Speculation has been running at fever pitch: What’s this year’s theme of literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-year poem? And which publishing executives has he singled out for poetic immortality?

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran Curtis’s annual summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

2008′s effusion, “The Coming of the POD People,” had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009′s poem, “The Yr of the Tweet“, Curtis solidified his claim to a place in Westminster Abbey when he managed to devise a rhyme for “Shatzkin”.

What delights will 2010 (The App) reveal?  How about this one:

They tossed in every kind of crap
And designated it an app.

Click here to read it in its entirety. Many of Curtis’s verses plus his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.

Photo by Leslie Curtis

Publishers Weekly‘s Craig Morgan Teicher and Rachel Deahl have surveyed leading e-book publishers and learned that with one exception, none of them is paying advances.

The exception is E-Reads.

Teicher writes that “Most e-book original publishers interviewed by PW do not offer advances, explaining that the rules in the e-books world are different from traditional print publishing.” Literary agent Richard Curtis, founder of E-Reads, doesn’t seem to have read the rules. Though E-Reads has worked on a 50-50 profit-sharing basis from its founding ten years ago, Curtis realized that in order to attract authors and agents he had to offer a business model they understand, and there’s nothing authors and agents understand better than advances.

Curtis also told PW he foresees a day when e-book rights will be an independent marketplace similar to the one for audio rights. Writes Teicher: “Curtis said that he sees advances as incentives in what is becoming an increasingly competitive marketplace, where authors and agents may withhold e-book rights when they sell print rights in order to get a better deal for the e-book.”

Actually, Curtis quietly revealed the news a few months ago, but PW picked up on it. In a Digital Book World interview with Emily Williams, co-chair of the Book Industry Study Group Rights Subcommittee, Curtis disclosed that “we’re beginning to pay advances.” For an industry that has operated on a back-end, no-front-money model, this is a significant precedent.

The interview was conducted in connection with a DBW webinar on the subject of literary agents who are also e-book publishers. Curtis launched E-Reads in 2000 in anticipation of the digital revolution and it currently carries a list of some 1200 previously published titles in science fiction and fantasy, thrillers, romance and general fiction and nonfiction. Also participating in the September 14th event are Arthur Klebanoff, founder of Rosetta Books, and Scott Waxman, who recently launched Diversion Books.

Typically, when making deals with mainstream publishers agents throw the e-book rights in for no further advance money.  The explosive sales growth of the e-book industry now makes prepayment of royalties more feasible, and being the first to offer them gives E-Reads a competitive advantage to augment its industry-leading 50% royalty, twice the current going rate offered by trade book publishers.

The story of Curtis’s founding of E-Reads – it was called “Curtis’s Folly” by some of his mystified colleagues – how he built it into one of the leading independent e-book publishers in the business, how digital technology has enhanced his approach to agenting, and his surprising views on the future of print publishing may be read on the Digital Book World website.

And you can read Teicher’s PW article here.

John Douglas

Posing as the chief digital officer of a Big Six publisher, E-Reads’ own Richard Curtis got a sneak peek at Floppatronic’s new Pfleeber reading device and has reviewed it for Publishers Weekly.

His verdict? “‘Kindle Killer’ is an overused term,” writes Curtis. “but if anything deserves it more, we’ll eat our laptop.”

Curtis awards the device 4 1/2 stars, withholding a full five because of the gadget’s dumb name.  Here are some features he finds so compelling:

• Its 8.5″×5.5″ dimensions are almost Grecian in their perfection.
• It weighs a mere 15 ounces, yet it’s more flexible than the Plastic Logic Que.
• Its operating system is 50-pound paper stock bound on the left-hand seam.
• The bright ivory-white surface enables us to make out 10-point text clearly in ambient light even at an astounding 20-degree reading angle.
• The pages make a satisfying pffftt with each activation, simulating the sound made by the iPad.

In fact, the Pfleeber sounds suspiciously like another and quite familiar reading device but we can’t quite put our finger on it. The fact that Curtis’s review appears on PW’s “Soapbox” page where his satires are often published leads us to wonder if our leg isn’t being pulled…

Check it out here and see if our suspicions are correct.

Digital Book World will conduct a free webcast pairing agent and E-Reads publisher Richard Curtis with Richard Nash, a former publisher and now consultant. The dialogue will be hosted by F+W’s Guy Gonzalez and will take place on Tuesday April 27 2010 at 1PM East Standard Time/10 AM PDT. Visit the DBW website to tune in.

Writes Gonzalez:

“The publishing industry is undergoing an extreme transformation, and there are many innovative thinkers challenging traditional thinking and helping push that transformation forward.

DBW Conversations pairs two respected thought leaders for a 60-minute discussion on the future of the publishing industry, and what they’re doing to ensure they have a place in it.

DBW Conversations: Richard Curtis & Richard Nash.

* Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent; founder of E-Reads, an electronic book publisher; and a well-known author advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry and is a former president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives.
* Richard Nash ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. He’s now consulting for authors and publishers on how to reach readers and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade. He was named one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by Utne Reader, and one of “15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing” by Mashable.com.

Amazon has just posted its list of best science fiction and fantasy books of 2007 and Dan Simmons’s The Terror is the top-rated book in the category. If you haven’t read this masterpiece I can’t imagine what you’re waiting for. Simmons’s recounting of the doomed Franklin expedition in search of the Northwest passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific will freeze your blood. Bad enough that two ships lay icebound for several years, but the lurking presence of a malevolent and unnameable predator takes the book into the territory of Melville and Conrad.

E-Reads is proud to carry two earlier novels by Dan Simmons, Song of Kali and Phases of Gravity.

- Richard Curtis