I’ve been good. I’ve been really, really good because some of the people I know and care about are involved in this. But here we go, foot in mouth. Again.
The publishing industry is stumbling from crisis to crisis, but in a way, that’s always been so. Throughout history, things tend to happen despite people, who then look around with a bewildered air and scratch their heads, as if nobody warned them.
Because they didn’t. They weren’t listening. They weren’t looking in the right places. “Let the instigators take up all the slack, we’ll move in later.” After all, it worked for Clarence Birdseye.
That excellent pundit, Sarah Hoyt, compared the changes currently taking place to Cornwallis surrendering to Washington. But that was similar. In those days before broadband, TV and even the telephone, America seemed so far away that it didn’t matter to the powers-that-were in Europe. So at the time, it was a little local difficulty that the willfully blind people in Britain brushed aside as less important than the balance of power falling apart in Europe. True, but it was only later generations who reaped the reward and came to a full understanding of what happened when Europe let America slip out of its grasping hands. Didn’t make the same mistake with Africa and India, at least they learned that much.
People will always look at the short term and use solutions that have worked in the past. They’ll commission reports and surveys that give them the answers they want (I know that one—I used to do it for a once-powerful consumer giant that is now no more. If I hadn’t, I’d have lost my job). In the end, they’ll probably win, and a new market will reform from the old, with a few new entrants, and maybe one giant. But we always do what we’re comfortable with, until the new way makes it completely impossible.
So sending material out to agents in the hope of snaring a big publisher is the way to go. Or it was. But with the long lead times the companies demand, that strategy is more dangerous than it used to be, because the industry is changing fast. In two years that publisher might have changed, and the contract you signed might not mean as much as you thought.
Publishers are taking action. They are taking fewer new authors, concentrating on their big authors, dropping midlist authors. They’re cutting advances to the bone, but they aren’t always offering the royalty commensurate with that, so gaining a few years of milking the author before the author gets wise and demands more. That will give them the cushion they need to adapt to their new market. Sell the expensive offices in Manhattan? Are you crazy? That’s where it’s at.
As a consequence, agents are being squeezed. In the last twenty years they have become the gatekeepers for the bigger publishers, doing the screening that hired interns used to take care of. Most of the big publishers are agented-only, which means they are closed to anyone who doesn’t produce what they are expecting to get.
Agents are still receiving floods of queries, but they’re not selling like they used to. Not their fault, they are working on the old model of getting to know editors and what they wanted. They even adapted to the increasing dominance of the marketing department and its emphasis on “product” rather than books. MBAs trained to dissect and analyze, and if it means ripping the heart out of the industry, so be it (and before MBAs start screaming about their value, you should know that I have one of those. Been there, done that. And, yeah, the money’s good, but I still walked away).
But don’t feel sorry for the agent. They’ve found a new source of income. More and more are opening their own self-publishing ventures. I don’t care what fancy words they put around it or how they describe it, they are acting as third parties, distributors. This doesn’t just damage their relationship with the writers, it damages the relationship with the publishers, too. The writer can no longer trust the agent to recommend the best possible deal if at the end of the day the agent has that self-publishing/vanity publishing option. And the possibility of generating extra income from that venture.
If they separated the self-publishing option completely, it might work better, but I doubt it. They’re still part of the same conglomerate, owned by the same people. Some agents are offering “services” to edit, give cover art, and format a book. Fair enough, you think, but it’s worth comparing what they do with the cost of employing an independent or several independents. However you cut it, it’s a conflict of interest.
How can that be right? That the person you are trusting to find you the best deal possible for your career has an interest in signing you to his or her own personal venture? I’m sure the agents mean well, at least most of them do, but before the world turned upside down, the AAR would have condemned this practice out of hand.
I’ve seen some really shoddy attempts at capitalizing on backlists recently. Inadequate cover art, poor editing, and one place only (usually Kindle). It made me angry that some of my favorite authors or their families thought so little of books that I’ve loved in the past that they’ll throw them away like that. That’s me as a reader, not me as a writer.
So sadly, I’ve decided to stop my Great Agent Hunt. Or to be even more careful who I apply to, because not every agent is into this, and I know they mean well. But there is no way I’d accept a deal with a publishing house, self-publishing house or whatever that my agent owns or has an interest in.
Douglas Adams was right.
