Agents sell. When they
do, they get paid. As and when monies come in for the clients, the
agent takes commission, which should only be commission from the
amount that has come in for the client. If for any reason a payment
is not made, the agent loses as well as the author. Bad debt is
actually rare in publishing, thank goodness. If agents don't
sell, or if they don't collect the monies due, they don't get paid.
Sometimes I think the job description of an agent must be a mix
of nanny and brothel keeper: kind, supportive and protective (to the
writer) and procurer and exploiter (when luring the editor to the
novel). Not every one of my workdays is as stimulating as that
though.
Joking
aside, agents must both protect and exploit their clients:
protect their rights, exploit their work. To this end, good
agents spend all of their working week (and a great deal of their
so-called spare time!) talking to editors, negotiating with
publishers, reading contracts and manuscripts, attending
prize-giving ceremonies and writers' conferences, giving talks and
writing articles, reading trade magazines and pitching their
authors' books at trade fairs and on foreign visits, and
breakfasting, lunching, dining and drinking with clients and
customers alike. This means they know what's selling, who's buying,
what the current rates and fashions are, and who's looking for what.
Those
bits sound interesting. Unfortunately, these social and stimulating
parts of the working week are not all that agents have to do. That
attractive list is balanced by a range of less glamorous activities:
chasing
overdue payments; checking royalty statements, publication dates and
whether the author has received their free copies; arguing with an
editor over a manuscript's acceptability; telling the author that
the book needs rewriting, or sometimes that their editor has turned
the new book down.
Agents
vary a lot in the amount of editorial work they are prepared to do.
We get paid for our sales, not our opinions, but our agency takes
the view that the better we can make the manuscript, they better the
deal we can do for it, and the better the long-term prospects for
the writer. So we throw the opinions in free, even though
reading the manuscripts and then editing them is the most
time-consuming part of the job.
Once
the first deal is made for a manuscript (usually, but not always, a
book rights' contract in the author's country of origin) the agency
starts to work in several additional areas at once. The agent
will monitor the relationship between the author and the publishing
company, not only to make sure that the author and the editor
are working well together, but also to keep an eye on the author's
relationship with the copy-editor, the publicity department and the
marketing department. In some cases the author may not have any
contact with these people. Authors seldom meet marketing executives
if there isn't a substantial marketing budget allocated to the book,
for instance, and should beware of pestering for marketing input on
books that don't warrant it, and which are likely to be review- and
PR-led. But a good agent should know these people anyway and be
ready to promote their writer to them at every opportunity.
I
have several times had to step in and gently mention to the
acquiring editor that they might take a close look at the manuscript
that has just come back from the copy-editor. It is unusual, but
not unknown, for copy-editors to sometimes exceed their brief and
start rewriting an author and changing their style. Inexperienced
authors, or simply those without a liking for confrontation, will
sometimes become very upset at this kind of situation, and if they
don't know how to handle it will talk first to their agent. It's
then easy for me to speak to the commissioning editor and ask them
to deal with the copy-editor. Not only does this preserve the
author's voice in the text (which, after all, is what the publisher
demonstrated they wanted, by purchasing it in the first place), but
if the publisher will reinstate the original text, it also saves the
author all the work of doing it.
If
the deal agreed gives the publishing company subsidiary rights to
exploit (book club, serial, large print almost certainly, American
and translation rights perhaps), then the agent should make sure
that the editor has briefed the publishing company's rights
department well. If the agent has interesting biographical material
on the writer, or reviews for earlier books, or rights sales
information for earlier books, it's only sensible to provide that
for the rights and publicity departments. A good editor will do that
automatically: a good agent will remind the editor or do it, and
will make sure the same material goes to the publisher's key export
offices around the world, or to the person in the head office
who is coordinating the publisher's export efforts.
Simultaneously
with monitoring the home market comes the beginning of the overseas
work. Offering the manuscript to American publishers and translating
publishers around the world, whether direct or through the agency's
co-operating agents worldwide, and starting to work on film and
television submissions is always exciting. I love the knowledge that
I've sold a book once but can sell it all over again - dozens of
times, hopefully!
We
circulate our client list, with details of all our current books,
very widely, and I issue a new one every month so that rights sales
information is kept up-to-date. Every new sale is listed so that
publishers in markets that are still free can see the calibre of
publishers who have signed up for the book so far. I send a long
chatty newsletter to all my foreign agents about three times a year
in addition to mailing them manuscripts, proofs (of books and
covers), and finished books and press cuttings with reviews, and
sales presenters and advertisements and catalogue pages from my
authors' publishers. The newsletter keeps them up to date with all
the latest news about our writers, including film and television
options and sales, manuscripts delivered or delayed, entries in the
bestseller lists around the world, new clients who have joined us,
clients who may have left, and snippets of information about our own
staff. That's a lot of work, but it pays dividends in the way that
our agents feel connected to our writers and to ourselves. And the
more my overseas agents know about my writers, and about the agency,
the better they can - and do - sell them.
All
of this, including mailing costs but not including actually
purchasing the text (copying manuscripts, buying proofs and finished
books from the publisher) is covered by the commission we charge. We
check that the client is happy for us to copy manuscripts (we do it
in the office and charge at cost) and will authorize us to purchase
proofs and books, and we charge the cost of these items against
monies we are sending to the client, We do not send invoices to our
clients for monies owing unless there are payments to set the
charges against, although I believe some agencies do.
Now
that it's so easy to e-mail manuscripts around the world we spend
less time and money on mail and courier deliveries. We only e-mail
manuscripts to scouts, agents and publishers with whom we have made
a prior arrangement to do so: companies in publishing do not like
receiving unsolicited manuscripts by e-mail. Authors should be
careful not to antagonize agents and publishers by sending material
in this way, or by disk alone. It is a courtesy to enquire first
if text is welcome because of the cost and time taken to print it
out.
Our
agency's film and television staff compile newsletters too, which
they mail around the world to film and television producers,
directors and broadcasters before the major film and television
festivals and markets. These carry news of all our books optioned
or bought for audio-visual rights, films distributed or television
work broadcast either from our books or from scripts by our
scriptwriters. When our first film and TV newsletter is produced
in each calendar year, usually for MIP TV in Cannes in April (the
international television market, which is quite different from the
better-known film festival which is held in Cannes in May), I also
mail that to our overseas book agents and do a wide mailing of it to
English language publishers. This is more for general information on
the agency's activities than anything else, because the relevant
publishers will already have been informed, as a matter of course,
where film or television deals have been struck for books they are
publishing.
Although
there are far fewer magazines publishing short fiction now than
there used to be, we do try to persuade our novelists to write some
short stories so that we can place them to coincide with the novel's
publication. There are few magazines serializing novels now, but
a short story will often carry with it a mention of the author's
latest novel. Every little bit of publicity helps. And while the
fee for a short story sold to, say, a British magazine, is never
huge, if it's possible to sell it to other markets as well, such as
Australia, South America, the Scandinavian countries and Holland,
the accumulated fees, plus the publicity generated for the author's
novel, make the writing of it worthwhile.
Short
stories have proved quite lucrative for some of our clients. Teresa
Crane and Barbara Erskine both began their writing careers by
concentrating on stories for women's magazines. Some years ago, when
Barbara Erskine's publisher was worrying about the fact that she
wouldn't have an Erskine novel in the next calendar year (Barbara's
novels are long and often require a lot of research so it takes her
almost two years to deliver each new one), I suggested rather
diffidently that she could publish a volume of Barbara's stories. I
say I suggested it diffidently because the publishing trade has
always believed that 'short story volumes don't sell'. The
stories I was offering had all appeared in print in magazines over a
period of years. The publisher jumped at the chance. They published
a large hardback of more than forty stories (Encounters,
now a Fontana paperback) and, having retained serial tights, we
sold six of them to six different women's magazines to coincide with
publication of the volume. I was particularly pleased about the
magazine sales because this meant these stories had been paid for
three times in the UK alone - by a magazine first, then by the
publisher and then by another magazine: deeply satisfying. Barbara
now has a second volume of stories, Distant Voices.
More
recently, Maeve Haran's German publisher, keen to publish her more
often than she could write full-length novels, also raised a
contract for a volume of her stories. These stories will be
published in German in book form without appearing in book form in
English first. Another translating first has been achieved for
Barbara Erskine because of her short stories: the first time any of
her work appeared in Japanese it was a collection of her stories
which a Japanese publisher put together by making a selection from
Barbara's two English language volumes of stories.
By
the time we get to the first publication date for a novel, we hope
to have several overseas sales. So when we send finished books
to our agents, and the publishers who will be translating, we give
them news of the editions signed up so far.
Once
the books are published, we collect press cuttings (and extra
covers) for our authors' books from their publishers around the
world, and send everything from every market, to each publisher
who has bought the book. The covers are particularly useful
because publishers in the smaller markets (such as Norway, Denmark,
Estonia and Poland) don't always want to commission artwork
themselves in order to generate a new cover, and often couldn't
afford to do so. By showing them the range of covers that have been
designed by publishers in the larger markets (UK, USA and Germany,
for example) they can choose one and buy the right to use that
artwork from the publisher, usually purchasing a colour
transparency, perhaps with a disk linked to the art files, which
enables them to separate design from lettering.
At
the same time, we send all the press cuttings to our agents in
markets that have not yet bought the book. It's a lot of work and
expense and occasionally I wonder if it's worth it. But at every
book fair I have ever attended at least one publisher has told me
that getting all the press for an author regularly is very valuable
to them. They can pick up on marketing ideas from other
countries, use favourable review quotes on their covers, and brief
their own sales people more widely than if they were ignorant of
what was going on in other markets. So we still do it.
