That’s what The Bookseller is reporting today. The UK agents are talking about changing the Association of Authors’ Agents constitiution to allow them to become publishers. It’s not official yet, but evicently the talk is going around. According to The Bookseller:
The issue is not yet on the agenda of the next AAA meeting but the debate was sparked following Sonia Land’s decision to publish Catherine Cookson’s backlist digitally through her own company Peach Publishing, as well as Amazon.com’s continued courting of agents, with it currently hiring an editorial director.
The AAA constitution says anyone employed by a publisher should not be eligible for membership. Piers Blofeld of Sheil Land said the AAA should reflect the “fast-changing landscape” of publishing. He said: “There are obvious issues and potential conflicts of interest, but at heart the role of an agent is to offer advice and support to a writer on their writing career. We’re here to maximise their earnings. We’re not simply there to act as an interface between authors and publishers—that landscape has gone.”
More in the article.
Blofeld is right. Agent publishing makes sense, particularly for digital publication. I know families with valuable literary estates who hesitate to plunge into digital because the market is still unsettled and the likelihood of their being ‘taken’ by a major publisher high. If they have agents they trust to look out for their interests, it makes sense for those agents to subcontract the creation of digital books and to manage their distribution. The same could be true for print-on-demand titles.
Digital and print-on-demand books don’t require a large staff to manage the printing, inventory, warehousing, and shipping, eliminating one role a traditional publisher plays. Those agents may not be able to provide the publicity that a major publisher might provide. But if the author is already well-known that matters little, and if he is unknown the publisher unlikely to do much advertising anyway. Nor is the lack of on-the-road sales staff that important any more. Fewer brick-and-mortar stores and more online sales are making that work less important. You’re better off hiring someone who knows how to make a book look better on Amazon.
In short, if an agent can hire an editor to create a print-on-demand edition and send it to Lightning Source, that author will automatically get worldwide distribution and a posting on the major online stores. If that agent can hire an editor to create epub and Kindle editions, then digital distribution is also taken care of. The agent may not need or want to do everything. He doesn’t have to wear a dozen different hats. But he can contract out the more technical work and turn an himself into a credible de-facto publisher, splitting the savings between himself and the author.
The times are a’ changing, and agency groups like the AAA need to change with them.
–Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien