called and she was out they were so used to having me as their assistant that they would ask for me, even though I was no longer the assistant, and they would say, “Oh, can you read my novel overnight,” and of course I would do it because I still worked for the agency and that was our agency’s biggest client. But it was really becoming a drain.’ So this young agent moved to another agency which was recruiting for a junior agent position, where she found that she had more freedom to do her own work and build her client list, unimpeded by expectations that stemmed from her previous work as an assistant.
Some junior agent positions of this kind pay a straightforward salary, some pay a low base salary plus commission and some are commission-only posts. Where the agent is earning a commission, it will be on the basis of an agreed split with the agency – that is, the 10 or 15 per cent commission earned by the agency will be split on an agreed basis between the agent and the agency, which could be anything from a modest 20 or 30 per cent share to incentivize a junior agent whose primary job is administrative to 50:50 (50 per cent to the agent and 50 per cent to the agency), 60:40 or even, in the case of more experienced agents or those who work from home, 80:20. The commission-only agents either earn their commission as and when they sell their books, or earn it on a ‘draw’. ‘A draw means that your agency assumes you’re going to earn $X,000 a year on commission and pays you as if you’re going to earn that,’ explained one young agent. ‘If you earn more by the end of the year, it’s almost like a bonus and they pay you the extra. If you earn less, depending on your agency, they will either ignore it or ask you to pay it back.’ For those young agents who work on a commission-only basis, it is often very difficult to make ends meet. ‘I’ve been here for a year,’ this agent continued, ‘and I’m not completely earning my living on my commissions yet. It’s a business you have to grow.’ She relied on savings, her husband’s income and some freelance editing work to make ends meet. A year later she had moved to another agency where she was offered a better deal.
Given the task of building a list, young agents generally have a much tougher task than those agents who come into the business with some previous experience and standing in the world of publishing; they lack the social and symbolic capital of their more established colleagues and have to accumulate it more or less from scratch. Sarah had been working at a New York agency on a commission-only basis for about a year. She explained that, at this stage of her career, she was eager to build her client list and was trying to sign up one, possibly two, clients per month. She typically received over a hundred unsolicited queries a week from prospective writers, all of which she read but the vast majority of which she declined to pursue – less than 1 per cent were followed up. Occasionally one of the one or two clients Sarah signed each month came from the 400-odd unsolicited queries she received every month, ‘out of the proverbial slush’, which means that for this young agent, who was hungry to find new clients and paying more attention to unsolicited queries than most experienced agents would have time to do, the chances of a prospective writer getting taken on over the transom were less than a quarter of 1 per cent. Most of Sarah’s new clients were the result of her own searches, but even this method was haphazard and usually resulted in disappointment. Magazines and journals were her principal source. She regularly read a host of women’s magazines like Marie Claire and all the literary journals – the New Yorker, Mississippi Review, the Missouri Review, Paris Review, Tin House, etc. She would find writers whose work she liked but the chances of signing them as clients were slim:
I spend maybe $50 a year on my Tin House subscription and maybe in all the issues I’ve read I’ll find three writers I’m interested in, because they seem like they’re at that point in their life where they’re good writers and they’re getting published and they haven’t been discovered. So they’re ready to be discovered. So I reach out to them. And out of those three what usually happens is that one is already represented, one doesn’t have a book-length work to show and the third has a book-length work that I request, that I read and that I don’t like or it’s not ready or it’s not saleable. So it’s just very difficult. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s a hustle – you’re constantly hustling. You’re constantly looking – especially when you’re me, when you don’t have a stable of clients who are bringing in regular income writing a book a year. You’re constantly looking for the next great client and trying to get them before someone else does.
A young agent struggling to build a client list will constantly come up against the problem of poaching, since many of the good writers who are publishing in the literary magazines will have already come to the attention of other agents who are similarly seeking to add new clients to their lists. In most agencies, young agents will be careful to avoid overt poaching, not only because it is likely to be regarded as improper behaviour by the more established people in the agency and would be condemned by them but also because they fear that it would damage the one resource that they are most in need of at this stage of their career – their reputation. ‘It’s a very small business,’ explained Sarah, ‘and if you get a reputation for poaching clients, nobody’s going to want to work with you. That kind of thing can spread to the writers’ community, clients might not want to sign with you, authors might not want to come to you, editors might not want to work with you, agents might not refer clients to you. It’s bad for your reputation, and the one thing you don’t want is a bad reputation.’
While the taboo against poaching is keenly felt by most agents, and especially by the young agents who are struggling to establish themselves, it is a taboo that is sufficiently vague to allow every individual to find their own way of accommodating themselves to it. Sarah had worked out her own way of drawing the line between what she regarded as acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. ‘I’m actually thinking of two writers now that I’d love to poach,’ she confided, just after having explained with some conviction why she felt it was bad behaviour, ‘and there are subtle ways of feeling out if they are unhappy in their situations.’ She elaborated:
I read a short story in a literary journal that I loved and I said to myself, ‘This writer has to be mine, I want this writer.’ So I Googled him and I found the writer and his contact information and way down on the third page I found that he was agented. My heart sank. I saw that the agent was on the younger side, so I drafted an email to this writer which said ‘Dear so-and-so, I loved your story, it touched me in so many ways. I’d love to take you out for lunch. Please tell me that you’re not agented so that I can take you out.’ That leaves the door open because the person could write back and say, ‘I’m sorry but I’m agented and I’m happy with my representation,’ in which case I’d write back and say, ‘I’m so happy for you, I’m so glad you’re in such good hands and I look forward to reading your next work.’ Or this person could write back and say, ‘I’m unhappy with my representation, I’m reconsidering it and I’d love to meet with you.’ If they’re already unhappy, I’d be willing to meet with them, even though I think it’s dangerous. In other words, I’m going to pretend that I never got to the third page of that website and only stayed on the first two pages. That’s a subtle way of doing it.
Even in this case, Sarah explained, she would wait for the writer to break things off with their existing agency and come back to her before she formally asked him if she could represent him. ‘I would want them to make the decision independently and separately.’
For some agents who are seeking to build their client list, there is a pivotal moment, which often happens by pure chance, that suddenly gives their career a boost and puts them on the map of agents. It might be a surprise phone call, a writer who gets referred to them by a friend or a manuscript that comes in over the transom – many young agents live in hope that their careers will be suddenly transformed by a serendipitous event of this kind. One senior agent who had been in the business for 20 years reflected on the fortuitous occasion that launched her career:
Fairly early in my career, I was an assistant to a very well-known literary agent and was working on a Friday afternoon in the summer – something which is unheard of in this industry – because I had stuff to catch up on. I answered a phone call and it was from an author who’d written a novel. He was not at all well known at that time – he had published a couple of non-fiction collections with a small Midwestern university press. We spoke for an hour and a half and at the end of the call he said, ‘Can I send you the book?’ I said, ‘Sure you can, but I’ll need to pass it on to someone else at the agency.’ He said, ‘That’s fine, but I really think this book is quite good and I really enjoyed this conversation, so I think you’d be the right person to handle it.’ I’d just started taking on clients so I read it and passed it around to the other agents at the agency who were more senior than I was and they all said, ‘Go with God.’ And that was X [a bestselling novel that went on to sell over 4 million copies in the US, was made into a film, translated into 25 languages and sold more than 50 million copies worldwide], and that got me started on my trajectory to agenting.
Not all agents are as lucky as this one was. Some struggle for years and never manage to sell a book for over $100,000, let alone happen upon a bestseller. ‘I’ve been an agent for three years and I still have never made a six-figure deal. What can you do?’ said one young agent. But at the end of the day, the standing of any agent in the field is indissolubly linked to the success or otherwise of the particular books they have sold and authors they have signed. Their client list is their CV, and their reputation as an agent, together with the trust they are able to elicit from editors and others, is shaped by the clients they represent and the rewards and awards – both financial and symbolic – that the books they sold have produced and received.
As an agent builds his or her list, the problems they face begin to change. They reach a point – and this may happen quite quickly with a successful agent, after four or five years of building a client list – when they have a good stable of authors and when the time and energy they have available to take on new clients is now much more limited. Most agents, including very senior and established agents, will say that they always try to remain open to new authors, even if admitting that it becomes more and more difficult. ‘I’m much less open than I used to be,’ said one well-established New York agent, ‘simply because there are only so many hours in the day. I tend not to shed clients, I’m very loyal to the clients I’ve taken on, and mercifully very few clients have ever left me, so I don’t have that many slots to fill. But I would never want not to be looking for new writers because there is a thrill to discovering an unpublished writer that is different from the thrill of the success of a writer that you’d already discovered.’ For the established agent, the problem increasingly becomes one of balancing the interests of existing clients with the natural inclination of most agents to want to renew their lists by taking on new authors. Most agents’ lists will effectively divide themselves into active and inactive authors, as some authors go quiet for a long time while they work on a new book or stop writing altogether. This enables the agent to concentrate their time and attention on those authors who are productive and whose work is selling well while allowing the less active authors to remain almost passively on their list. Most agents are reluctant to cut loose an author whom they’ve taken on, however inactive they may be. Partly this is because they see the bond with their clients as one of loyalty and mutual commitment: if an agent was prepared to cut loose their less productive clients, then what would stop their more successful clients from cutting them loose in turn? Partly it’s also because even the most inactive author can, on occasion, surprise you. ‘Authors you think have become inactive will suddenly come back with a wonderful new book,’ observed one agent. ‘It’s five years since you last made a contract and now you’re making a new contract and suddenly there’s momentum again. The pleasures of the unexpected are of course one of the great pleasures of this business.’
While most agents are very loyal to their clients and hope for their clients’ loyalty in return, there are occasions when agents and authors part company. There are occasions when an agent will come to the view that it is no longer worth their while to represent a particular client, usually because they find themselves investing a great deal of time and effort in reading drafts of material that ends up going nowhere, though they tend to present such parting of the ways as a separation by mutual consent. One agent described how he spent six years reading drafts of a second novel which never really worked, and eventually he decided to submit it to publishers because he didn’t know what else to do with it. One by one, the publishers turned it down, ‘and eventually [the author] and I looked at each other in the face and just realized that I wasn’t doing him any good anymore. Certainly the idea of even looking at another draft of anything that he was ever going to write just filled me with dread. And he’s gone to another agent.’ The other side of this equation is that most agents and agencies are dependent financially on a relatively small proportion of clients whose books are exceptionally successful, and the possibility of losing one of these key clients is a constant fear. ‘You look at any business in our neck of the woods and somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of our income is generated by somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent of our clients,’ explained the same agent. ‘That’s a scary equation and sometimes it’s even worse than that, with the ebb and flow of people’s successes. And then suddenly you look at it from behind my desk and think, “Jesus, if we hadn’t had X and Y, we would be in real trouble.”’ There are different ways that an agency can lose a key client – they might become ill, die or simply decide to take a break from writing. But the possibility of losing them to another agency is always a risk:
There is no doubt at all that there are certain circumstances at certain points in an agency’s existence where a certain kind of client – and I’ve seen it happen, though never, thankfully, been on the receiving end of it – will go, ‘I’m now such a successful author that part of what I need to demonstrate to the world is that I’m represented by a very successful agency. So however attractive your small boutique agency may seem, you know, seen from a distance, William Morris is my kind of place. I want to be up there with the big hitters.’ Well, there’s not much you can do to stop that, and hopefully you’ve been clever and perceptive enough in your selection of the client in the first place to guard against the possibility of that happening. And if you’ve been the one who, when they were really at their wits’ end, said, ‘We don’t normally do this, but how would it be if I lent you a couple of grand just until the next book?’ I’m not saying it’s always about bribery but there are many ways in which you can be the one that was there when everybody else seems to have fallen away.
The agent’s role
So how exactly do agents understand their role vis-à-vis their clients? In the broadest terms, most agents would describe their role as that of managing the long-term career development of their authors. ‘It’s about choreographing a career,’ as one agent rather grandly put it. This breaks down into several different components, including the following: preparing proposals and manuscripts for submission; pitching; selling; managing rights; managing careers. Each is a complex subject in itself and the list is not exhaustive, but a brief account of these activities will go some way to clarifying the agent’s role.
Once an agent has decided to take on a client, he or she must work with the writer to prepare the proposal or manuscript for submission to publishers. This is particularly true for the first book but, depending on the writer and the stage of his or her career, it may also apply to subsequent books. A great deal of thought and effort often goes into this process. It is not uncommon for a book proposal to go through six or more drafts, or, in the case of a novel, for the manuscript to be revised several times in the light of feedback from the agent, before it is presented to publishers. ‘I have an author who is a well-respected journalist and he just couldn’t get the proposal right,’ explained one senior agent. ‘We went through draft after draft and it took us a year. I probably could’ve sold it six months earlier but I really wanted him to get his head around exactly what he needed to be doing.’ The good agent knows, or has some sense of, what editors and publishers will be looking for, and they want to present their client’s offerings in the best possible light. ‘I operate as if I only have one shot,’ this agent continued, though she knew that, in practice, this wasn’t strictly true. She cited the case of a younger agent at her agency who had sent out a novel more than 40 times over the course of four or five years and eventually sold it. She admired his tenacity but it wasn’t her way of doing business. She also observed that some agents didn’t put as much care and effort into preparing proposals as she did. ‘There are some agents who have the shit-against-the-wall theory; they look at something and just throw it out there and if they sell it they sell it and if they don’t, they don’t. I don’t believe in doing business that way and I don’t train the people I work with to do business that way. I think it’s putting your best foot forward.’
Preparing a proposal or manuscript for submission is not just a matter of polishing a text: it’s also a matter of grooming the writer. How you present a writer can be just as important as how you present a text: what does this writer have to say that hasn’t been said before? What unique traits do they bring to the table that others have not brought before them? Of course, in a media-saturated world where publicity can make a big difference to the sales of a book, the physical appearance of the author and how telegenic they are can become a factor, especially for topical non-fiction books, and it is not uncommon for agents to parade their authors from one publishing house to another, both for the authors to meet editors and other staff and gauge their enthusiasm for a book and for the staff at the publishing houses to meet the author and gauge their potential for promoting their book. But preparing an author for the submission process is about much more than appearance: it is also about what those in the business call ‘platform’.
‘Platform’ is a term that has become particularly prevalent in the world of New York trade publishing in recent years, though the same considerations come into play in London even if the term is used less frequently. Essentially, platform is the position from which an author speaks – a combination of their credentials, visibility and promotability, especially through the media. It is those traits and accomplishments of the author that establish a pre-existing audience for their work, and that a publisher can leverage in the attempt to find a market for their book. As one agent put it, ‘platform means what kind of built-in audience is this writer bringing that can guarantee a certain number of book sales.’ Platform is important for all kinds of books but it is particularly important for non-fiction, especially for certain types of non-fiction like fitness and diet, where ‘the author absolutely has to have a national platform to sell the book these days.’ If an author regularly appears on national television or has a syndicated newspaper or magazine column, this gives them a high-profile platform which creates a pre-existing potential market for their book. As the marketplace for books becomes more crowded, the author’s platform becomes more important for agents and publishers alike, because they see it as a basis on which they can build a market for a book, get publicity for it and make it stand out from all the other books that are competing for the time and attention of readers, buyers, reviewers and others.
Some writers come with platform; others have to get it. So how does an author get platform? Here is where a good agent can help out. An agent can advise an author about how to build their platform – where to publish articles, how to improve their website and so on. But well-connected agents – those with good quantities of social capital, accumulated through years of strategic networking – can also call on their friends and contacts in the media to help get exposure for their clients. As one agent at a large agency explained,
There are occasions when I’ve called in favours for clients. One of my writers is an editor at a major newspaper who writes only human interest stories for them. She was looking for a new project and I said, ‘This guy is great, do a story about him and the publishers are going to flock to it,’ and that’s exactly what happened. That’s what I call a sweetheart deal. It helps. And being at a big agency like this helps. Sometimes I’ll go to another agent and say, ‘Can someone at the New York Times write a story about this?’ There’s definitely a patronage system going on.
By putting their clients in touch with people in the media who can help to give them more exposure and visibility, well-connected agents can help them to build or extend their platforms, thereby strengthening their hand when it comes to pitching the proposal to publishers.
How an agent pitches a proposal or book depends very much on whether it is a new book by an established author who has already published one or several books, or a new book by a new author who is as yet an unknown quantity. Pitching a new book by an established author is often quite straightforward, especially if the author has a good relationship with a particular house and editor, everything is going well and the author is keen to stay with that house. In cases like this, which comprise a good proportion of the deals done by agents with an established client list, the agent is simply letting the editor or publisher know about the new book, explaining how it fits with the author’s previous work, talking about how it should be positioned in the marketplace and discussing money and terms. However, there are many ways in which this seemingly straightforward negotiation can become more complicated. The author and agent might be looking for more money or better terms, the publishing house might be looking to reduce the advance in the light of the sales of the previous book or books, the author might be ‘orphaned’ at a particular house and so on. An author becomes orphaned when the editor to whom the book was originally sold leaves the house and the book is inherited by someone else – something that happens more and more often with the mergers and acquisitions among publishing houses. In such cases an author will often feel abandoned, lost. ‘It mostly doesn’t work out and you have to move the author,’ explained one agent. ‘It’s such a personal business. You have to be with the editor who wanted your book and wanted you as a writer and the way you wrote and so on, and the person who comes in after that likes you but has other writers they like more. So mostly you’re pitching to a publishing house thinking, “This isn’t going to work and I’m going to try some other houses.”’
With a first book by a new author, or a book by an author who is publishing a trade book for the first time or actively looking for a new house, the issues are somewhat different. The first question the agent has to figure out is: who is going to like this book? The agent has to work out a plan about which editors or publishers should be contacted about this specific book or proposal. There are many different elements that feed into this plan: partly it’s based on the agent’s view of what kind of book this is going to be and which publishing house or imprint would be a suitable home for it; partly it’s based on their knowledge of who’s who in the different publishing houses and what their tastes and inclinations are; partly it’s based on their knowledge of what the different houses will typically pay and what they think they can get for this book; partly it’s based on their experience of working with particular editors and publishing houses; and partly it’s based on their assessment of how hungry any particular editor or publisher is at any particular point in time and how much support they can muster within their house. These are often elaborate judgements in which a great deal of experience and implicit knowledge, gleaned from countless conversations over lunch and elsewhere, is drawn upon by the agent in order to work out an appropriate strategy for a particular book.
Knowing the tastes of different editors and publishers is crucial, and this is part of the practical knowledge that an agent acquires by working with editors and talking with them about which books they like and which they don’t – ‘You talk about books all the time in this business, and you just slowly get to know people’s tastes,’ explained one agent. So in trying to figure out which editors to submit a new book to, the agent is always seeking to match the content of this particular book, its specific style and character, to what they perceive to be the tastes of particular editors: it is an exercise in the equilibration of tastes. But it’s also about knowing who is looking for what at which point in time and how much power and support they have within the organization. One senior London agent put it like this:
You’ve got to know what’s going on, you’ve got to know who’s up and who’s down, you’ve got to know whose list is full and whose list isn’t full, you’ve got to know who’s looking for what kind of book, you’ve got to know which editors seem to be able to get their books through the system successfully and which editors don’t seem to be able to, and you do that by talking to them all the time. You do that by going out to lunch, by going to parties, by reading the trade press – that is, trying to figure out what’s going on in the houses. It’s spying in a sense – you’re a spy in the house of publishing. But it’s not really spying because spying implies that you’re trying to get information from people who don’t want to give it to you, whereas actually what happens when you sit down for lunch with a publisher is that they have as much interest in the trade of information as you do.
Since many agents have worked for publishing houses at earlier stages of their careers, they have a good sense of how the houses work. But they need to keep up with changes inside the houses and movements between them and try to get a sense of which editors are in favour and which aren’t, and the only way to do this is to talk to the people who work in the houses and pick up whatever bits of information they can get.
All agents have a cognitive map of the field of the publishing houses, divided up into players of different size and strength, which are further divided into the imprints that are located within each house, and populated by the names of editors and publishers whom the agent either knows personally or knows of. The map is always hierarchical, in the sense that the large publishing corporations are always at the top, with their various imprints listed beneath, usually in order of size and importance, followed by the serious but less than major houses, followed in turn by a handful of smaller houses. ‘There’s definitely an A, B and C list,’ said one senior New York agent. ‘I hate to admit it but there is. I’m being honest with you. There’s definitely a hierarchy. Part of it is who pays the most. Part of it is who has created the most bestsellers. And part of it is – and for me this is the number one concern – who ultimately is the best editor for this particular book.’ When an agent is considering which editor or publisher to approach about a particular book, he or she will usually have some names in mind – often editors whom they’ve worked with before and whose tastes they know well. But they will also usually consult their cognitive map – their master list of publishing houses – and try to come up with other names. This New York agent explained how she does it:
I have a master list that I look at and I’ll say, ‘This would be a really good fit for such and such a place, so who should I send it to?’ And I’ll look at the master list and I’ll say, ‘OK, so-and-so would be a perfect fit for this at Penguin.’ A lot of times at an agency this size we go around and talk to each other about it – you know, ‘I’ve got this book; this is what it’s about,’ and we’ll sit in each other’s offices and jaw about it for awhile. And we also have an agents’ meeting every week where, if we’ve hit a dead-end or are just at the beginning, we’ll talk about different projects and throw around ideas.
For the most part, the author is not consulted in this process – unless, of course, the author already has a pre-existing relationship with a particular editor and a particular house and would like to maintain this, in which case the process of submitting the new book project will be shaped by this set of preferences. But for the vast majority of new books by authors without pre-existing relationships in the world of trade publishing, this process of selecting editors and publishing houses is entirely in the hands of the agent. ‘The author doesn’t know anything,’ commented one senior New York agent. ‘I mean if the author says, “You know, by the way, my uncle is Jason Epstein,” I will listen. But otherwise the author is paying me to know these editors far better than he or she might.’
Once the agent has identified the editors to whom the book is going to be submitted, he or she has to contact them and tell them about the project – in other words, they have to pitch it. Often the first approach is by telephone – some agents always start by calling up the editor and trying to suss out the level of interest. ‘I have to know where they are, I have to know what they’re up to, I have to know what their reading schedule is like,’ explained one New York agent. ‘And my job as an agent is to get their blood pressure just a little higher after I’ve called them.’ This is then followed up with a letter and a proposal which is emailed to them. Some agents do most of their pitching by phone and keep their follow-up letters very short and to the point, while others write more elaborate pitch letters. The pitch letter frames the book: it gives a little background about the author and the book, often points to other books with which it can be compared or contrasted, gives the editor a way to think about the book and perhaps some reasons why they should take it seriously. ‘I try to give them a way of describing the book to their colleagues,’ this agent continued. ‘I’m telling them how to position this book.’
Sometimes the agent will make the drawbacks explicit in the pitch letter, with the intention of deflecting in advance potential reservations and focusing the editor’s attention on what the agent sees as the book’s real strengths. ‘There are several things I can’t offer you,’ begins one pitch letter. ‘I can’t offer you a particularly promotable author. X is not a sexy 28-year-old looker who photographs well in black. He’s a shy man who remains a little awestruck by my passion for his book. To make matters worse, I can’t offer you a high concept plot which can be described efficiently.’ The letter then goes on to compare the author to several hugely successful writers and adds, ‘I’ve read four drafts of this first novel in as many months and my conviction about the freshness of writing here remains stolidly unchanged. There are scenes here I’ve never read before and metaphors that belong to X alone.’ What matters above all with new fiction, explained this agent, is plot, character and voice. She knew that this author was a shy, reticent man and that his book lacked a strong plot. But the characters were well developed and the author had a fresh and original voice, so these are the features she chose to accentuate in her pitch.
How the agent pitches the book matters, but it also matters who the agent is. Experienced agents with good track records tend to be listened to with more attentiveness by editors and publishers than young agents who are struggling to make a name for themselves. ‘Certain agents have greater leverage, greater clout and greater credibility than other agents,’ explained one senior New York agent who began her career on the other side, working for a major publishing house. Their credibility is based on their track record, their ability to spot talent and sign up authors whose books turn out to do well – either becoming bestsellers or gaining critical acclaim or both. A track record of success gives an agent a degree of credibility, a quantity of symbolic capital, which helps to ensure that the books he or she is pitching will be taken seriously by editors and publishers. This doesn’t mean that editors and publishers will necessarily want to buy the next book pitched by a well-regarded agent, but it does mean that they are more likely to take it seriously, look at it more quickly and be more positively predisposed to it. ‘He’s someone whose taste I trust, therefore I’ll take him seriously when he says he likes something I haven’t read’ is how one senior agent described the way he thought that editors generally responded to his submissions.
For younger agents who lack the track record of their more established colleagues, it can be much harder to get editors and publishers to pay attention to their submissions. ‘Some editors will take longer to read your work because they don’t know you,’ explained one young agent, though it helps if you are working for an agency that is well known and respected. Young agents often tend to form lateral connections – based on age and relative newness to the game – with young editors at the publishing houses, both because they find that they share more in common in terms of their tastes and also because they find it easier to get their attention. It’s a strategy that serves both parties well, since the young editors find it just as difficult to get submissions from the well-established agents as young agents do to be taken seriously by well-established editors. Their lack of symbolic capital in their respective domains of the field gives them a certain commonality of purpose. They form relationships with their opposite numbers that will evolve with time and the success of one can help to build the success of the other, thus cementing the system of mutual benefit that ties agents and editors together.
Having pitched a book, the agent then needs to sell it if they can. In essence, there are three different ways of selling a book: a one-on-one submission, a multiple submission and an auction. If an agent has a book that they know needs a lot of work and they have in mind an editor and a publishing house that they think would be a good home for it, they can send it to the editor exclusively in return for them undertaking to look at it quickly and to give it the attention it needs – ‘You honour them with a single submission.’ More commonly, an agent will send the proposal or manuscript to a carefully selected group of editors – the multiple submission. In some cases only one editor expresses an interest and makes an offer, in which case the agent does what he or she can to raise the terms, though their bargaining position is weak. If more than one editor is interested, the agent can decide to have an auction. There are basically two ways of running an auction – the traditional auction, where the agent asks for the first offer by a particular time and date, after which the agent goes back to those who bid below the highest offer and asks them if they want to increase their offer and continues this process until bidders drop out; and the best-bid auction, where the agent asks everyone to give their best offer by a particular time and date. Whichever method you use, ‘you also always reserve the right to have the author’s decision be based upon all the terms,’ explained one agent. ‘So if you have $30,000 more from a publishing house that the author really doesn’t like, you can go elsewhere. You know you’ll still offend and aggrieve the publisher who’s offered more money, but it is the author’s right.’ At the end of the day, continued this agent, it’s the author’s decision. ‘But’, she added, ‘they depend very greatly upon my opinion.’
So do agents always advise the author to go with the highest bid? Some do, some don’t. There are some agents who subscribe to Andrew Wylie’s view that the advance is the only mechanism the agent can use to get the publisher to commit themselves seriously to a book and to sell and promote it aggressively, so going with the highest bid is the only rational thing to do. But many agents will adopt a more nuanced position. The size of the advance is important, no agent would deny that, but there are also other considerations to be taken into account, such as which editor and publisher would be the best for this particular book, how they propose to ‘position’ the book in the publisher’s list, what kind of marketing and publicity plans they have for the book, how much enthusiasm they express and so on. When asked whether the financial conditions were the most important factor when deciding which publisher to go with, one senior New York agent responded like this:
Absolutely not. If I can get you a deal where you can do what you want to do, and can put food on your table and pay your rent and stay relatively happy and sane, then I’m doing my job. If that deal is for $100,000 and you love your editor and you love the people who are helping you get where you need to get in your career, then that’s a perfect deal. Whenever I run an auction, one of my rules – and I have the most straightforward set of rules, there are five of them – is that at the end of the day it is up to the agent and author to decide what constitutes the best deal. So for me that’s not only the advance and the territories that come with the advance, it’s the actual editor, who may or may not be there by the time the book is published, as experience shows us, it’s what they’re talking about in terms of publicity and marketing muscle, and just overall enthusiasm. I’ve had people pay a lot more for books and let them die, for whatever reasons, and that’s something I’m very cautious about now.
So would this agent be happy to accept a significantly lower advance if other things seemed to warrant it? ‘Happy? No, never happy.’ But yes, on occasion, willing to do so. Most agents tend to subscribe to this more holistic view of ‘the best deal’, where the aim is to find ‘the best home’ for the book and where the size of the advance is one factor – albeit a very important factor – in an overall package. At the same time, most will also acknowledge that, while the largest advance does not always win the day, in practice it usually does, and that other factors tend to come into play most often when the differences between the final bids are small.
When an agent has three or four publishers who are seriously interested and who have all put in bids which hover around the same figure, the agent might arrange to take the author around to meet the editors and perhaps also the sales, marketing and publicity directors – what is commonly described in the business as ‘the beauty contest’. From the agent’s point of view, the beauty contest is an opportunity for the agent and author to meet the people they would be working with, get a sense of how committed they are and how they are thinking about the book, and assess their marketing and publicity plans. Of course, it’s also an opportunity for the publishers to meet the author and gauge how effective he or she would be in helping them to promote the book, but at this stage of the acquisitions process it’s really the publisher whose beauty is on show. ‘If you’ve made the level where you’ve offered, say, $500,000, you’ve made the decision as a publisher that you want this person on your list,’ explained one marketing manager at a major publishing house. ‘“Beauty contest” is a little slim of a term because it just suggests tarting yourself up, but really what you’re trying to do is say “We are the best house for this book and here’s why we think so. Here’s how we would publish your book, it would be a lead title in our catalogue, we would focus on it at Bookseller Expo, we would do this kind of online campaign, we would have that advertising component, we would want you to be on the road and do an eight-city tour.” You try to give them some sense of how you would promote their book.’
Once the agent and author have decided which offer to accept, the agent has to negotiate the details of the contract and deal with those rights that have not been assigned to the publisher. Agents vary in their ways of thinking about rights: some are willing to assign rights for other territories and other languages when they do a deal with a publisher, while other agents will always hold on to these rights and make it clear to publishers when they submit a book to them that rights for other territories and other languages are not available. The agents who are willing to assign these rights may, in the case of a sought-after book, ask publishers to submit two offers – one for restricted rights (either North America or the UK, depending on where the auction is taking place) and one for world rights or world English-language rights – and they will weigh up the pros and cons of the two offers and form a judgement about whether they and their client would be better off if they were to hold on to foreign rights and dispose of them directly. In those cases where the agent holds on to foreign rights, whether these are for North America (in the case of an agent in the UK), Britain and the rest of the world (in the case of an agent in the US) and/or foreign languages, the agent has to come up with a strategy for disposing of the rights they have retained, something which agents do with varying degrees of efficiency and dedication. Some agents will contract sub-agents to try to sell rights in other territories and languages, while other agents will handle these rights themselves and put considerable thought and effort into selling them.
The major book fairs, like Frankfurt and London, play an important role in the selling of rights – these are, essentially, rights fairs – and every agent and agency will have their Frankfurt strategy and their London Book Fair strategy, but the selling of rights is a continuous process that extends well beyond the planning for particular fairs. An agent will often use the size of the advance they were able to achieve in their domestic market as leverage to try to maximize advances in other markets and may try to ‘prime the pump’ by selling some foreign rights first. ‘Generally speaking you’re selling British rights first,’ explained one senior London agent, ‘but that’s not always the case. Some agents have been known to sell rights in Germany first before selling British rights because they know a particular editor in a German house that they’ve dealt with before and think is going to be receptive and the buzz is created in Germany or possibly in Italy or America first.’ By carefully orchestrating the sale of rights, the agent can create a snowball effect, with each sale serving to increase the leverage they have in subsequent sales. They may also draw scouts into this process, since they know that scouts are hungry for information about forthcoming books and they may calculate that by providing them with certain selected bits of information or even entire texts at certain points in time, they may be able to generate excitement about a book in foreign markets before it is sold in the domestic market. ‘Before he’s sold a manuscript here, quite often an agent will think, “If I slip this manuscript to a scout and the scout is enthusiastic and alerts publishers abroad, then I’ve got momentum, I’ve got buzz.”’ And this snowball effect may happen whether the agent actively seeks to create it or not, simply because the world of potential buyers is small and they talk to one another constantly. ‘It’s a very leaky business,’ this agent continued. ‘We all go back and forth between London and New York all the time, we all know each other extremely well, we all pick up the phone to each other all the time. An American editor will call up a British editor and say, “So-and-so has just sent me this book, I see you bought it, how much did you pay for it, what are you going to do with it, when are you going to publish it?” and so on, and that will condition their response.’ Success breeds success. Buzz generates more buzz. Of course, doing a big deal with a British publisher does not guarantee a big deal in the US, nor does a big deal in the US guarantee a big deal in the UK – the markets are different and much depends on the author, his or her platform in the different markets and what kind of book it is. But if you do a big deal in the UK, ‘your chances of making a big deal in the US, depending on what kind of book it is, are greatly improved’, and vice-versa.
In addition to helping authors prepare proposals and manuscripts, pitching and selling books, negotiating contracts and managing rights, most agents understand their role as one of managing the long-term careers of their clients. Part of this role is trying to secure enough money for them to become full-time writers and live from their pen. ‘You have a client because you believe they have a career,’ explained one agent. ‘And if you’re only making X amount of money in a year and I’m not helping you become a full-time writer because you’re not making enough money, I’m not doing my job well enough.’ She saw it as part of her job to get enough money for her clients to enable them to write full-time, ‘and most of them do’. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are only writing the kind of novels or non-fiction books they want to write – they might have to do other kinds of writing as well, such as writing for newspapers or magazines or perhaps even ghostwriting. ‘I’m happy if my writers are just writing on a regular basis,’ this agent continued. ‘I think writing is the great lost art, or will be the great lost art, and the only way we’re going to sustain it is for people to continue with the written word.’
As part of managing their authors’ careers, most agents will spend time with their clients discussing their next book, and may read draft chapters and give them advice and feedback. Depending on the writer, some novelists will start to work on something, send a couple of draft chapters to their agents and say, ‘Should I carry on or should I dump this now and not waste the next two years turning it into a novel?’ Other writers will have a very clear idea of what they want to do and will simply send their agent the final manuscript when it’s done. In the case of non-fiction, agents may suggest ideas for books to their clients and work with them to shape the proposal before sending it out. With both fiction and non-fiction writers, agents will sometimes actively encourage a writer to change direction if their career seems to be in a rut. Most commonly, this is simply a matter of channelling a writer’s energies in one direction rather than another, of using one’s experience and knowledge of the market to temper the inclinations of the writer and encourage them to pursue a more promising path. But sometimes it can involve more radical changes – even to the extent of suggesting, in some instances, that a writer changes his or her name.
One senior agent in London described how one of his agency’s clients – call her Sarah Jones – had been writing novels for many years, each selling somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 hardback. ‘So everybody thought they knew how much she was worth. That’s how much she sold so everything became geared to that. Despite the enthusiasm of the publisher, despite their relentless attempts to persuade the trade that they’d got it wrong, she was labelled.’ Then one day the author decided she wanted a change of pace. She made a couple of suggestions to her agent about what she wanted to do next and the agent’s response was lukewarm – ‘We said, “I really don’t think that’s going to work but, most importantly, I don’t think that’s where your heart lies.”’ The agent encouraged her to move in a different direction, to write something frothier and aimed at a slightly younger audience, and, crucially, to submit it under a different name. Why?
Because it feels different, but mostly because if we go back to the marketplace with another Sarah Jones novel, they’ll say 40,000 copies. I’m not even going to tell your existing publisher – who will get preferential treatment – who this is by. In other words, I want to create for you that absolutely ‘magic moment’. It’s like the first date, before you realize that the girl you think you’ve just fallen in love with is going to irritate you terminally because she keeps leaving the top off the toothpaste tube. It’s that blissful moment when everything is possible, we’re not constrained by any previous history and it’s just blue sky ahead.
Coming up with a new name – ‘this manufactured authorial name’, as the agent put it – gave this writer a new lease of life and created a completely new publishing presence, untainted by the settled assumptions in the marketplace that were inseparably linked to Sarah Jones. The new novel went on to become a huge international bestseller and spawned a series of highly successful sequels. The agent insisted that it was not the agent who reinvented this author, but rather the author who reinvented herself with the help and active encouragement of the agent. ‘One of the things we all need to remind ourselves of in this business is a wonderful phrase of a much lamented late colleague of ours who said, “What we’re here to do is to publish the gleam in the author’s eye.” And I think we forget that at our peril. But that doesn’t mean to say that we just let that gleam bounce off as many mirrors as it wants to – it needs to be directed.’
While an agent who takes on a client is investing in principle in their long-term career development, it is not always easy to strike the right balance between long-term interests and short-term gains. It can be very difficult for agent and author alike to resist a very large advance for a first novel, especially when it represents, as one agent put it, a ‘life-changing’ sum of money, even though they know that, if the book turns out to fall far short of the publisher’s expectations and comes nowhere near to earning out, this may make life more difficult for the author when it comes to selling his or her next book. This is an issue about which there is a varied range of opinions and attitudes in the agenting community. ‘There are agents who say, “You always want the publisher to overpay wildly, you want to get them to overpay by as much as you can possibly manage,”’ explained one agent. ‘But you have to keep an eye on the fact that in the long term an author is judged not on their books but on their sales. I think that you want them to pay as much as you can get but not to the extent that someone looks at their sales figures when their next book comes around and says, “Well, that was a flop.” Then they either move on or they make no effort for the second book. There’s a sort of middle ground you’re aiming for where you’re trying to get them to dig deep but not so deep that it’s impractical and the book can’t possibly come anywhere close to fulfilling their hopes.’ Caution of this kind may sound sensible and reasonable but in the heat of an auction it’s not easy to put a lid on the bidding. There are some agents who do it but it’s difficult. In a field where the dynamics are shaped by different players competing against one another and pursuing interests that coincide in some respects and diverge in others, and where the value of a book proposition is determined as much by passion and belief as it is by any clear-cut evidence or firm knowledge of likely sales, there is enormous scope for the imagination to run wild and for enthusiasm to drive up prices to levels that, with the benefit of hindsight, can be seen to have been excessive and, in some cases, undoubtedly damaging to the long-term careers of authors.
While most agents work very hard to nurture the careers of their authors and secure the best deals they can for them, there will always be cases where authors feel let down by their agents, either because they feel that their agents failed to get the kind of deal they expected (or were led to expect), or because they feel that their agents advised them poorly (or failed to advise them at all), or for some other reason. The world of writers abounds with horror stories about incompetent and duplicitous agents who lavished attention on young and promising writers and then dumped them as soon as the going got tough, who failed to return their calls or respond to their emails, who misled them, lied to them or ripped them off by charging fees for reading and other things. One Brooklyn-based writer described how he had been through six agents in 15 years, including one – his first agent – who worked for a big agency, read his first book and was enthusiastic about it, signed him up, sent the book out to the top editors in the big houses and then, when she failed to sell it, quickly dropped him:
It got to a point where she said ‘You know what, I think I’ve sent it to the people that I can send it to,’ and at that point I said, ‘Well, how about trying smaller presses?’ And she just flat out said ‘I’m not going to do that because there’s not enough money in it for me as an agent, at this big agency.’ So she didn’t do it. And then her attitude just completely flip-flopped. She went from being incredibly nice and kind and enthusiastic to suddenly not returning my phone calls. I called someone else at the agency and they said, ‘Oh, you’re a non-client.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ Because she didn’t tell me that she was dropping me as a client. I found out just by accident. So that was my first experience with an agent.
His experiences didn’t get much better. The next agent he signed with lied to him about the foreign rights he had sold for the book, while another, when asked by an author clearly desperate for some career advice, replied by saying that he couldn’t help because he had no idea how the business worked. Maybe this was just bad luck. Certainly it is rare for a writer to go through six agents in 15 years, and for every story like this you will hear another of a writer who has remained happily with the same agent throughout his or her career. But the experiences of this writer do highlight the fact that, in a field where anyone can become an agent and there are no common standards and regulations, finding a good agent is a treacherous undertaking and often depends on an elusive mixture of good connections, good chemistry and good luck.
1 See James Hepburn, The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
2 Hepburn, The Author’s Empty Purse, pp. 52ff; Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, pp. 27ff.
3 William Heinemann, quoted in Hepburn, The Author’s Empty Purse, p. 1.
4 Hepburn, The Author’s Empty Purse, pp. 73ff.
5 Albert Curtis Brown, ‘“The Commercialization of Literature” and the Literary Agent’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 80 (1 Aug. 1906), p. 359.
6 Morton Janklow, quoted in Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex, p. 60.
7 See Eric de Bellaigue, ‘“Trust me. I’m an agent”: The Ever-Changing Balance between Author, Agent and Publisher’, Logos, vol. 19, no. 3 (2008), p. 114.