Another Agency Shoots Itself in the Foot Announcing an “Assisted Self-Publishing Initiative”
What is it with agencies and new initiative announcements this week?
First, Bookends does less than well in announcing its “Strategy for Self-Epublishing” and now The Knight Agency screws up its “Assisted Self-Publishing Initiative.”
Do all you people buy your bottled water from the same source? Are these examples of your online savvy and how well you will do in promoting your authors with blogs and tweets and social media?
You already know about Bookends. Allow Passive Guy to tell you about The Knight Agency.
1. On Wednesday, Sarah Hoyt blogged about deciding to no longer have an agent and go indie.
2. Sarah said good things about her agent, a welcome contrast from previous agents. However, as with many authors, Sarah was concerned about major shifts happening in publishing that we’ve often discussed on this blog.
3. Sarah was also concerned that her agency had started their own digital publisher and specifically concerned about conflicts of interest, just like lots of those who criticized Bookends for doing the same thing.
4. Early on Friday, Sarah received an email from her agent that said, in part, “I’m very disappointed that you’ve said something very publicly that I feel damages my reputation and that of the agency. I do hope you will print a retraction.”
5. Shortly thereafter, Sarah received a phone call from the agency owner threatening legal action.
6. Sarah wrote a lengthy blog post apologizing for any misunderstanding, reiterating her very clear earlier statements of admiration for her agent. She included a copy of the agency email announcing the new business that triggered her decision to be unagented. Sarah helpfully interspersed comments between the paragraphs of the email about her understanding of the email together with the concerns that came to mind about ambiguities in the explanation of the agency’s future new business venture.
7. It appears that Sarah’s greatest sin, in the eyes of The Knight Agency, was saying “they’ve started their own digital publisher” instead of saying the agency had started an “assisted self-publishing initiative.”
Well, of course, everyone knows the difference between a digital publisher and an assisted self-publishing initiative. (For a giggle, PG googled “assisted self-publishing initiative” and found the only people using that term anywhere on the web are associated with the The Knight Agency or Sarah in her clarification blog posts.)
Here are some excerpts from Sarah:
Be that as it may, last I checked, calling someone a publisher was neither an insult nor a libel. Heck, my favorite publisher has it put on her name tag at conventions. So it would be REALLY hard to make that stick. As is to make the idea that I perceive a conflict of interest as being a problem into a libel. It would be fairly hard to make it stick in any case when speaking of a post that labels itself as my reasoning process – i.e. my opinion.
. . . .
So, is The Knight Agency becoming a publisher? According to them, no. I’ll leave it at that. Did I mean to impugn their character? Absolutely not. Do I agree with the path they are taking? No. Does this mean I think everyone should run madly away from them? Positively not.
I was simply explaining my own reasons – and reasoning – for taking the action I did. And everyone informing me by various means that I’m wrong and the Knight Agency is the way to Win The Future or whatever it was, please note I made it a point of saying that making predictions is hard, particularly about the future. While my decisions often cause friends, acquaintances and passing strangers to say “WTF” I don’t think this is what they mean at all.
. . . .
Yes, as in all good Hollywood Divorces, while this marriage could not be saved, due to the party of the first part having decided the concept of agency is outdated, the relationship would have been fine with better communication and if someone hadn’t tried to scare someone else with a lawyer. As is… (Waggles hand) I hope all parties involved can find a way to dismount from the soap box and shake hands and be friends, if not now at some future point.
. . . .
[Following is one of the paragraphs from the Knight email and Sarah's response]
We’ll be taking our standard agency commission of fifteen percent (15%), absorbing all costs except those associated with copy editing. As always in our work as your agents, our objective is to allow you as the author to focus on what you do best, which is writing the most wonderful books possible while we take the time-consuming and tedious business elements off your shoulders. For our fifteen percent commission, we will provide self-publishing assistance in the following areas:
Okay, this was the crux of my problem. They don’t tell me they’re taking the 15% fee to cover the costs, they tell me it is their “standard agency commission.” I am a simple woman who reads these things far too literally, perhaps. “Agency commission, as far as I’m concerned means that they are taking a commission for selling the book. But to whom are they selling the book? Well… to the public. What does a publisher do? A publisher absorbs all costs, cover, etc, then sells the book to the public to recoup those costs and make a profit. Oh, hey, I’m going to be the first to say that 15% is a great deal in relation to what publishers offer. And if that contract has a firm termination date, it might even be a great deal overall. (As someone has noted on a blog, the costs associated with processing a book are arout $300. $1k if you go fancy. While for most small publishers publishing most authors the cost might well never be recouped even at a much larger percentage, the author has to ask himself how much he hopes to earn over the lifetime of the book. Income compounds, see. Suppose your book earns $200 this year but $1k next year and $10k the next… how good the deal is depends on how good your income is. I’m going to say – not just about the Knight Agency’s deal, but about the entire field that an author should insist on any epublishing contract coming with either a termination or a cancel at will after x time.) For all I know the Knight Agency does this. (According to Lucienne, it’s a 2 year term.) I haven’t seen a contract. This is merely a side note for those unfamiliar with digital publishing.
Meanwhile and for the record, the 15% means the agency has to collect it before forwarding the rest to the author, right? Which again is a function of publishers. Again, they say they’re not publishers and I believe it, but do you see the source of my confusion, and the source of my remaining discomfort? I’m perfectly willing to believe it drinks ammonia and eats arsenic, but I hate the fact that this schmerp looks like a bunny, okay? I would never trust it not to dig up the backyard. This is my paranoia and not meant to dispute the opinion of experts.
PG won’t copy the entire letter, but merely pronounce his assessment that the Bookends announcement and the Knight announcement share many of the same shortcomings.
Link to the rest at According to Hoyt
What separates the Knight announcement is the wonderful touch of threatening to sue one of the agency’s authors because the agency’s announcement was so poorly written that it caused the author to fire the agency. My, oh my, isn’t that a wonderful way to launch an assisted self-publishing initiative!
An old lawyer on the other side of negotiations involving PG many years ago had a favorite saying he repeated over and over during our meetings, “If it’s chocolate, you can call it vanilla all day long, but it will still be chocolate.”
PG will update the old lawyer’s saying: If it’s a digital publisher, you can call it an assisted self-publishing initiative all day long, but it will still be a digital publisher.
PG will close with three free tips about online marketing for budding online marketing geniuses at The Knight Agency:
1. Don’t threaten to sue somebody with a blog.
2. Don’t threaten to sue somebody with a blog who has friends with blogs.
3. Don’t threaten to sue somebody with a blog who has friends with blogs when you’re launching a new product.
Remember those three rules and all your mistakes will be new ones.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
[...] The Passive Guy put a head’s up in his blog about the nastiness that ensued when author, Sara Hoyt, blogged [...]
If you want to be a publisher, it’s simple. Just close your agency. Then become a publisher. I still don’t get what is so hard about that.
But until you can offer things I can’t do, and do better, on my own, I don’t care if you only want 1 percent. You can’t go from A to B because the digital world is already at D and counting. Go to E or F and we’ll talk.
Sounds like a way of avoiding any conflicts of interest, Scott.
I particularly like you advice at the end, PG. Hear, hear for new mistakes! I can hardly wait.
Thanks, Anthea.
I feel the lawsuits will come, both ways. Authors will sue the agencies that have branched into publishing when something goes wrong or they percieve it has gone wrong. This will happen more than once. When the courts find conflict of interest in one of those cases I expect a traditional publisher, a division of a large coporation that commonly buys other companies, will step in and say, “sell your publishing division to us”. The traditiional publishing company eliminates the conflict of interest and thus reduces the damage award, so their damage risk is lower. The traditional publisher gains a bunch of books and authors under contract, mostly ones who did not sue. They will try to amend and rewrite these contracts for their own interests. The agency shuts down and the principles retire or go on to other ventures.
William – I’m afraid you’re right about the lawsuits. There have been a few high-profile agent/author lawsuits in the past, but I expect more in the future.
I don’t know that a publisher would be anxious to acquire those contracts unless at a substantial discount to their value because if they were obtained using undue influence based upon the agent’s fiduciary relationship, a conflict of interest, etc., those contracts might be rescinded. If my author/client approved, I would likely argue the contracts were void from the beginning and the agent should cough up all monies they received under the contract.
I’ve been puzzling for a while whether “assisting” or “facilitating” self-publishing was perfectly okay for an agency. Since there are ways in which it seemed a natural extension of the proper function of a literary agent (i.e. helping the client make money from her writing), I thought the ethical parameters might quite different for this than for an agency that adds an epublishing branch to its business.
But having read about it, thought about it, discussed it, etc. in the past week… I’ve realized that the ethical flaws and conflict-of-interest issues are identical:
Whether becoming an epublisher or assisting/facilitating a client’s e-self-publishing in exchange for a commission… the agent/agency engaging in EITHER practice is setting up a business model wherein they generate profits for themselves by NOT submitting and selling clients’ work to publishers. So, as long as any client hired them or remains a client in expectation that their primary job is submitting and selling the clients’ work to publishers… the bottom line is that generating profit from NOT doing so is a clear conflict-of-interest quagmire no matter HOW the agency structures or phrases its intent to do exactly that.
Laura – I don’t have problems with assisting activities such as drumming up publicity for a book.
In the case of The Knight Agency, it appeared from the letter that the agency would obtain ISBN numbers which, in bulk, all carry the same publisher, so presumably, the author wouldn’t be listed as the publisher. It appeared the agency would be receiving and collecting royalties from Amazon, et al, which would almost certainly require that the agency be the publisher instead of the author.
I don’t claim there’s a bright line between agent and publisher for all types of self-publishing “assistance”, but an author can fire a PR firm that doesn’t do a good job and I didn’t see any indication the author could fire the agent/publisher at any time and take over complete control of her book.
Since your post, PG, Lucienne Diver has commented on Sarah’s explanatory blog post: “So, basically, you’re saying “I was wrong, but I stand by my erroneous statements and will not retract them and they’re mean for insisting I do so.” Yeah, I suppose that makes as much sense as your misrepresentation of our program.”
Was that perhaps the sound of The Knight Agency shooting themselves in the OTHER foot?
Bridget – Just keeping the fight they’ve lost alive. Their word-parsing would have embarrassed any lawyer.
Doesn’t it just make you want to run out and post a bunch of opinions all over the place?
I think The Knight Agency is becoming a digital publisher. I think they were blowing smoke up everyone’s anal cavities in their word parsing. I think they treated a former client badly who actually left with a kind public statement.
I think it takes a steady hand to inflict that much damage with one bullet.
Loren – Love the steady hand metaphor.
[...] The first was a link to, and comments on, Sarah Hoyt’s continued discussion about why she dropped her agent. [...]
All this sound and fury about agents … it feels like the death throes of yet another profession made redundant by technology.
They should enjoy the attention while they can get it. Within a few years, I suspect nobody will care. They’ll linger, but be largely irrelevant. Like video stores.
Agreed, Aaron.
What I can’t wrap my mind around is how people who are supposed to professional negotiators and networkers can shoot themselves in the foot like this.
Livia – They have a gut reaction to uppity authors.
An agency providing assistance to those wanting help with the business side of self publishing is fine. There are plenty of authors wishing to self publish who need help with covers, formatting, marketing, placing their product, etc. It’s providing a needed service.
The kicker is how they get paid for such services.
If I make salsa on a commercial scale, but want someone else to package it, they quote me a price to do so. They don’t take a cut of my sales, and sales are paid to me, not the packaging company.
Want to provide a service to budding authors? Make a menu of services and their cost. Flat fees. Taking a % and collecting all revenue = publisher.
As an outsider looking in, I defended the handful of agencies (e.g., Richard Curtis) who long ago e-published their clients’ backlists that had gone out of print. I still applaud the foresight they had nearly a decade ago that got them out in front of the curve. Even if they took 50% for their troubles, at the time anything the books made was more than the author was likely to make on their own. (Please note, these agent-publishers were NOT pubbing anything new — only titles where publisher rights reverted because the books were out of book.)
It was a decent transitional model. The problem comes that authors are still locked into contracts with some of those agents. 5 years is far too long to sign with anyone. Technology is changing too fast. What was a pretty good proposition even 4 or 5 years ago has authors tearing their hair in frustration and remorse now. Yet some of these agent-publisher agreements are not being renegotiated to reflect the current state of the industry. The crime is that the client relies on the agent to negotiate in the client’s best interest, yet the agent continues to negotiate in the *agent’s* best interest. (I’m currently hand-holding someone in this exact position.) How is that NOT a conflict of interest?
Obviously, my opinion about these early entrepreneurs has changed over time. What was once cutting-edge is already nearly obsolete.
For instance, when I see an agency not just listing but calling out “help with metadata” as part of their services and marketing aid, I have to wonder just how naive they believe their clients to be. (Although I have seen both big-name agent-publishers and Big 6 publishing imprints neglect that important 2-minute step when uploading client books – which is just sloppy and shoddy.) It’s like touting when a customer purchases new tires, the dealer will not only mount them but “put air in them” and “tighten the lugbolts.”
Unfortunately, agents as assistors/whatevers will succeed in scooping up a few poor souls into long-term contracts before general wisdom rewrites the selling points.
[...] The Passive Voice comments on the disagreement between Hoyt and her agent [...]