With a Little Help (51 page)

I'm Cory Doctorow's literary agent. I advise him on various business and editorial aspects of his writing career and I negotiate licenses to commercial organizations like book publishers and movie studios. When I sell a piece of writing to such an organization, I receive 15% of what the author makes, and that's how I make a living.

Like any literary agent, I need to keep my clients happy and loyal, which means selling whatever they need me to sell. A small press deal could earn me as little as $150 on a $1,000 advance, but the same client might have a national bestseller that earns me enough to put a kid through private college. I handle all these deals, large and small, because it's what you do when taking care of a writer's entire body of work. But there's always
something
.

In the case of this volume, we're not licensing any rights to any organization, and so there are no fees or royalties due the author and therefore nothing for me to take 15% of. I'm getting bupkes.

And yet I've happily been one of Cory's "friends" putting the project together: giving him some advice and ideas on various aspects of the project; composing a little contract regarding one aspect of his relationship to lulu.com; and donating some of my office staff time to maintaining certain records relating to the venture.

Why would I do such a thing? It's not
pro bono
. I'm only in it for the money.

Publishing economics are ridiculous. Suppose we'd sold this volume to a conventional publisher, and let's call it a $15.95 trade paperback. The author's share would be 7.5% of the cover price, or $1.17. We're leaving 92.5% -- $14.78 -- to bookstores and publishers. There's no room to negotiate a better share for the author because most of that $14.78 goes to people who won't reduce their shares: bookstores, paper suppliers, printers, warehouses, shippers, the owner of the publisher's office building, taxes, and so on.

It's a business model that enables only a tiny fraction of authors to make even a modest living, while employees of publishing houses enjoy solid middle class lives with salaries, health care, pensions, and expense accounts. Most authors need another job or a supportive spouse to be able to create books. Or, if they can support themselves from writing, their income is frighteningly erratic.

Bad as that model is, we'll soon look back at it as a Golden Age, because the future will be worse. I'm old enough to remember when the choice was between NBC, CBS, ABC, whatever was at the local movie theater, or a book. Those days are long gone, of course, and we ain't seen nothin' yet in terms of the share of our minds devoted to new media. Book sales have been trending down for a generation, and haven't bottomed.

As a result, authors' incomes are way down. Those of us who work on the business side of writing have always tried to think of new ways for writers to make money, but now that quest has taken on a new desperation.

New technologies make it theoretically possible to cut out some of the middlemen, enabling writers to derive more income from each copy sold, and reach more readers. We need to find out if this can work.

I've built a career within the conventional publishing industry. Would I care if that industry were destroyed by a new model? Editors out of work, bookstores taken over by rats and squatters? Not really. As long as there's a way for writers to get their work to readers and be paid a fair amount for what they provide, I'm content. All of us in the publishing industry are a mere support structure: we don't have intrinsic value. We're there to help writers find readers. Anyone who finds that he's no longer doing that, and has in fact become an obstacle, needs to get a new job.

It's not just that there might be a way for writers to earn more from each copy of a book that they sell. The current model ensures that only certain kinds of books can be published commercially in the first place.

For instance, like most people I have my own little area of passionate interest. In my case it happens to be nature, wildlife, and the environment. I like to experience wild nature and I like to read about it. Sometimes I can help an author create a commercial book about that subject, but all too often the material is just too narrow and specialized. Commercial publishers can't touch such books, and so they either don't get published or are published by university presses, which often means very expensive books that are under-marketed and never find their audience.

When I daydream about a new publishing model, this is what I secretly dream of. Not my million dollar clients becoming five million dollar clients: that would be nice but I don't daydream about it. What I dream of is the book about slime-mold that can't be created because it would only sell 2,500 copies and earn the author less than $5,000. I dream that using new technologies and distribution methods, we could find a way to sell 10,000 copies, earning the author $20,000, making the book doable for him.

You don't have to share my interest in slime-mold -- which is actually fascinating, but don't get me started on that -- to see that there are millions of worthy books that will never find a mass audience and never interest the stressed-out commercial publishers of today.

That's what we're trying to do. Experiment with a new publishing model that might show a way that we could reach more people, and keep more of the selling price for the author, than the old way.

Where do I fit in? I can imagine a world where there's no bookstore and no publisher, but I can't imagine a world in which authors -- or any other kind of freelance artist -- operate alone, without a business partner, advisor, editorial consultant, and manager. I know Cory needs me. I just can't figure out how he's going to pay me. I'm in this project to explore that question.

For Cory to pay me, he first must make money for himself. Literary agents can and should only be paid on a commission basis: that is, as a percentage of what the author earns. I would not accept an hourly fee or a flat sum. A lawyer can be nicely paid for setting up a nonprofit or for otherwise working on a venture that doesn't make money. But not a literary agent. For me to prosper, my clients must prosper.

That means that if I'm to benefit from this mode of publishing, it has to be profitable, so that I can receive some share of the profits. There's no media conglomerate forking over fees; profits are the only money that might be available to be divided up. I don't know if "With A Little Help" will be profitable, but it has the potential to earn a profit. If it doesn't, it won't be because the model is wrong, but because we did it wrong, or because the time isn't right for it. We'll learn; change the formula; wait for the culture or the technology to evolve; and then come back and try it again.

By volunteering some of my time and talent to the project, I'm in a position to educate myself about what does and doesn't work in this crucial area: generating a profit in this new publishing model. If you want to say, "Typical agent, only cares about money, has no soul and no taste for art," go right ahead. Lack of money is art's abortionist, killing off too many God-possibled projects that are conceived but never born. I'm here to help my clients make money. They, and the slime-molds, need me.

I hope to take what I learn and do a better job next time, advising Cory (or other clients one day) on how to make money from this mode of publishing. I'm trying to be as useful to him as I can be, but I'm really preparing for a time when this might be my primary source of commissions. I feel it coming.

In this new model, the term "literary agent" might fall out of use, since the word "agent" means "the person who gets you the money." Already some literary agents like to use the word "manager" to provide a broader sense of our role as literary counselors and not mere deal-brokers.

But I like the word "agent" because it is my job to find you the money and that shouldn't change. Managing is simply one of the skills an agent uses to get that money in the first place, like a used-car salesman who details the car and changes the oil before showing it to customers. What will change is where the money comes from and what kind of management skills I'll need to help get it. It could be something like being a partner in a small business -- with each book its own individual small business -- and receiving a share of profits, if any. That is, of course, already what I do, helping to run the day-to-day business of our agency, and so it won't be that radical a change.

It might not be as much fun as calling up some international media conglomerate, wresting a few million dollars out of its hide, and keeping 15% for myself. I'll miss that. In exchange, I won't have to listen to them, either, and I won't have to devote my life to selling them only what they want to buy, which is not necessarily what I want to represent, or what people want to read.

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