Redhammer manages international bestselling author Michelle Paver‘s fan site, The Clan, and the most recent ClanCast – exclusively for Clan members – has just gone online – view it below!

“In just five books”, says Redhammer’s Peter Cox, “Mal has distinguished himself as one of the most important writing talents of our time.   His awards have only been surpassed by praise from critics and his peers.  We are honoured that he has chosen to come to us.”

Redhammer offers a completely different management approach to other, more traditional literary agencies.  Cox came to agenting from a background in advertising and marketing, not the more conventional route through publishing or inheritance.  “We are very client focused”, he says, “and quite obsessed about delivering what authors need.  I’m sure publishers thought I was crazy initially but our success – and that of our clients – proves that this is the right approach for the future.”

Mal Peet has been tagged a “young adult” author, but both Peet and Cox feel this is unnecessarily restrictive.  “I’m with Mal when he says he sees no barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature”, says Cox.  “Good writing is good writing, period.”

“Redhammer has an astonishingly small client list compared to other agencies”, Cox says, “but we provide highly personal management and a far broader range of expertise than can be found in almost any other agency.  We’re the agency of the future, and Mal is in the right place, where he belongs.”

More information about Mal Peet here.

Redhammer founder and agent Peter Cox said: “I was very impressed with what Andrea did for Canongate, and felt that she’d be a terrific fit with Redhammer’s ethos.”

He added: “Other agencies are busy plundering their clients’ digital rights. By contrast, we’re busy creating more value for the client, the publisher and the reader. That is the only way for literary agencies to grow in the future.”

The Clan, at www.jointheclan.com,  will also feature a “wiki” which site users can contribute to, aiming to be the biggest repository of knowledge about Paver’s writing on the internet. The site currently has almost one million posts from more than 20,000 members.

Puffin will publish Paver’s next series, Gods & Warriors, in 2012.

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

Half the adults in the wasteland that used to be the great American city of Detroit now cannot read.  We’re not talking about their failure to perceive the finer nuances of Jonathan Franzen’s latest flight of fancy.  No.  They can’t read a bus sign, a pill bottle, or a McDonald’s menu.

If that doesn’t scare you, nothing will.

With our libraries falling at a rate not seen since Caesar sacked Alexandria, and our public wealth being nasally ingurgitated by sociopathic bankers, the most we can expect on this issue from our rulers and masters are homilies without substance and  platitudes without resources.

Things will get worse.

Today, there is an air of urgency in the bookselling business that I’ve never sensed before.  It’s not just about the money; it’s about fighting for our society and culture.  We can all sense the darkness at the edge of town, I think.  Getting people into bookshops is today a moral issue.   But – how?

All retailers study the science of footfall.  Independents are disadvantaged in this respect, with less in the way of resources compared to their larger competitors.  Even so, some creative thinking can go a long way: challenging times call for exceptional actions.  Here are five of the best, least expensive, ways to boost bookshop traffic.

1. Get into the street.  Scientologists do it, chuggers do it, Starbucks do it – we should, too.  Get right into your customers’ faces, every daylight hour. Take a survey, give a bookmark, read a poem, offer a trade-in – any excuse to talk to passers-by.  It’s basically a numbers game: the more you pitch, the more you’ll profit.
2. Develop atmosphere.  Many bookshops feel sepulchral. Chill the vibe (ambient, not Four Seasons), sex up the decor, chiaroscuro the lighting (yes, the customer still has to read – but this isn’t Sainsbury’s is it?). Entering a bookshop must be an adventure, a moment of escapism. Create some magic!
3. Build loyalty.  There are few urban businesses so cutthroat as coffee shops, and they’ve long understood the power of loyalty schemes. Try collaborating with other local shops: punters must get their card stamped by six different retailers to be entered into this month’s prize draw for a hamper.
4. Get a patron.  Bookshops aren’t merely businesses, they are local cultural institutions. As such, they need patrons.  Your patron should have media clout, a great social network, be prepared to MC events and proudly speak out on your behalf.  Better yet, get two.
5. Free is the most powerful word in marketing.  Every successful business on the net was built on it. Free Fridays (second-hand books taken as trade-ins)… free instore classes… free storytelling… this is one F word you can’t overuse.

We can win this battle – as indeed we must, if we’re to save Western culture before it’s closing time.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 24th June 2011

Illustration by jinterwas

by Peter Cox

A major debate is going on in publishing circles at the moment, and you need to know about it.

Frequently, these things are a storm in a teacup.  What excites publishing folk often leaves the rest of the world… a bit limp.  “Inside Publishing” isn’t always as exciting as… watching leafcutter ants.

This time it’s different.

This issue is enormous.  Because it will affect every book deal, every publication contract, from now until the end of time.

Click for the full article

It affects every author who has an agent, or who would ever like an agent.  It goes to the heart of what being an agent is all about.

In a nutshell, this is the question:

Should your agent also be your publisher?

In recent weeks, there have been a spate of agents who have cut deals on behalf of their clients with… themselves.  One such involved the agent to the estate of the late author Catherine Cookson.  According  to the Daily Mail, the literary agent didn’t even inform the author’s publishers, Transworld and Simon & Schuster, that she’d done a deal – with herself – to digitally publish 100 of the author’s titles.  “I haven’t told either firm about the deal”, she said, “and I am sure they are going to kick up a fuss about it”.

Yes, I bet they will.

As should any author whose agent says to them – come on – let’s cut your print publisher out of the picture… give me those lovely digital publishing rights, and I’ll publish you myself!

No doubt many agents will jump on this particular bandwagon before it overturns.

It’s Not OK To be Your Client’s Publisher

Let me be absolutely candid with you.  Although various excuses have been put forward by agents for doing this – it’s mostly about lining their own pocket.

Not that I’m against agents making money – how could I be?

But this isn’t just about making money. It comes perilously close to what is termed in law “self-dealing“, and it is both ethically wrong and legally very dangerous. In taking this fateful step, those agents who choose to do this are in danger of crossing a line that is legally and ethically of immense significance.

“The law is very clear…An agent must at all times avoid conflict of interest”On a matter of law, the situation is very clear.  An agent must at all times avoid conflict between the interests of the principal and his or her own.

Once you become your client’s publisher, you then become a principal in the transaction.  This means you can no longer function as the client’s agent.

Agency law makes it clear that an agent must not engage in self-dealing, or otherwise unduly enrich himself from the agency.  Nor must an agent usurp an opportunity from the principal by taking it for himself.

I really doubt whether any agent can legitimately claim that it is in the author’s best interests to be published by their literary agent.  It’s like the ref in a game of footie being paid by one of the teams playing.  It raises huge issues – and it just doesn’t feel right – does it?

Also, I don’t believe any agent can declare, “I couldn’t find a digital publisher for my client, so I had to do it myself.”  No.  The fact is, the internet is full of digital publishers, both large and small. Digital publishers are everywhere, and they are keen for our business.

It’s A Rights Grab

We have to be honest with ourselves, and say that this whole issue is about one thing, and one thing only: opportunism.

“Most agents don’t have the resources to be publishers. Especially now, when publishing has never been a more difficult or demanding profession”It feels like a rights grab.  Looking after Number One.

The problem is this.  If you become an agent, the author should be Number One.

Maybe those agents who have cut these sort of deals haven’t really considered all the implications – I don’t know.  I certainly hope they have great liability insurance.

I also hope they fully understand how to publish their clients effectively in the digital domain.  I hope they have all the necessary technical and marketing expertise and resources to do a great online publishing job.  I hope they won’t stint on the advertising and marketing budgets.  I hope they won’t favor one client ahead of another.  I hope the contract will have a review period which will allow the author to go elsewhere if the agent makes a hash of it.  Fingers crossed on all those points.

Frankly, I just don’t believe that most agents actually have the resources to be publishers.  Especially now, when publishing has never been a more difficult or demanding  profession.  Most “traditional” publishers I know face massive challenges currently.

Any agent who thinks that it’s a soft option being a publisher today is incredibly naive.

Opportunities Without Pillaging Clients’ Publishing Rights

There are plenty of new opportunities for agents today without pillaging clients’ publishing rights.  The agency Conville & Walsh has just launched a speakers bureau for its clients.  Good thinking.  Make more money for the client, and you’re making more money for yourself.

I like that idea.  Let’s have more like it.

If you’re an agent reading this – please pause for a moment.

Our authors need us now more than ever to guide them through the treacherous waters ahead. They need us for our good advice, expert knowledge, and  selfless counsel.  Agents need to evolve into good business managers.  Some of us may have to learn a pack of new skills to do that.  Nevertheless, that is the way forward.

So – are agents to be driven by short-term opportunism – or by the longer term interests of authors?  Every agent has to take a decision on that for themselves.

But you know where I stand.

Firmly on the author’s side.

Peter Cox

To contact me, mail peter [at] redhammer.info

Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller

The year is 1983, and the once-proud Swiss watch industry lies broken beyond repair.  Formerly a bastion of traditional craftsmanship and old-fashioned working practices, the Swiss have been humbled by a ferocious price-war fought on the battlefield of new technology.

Sounds a mite familiar? It gets better.  Devastated by a deluge of disposable digital watches from Japan, three quarters of the Swiss watch industry has simply keeled over and died.  But then, something miraculous happens.

The man tasked by the banks and creditors to dispose of the ragged corpse of the industry has other ideas.  Nicolas Hayek reckons he can best the Japanese at their own game – and he does.  Using the same technology that had nearly obliterated Switzerland’s flagship industry, Hayek’s first broadside is the now-ubiquitous Swatch – cheap, but far cooler than anything the Japanese can muster.  Next, he hopelessly outguns them at the luxury end of the market with mega-brands such as Breguet, Omega, Longines, Tissot…  Just like books, no-one needs a top-end luxury watch.  But through brilliant marketing, Hayak makes almost everyone want one.  His visionary strategy becomes a textbook example of how to turn a full-blown crisis into a transformative opportunity.

Hayak’s business bravura stands in shining contrast to some of the grubby opportunism that’s happening in our industry at present.

My own profession, for example, is currently debating the niceties of how to put our own interests ahead of our clients – which is what will happen if literary agents become publishers to their authors.  Can anyone say “conflict of interest”?  As our trade body apparently mulls a constitutional amendment to permit this desperate folly, all I can say is – being a publisher is far more difficult than many might naively suppose.  For agents habituated to doing quick-buck deals and then walking away with the proceeds, I fear the future will be both educational and painful.

But publishers themselves – or rather, some publishers – are not beyond reproach, either.  Publishers buzzword du jour is “owning the IP”.  That’s a euphemism for cutting the author out of the financial picture; it means that “book concepts” will increasingly be originated by Henrietta in marketing and given to a team of hack writers to flesh out.  This is sweatshop labour.  It produces dross that “reads like an assembly-line product, poorly written and thinly imagined”, as the New York Times aptly wrote of James L. Frey’s latest offering manufactured in exactly this way.  I, for one, don’t want to be part of an industry that exploits authors like this.

The challenge our industry faces today is at least as momentous as the “quartz crisis” faced by the Swiss three decades ago.  We will survive – and thrive – only through courageous, strategic thinking.  It’s time for the heroes of publishing to put on their armour: the battle awaits.

This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 29th April 2011

Illustration by Nancee_art

Flynn said: “This light and dark collection of poems is a funny, honest and often moving account of Martin’s life and experiences.”

Icon will publish as a £9.99, B-format hardback on 1st December.

Paver met international publishers at the fair to give details of the new series, set in the Mediterranean region during the Bronze Age. At a presentation this morning, Paver told publishers she chose the era because it was a “rich, spectacular, exciting world to inhabit, with chariots, ocean-going ships, slaves, warriors, myths and magic”.

The new series will tell the story of Hylas, a lowly 12-year-old goatherd in the Greek mountains, whose adventures take him far afield to Crete and Egypt, and involve him, like Torak in the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, with animals—in the new series, a lion, a falcon and a dolphin.

Paver moved to Puffin with her new series, after publishing the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness books with Orion. Elv Moody, editorial director of Classic Puffin, promised international publishers a “global sharepoint to share ideas and resources” for the launch campaign for the first book, as yet untitled, in the autumn of 2012.

Peter Cox writing on Litopia

Recently, Margaret Atwood cautioned the publishing business not to forget the central important of authors (read the interview in this piece from the Globe & Mail). How very timely.

At lunch last week I was discussing this issue with someone from the film industry. We were comparing notes about the ways in which our relative industries were developing.  We came to the conclusion that we’re both headed in the same direction.

The big boys increasingly want the whole pie.

This is how their logic runs.  Why pay royalties to bothersome authors, when you can keep all the income for yourself?  Even better – why bother licensing a manuscript (that’s exactly what a publishing contract is) when you can own the whole caboodle… for ever?

That is absolutely the way publishing and the feature film business are both moving.  The studios and major publishers increasingly want to own the core intellectual property.  That right – it’s their copyright – not yours… even though you may have written it.

Work Harder, Slave!

What of writers, then, in this future scenario?  Well, they’ll still be needed – a little.  Hire them in… pay them for what they do… sack ‘em if they get uppity… then move on to the next project. The central importance of the writer is increasingly under attack.  Soon, you’ll just be the nameless hired gun.

Hack writing has always been around, of course. There have always been naive writers willing to accept any deal just to see their name in print.  You only have to think of nincompoops such as Jobie Hughes (a “minion” from James L. Frey’s “literary sweatshop” according to the New York Times) for a classic example of that.

You may be wondering, well – isn’t it Ok for writers to be minions – if they choose to be? Personally, I find the idea repellent.

Writers from Dickens onwards have fought for the idea that if you create something, you should own it.  That notion will soon find itself under increasing attack.

Guns For Hire

Movies are increasingly franchise operations, and that’s the inexorable way Big Publishing will develop.  In fact, dating back to the days of book packagers, this kind of approach has been slowly but surely gaining traction.

One company that successfully ploughs this furrow is Working Partners.  According to their website, they create series fiction ideas internally, and then hire writers under “umbrella pseudonyms” to do the hard graft.  And of course, Working Partners keep the copyright.

Working Partners are commendably straightforward about your chances of striking gold with them.  “The upfront sums for each title are relatively small”, they say.  “However, for writers struggling to find a publisher for their own work, we provide a great learning experience…”.  Well, fine.  if all you want from your writing life is a great learning experience- and that’s all that many writers obviously do want – then, great.

Unequal Partners

Let’s be clear about how the money works in these situations.  Working Partners asks writers to produce work on spec, following the series concepts, storylines, and cast lists that Working Partners has already figured out.  They then try to sell the project to publishers.  if they succeed, they get an advance – in the same way as any author would normally get an advance from a publishing deal.

The difference is, Working Partners  keep a goodly proportion of that sum for themselves.

And only a “relatively small” sum is passed on to the author.  Finally, if there’s an agent in the chain, the agent will take their percentage of that “relatively small” sum… and hopefully, the agent wasn’t planning on eating that day.

To my mind, this type of arrangement is wrong.  Most importantly, it fails to properly value the author.  Its saying that the organisation that owns and markets the concept actually deserves more reward than the person who does the creative work – and in my book as an agent, that’s just plain wrong.

Not everyone agrees with me.

Philippa Milnes-Smith, a literary agent at LAW, is quoted on Working partners’ website thus:

“We have a number of clients who have worked very successfully with Working Partners not just on one but on many titles and several different series: we have enjoyed a good long term working relationship. In addition, for some authors it’s a first real – and often invaluable – introduction to the rigours of commercial fiction market, in turn helping them to develop their individual talent and skills.”

Sorry to say this, Philippa.  But in my view, you shouldn’t be endorsing this type of working practice.

I’m sure Working partners are great people.  I’m sure they are very ethical, highly talented and nice to their pets, too.

But that’s not the point.

The author should always be at the centre of the whole process – not some anonymous hack-for-hire.  Sales agents such as Working Partners should be there to serve authors – not the other way round.  Frankly, I’m surprised you don’t see this.

And you know what?  I don’t believe this practice generally does justice to readers, either.  As the New York Times wrote of I Am Number Four, it “reads like an assembly-line product, poorly written and thinly imagined.”

Yes – that’s because it is an assembly-line product.

Things To Come

I predict we’ll see Big Publishing increasingly claim ownership of the core intellectual property, and retain writers, where necessary, to do the hard stuff… i.e. to actually write the books.  Only another ten thousand words this afternoon, and you’ll be done for the day!

This scenario is one that will continue to grow in the future and – ironically – its growth may even jeopardize external book packagers.   As Big Publishing increasingly searches for profit, it will realize the economic value of keeping copyrights for themselves.  It certainly won’t want external third parties to control them.

And yet.

I predict this disrespecting of the authorial function – for that is what it is – will carry a heavy and unexpected price for those publishers foolish enough to pursue this path.

Not every publisher will go down this route.

The less corporate will not.

The publishers who value authors will not.

And – let’s not forget that authors increasingly now have a choice.

While years of indented servitude might once have been the only way to advance in any skilled profession, authors today have a myriad of options.  They don’t need to work for your “relatively small sums”.

I think some publishers will understand this, and firmly come down on the side of the author.  Others won’t.  Same for agents.

Interesting times ahead.