Literary Agents and Conflicts of Interest – A Compendium

Passive Guy missed a request from Dean Wesley Smith a couple of days ago. Dean wrote about The Trident Literary Agency claiming it could do publishing better than Penguin’s Book Country. He mentioned PG’s various posts about literary agents getting into conflict of interest situations with their clients when the agent’s own financial interests were no longer aligned with the financial interests of the author.

Dean suggested that PG point to his posts on this topic.

PG did some checking and discovered he’s been a chatty guy about conflicts of interest.

Here is a listing of PG’s conflict of interest posts. In some cases, most of the post is PG’s deathless prose. In other cases, the posts are mostly someone else’s writing with a few bon mots from PG. He thinks this is everything.

• Agents in Conflict with Authors - May 13, 2011
• How Agents Can Avoid Conflicts of Interest - May 14, 2011
• How Convenient: Publishing Not a Conflict of Interest for Agents After All - June 18, 2011
• Dystel & Goderich Does Indie Pubbing as an Agent – June 28, 2011
• Big Conflict of Interest Suit Against Agent – July 21, 2011
• Agents in Conflict with Clients – Issues and Responses – July 26, 2011
• An Open Letter to Agents – Must Read – July 26, 2011
• Conflict of Interest? Agents Don’t Want to Know – July 27, 2011
• Agents Who Publish Their Clients are Engaging in Unethical Behavior – Courtney Drops the Hammer – July 27, 2011
• Agents Are Becoming Publishers Because They Don’t Think Legacy Publishers Will Survive – July 28, 2011
• How to Read a Book Contract – Agents and the Law – July 29, 2011
• Another Agency Shoots Itself in the Foot Announcing an “Assisted Self-Publishing Initiative” – July 30, 2011
• Agent as Publisher? Ethical Problem and Conflict of Interest – August 2, 2011
• An Argument Against Agent-Publishers – September 7, 2011
• Agents Who Want to Be Publishers: Get Author Consent in Writing – September 23, 2011
• A New Company Helps Clients of Literary Agents Self-Publish E-Books – October 3, 2011
• Agency Sells 520 Books in a Single Deal – October 14, 2011
• It’s So Much Easier to Sell 520 Books in One Deal When the Authors Are Dead – October 20, 2011

Agents, Dean Wesley Smith, Legal Stuff