An Interesting Tidbit About Dead Agents
Everyone keeps going on about Miss Snark. For those of you who do not know, she is a literary agent. Or was. Maybe still is. Anyway, she has a blog that went on for years and is revered in the online writing world. Of course, I had to check it out. I read some of her later blog posts. And I didn’t get it. People would go on about her again. So I’d go back. I still didn’t get it. That’s not to say that I didn’t understand her. I just did not get the appeal. Then again, when you go to her blog, the last posts are about her retiring. So, uh, yeah. Kind of late place to come in on things.
When once again her blog was recommended to me through other blog comments, I dutifully followed the link. Yet again. This time I had a plan. I scrolled down until I got to her archives and then I did some random clicking. Oh, look at that, a question that I sent to ‘Ask Daphne’. Hmm. Maybe I have been missing something. Another random click or two. Ta-da. Something I did not know and did not even think about in order to think about.
Dead agents. That sounds brutal. What I am getting at is this: what do you do if you have an agent who is dealing with the royalties from your past projects and then poof! they are gone like last week’s cut flowers. In this case the agent was a solo. (They were the agency.) So then what? How do you get your royalties? They go to the agent’s estate and the estate then is to get their percentage of the royalties and send you the remainder. Eventually. But what about any further dealings with the old projects? Yikes! Do you get a new agent for that? Can you get a new agent for that? If the agent isn’t a solo, it is simpler as I assume the agency has a contingency plan and they take care of things. Easy as pie. (Unless they go belly up. In that case, oh brother!) What I learned, I suppose, is that an agency isn’t always ‘just’ an agency if there is one person behind it. Something to look into when you sign that literary contract. What is their contingency plan? Sort of morbid, but worth bringing up in conversation.
Oh and thanks Miss Snark. I guess I judged you wrong (several times). Oops.
