ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (11/6/00)
Shrewd advocate or two-faced monster? That’s the question currently confronting literary agents, as they depart from their traditional role as authors’ representatives and leap into the bracing — and perhaps perilous — world of electronic publishing.
”We’ve gone into it with both feet and over our hairline,” says Richard Curtis, the agent who many feel has strayed farthest to date into uncharted territory. After hanging out his shingle as an e-publisher , for example, Curtis has proceeded to aggressively seek rights to his own clients’ previously published work, and negotiated for rights with other agents and authors to content for e-books and print-on-demand editions.
It strikes some in the industry as more than a little odd to find an agent — whose mandate is to be the author’s trusted ally — stepping smack into the role of publisher.
It struck Curtis himself that way.
”No one was more keenly aware of the potential for conflict of interest than I was,” Curtis says of the birth of his company, e-reads, which now publishes some 1,200 titles (the e-reads.com site will launch in the coming months). While Curtis continues to do business as a traditional literary agent for such authors as Harlan Ellison, working in the genres of science fiction, mystery and romance, he says he has pre-empted cries of foul play on a number of fronts. He offers full disclosure to his clients, waives his agency commission on revenues generated to those authors by e-reads and gives clients the opportunity to engage other parties to negotiate on their behalf. He also submitted the e-reads contract to publishing attorneys and agents, and ”invited them to whack away at it.” The result, he says, is a ”model for author-friendliness.”
Certainly, the blurring of agents’ roles is nothing new in an industry famous for peculiar cross-relationships. ”We live in a business where levels of conflict are inevitable and everywhere,” says Arthur Klebanoff, president of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. ”The question is how you deal with them.” Klebanoff, who is plunging into the publishing arena with the coming launch of RosettaBooks, notes that an agent who slogs through contracts to drag out rights reversions, and then digitizes and markets the files as e-books, is arguably offering a valuable service for authors whose books have gone out of print.
As more agents reinvent themselves in a variety of new guises, however, others caution that under the wrong circumstances, authors may find themselves doing business with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
”A lot of what I’ve seen so far seems ethical,” says Joel Fishman, chief executive at Subrights.com and former owner of the Bedford Book Works agency. ”But if agents start to act like publishers on behalf of their authors, then who’s going to protect the interests of the author? If an agent becomes an e-publisher, then they’re pre-empting any other potential electronic publication of that book. Their incentive is to lock in those rights for their own business.”
And e-publishing also begs the question of quality, says agent Todd Shuster. ”Isn’t there a danger that in the hands of certain agents, material that really belongs in a graduate school writing program is going to get distributed before it should be seen?” he asks. On the other hand, the rise of the agent as publisher may be driven by the flexible roles all parties are playing in a collaborative publishing process, especially when editing is not necessarily being done by editors at publishing houses. ”In some ways, it may be out of necessity that certain authors are looking to their agents to edit,” says Shuster. ”There’s a very positive role that agents are playing now, because they’re picking up the ball and running with it.”
But some question the motives of increasingly self-interested agents. ”A lot of agents are trying to hustle at the tail-end of the whole dot-com bubble,” says Lynn Chu, vice president at Writers’ Representatives. ”But when you look at it carefully, you have to ask yourself, Do I really want to do this?”
For her part, Chu adds that the danger facing authors, regardless of who controls electronic rights, is in a publisher’s refusal to declare a title out-of-print — in effect squatting on electronic rights — with no immediate intention of reviving an all-but-moribund book. ”Authors are finding themselves in the position of losing total control over their rights forever to a publisher who has committed to doing only one thing for a limited time,” she says.
Indeed, it seems that as agents go boldly into the brave new world, authors and their representatives are the ones who have to sweat the bottom line. ”I thought the agent and I were on the same side of the table,” says a source who represents an estate handled by an agent turned publisher. ”But he wants to get as much from me as he can, now that he has his own agenda. I feel like I’m sitting with the wolf who’s dressed in grandma’s clothing.”
