Stellar eclipse
From the OTHE SIDE OF THE DESK
Mega-bucks mega-authors and their powerful agents have tipped the balance of the royalty scales so far in their favour that there’s slim pickings for everyone else. Literary agent Piers Blofeld sets a case for redressing an unfair imbalance
Piers Blofeld
Legendary agent Ed Victor was famously supposed to have said that if a client earned royalties it meant that his agent had not negotiated a big-enough advance. In its time this statement was seen as a sign of his big-beast bravado and how good he was at getting money out of publishers on behalf of his clients.
I was reminded of it because Jonny Geller, CEO of Curtis Brown, the UKs largest literary agency was quoted in the Bookseller as complaining, diplomatically, at the lack of ‘partnership’ with publishers and a model based on ‘big advances, low back end’. The publishing model, he seems to be saying is too adversarial, possibly worse than that.