Agents As Publishers

Publishing is changing. Some days it feels like the Wild effing West out there. There's traditional, commercial (aka "legacy") publishing ala Random House or Simon & Schuster. There's small/indie press publishing like, oh, Llewellyn, Eraserhead or Behler Publications. There are big, successful epublishing firms like Ellora's Cave and Samhain and Loose Id. There's self-publishing ("indie") where you control the whole show, and its close cousin vanity publishing (where you pay a shit ton of money) to publish your book with shady places like AuthorHouse or PublishAmerica. There are author co-ops like Excessica (great place for out of the box erotica!) and newish hybrids like Summerhouse Publishing.

 

Those options are all valid choices for a writer. Some writers want to go the commercial route. Others want to go it alone and give self-publishing a try. Some authors write niche books best published by smaller, indie presses well-known in the genre. Others, like me, write erotic romance or erotica so epublishing is the natural choice. The advances for erotic romance in NY have gone down and the slots are few and far between.

 

Lately agents have been throwing their hats into the ring, acting as publishers for their clients. Conflict of interest much? It's not just that. Some of them are doing a shoddy ass job of it. (Catherine Cookson deserves so much better than those crappy covers.)

 

There is just so much wrong with an agent working as a publisher. It skeeves me out. Seriously. I was burned once by an agent, way back in my literary fiction writing days. She was a good agent, well-regarded and all that but she didn't have my best interests in mind. We parted ways mostly amicably and I forged ahead with a career focused on the spicier side of writing. In the end, everything worked out okay. But what if she'd published my lit fic novel under her agency imprint. I'd be tied to her for the duration of that contract. Awkward much?

 

Every time you send a book to your agent are you going to have to wonder whether or not he or she is really going to give their all to sell it to a commercial publisher? Will you be ballsy enough to negotiate a good contract? Will you even know if you're being taken? I mean, this agent of yours never steered you wrong when you signed those deals with XYZ so she wouldn't start now, right? What about distribution and POD?

 

If I went on the agent hunt again (and who knows I might hop on the query-go-round another time or two,) I'd be awfully leery of an agent with a publishing arm to the agency. Actually, I'd say hell no. Thank goodness other agents are saying the same thing.