David Thayer

The other day I was attacked by a toy poodle whose teeth sank into my denim cuff forcing me to go about my daily chores with the dog attached as a sort of talking point-conversation piece along the lines of “did you know you have a dog attached to your leg?” In the interest of solid journalism I had to admit that I did know that, but I was trying to ignore it. This got me to thinking about literary representation. As an aspiring novelist I have been both the dog and the pantleg, alternatively clinging to, and being shaken from the ranks of the represented. In this matter I have had three literary agents. On the one hand three does strike me as excessive, on the other, let’s say I had forty agents. That would be impressive to some. Former executives at Enron, who will certainly have literary representation now that they’ve been convicted, will require just one agent.

My first agent issued the following set of instructions: never call, don’t write to me, don’t email me. If you see me on the street, pretend you don’t know me. Over the course of two years I did violate that directive from time to time if only to confirm her continued existence among us. Thus reassured I was able to focus my energies on writing.

We parted company and since that time she rose to prominence, only to fall from grace in a very public and strange manner. She was not a scammer, she did not charge reading fees nor was she entangled with a phony editing service. Literary agents receive money from publishers, place those funds in a trust acount, and disburse them to their authors minus commission. The allegations against her involved theft or alleged theft of client’s money, not once but twice, resulting in court orders, judgments, and all the things attendant thereto.

After reading about Absolute Write’s travails on the web I got to thinking about my former agent. Why would anyone spend a decade building a reputation, a business, a client list only to throw it all away? I’m feeling sorry for her, but I also know she wreaked havoc with countless writers, appearing at writers conferences to draw more moths to her peculiar flame. This is the first year her activities have caught up with her and she is off the list of agents invited to hear pitches, bestow advice, and bend the minds of the uninitiated. Her agency seems defunct.

What’s the take-away from this story? The relationship between author and agent is more complex than meets the eye. An agent is one part advocate, one part fiduciary. They run small businesses for the most part, and as a group are struggling to make a go of it. In the aggregate there are too many agents chasing the big five or six houses in New York. This is a massive shift from thirty years ago when editors and imprints outnumbered established agencies. Crunch time is approaching, and as writers we have to be more vigilant than ever about who is representing our work.
We’ll explore another facet of literary representation in our next episode of Don’t Call, Don’t Write.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 8:15 am and is filed under Publishing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.