Fauci's Diary and the Magic Boom in Fiction

So a story that we covered last week, which was about literary agents, we only covered superficially because I was like, surely this can't be true.

And the Association...

The AALA, which I still can't ever remember what...

The Association of American Literary Agents... finally published their actual revised ethical guidelines and it is worse than my worst projection of how bad it could be let's go through it jonathan

okay so in the list of paid services to clients okay and first of all y'all may hear that there is a cat in my office the stupid thing won't leave i've tried opening the door for it letting it out and it won't leave

you're in the cat's house you are lucky to be allowed to be in the

No, no, that's not how it works here.

Anyway.

Paid services to clients.

Section 10 of the new canon explicitly allows a member or the member's agency to offer marketing, promotion, web design, or other work to clients for a mutually agreed fee.

Representation cannot be contingent on buying those services, which is idiotic because how they decide who gets represented is so...

So subjective.

And clients must be told in advance that they are free to hire anyone else.

Now, there's some positive framing happening here.

The president of AALA, President Regina Brooks, told Publishers Weekly that authors now do the bulk of their own marketing and keep asking agents for help.

The rules simply create a transparent way for agents to charge for that help while keeping representation independent.

Now, there's a critical view.

Jane Friedman from The Bottom Line says, warns that this formalizes a shift toward fee-based income for agents.

With 39% of AALA agents reporting under $50,000 a year from traditional commissions, the temptation to steer clients toward high-margin services will be strong.

Writer Beware notes that power imbalances make voluntary purchases hard for many authors to refuse in practice.

Jane Friedman had a really good breakdown of this.

She's got a great newsletter, the Bottom Line Newsletter.

Her breakdown of this particular change, though, is available for free on her blog.

And I don't always agree with Jane Friedman, but her criticisms of these changes I thought were all valid and some of them didn't go far enough.

And this is one of the areas where I think they didn't go far enough because I suspect Jane doesn't realize just how much more money there is in author services than there is in all the rest of this whole industry, other than working for best-selling authors, which is historically how agents made their money.