As an Observer article reports, Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency represented Norman Mailer while we he was alive but the estate has selected Mailer’s friend and longtime collaborator Larry Schiller to represent all unpublished material, including the trove of “something like 60,000” letters. J. Michael Lennon, who just signed with S&S for an authorized Mailer biography, has been working on one book compilation of Mailer letters “on and off for about five years.” The Observer suggests that publishing rights to that collection might have been ambiguous under Mailer’s contractual relationship with Mailer: “Though at one point last winter there […]
Agency News
Misunrepresented
Some time last year, before THE WHITE TIGER was published let alone in contention for the Booker Prize, debut author Aravind Adiga served notice that he was parting ways with his agent Jay Mandel at the William Morris Agency. That relatively unremarkable event didn’t become news until earlier this week when the Telegraph’s “Mandrake” misinterpreted that move to declare that Adiga “suddenly parted company” with agency after his big Booker win. And the paper compounded the error by asserting that Cathryn Summerhayes at WMA’s London office “has been widely credited with helping win.” Adiga tells an Indian news service, “The […]
Personnel News: Crowley Switches Agencies; McDermid Picks RCW
Sheila Crowley has left AP Watt to join Curtis Brown UK, and expects most of her authors to move with her. She says “the time was right to move to a bigger agency and one that would embrace the more commercial angle of the authors I represent.”Bookseller Canada’s Anne McDermid & Associates will use British agency Rogers, Coleridge & White to represent rights on behalf of their authors in the British and translation markets.
Molly Friedrich Interviewed
Jofie Ferrari-Adler interviews agent Molly Friedrich as the latest in his series for Poets & Writers Magazine. “I don’t think I can adequately convey the whirlwind of charm, passion, and sheer personal magnetism that Friedrich has spent the last three decades unleashing on the publishing world in service of her clients.” Some excerpts: Q: Did you like doing publicity?A: In my opinion, the two jobs that are the most exhausting in this business are the jobs of the foreign scout and the publicist. The reason is that there is never an end to the job. If you’re a scout, there […]
Personnel, Etc.
Book review editor (and arts writer) at The Tennessean Jonathan Marx e-mailed contacts to let them know he has left the newspaper to take a job as publications manager for the Nashville Symphony. Del Commune Enterprises is now scouting in France for Calmann-Levy and Le Livre du Poche and in Spain for Salamandra Ediciones. As of August 1, they will also scout for Jorge Zahar Editor in Brazil.
UK Agents Compete for Estates
Savvy agents have long known the advantages of representing well-established literary estates and now following the diminution of PFD, the gloves are off in London. The Times says: ” No point wasting one’s time with new authors. They’re unpredictable, demanding. They require lunch. No, what any literary agent worth his salt needs in 2008 is a classic author with form: famous, prolific and deceased within the past 70 years. In recent months, the literary estate – the body of work belonging to a dead author – has suddenly and unexpectedly become big business.” As previously reported, Andrew Wylie took over […]