Recent content by AgentPete

Hey Paul, really nice to have you on board! I think this is the first time I’ve actually come across a writer who executes on their phone… wow! Is this full length stuff, e.g. 80k words or so? How do you manage? :) p.

Sorry! Too quick off the mark! Can you live with it…?

Ahoy there, Deborah! Glad to have you aboard! :) p.

It's not particularly insightful, in fact. Just covers the basics... 1. Understand the terms 2. Scrutinise the financial model 3. Know how the royalties are calculated 4. Pay attention to termination clauses 5. Act quickly when trouble arises And... "We urge those involved at the Boundless...

He got a lot closer to owning his readers than most authors do, yes. However, his relationship with them became horribly subverted by a third party, which seems to have been – at heart – Unbound‘s true business model, i.e. Author finds readers; Author raises funds for publication from readers...

Medium-sized publishers tended to have more overall stability than the conglomerates. I say “tended” because there are far fewer mid-sized indies now than there were just a few years ago. This is paradoxical since you’d expect the congloms to be far more stable financially, which is true...

This is my message of the decade. Writers must own their readers. That’s really interesting. And a bit daunting for new writers, too, yet without a base. I’ve funded one or two Kickstarters (not books tho) and the experience was… mixed. One in particular stands out (for an innovative NAS box)…...

Yes, definitely the right time for some intense conversations. This guy (Tom Cox, no relation!) suggests that he has actually got some rights back, so there may be a precedent. Yeah, they’re calling royalties due from the old company “goodwill payments” and while they’re technically correct...

This is a crucial point. The publisher will tend to want to retain whatever contractual rights they have in the event of administration or “making an arrangement with their creditors” since IP assets are pretty much all publishers are likely to have left if they crash and burn. From the author’s...

M&A in publishing has been bad news all round. It’s killed off so many decent medium-sized publishers, folk who had a flair for certain genres / publishing approaches. Publishing is almost by definition idiosyncratic and quirky; the polar opposite of typical conglomerate culture.

That’s a good point. Actually, two good points, viz: 1) At the time (and today, but less so) authors really wanted the kudos of being “properly” published, i.e. not vanity. Although I know very little about Unbound, they did have a generally positive reputation in the trad (and very...

I think you’re right to be suspicious. I don’t know what happened to Unbound, but they seem to have burnt through money. Nor do I know if their publishing model ever worked properly (does anyone here know?)

Freddie Forsyth is dead. Author of The Day of the Jackal and more of that ilk. As dodgy a character in real life as any in his books. Like Jeffrey Archer, wrote thrillers for the home county set. End of an era – end of a profitable genre too, perhaps.

This topic emerged in last week’s Huddle. Before the Huddle, I knew almost zero about Unbound, other than the generally favorable buzz that most of the publishing industry seemed to share about them. Frankly, what’s happened is shocking and disgraceful. It makes you wonder what other...

Yeah. Can do. Thing about cog diss as a tool is that it actually has to work. Just throwing two utterly disparate concepts together into your story blender doesn’t guarantee any cog diss impact at all. There has to be some weird, spooky-at-a-distance sort of entanglement between them…