AAR

Agents work for authors and sell books (mostly) to big general trade publishers, but there’s really a partnership at work there. Nearly all the books big publishers buy, and almost without exception those for which big money is paid, come to them from agents. There’s a symbiotic dependency between them.

Publishers depend on agents to sort through the possibilities to discover new talent, develop proposals to a professional level, and handhold and cajole the author through the lengthy process of actually delivering the manuscript a contract calls for. Agents live in a world where the big publishers are really the only source of substantial revenue.

So they have lunch a lot to discuss what amount to joint efforts. I don’t know if it is unique to publishing, but our industry’s convention that the buyer (the publishing editor) pays for the seller’s (the agent’s) lunch must be very unusual. By constantly monitoring what the editors are looking for and are inclined to buy and each house’s current frame of mind of what will work and what won’t, agents get the information that, in turn, directs them to what will sell. What will “sell”, to an agent, means what people who are personally known will want to buy. It doesn’t require the agent to think in terms of what the public will buy; that’s the publisher’s job. The agent’s job is to deliver what the publishers have decided is commercially viable.

There is, in general, a great deal of mutual respect here. Obviously, there is a point where the partnership becomes adversarial: publishers want to pay as little as they can for books and agents want to get as much as they can. But, in general, these competing interests are resolved in ways consistent with the need both sides have to continue working together in the future. There are only six very large houses and only a small handful of others that can occasionally play at that level. And while the agent community is somewhat less consolidated (you can be a very successful agent with only one or two big clients; you can’t be a very successful big publisher with only one or two big authors), both sides do each deal knowing there will be a next deal they’ll want to do with each other coming along soon.

This symbiosis is important to remember when we consider that one of the big publishers’ defenses against disintermediation is their ability to curate, to filter. There is a school of thought (which is an attractive one to publishers thinking about their role in the increasingly digital world of books) that when content choices become more plentiful, reliable branded filters become more valuable. All sides recognize that the principal brand value lies with the author. I am increasingly coming to the view that the big publisher name — Random House or Simon & Schuster — also communicates “value” to the consumer, although it doesn’t describe the potential reading experience with anything like the specificity that the author name does. The agent name, of course, means nothing at all to the public. So the publisher is essentially getting credit for a filtering process for which they are the last step after agents have done a lot of weeding out before them.

Two years ago, when we were organizing the first Digital Book World conference, we foresaw that ebooks would lead to much cheaper and more accessible self-publishing opportunities that some authors, at least, would be keen to explore. When we started to organize a panel on the subject, we learned that the rules of the AAR (which is, effectively, the agents’ trade association, although it doesn’t act as such in many ways because of its highly independent-minded membership and the potential for restraint-of-trade violations) were interpreted by many to mean that agents could neither set up publishing operations nor charge authors for services. In that ancient time, very few agents would openly discuss the possibility of working with authors in anything but the time-honored way of selling their proposals to publishers on commission.

But times have changed. A quick check of recent news and announcements in our office turned up nine agencies with announced digital propositions. These range from Waxman Literary Agency’s Diversion Books, an ebook publisher, to the Ed Victor Agency’s Bedford Square Books publishing arm working through Open Road, to, in most cases, consulting services for the agency’s clients on ebook development and distribution.

The other seven on our list right now are The Knight Agency, BookEnds, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, McDermid Agency, Levine Greenberg, Curtis Brown UK, and Andrea Brown Literary Agency. There are certainly some we’ve missed. And there will undoubtedly be more in the weeks to come.

The Knight Agency did a really nice job of laying out the suite of services they’re going to provide through their offering. It’s very impressive, including content editing, line and copyeditor referrals, ISBN number assignment, copyright registration, cover copy, cover design and consultation, file conversions to ePub and mobi, uploading files to major retailers, dynamic pricing, metadata, search engine optimization, marketing plans, subsidiary rights, royalty tracking and payments, oversight of existing contracts and obligations, and, down the road, arranging for print publication through POD or other means.

But what really surprised me was that the Knight Agency says they are absorbing all costs except copy-editing and working for 15% of the revenue. The range of services they are offering, even without the copy-editing (which can be anywhere from $500 to $3000 or more, depending on the length and complexity of the manuscript), requires real humans to spend real time doing the work. They seem to be offering to design the cover at their expense, which is a value of anywhere from $200 to $2000. The Knight Agency is undertaking a substantial investment in each book that will be done in this program and, if I’m reading them right, will only get that money back at 15 cents on the revenue dollar before they earn any profit.

That’s a commitment! And even though the service is being offered only to existing clients of the agency (at least for now), it’s an impressive one.

So with that context, I’d offer a few observations.

I don’t know what other agents have planned, but Knight has definitely thrown down a marker that other agencies will be highly challenged to match. (Of course, the first thing to see is how well Knight can do against their own checklist!)

Many of the agents, but not Waxman with Diversion, are specifying that their services are only for existing agency clients. That’s a good way of putting a toe in the water and it’s a good way to minimize the concern of publishers. But it’s not likely to last as the policy for any of them that do this kind of work successfully. If their ebook publishing services actually work and the business is shifting in that direction, why would you turn down an opportunity that came from outside the client base. Why would you turn down the opportunity to offer the same suite of services to all the clients of some other agency that doesn’t want to build this themselves? (That’s an opportunity almost certain to arise for all of them.)

Publishers are also working on self-publishing services. Distributors have been noodling for some time about packaging these services for agents. Knight has promised to do a lot, including a substantial per-book investment, for 15% of the revenue. Are any of these other players now going back to the drawing board to reconsider their pricing? I would think so.

How everybody is going to feel about these agent service offerings is going to depend a lot on how they’re used. To the extent that they are used as leverage by authors with big backlists to push publishers to higher ebook royalties, the big houses won’t be pleased with them. But if they turn out primarily to be “farm systems”, giving exposure and building awareness for an author who can then “graduate” to a “real” publishing deal, everybody might be all smiles. If that’s what happens, these services become something like the new digital world’s equivalent of an agent getting an author to write a piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine or to start blogging to build a following: a career-building step that leads to a major house. If that ends up being the prevailing effect, everybody will be smiling.

Let’s remember that Amanda Hocking went from self-publishing to a major publisher deal and that Barry Eisler decided that taking Amazon’s offer to publish him was more appealing that truly doing it himself.

Perhaps for as long as five or ten years, the print component will remain an important part of any book’s total revenue potential. None of these agents can do much to help there (although a distributor could.) Even if what Knight offers turns out to be high quality across the range of services and what they’re offering to cover out of their pocket versus what they’re planning to take in revenue is sustainable (hard to say from here), they’re still going to want to sell lots of books to publishers. Will this service offering help them or hurt them in that regard? Will publishers see them as developing competition? Or will the commercial proposition of each book on offer remain the key element of each negotiation?

We’ve come a long way in the past two years, from a time when many agents thought getting involved with self-publishing was a non-starter to a moment now when, in the words of one agent I spoke to last week, “none of us has any choice” but to provide digital publishing advice or capabilities to their clients. The next two years will probably bring much more change than that.

We’re putting together a new Publishers Launch Conferences show called eBooks for Everyone Else for both New York (on September 26) and San Francisco (on November 2). More details will be announced shortly. “Everyone else” is anybody without an IT department, and we always knew agents would be an important part of our audience (along with authors and small- and midsized-publishers) and our program. Looks like that show will be very well timed.

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It looks like we’re going to have a bit of an unintended debate stretching across several of our panels at the Publishers Launch show in London. Since I’m the guy who put the show together, I can speak with authority to the fact that it was really unintended. But I consider it serendipitous and proof of Branch Rickey’s axiom that “luck is the residue of design”.

I first started probing the question of new business models for agents two years ago when I was organizing the first Digital Book World conference. I had been asked by F+W Media to create a program that would be (in their words) “more practical” than they found Tools of Change to be. I was in partnership with O’Reilly at that time working on a “StartWithXML” show to take place in London. I wasn’t really looking for a reason to compete with them; we were collaborators.

But as I thought about what they did (which I like) and what I might do, I realized that our approaches would be different and our shows would be different. In my mind, the clearest delineation of the difference was that I put agents squarely into the middle of our show planning. This move is a bit counterintuitive in the conference business since agents have never been big ticket-buyers for the industry’s digital education events. But I thought then — and events have subsequently confirmed — that agents were key actors in the digital transition. You can explore the tech challenges of digital change without them, but you can’t really think about the changing economics of trade publishing without bringing them into the conversation.

What seemed logical then — also confirmed by subsequent events — is that agents might become ebook publishers. This had actually happened a decade before, when agent Richard Curtis set up his E-Reads business at a time when most publishers just wouldn’t do ebooks for most titles, if at all. Richard had run into political problems with the agents’ association (AAR) which I believe he headed at the time. They have a code of ethics which could be interpreted to prohibit an agent-publisher such as he had become. In fact, I was a bit surprised (but definitely sensitized and enlightened) when a good friend of mine who is a successful and highly ethical agent told me she couldn’t possibly participate in a conversation that might be seen to endorse the idea of agents becoming publishers.

We put together a panel on “new models” for agents at DBW 2010. We repeated it last year (even though there’s a natural reluctance to repeat things year to year), and we surely are going to include the topic at DBW 2012 next January.

And that brings us to what is going to happen in London on June 21.

We have four prominent agents speaking on different panels on the program. At least three of them are likely to renew the conversation about whether an agent can become a publisher and still be a credible representative for an author.

One of the panels I’m most looking forward to on that day is called “An Emerging Opportunity: Selling into the US”. Charlie Campbell, an agent at Ed Victor Ltd., will participate on that one. We wanted Charlie on the panel based on a conversation we had with him a few months ago about the possibilities he saw for his office’s clients to capture sales in the US through ebooks. When Victor’s office announced the creation of a new publishing operation to handle their own authors’ books, our interest heightened. So Charlie will be explaining how that publishing operation will work and how it benefits the authors in their stable within the context of capturing US sales from a UK or Ireland base. His fellow panelists will be publishers.

Our last panel of the day has Michael Cader and me interviewing four leading luminaries of UK publishing. Three of them are publishers, but the fourth is the agent Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown. Curtis Brown is frequently rumored to be about to start an operation similar to what Victor has announced. (In the US, by the way, agent Scott Waxman — a member of the DBW Conference Council and one of the original participants in our conversations about this — has created a publishing adjunct to his business called Diversion.) Our focus in that panel was not intended to be on the ethics of agents starting publishing companies, but now I think the topic is likely to arise.

Why? Because a third agent on the program that day, Peter Cox of Redhammer, has placed it front and center with a post he published yesterday called “Your Agent Should Not Be Your Publisher”. Peter is on a panel about “Innovation in Marketing and Business Practice.” He caught our attention because he’s been training his authors in digital marketing for years and because he told us he was thinking that the agent’s model had to change to handle fewer clients for a higher-than-standard percentage of the revenue. We didn’t ask Peter at the time how he felt about agents becoming publishers.

It turns out he is very firmly against it and is very clear and articulate about why he thinks that. The moderator of that panel is Richard Mollet of the Publishers Association. I’m sure his membership will very much want him to invite Cox to expand on his ideas. Cox’s panel takes place after Campbell’s but before Geller’s. The juxtaposition of the commentary across the panels will probably be of great interest to the audience and should make for some very interesting tweeting. Maybe we’ll need a special hashtag just for #agentsaspubs!

It was the fourth agent on the program that we thought was going to have the trickiest assignment. David Miller of Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd. will be discussing “Territorial Rights and Open Markets” with Richard Charkin and Toby Mundy. Since the future of both practices depends very largely on what agents will agree to as the publishing landscape changes, I had thought David had the most politically challenging conversation of the group. It turns out that he’s excused from what will certainly be one of the most controversial aspects of the day’s discussions, although in our very open format, everybody’s free to say pretty much what they want. Perhaps Philip Jones, the moderator of that panel, will want to touch on this question with his panel as well.

It might be that at Publishers Launch Frankfurt we’ll stage this more directly as a debate (but that’s a crowded program and it might be hard to fit it in). You can bet it will be aired thoroughly at Digital Book World next January. And you can be pretty damn sure we’ll be generating some news on this topic (and others too, I’m sure) out of “A Global View of Digital Change”. If you’re in (London) town on June 21, you ought to be there.

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I had a lunch conversation this week with three successful literary agents, who will remain anonymous for this post. They wanted to talk about the panel we’re having at Digital Book World called “The Changing Author-Agent Relationship: How Will It Affect the Business Model?”

That panel was born when I engaged an agent last summer with my observations about digital change and tried to recruit her to join a panel discussion about it. “Suppose you work with an author to develop her manuscript so your creative input becomes part of the work. Then you can’t sell it, or you get only a token offer for it, and the author wants to self-publish. Shouldn’t you, or any agent in that spot, be entitled to something in that case?”

The agent, sensing quickly that I was going to a model of “author pays agent for consulting help” said, “I can’t participate in a conversation like that. We have a canon of ethics in the AAR, and that might well run afoul of it.”

As it turns out, the canon of ethics of the AAR only explicitly prohibits agents from charging “reading fees” to prospective clients. Other charges are explictly permitted, such as for xeroxing and messengers. And others, such as consulting on self-publishing options, aren’t mentioned.

But, still, the question of whether the business model needs to change remains. The kind of book advances that agents have made a living on for years are diminishing in number. And now that self-publishing is legitimately part of the commercial continuum, authors have a right to expect that their career business manager, which an agent is, will employ it, or suggest that they do, when it makes sense. And agents will have a right to expect to be paid for that.

Of course, that’s not what these three successful working agents do. Their business assets are their personal knowledge of and relationships with acquiring editors; their ability to shape a writer’s concept and proposal into a commercial book; their knowledge of the ins and outs of book contracts and publishers’ accounting procedures. Exploring and keeping up with the various print and electronic self-publishing options: starting with Author Solutions and Smashwords, but including many others including our client Bookmasters, lulu.com, and many others, is a fulltime job in itself. (There’s a string started on Brantley’s list today by Joe Esposito who noticed announcements for four new self-publishing startups in his email in the past few days.) And searching out the authors with the money to self-publish, let alone to pay for advice on how to do it effectively, is also not what the successful agent in the current marketplace does.

I had spoken at a Writer’s Digest conference two months ago and told aspiring writers “get an agent” but also, “make sure the agent knows about the self-publishing options.” These very professional and desirable agents did not. But they agreed that when ten or thirty or fifty times a year a project they’d developed goes off for self-publishing, they’ll want to have a way to monetize that. We agreed that the likely solution will be an alliance with somebody who perhaps positioned themselves more as a “consultant” to aspiring authors. There is no shortage of such people.

The conversation turned to contract terms, particularly regarding ebooks. The agents asked me: “don’t the big trade publishers see that the strategy of paying authors half or less of what many ebook publishers will pay on digital book royalties isn’t sustainable? that we’ll end up splitting those deals?” I told them that I had raised this point with Big Six CEOs and they all said, “we won’t buy print-only; never happen.” The big publishers are counting on the authors’ (and agents’) desire for the advance to keep them locked into the current model. (Richard Curtis made this same point in a recent eReads post.) It is clear that the idea of splitting off ebooks from print contracts is one that these agents have been thinking about for a while. The relative attraction of the advance goes down as the level of ebook sales on which you’re taking half or less of what you could get goes up.

We also spent a little time discussing “verticals” and my theory that power is moving from “control of IP to control of eyeballs.” In the past week, I’ve had two conversations with Hay House executives (they’re on the Digital Book World program too) about their business. To somebody with a trade orientation, it’s pretty phenomenal. They run between 30 and 100 live events a year for their community. They have over 1 million email addresses that drive the sales of all their books. One of the agents said he had an author for whom he sold a book to one of the Big Six houses and they sold twelve thousand copies. He sold the next title to Hay House and they sold two hundred thousand. How long will the Big Six houses be able to compete for big-potential books in Hay House’s sweet spot (mind-body-spirit), advances or no advances?

One of the agents at lunch does a lot with juveniles. “Do I have to worry about this ebook thing much?” that agent asked. Soon you will, I said. After lunch I was working with my frequent collaborator Ted Hill on a proposal we’re making for another conference on digital tipping points. One we were talking about is “when does the publishing house have editors shift their focus from developing a print book with an author, with the ebook as afterthought, to developing the best possible digital product, with the print book coming out of it?” That gave me an answer for that agent: you better have somebody on your team now who can see the digital book possibilities in every idea before you peddle it. Now that you’ve made me think about it, I realize that if you’re not fully exploring the creative possibilities for digital products for every kids book you develop, you’re already missing the boat.

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I was flattered to be asked to speak to the AAR last night as part of a very distinguished group. My fellow panelists were John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan; Morgan Entrekin, the CEO of Atlantic Monthly Press; the agent Larry Kirshbaum, who was CEO of TimeWarner’s book division (now Hachette Book Group);  and Susan Katz, the CEO of Harper’s juvenile division. The topic was the “future of publishing.” We each got ten minutes to introduce our thoughts about “the future of publishing”. I went feeling the need to make three points:

1. The shift from horizontal to vertical is inexorable, unstoppable. People need to understand what that means and, as uncomfortable as it is for many leaders of today’s trade, they need to start adjusting their business to meet that shift. I wasn’t expecting any agreement, or even any recognition of this fact, from my fellow panelists. It’s still sort of my own private little point in trade publishing circles (but I’ll keep making it).

2. The impression I was getting from our BISG research for “Shifting Sales Channels” is that a) big publishers are feeling the pain more than smaller ones, b) people are seeing backlist erosion they hadn’t seen before (although that was contradicted at a lunch I had yesterday with a publisher who follows BookScan numbers closely and said backlist was holding pretty firm); and that the pain was much worse in Q408 than in Q109. Publishers are feeling excess pain at the moment, of course, because they’re taking returns from the Fall against smaller frontlist buys. But, in any case, books are down a lot less than a lot of other discretionary things.

Short conclusion: books may not be recession-proof, but they might be recession-resistant.

3. Trade Books live in an ecosystem. The publishers and agents in the room last night were mostly in the business of fiction and narrative non-fiction and juveniles. But if sales of travel books, craft books, and cookbooks go down, it hurts the stores. And if a store loses 10% or 15% of its business, it could close. Whatever publishers are seeing in growth of online sales, they should never forget that retailers give priceless exposure of their books, and only fullline bookstores give that exposure to just about all their books. The agents and writers and publishers can be just as smart as they’ve ever been, but if the bookstore shelf space shrinks, and it is doing that, the results will not be the same as they’ve always been.

All of my fellow panelists had useful contributions to make but I took most note of John Sargent’s points. He made it clear that big publishers are in troubled times. He pointed out that all big publishers work with borrowed money and want to be working with less of it. So they’ll be “de-leveraging.” That means smaller advances to authors, smaller printings, and tighter financial controls all around. He also reported that Macmillan had invested many more millions in ebook infrastructure last year than they had realized in ebook sales (in response to suggestions from some, including publisher-turned-agent Kirshbaum, that perhaps ebook royalties should rise.)

I made one point at the end that I was a bit surprised seemed new to just about everybody. Very few had taken on board that the difficulties in the trade book business are partly due to the Long Tail: the fact that Amazon’s retailing and Ingram’s Lightning Print (particularly) is making it easy for people to buy books that would have been dead a decade or two ago is just increasing the competition for every book that is newly published tomorrow. (And, of course, throw used books in there too, part of the Long Tail and largely enabled by Amazon.)

This is the same phenomenon that has made it harder for new bands to break out for years: a kid today can still “discover” the Beatles or Bob Dylan and have dozens of songs to listen to and learn without any regard to what is “new”, because the Beatles and Dylan are new to them! We haven’t (yet) had the situation where a multi-book novelist from the 1880s or the 1930s becomes a new addiction, but we’re bound to eventually. And in the meantime, all those Long Tail units are just making the slope to success a little steeper for every new book.

I also told the agents (and, because I did, I want to tell you) about a brand new business I’m involved in called Filedby which, I’m happy to say, is addressing the Long Tail question from another direction. Filedby is now live with a web page for 1.8 million authors — every single one with a live ISBN in the US or Canada. The pages, already mounted, are “claimable” by the authors, providing a big head start on a personalized web page that Filedby has provided largely through  automation. We see an enormous opportunity in helping authors help themselves. There are a lot of them not getting much help from their publishers. Frankly, except for Morgan Entrekin — who explictly spoke about working the internet finding the audiences for books that would sell between 6,000 and 25,000 copies — nobody was offering much hope that the publishers would be doing more for the authors in the days to come. Everybody seems to be looking to authors to do more for themselves. I think my co-founder Peter Clifton and I picked a very good time to be starting this business.

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