Writer Beware

Literary agencies becoming publishers? Screw that trend. PublishAmerica, always a trail blazer, is swinging the other way.

How threatened do publishers feel by agencies’ aggressive moves into publishing? Well, according to a report today in The Bookseller, Random House UK has done an end run around prestigious literary agency Sheil Land, directly approaching author Tom Sharpe to secure digital rights to his backlist.

Last week, prestigious UK agency Ed Victor Ltd. announced that it was going into publishing, with an ebook/print-on-demand division called Bedford Square Books.

As readers of this blog know, I’m fascinated by the oddities that pop up at the fringes of the writing and publishing worlds. This qualifies as one of the odder things I’ve come across lately: T-Post.

Vanity anthologies are a popular way for unscrupulous companies to make money on writers’ hunger for publication. By far the most common vanity anthology scheme is the free contest scheme, in which writers are enticed to enter poems or stories in a competition, and then pressured–though usually not required–to buy the anthologies in which their work appears.

An “interminable agency clause” (sometimes called an “interminable rights clause” or a “perpetual agency clause”) is language inserted into an author-agency agreement whereby the agency claims the right to remain the agent of record not just for the duration of any contracts it negotiates, but for the life of copyright.

Last October, I blogged about David Boyer, a self-styled author and publisher who was discovered to be committing extensive plagiarism, publishing stories and books both under his own name and his many aliases.

The question now becomes, “where do we go from here?” The parties were left free to negotiate a new settlement, or continue the original lawsuit.

Throughout the year, book fairs draw crowds of publishers, agents, and industry professionals of all kinds to promote their products, take stock of the competition, and make rights and other business deals.

Once upon a time, a motley crew of knights, hobbits, and assorted elves–all members of the Fellowship of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America–set out to prank a certain publisher of ill repute.