BilmBlog500

In the evolving world of publishing, the roles of the author, agent and publisher are all having to evolve. What should our role as agents be? There's one school of thought I know I don't agree with, which says that an agent should never be a publisher. One statement of that position from a British agent can be found here , and in the US one prominent agent who's expressed his firm opposition to melding the roles is Robert Gottlieb, the head of the prestigious Trident Media Group. That's some of what he discusses in this guest blog post on the Publishers Weekly site. My VP, Eddie Schneider, reacted very strongly to a news article in Publishers Lunch Daily this week (also the source for the above link) about a literary agency that wants to go into e-book packaging. I thought I'd invite him to guest on my blog, and italicized are his comments below: I'm sure many of you involved in book publishing in some fashion (agent, editor, aspiring author) heard the news...

So as Borders makes its way through the bankruptcy process, they've gotten the OK to terminate their relationship with Starbucks to have Seattle's Best Cafes. The filings to get out from under say how the royalty rates are too high and make it difficult for Borders to make money on the cafe operations, so it would be better for Borders to take back the operation. Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu. Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never ...