“The most influential member of the editorial board of your publishing company is the literary agent.”

It seems like a century since I wrote that. In fact, it was a century ago. I wrote it in the twentieth. Is it still true in the twenty-first?

Literary agents stand at a crossroads, and the vista in every direction is cloudy. On the one hand, publishers – the buyers – are fewer and more selective. On the other, many authors – the sellers -  expect more attention and service from their agents to fill the vacuum left by a shrinking publishing industry.  And some authors are choosing options that don’t include agents at all. Boyle’s Law seems to be at work here: the more pressure exerted on publishers and authors by a compressing marketplace, the more heat they generate, and a lot of it is focused on their agents.

Like brokers in every other field of endeavor, agents are supposed to add value to the relationship between buyer and seller in order to justify their commissions. I could write volumes about all the things agents do and have done to make publishing a better place for both parties (actually, I have written volumes***). Does that matter as much as it used to?

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: agents are intermediaries in a rapidly disintermediating world. The pitiless march of digitization that has eroded, and in some cases destroyed, so many other go-betweens now menaces the agency profession like a siege army outside bastions that have stood for a century. As in so many other fields where digital technology is squeezing middlemen out of the middle, agents have become vulnerable.

Is there any reason to believe that agents are exempt from the cruel laws of the marketplace? Given my vested interest in the answer, it’s hard to render an opinion that sounds like anything other than wishful thinking. But if one can try to be objective, one does have to wonder why book agents in the age of Smashwords and Kindle are more fit to survive than travel agents in the age of Orbitz and Expedia. Tomorrow, in the second part of this article, we’ll look at ways that agents are adapting and reinventing themselves to meet these challenges.

What are the factors forcing middlemen and women out of the middle?

Buyers. The pool of viable buyers – big, established trade publishers with nationwide bookstore distribution – is shrinking like a lake in a drought, and so is their wealth. It was only a few decades ago that they numbered one thousand or so. Today it is closer to a few dozen.

Though the top six or eight are well heeled enough to pay giant advances for blockbuster novels and celebrity tell-alls, they have almost nothing to spare for the platformless newcomers and midlist authors who have traditionally been a staple of the publishing industry and a nursery for talent. If an agent doesn’t represent household-name writers and has no place to go with garden variety ones, the options are nasty, brutish, and poor. The collapse of Borders and the struggles of Barnes & Noble have eroded the marketplace even further, reducing the pool of markets and money to spread around.

Sellers. Given this contraction, the author community has understandably become disenchanted with the allure of traditional publishing. Even big-name authors – indeed, some shockingly big-name authors -  are disgusted and have begun exploring self-publication options, options that are seldom commissionable by their agents. And they are finding a host of compelling options that only serve to accelerate the centrifugal disintegration of what, not very long ago, was a dynamic, agentcentric industry.

A decade ago authors dissatisfied with their agents sought new representation, and there is still intense competition for seats at the grand table. But there are fewer of them, and authors who can’t find one have begun seeking alternate ways to get their books discovered, published, distributed and publicized. Unfortunately, their agents don’t always have the technical skill set necessary to be of assistance, and reports of fabulously successful self-published newcomers only add to the sense of futility with the establishment.

As a result, many agents are struggling to find significant ways to add value to the work of their clients in the emerging digital paradigm, where self-publication has become a lure that for many writers is intriguing and, for some, irresistible. Editing, formatting and uploading books, managing content and promoting oneself have become so easy that authors are not as reliant on traditional agent services as they once were. New authors who once desperately pursued agents as the key to a professional writing career now put their books directly into Kindle, Sony, iPad and Nook, even issue them as print on demand paperbacks, and manage their own marketing and publicity.

The dream of being discovered by a major house or attracting an agent is so remote for new authors that many no longer bother. Even elite, privileged, and affluent authors have begun to sell their work directly to their fans, leaving their agents bewildered, helpless and – commissionless. Where are tomorrow’s agents going to find clients?

In the second installment of this article we’ll see what agents are doing, or trying to do, to maintain their relevance in this rapidly evolving paradigm called Digital Publishing.

Richard Curtis

*** See What I Have Done for You Lately