Scott Meredith

This is the custom of sending out a manuscript to multiple publishers, soliciting offers from all of them at the same time.

And there's one literary agent you focused on, Scott Meredith, who takes credit for inventing the book auction.

And every single obituary around Scott Meredith's death is happy to give him that credit, but I was not able to fully substantiate whether this is just industry lore or whether Meredith really is the initiator here.

But early issues of Publishers Weekly do credit him as being among the few and the brave who were willing to cross that Rubicon of simultaneous submissions into an auction.

Scott Meredith recognized that he, in fact, controlled supply And that without these writers, without the writers that he represented and without the writers that he was finding, publishers would have nothing to publish.

They would have no product to sell.

And he didn't care if he was characterized as a grubby, low-class rule-breaker.

No, Scott Meredith did not care about his reputation in that way at all.