Star literary agent Andrew Wylie’s move to exploit the ebooks business created a brief but significant flutter in the clubby world of global publishing.
Ebooks have shaken up the quiet world of publishing. The way people choose to read has begun to change. Spotting an opportunity here that traditional publishers were missing, Andrew Wylie, the powerful literary agent known to some in the trade as “The Jackal”, moved in for the kill, creating an uproar in the close, clubby world of global publishing.
Wylie has an impressive list of authors on his rolls, including the likes of Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis, John Updike and Norman Mailer. Perhaps a cocktail of deep ambition and huge opportunity made Wylie more adventurous than in normal times. He decided to offer 20 of his top published authors directly to Amazon.com, bypassing their original print publishers. He even gave his prospective online publishing house a name: Odysee Editions.
For established publishers, this was an act of sacrilege. They had to meet the challenge, and because Wylie is also considered a hero by many authors, he could not be taken lightly.
Random House, the global publishing giant, was affected the most. It declared Wylie’s Odysee Editions a direct competitor and announced that it would not enter into any new agreement with him — and Random House probably provides the largest share of revenue by a single group to the Wylie Agency.
Encouraged by Random House’s move, members of the French publishers’ association, the Syndicat National de I’Edition, wrote an open letter signed by 50 top publishers to say that original print publishers must retain rights over the electronic versions of their authors’ books, and that agents planning otherwise would be taken as competitors.
Against this pressure, Andrew Wylie met Random House’s Chairman Markus Dohle. No one knows what transpired at the meeting, but the result was that Wylie backed down. He appears to have given up his intention of becoming an e-book publisher, at least for now. On the other side, a few weeks later Random House bought Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming memoir from Wylie for a seven-figure advance.
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What is intriguing is that the powerful Sonny Mehta, head of Knopf USA — a prestigious publisher within the Random House stable — will not publish the memoir under his Knopf imprint in the USA. It will be published by Knopf in neighbouring Canada, but Knopf is not lending its name to the book in the USA. Instead it is being published under the parent Random House imprint. Why? Is it to do with Wylie? Or perhaps with Salman Rushdie? Only Sonny Mehta knows.
It’s worth remembering that in early October this year, just before the Frankfurt Book Fair, Mehta made history by signing Wylie’s client Kiran Desai’s yet-to-be-written novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, for $2.5 million — on the basis of a four-page-long synopsis! The synopsis was presented to Mehta by none other than Wylie, who had snatched Desai away from David Godwin, a literary agent of great repute. This was unprecedented.
So this looks like a patch-up of the highest order. After a very public fracas the two seem to have kissed and made up. As a top industry watcher in America said, “Content is king. Perhaps the huge dollars made them patch up.”
As far as Wylie is concerned, though, his move has gone wrong. It backfired not because he was ahead of his time but because of the politics of the publishing business and the size of the publishing group he chose to take on.
The fact is that authors might have supported Wylie, had he not made his deal solely with Amazon.com but opened it to all ebook retailers. Making a deal with just one provider smells more like a move for personal gain than one that opens new avenues for authors. Dealing with just one entity, Amazon.com, would have given Wylie and his authors no control over the retail price — and thus no protection of the authors’ income. Then there was the issue of how to interpret the standing contracts Wylie had with traditional publishers.
The failure of Wylie’s Odysee Edition is no guarantee that such an enterprise will not surface again. If Wylie, for instance, had taken on smaller, independent and less powerful publishers, it’s more than likely that he would have pushed through and crafted himself a new identity.
Would such a change have transformed the role of literary agents? No, says agent David Godwin, who represents Aravind Adiga, Fatima Bhutto, William Dalrymple, Arundhati Roy and other bestselling authors. “Agents have little experience of publishing themselves,” he says. “They lack capital and have no marketing skills.” Instead, he says, “agents and publishers should devise systems whereby you can buy both editions, print and digital, on a two-for-one principle”.
Anne Michel, a top acquisitions editor in France, agrees. “Publishers and agents must stick together,” she says, “otherwise soon we may see large providers [read Google, Apple, and so on] bypassing us and making direct deals with authors.”
With as much as one third of book sales in the USA now in the digital format, it will surely not be long before Google, Apple, Amazon and others hit the market big time with ebooks — even before the printed copies are made available. According to one estimate, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has sold over a million ebook copies. For Jonathan Franzen’s much-praised novel Freedom, print and digital sales are in an astonishing 65:35 proportion.
With a market as large as this, and growing as rapidly, I think it is time that agents and publishers worked together to create new readers, rather than generating internal competition between print and digital editions.
For an entertaining description of Wylie’s life and reputation as a literary agent, do look up the graphic novel version on the website of the New York Review of Books, at nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68514.
The author is publisher, Roli Books