A comment article on The Booksellers website highlights the pressure and abuse that agents are subjected to by a small percentage of authors. Whilst it is frustrating for authors to receive rejection after rejection for their manuscript, vexed authors take their anger out on the editors and agents. This reminded me of an incident I experienced myself not long ago.
It all comes down to expectations, and the secrecy of publishing doesn’t help the situation.
I reached out to a local theatre that welcomed a lot of community writers (I was one of them, many moons ago) to see if their writers had any interest in working with me and getting their work published. They very kindly put the word out and one person reached out to me.
Their story was taken from their own experiences which involved a legal case. I read through their work and liked what I saw, and so I started working on the pre-production elements of the project. This included checking all the rights were correct (making sure I don’t get sued). I know very little about the legal side of publishing, save author contracts, so I reached out to a lawyer (who was not a part of the original case) to clarify the law when it came to cases like my authors.
Anyone who knows anything about lawyers knows they are expensive. Even for a consultation, the cost for an hour is several hundreds of pounds. Being a very small indie publisher, I asked the author if it would be okay for us to split the fee between us – that way the risk can be spread more evenly and we can start working on the project quicker. Alternatively, because the purpose of a publisher is to reduce risk for the author, I would pay the fee myself, but would add a clause to the contract that would allow me to make the money back before royalties are paid. I suspect larger publishing houses would include these kind of fees in their contracts from the get-go, but I don’t deal with these situations often (or at all). The author wasn’t comfortable with fronting the cost, so I added the additional clause.
Whilst this conversation was happening, the author was telling me more about why they wanted to write and publish their story – a phrase they kept using was bringing themselves “justice” for the things that happened to them. I understood this from their writing and empathised with their situation; I reminded them that, although the project is based off their experiences, there still needed to be enough ‘creative liberties’ to avoid being accused of slander and defamation, like changing names completely and removing some scenes that felt a little too close to the line. I thought the author understood, and I was planning on discussing this further with the lawyer to make sure we didn’t need to make any more changes, considering the case was relatively recent.
I didn’t get a response from the author for a few days – not unusual, people have lives – but then received an email from them accusing me of siding with the person who hurt them, and saying it was a red flag that I wanted them to split the fees with me.
I was taken aback. This email came out of nowhere, and the author wasn’t giving any room for discussion. Needless to say, we parted ways without further development.
Having had some time away from that situation, I know there is nothing I could (or would) have done differently. Unfortunately, it happens, and I’m lucky that I’ve only had one incident, but larger companies definitely deal with more and worse. The publishing industry is chronically overworked and underpaid, and being on the same page with authors can reduce the pressure that publishers are under.
The publishing industry is a close-knit one; stories are our trade, we know how to spread them quickly. We are all human and trying to do best by everyone, but unfortunately not everyone can win. Authors, please be patient with editors and agents and publishing professionals – they have a lot of work on their plate! And publishers – talk to your authors! Have a conversation about their work. Like applying for any job, being told no without any reason why or notes on how to improve can be crushing.
Talk to each other!
