Towards the end of my time in publishing, in the late 1980s, something very curious happened. The big publishing groups were becoming ever larger and more musclebound, swallowing up firms to left and right; and yet, in what seemed like an act of self-immolation, they and their fellow publishers wilfully abdicated their position as the ringmasters of the literary circus. Far from ruling the roost, they became, in effect, supplicants, seemingly at the mercy of people whom, in days gone by, they had regarded as inherently inferior, namely booksellers and literary agents. Far from resisting or resenting their conquerors, they warmly welcomed them in, like decadent emperors confronted by virile barbarian tribes.
To begin with, dusty old backstreet bookshops were steam-rollered aside by the new chains, headed by Waterstone’s. Publishers and their sales managers were carried away by this, happily envisioning American-style shops in which customers were served hot drinks and cake and sat about reading in armchairs without spilling crumbs or coffee into the books they might or might not buy. The new shops were bright and smart, often in prime sites, and were said to be staffed by enthusiastic and well-informed graduates, but they ordered as many (or as few) copies of most books as the much-maligned men in cardigans, only at a far higher discount and on a sale-or-return basis. (In the dim and distant past bookshops had tended to buy firm, and were allowed to return copies only in exceptional circumstances.) Not only were publishers giving away a larger slice of the cake, but all too often they were so carried away by the huge orders from the chains that they foolishly reprinted – only to have all the sale-or-return copies flood back, leaving them with warehouses full of unsaleable stock, and converting what might have been a modest profit into a thumping loss.
Life became even more hazardous after the abolition in 1997 of the Net Book Agreement, which had legally prohibited the sale of books below the published price for two years after publication. Before long the chains were joined by supermarkets and online booksellers, all demanding ever larger discounts. Chains and supermarkets fought to undercut each other, offering bestsellers to the public at a fraction of the recommended published price, to the benefit of no one: the publishers were giving away their most valuable assets, the booksellers were making little or no profit on their bestselling titles, the authors were paid the derisory royalties that apply on high-discount sales, and the traditional balancing act whereby the occasional bestseller and boring but dependable books on gardening and bridge fund first novels and books of poetry was thrown into jeopardy.
Conceding higher discounts and more favourable terms to the retail trade coincided with a surge in the level of advances paid to authors. In the bad old days, authors without private means or a job teaching in a school or university were expected to live in a garret on a diet of baked beans. Despite the enormous earnings of a tiny handful of writers, which mislead the world at large into thinking authorship a lucrative profession, most writers still earn far less than the minimum wage, but can now wash down their beans with a glass or two of supermarket red. Nor is their loyalty to publishers what it once was. H.G. Wells used to be quoted as a dreadful warning because his readiness to move from one publisher to another with each new book meant that none of them had an interest in promoting his backlist or keeping his works in print. With editors forever on the move, the life expectancy of the average book put at weeks rather than years, and the chains concentrating their energies on short-lived, highly promoted bestsellers, backlists are no longer as prized as they were: authors shop around, and exploit other media in order to survive.
Better terms for writers reflected the increased power of literary agents. A.P. Watt, where I spent six unhappy years in the 1970s – unhappy due to my own incompetence and unsuitability for the job – is generally thought to have been the world’s first literary agent, setting up shop some time in the 1880s, and going on to represent Kipling, Yeats, Conan Doyle, Buchan and other great figures of the time. Watt’s near-contemporary J.B. Pinker had an equally impressive cast of authors, but his reputation for shady dealing blighted the trade. Agents came to be regarded as parasitic, slightly dodgy figures, literature’s equivalent of the used-car salesmen played by George Cole in post-war British comedies. Although he ended his career as an agent, Charles Pick of Heinemann was among the last publishers to make no bones about disliking and distrusting literary agents. More often than not they retained American, translation and serial rights, all of which he regarded as part of the publisher’s inheritance, and because he was nimble at selling such rights himself, to the benefit of his firm as well as his authors, he resented agents all the more. As a publisher, Charles Pick dealt fairly with his authors, but in the early years agents had their work cut out. Whenever possible, publishers would fail or refuse to pay royalties, and buy the copyright in an author’s work for a modest outright fee; in more recent times, Paul Hamlyn founded his fortune on paying flat fees to unworldly authors of highly illustrated books about seashells or macramé, which were then sold in huge numbers around the world in risk-free co-editions.
A.D. Peters is generally credited with converting literary agency into an honest and reputable profession. A former journalist, he founded his business in 1924, and included Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Blunden, J.B. Priestley, Storm Jameson, Stephen Spender, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West, C. Day Lewis, Frank O’Connor, Eric Linklater, V.S. Pritchett, Nancy Mitford and C.S. Forester among his clients. Petra worked there towards the end of his life, and I spotted him once or twice when I called in there to pick her up after work. The firm then inhabited an elegant eighteenth-century house in Buckingham Street, with a three-sided bow window overlooking the street, creaking floorboards, and barleysugar banister rails up the staircase. Peters was a sturdy, red-faced, blue-eyed man, clad in immaculate suits and highly polished hand-made shoes, a shy and benevolent Mr Toad who looked as though he should have had a large cigar in one hand and a brandy glass in the other.
Agents are, by definition, pullers of strings who work behind the scenes, and Peters was the ultimate éminence grise. A keen cricketer and a friend of J.C. Squire and Alec Waugh, he was part of the world immortalised between the wars by A.G. Macdonell in England, Their England. During the war he worked for both the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Food, while simultaneously running his business; in 1940 he joined Harold Macmillan, Hugh Walpole and others in a successful campaign to dissuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer from imposing purchase tax on books; a year later he was a moving spirit in the influential 1941 Committee which drew up blueprints for a more egalitarian and socialist post-war Britain, and included among its luminaries Victor Gollancz, David Astor, Kingsley Martin, H.G. Wells, Ritchie Calder, Douglas Jay and Tommy Balogh. In later life his liberal instincts manifested themselves in campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, and on behalf of prisoners and refugee writers. He was one of the founders of Associated Television, together with Lew Grade and his author Norman Collins, the author of the bestselling London Belongs to Me and a former director of Victor Gollancz. He backed new plays in the West End, launching the theatrical careers of Terence Rattigan and J.B. Priestley, and produced films, among them An Inspector Calls. With A.P. Herbert, Billy Collins, V.S. Pritchett, Roy Jenkins and others he campaigned for reform of the obscenity laws, culminating in Roy Jenkins’s Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Yet if most publishers are forgotten within their lifetimes, agents are even more ephemeral. Peters may be remembered by the world at large as an occasional recipient in the published letters of Evelyn Waugh – his contemporary David Higham occupies a similar role in those of Dylan Thomas – but influence and celebrity don’t always coincide.
Relative anonymity is more than made up for by material success, and successful agents can make a good deal of money for themselves as well as for their more saleable authors; and never more so than over the past twenty years. The sums paid for serial rights by Sunday newspapers are not what they were back in the Sixties, but for the lucky few the sale of film and television rights more than makes up for this; and, more importantly for the average author, the advances paid for even modest-selling books far exceed those on offer in the past. Agents, or so it is said, have replaced publishers’ editors as the lynchpins in authorial lives, doling out editorial words of wisdom, advising on publicity, giving their views on