Literary Agent Andew Wylie Aimed for E-Book Czardom, but Blew His Big Chance
He's been called "the Jackal," "evil madman," and a host of other less-than-complimentary epithets. But literary agent Andrew Wylie could never be accused of not knowing his publishing stuff. Or could he?
Wylie's venture to publish backlist classics as e-books has gone from an exclusive deal with Amazon (AMZN) to pissing off Random House -- and back again. All the fuss suggests that the agent to such publishing mega-stars as John Updike and Philip Roth has just showed us how little he -- not to mention the rest of the publishing industry -- knows about management of e-book sales.
Wiley trotted out his Odyssey Editions last month, aiming to publish and sell a collection of e-book titles whose paper counterparts were printed well before contracts had provisions for digital rights. Wylie reasoned thusly: if he represented the author and there was no e-book stipulation in the contract, he'd be the one to enable digital bookworms to download their fill.
This move came as no surprise to those who'd borne witness to Wylie's lament on the unfairness of the game in the wake of the digital publishing revolution. Wylie told the Harvard Review, "We spend 96 percent of our time talking about 4 percent of the business," (e-books' current share of publishing revenue) and that he was dissatisfied with the terms publishers offer for e-book rights.
His solution was to go outside of the traditional model completely:
We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those e-book rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple.
And so he did, making quick work of a partnership with Amazon. What Wylie didn't anticipate was that the management team at Random House would flip their collective literary lids and bring the hammer down swiftly. The company declared it would no longer do business with Wylie, rendering 13 of the proposed first 20 titles unavailable for sale.
The two sides eventually reached an agreement. But if Wylie really wanted to champion authors' digital rights, he should have started by taking a different approach with the megalithic Random House. Without the contentious pissing match, Wylie might have been able to negotiate a better deal for his 700 writers. As it stands, no changes have been made to the standard e-book royalty offered to authors by the company, which starts at approximately 25 percent of net earnings, but can go as high as 40 percent.
But a clever negotiation would have had the additional impact on publishers as a whole. Random House is the last holdout of the big six legacy publishers on the issue of selling its e-books on the agency model (30 percent cut of sales in exchange for being able to set the retail price). Had the company been persuaded to rethink its royalty model, others may have followed suit. A clear cost structure is desperately needed in this nascent phase of e-book publishing. The result could have been a definitive ruling on not only royalties, but fair e-book pricing, too.
With strategies on hold for the time being, the e-book business will continue to grow and no one is minding the store.
Image via Flickr User dweekly CC 2.0
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