Short and grumpy
A short and irritable email this week, inspired by a trio of author-interactions I’ve had in the weeks since Christmas.
Three authors. Three stories. Here they are.
Author #1
Sells her debut book to a Big 5 publisher for a reasonably good advance. Lots of excitement, lots of mwahs, lots of happiness.
The excitement and happiness lasts for a while, but in the weeks before publication something in the atmosphere starts to fade. A cover reveal is mishandled on Twitter. A publicist is changed, a bit abruptly. Actual, tangible marketing activity seems hard to locate.
The author happens to grumble – a bit – to me about it. I ask the author what the level of supermarket orders is. She asks her editor (with whom she still has a decent relationship.) Editor says, roughly, “No, a bit disappointing unfortunately but, yay!, orders from Waterstones are yadda yadda, blah blah, change the subject.”
The marketing never materialised.
That’s author #1.
(Info on how to get published can be found here.)
Author #2
Has a reasonable track record over several books. Sales in one (smallish territory) have been good. Sales in the bigger, more influential markets have been weak, probably due to inattentive publishing. Reader reviews and critical reception has always been strong.
Anyway, after a hiatus, Author #2 writes another book and gets a (perfectly fine) offer direct from a publisher.
She goes to her agent with the offer. It is now that agent’s job to turn that offer into a contract, and to knit together a set of deals across the various English language territories, so that the author has a proper sales platform to work with.
But – after weeks of delay – the agent dumps the author. Nothing to do with the author; more a change of direction for the agent.
Now, it’s perfectly OK for agents to alter direction, of course, but that doesn’t, to my mind, mean that you can desert your existing clients at their moment of greatest need. On the contrary, you need to get the deal done, then move on. You take on those obligations when you take on clients. Like it or lump it.
That’s one thing, but there’s another. In this case, the agent was and is part of a large and well-resourced agency with plenty of other agents. So if Agent X wants to change direction, she should damn well speak to her colleagues and say, “We can’t, as an agency, let our client down, so please can someone step in here for me.”
That didn’t happen.
The author – the admirable Author #2 – has a publishing offer that urgently needs attention and she’s been abandoned by both her agency and her agent. Great.
(Info on how to get an agent in the first place can be found here.)
Author #3
This author email wasn’t even especially grumbly. It was just a “hi, how are you” from someone I last talked to years ago.
But one snippet from that conversation struck me. Author #3 got an agent. Agent launches the manuscript at the Big 5 publishers and their immediate competitors. Some nice words came back, but no offers.
The author then thought, “Well, that’s disappointing, but there’s a slew of smaller publishers who might be interested,” … only to discover that her agent had no intention of approaching them. Their relationship ended right there, over the corpse of an unsold book.
And I don’t like any of this. Not one bit of it.
Here’s what I think:
- Author #1: What happened here was that a big publisher killed its marketing efforts when it didn’t get sales from supermarkets. What should have happened was that the marketing effort pivoted to be Amazon-led, not supermarket led. But no such pivot happened. The publisher hasn’t yet come clean with the author, and likely never will, but when the supermarket orders failed, that author’s career was dead – even before the first book of a two-book deal was even published.
- Author #2. Agents can’t abandon authors when authors most need their help. It’s fine to part company, but you have to take the author’s needs in mind when it comes to timing. And big agencies should act like big agencies. If one agent is forced to step out, another should gladly step in. That shouldn’t be forced on the agency by a plaintive author. It should – obviously – be the way the agency wants to approach its business.
- Author #3. If an agent takes on an author, they should take that author on. Yes, a small publishing deal will earn peanuts for the agent, but it’ll quite likely be one of the most important things ever to happen to the author in question. An honourable agent should let the big deals pay for all the deals that never quite happened.
And many agents, agencies and publishers are deeply honourable about these things. I don’t want to suggest that malpractice is rife across the industry. But it is too common.
And I don’t like it.
These things are almost never the author’s fault. It’s just crappy behaviour by people who should know better. But because authors are (weirdly) relatively powerless in their own industry, there are no effective sanctions against bad behaviour. These things come down to a question of honour. Of honouring the broader contract between author and agent, or between author and publisher.
What can we do about it? Not a lot, except call it out when we see it.
What can you do about it? Not a lot, except know that you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not you, it’s them. Oh yes, and if you start to feel like you are being badly treated by your agent or publisher, then you are quite likely right to think so. It’s time to start making plans to move on.
There.
Rant over.
As promised: it was grumpy.
Alas, however: it was not also short. My bad. I can’t really do short. Sorry.
I shall be sunnier next week. I shall be Mr Sunshine, with my tapshoes on. I have given you a sunny header image to brighten your soul.
And what about you? I think this week we should scrap the Heated Debate and go straight into your experience of Planet Agent and the World of Publishing. What’s been good? What’s been bad? Let’s eat an ice cream and talk about it.
I’ve had mixed experience with agents I have to say. I’ve not been lucky enough to have one so far, but I’ve spoken to plenty – I even had a drunken night in the pub with one once- purely by chance which was an eye opener.
This particular agent had around 80 authors and worked for a middling size agency – she’s since gone solo but at that time she was an employee! Anyway – of the 80 she represented only 8-10 of them made her any real money – so guess where she spent most of her time? Right – which in a way I can understand you need to look after the cash cows – but by ‘neglecting’ the others – her words not mine, she felt incredibly guilty but the pressure she’d been put under meant about 90% of her clients were on a ‘care & maintenance basis.’
She reckoned she spent a fraction of the time on their manuscripts and even less time trying to place their output with publishers. I asked her, ‘how do they feel about the fact you;re too busy to be bothered with them?’
She shrugged and said, ‘Most of them don’t know the difference anyway.’
For me that kind of sums up an authors lot, if we don’t know what we are supposed to get when we sign up with an agent, how can we tell if they’re any good? Or are we thinking any agent is better than no agent.
Thatr’s the thing. They don’t know the difference. It slowly dawns, over years.
That said, my agent has some yuuuuge clients – Hilary Mantel, for example – but he’s always always put in a shift for me. Now, OK, I probably earn him a good bit more than most of his list, but he put in a shift even when I was chasing much smaller deals. The difference is ethics. My agent has em. Some don’t.
I have had two agents and where that might sound fortunate it wasn’t! The first enthused about my novel and promised me edits (are agents supposed to do edits?). The edits never came but my author profile was put on the agency website. I’m not sure if my manuscript was ever sent to publishers and my enquiries got a brief response. Sometime later the agent (this was her first list) told me she’d ‘lost interest’ in my work.
Agent two was very nice and sent the same novel to just about every publisher. There were no takers. She also sent out a second novel and again no takers. I was fresh from uni and knew nothing about agents and publishing, or writing novels it seems. When I learnt more about all three I realised how bad the novels were and how no publisher in their right mind would have published them (oh yes they really were bad). I also realised that the first agent was probably not experienced or discerning enough to know a good book and agent two probably hadn’t even read my novels. I felt disappointed for being told my stories were publishable (firstly by uni tutors but that’s another story) and also quite embarrassed!
Yeah. That’s not agents in general, that just crap agents. A half decent agent wouldn’t take on a weak manuscript.
It’s a relief that on the whole the agent model seems to work well. In other industries such an imbalance of power between professional and client, with the chance of clients’ finances and well-being taking serious damage, would be a signal for external regulation. I don’t know if anything like that exists for literary agencies or publishing in general.
Absolutely none. And the ethics of the larger publishers is sometimes questionable. Sad but true!
I suspected as much. But including users’ voices and responding to their needs and opinions – be they clients, patients, citizens – is becoming more common in the rest of life. Hope springs eternal 🙂
I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you. Shocked…😮
I’m not. I had an agent who took me on after one draft. I followed her indications for two subsequent drafts, the first of which she liked, but after the second she decided that too much work was still needed and that was a good enough reason to drop me. She couldn’t be bothered to wait for one more draft because I hadn’t yet made her any money. The worst part was how she’d been praising my work until then so it came completely out of the blue, right at the time when my mother died. Not that agent knew, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.