agents – ACHUKAblog

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 50

August 31, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Excellent piece by Lucy Mangan in yesterday’s Guardian Review

What we think of as the "real" Dahl is there, moving underneath the story like a shark but only occasionally breaking the surface to show his grinning teeth (one mother objects to her child being made into fudge on the grounds that "we’ve spent far too much on his education already"). But it is only after a letter from his former agent and confidante Sheila St Lawrence that you can see him start to really trust his instincts. Although she says now that "he was going to get there anyway … If someone else hadn’t alerted him, I’m quite sure he would have alerted himself", she made a variety of specific suggestions – including making the uniformed assistants "something more surprising than they are" – but also encouraged him more generally to let rip. "I’d like to see more humour, more light, Dahlesque touches throughout," ends the letter. "I hope some of my remarks will produce counter remarks in you that will stir you to flights of fancy to make the book take off and really fly, as it undoubtedly will."

And it did. It was published in the US in 1964 and sold 10,000 copies in the first week (and was acclaimed as "fertile in invention, rich in humour, acutely observant … he lets his imagination rip in fairyland" in the New York Times), and has been pretty much flying off the shelves ever since.

via Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 50 | Books | The Guardian.

Submission Guidelines Begin Asking Authors For Social Media Status

January 2, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Mercy Pilkington, CEO and founder editor of Author Options, reporting for Good Ereader:

News came this week that Bloomsbury UK was the most recent publisher to realize that authors are tiring of the hoop-jumping, as the announcement that its new YA and New Adult imprint Bloomsbury Spark would accept submissions from unagented authors. But is this too little, too late for an industry in which authors are routinely thumbing their noses at giving up as much as 85% of their royalties for the privilege of being “accepted” by the traditional industry?
Some publishers, such as the ultra-disruptive Sourcebooks, have been accepting unagented submissions for some time, and have even welcomed the opportunity for authors to win the right to submit a manuscript as part of a writing contest. Tor UK, an imprint of Pan Macmillan SFF, announced its own policy earlier this year, encouraging authors to think that they have options besides self-publishing.
What is interesting to see in this new shift is that Bloomsbury’s submission guidelines for this new imprint include the requirement that authors provide information on their social media standings, meaning the publisher wants to see how much reach and influence (re: built-in consumer base) the author has before agreeing to publish the work. This is similar to the publishing houses who join sites like Wattpad, sweeping up authors whose books have a significant following on the free reading and sharing platform.

via More Publishers Begin to Accept Unagented Submissions.

What Is Agent Julia Churchill Looking For?

April 19, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

The agent as Treasure Seeker is probably a more alluring analogy than agent as celebrity manager (see previous blog post).
What kind of treasure is Julia Churchill, now at A M Heath, looking for? Find out in her own blog post:

When I was little, I was the dorkiest of waistcoat wearing metal detectors. Thankfully my dad is a big dork too, so we’d head out and treasure hunt on the weekends. We found the odd twisted piece of rust and scraps of whatever. But we also found 17th belt buckles, a cherub-shaped tankard handle, a diamond engagement ring from the 1930′s, a thick silver roman coin. I’m lucky that my job now is a treasure hunter. It’s an embarrassing truth that an agent feels a little like Indiana Jones for a day when they find their new treasured author. I don’t know quite what treasures I’ll be lucky enough to find as I start my new job here, but I’m looking hard and I know it when I see it.

via What Am I Looking For? | A.M.Heath.

Literary Agents As Sports Agents Or Celebrity Managers

April 19, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Literary agent Andrew Lownie, speaking as one of the panellists at a late day panel on the Tuesday of the London Book Fair, says agents have become more like sports agents or celebrity managers:

Lownie… said agents have become more important, on some level, because there are now more rights available and contracts have become more complex. With digital publishing creating a host of new available rights, Lownie sees agents working as authors’ "copyright protectors," as much as someone who can help them because of their overall knowledge of the book market. In this way, Lownie noted, literary agents have become more like, "sports agents or celebrity managers," in so far as they now need to look after their author’s entire career.

So why do authors even need a publisher, if their agent can now publish for them? Lownie put it bluntly when he said that only a publisher can "get books into the supermarket." (In London, with the dissolution of many of the bookstores, the supermarket is one of the most important outlets for selling books.) To the end, Lownie said that while many authors can (and have) found success self-publishing, he thinks they will continue to need to seek out a traditional deal to "move to the next level." As examples of this, Lownie cited authors like E.L. James and Amanda Hocking, who both struck traditional print deals, after finding success self-publishing.

Both Lownie and Ogden said that, as the market continues to become more competitive, they believe more agencies will continue to merge. (In the U.K., agencies Conville & Walsh and Curtis Brown recently merged.) They also feel that everyone working in this business–authors, agents and publishers–will need to continue to become more innovative to survive. Nonetheless, certain realities of this business remain. As Lownie put, publishing it still "all about timing and luck."

via London Book Fair 2013: Defining the New Role for Literary Agents.