Agents as publishers

The big news in the book world the other day was the announcement by agent Andrew Wylie that the agency would begin publishing ebooks of some of its (famous) clients on its own.

This naturally upset a number of publishers, but it's not surprising at all. The rapid changes in technology, as well as actions by publishers themselves, have dramatically changed the model the book world has followed since the dawn of the mass market paperback era. In many instances the value of what traditional publishers do has decreased to such an extent that they have become almost irrelevant - or in this case, completely irrelevant.

Publishers are aware of this, in varying degrees, but they haven't been able to solve it. I don't think the problem is unsolvable in the whole, but it will be very difficult for publishers to add real value to books such as those Wylie is epubbing - established classics (for the most part) that are so famous they far transcend any publisher, be it a traditional press or an unknown. Without control of the distribution network - something Amazon realized two or three years ago - publishers have very little to offer in those cases.

One reaction has been to try and claim all rights and, in effect, partial authorship of works. Neither is a sustainable strategy, however. The former depends on the importance of physical books, which is declining; the latter implies that editors are more important than the authors, a difficult argument to sustain even in the alleged golden age of publishing. Who believes that Max Perkins contributed more to a particular book than the writer?

I don't think the ultimate answer is going to be agents publishing books. Those are two different roles. Agents have a great deal at stake in publishers' survival - you don't need middlemen if one of the sides disappears. But as a strategy to further encourage change - which everyone thinks was the real reason Wylie went ahead with the plan - the attention is justified.

This may simply make publishers dig in harder; unbundling rights is already a bigger issue in many negotiations than the dollars. But if that's all they do, it will be a failing position. Publishers have to take more steps to restore value to their part of the equation.