10 November 2003
Money
I wonder if you are reading this column because you are a creative writer yourself. If you are, I wonder if you are also a good, hard-nosed negotiator ...
Perhaps you are. Perhaps in your business life or as a union representative or a councilor, you hold your own and manage to find a way of getting your arguments heard and respected. I wonder if you would find it as easy if it was your book - the fruit of your imagination - that you were trying to sell ...
A good agent is a wonderful thing. A good agent provides editorial advice on the book you're currently writing and strategic advice on what book you should write next. A poor agent does neither of these. They are pretty much all paid the same, though.
When I go to literary festivals and other book events, people often ask about the role of the agent. Sometimes I tell them about how massive deals are done in just 20 minutes, earning the negotiator a fortune. I also tell people that an agent usually has to spend a long time on the riverbank before catching a really big fish.
Anyway, here's the deal.
Say you write a novel that your agent manages to sell for £10,000 to a UK publisher. Your agent will take £1500 of that £10,000 - 15%. Then you have to pay tax and National Insurance on the remainder. If the book sells well enough to pay the publisher back for the £10,000 advance - that's called 'earning out' - you then start getting royalties. (I'm still getting a few hundred pounds now and then for my first book, Becoming a mother.)
Say a foreign publisher likes the look of your book, too. Your agent sells with the help of a sub-agent who specialises in foreign and translation sales. Let's say it sells to Italy for £5000. Of that £5000, your agent takes £500 (10%) and the sub-agent takes £500 (another 10%). You receive £4000 from which - again - you must pay tax and national insurance.
I'm not telling you this to scare you off or moan. These are the facts. If you have the imagination and commitment to be a writer, you have the strength of mind to cope with unvarnished facts. (As Dumbledore says, the truth is preferable to lies.)
And if you spend ten years on your masterpiece and an agent negotiates a six figure sum in an afternoon, do you begrudge them their cut? Or do you recognise that you could never have done the deal yourself?
Or do you vow to self-publish next time?
There are many ways of leading your readers into the Labyrinth.
