My lawyer and I have been quietly dealing with a legal problem with a former publisher of mine. I won’t go into details, since the matter is still open (though now rapidly approaching conclusion). But a key point in the problem was my claim that I have not received any fiscal reporting on this matter. Well, it turns out that the publisher is astonished by this claim… because it can show lots of proof that it has indeed been reporting to me fiscally.

I took a look and, er… now I see that the fiscal reports have been going to a former literary agent of mine. And this isn’t EVEN the agent with whom I’m in an ongoing battle to get my payments split.

This is a DIFFERENT agent. (So, basically, my consistent experience now is that as soon as you stop being a client, you can COUNT on your ex-agent to stop FWDing you fiscal and legla paperwork to you.)

This is someone from whom I DID get payments split when I left… but from whom I didn’t get payments split in =this= particular matter, because I thought -this- particular matter was already old, finished, closed, wrapped up news when I left.

Well, guess what? It now turns out that I only thought that BECAUSE I WASN’T GETTING THE PAPERWORK. The -publisher- was still treating it as open business, new things happened, the publisher reported this development in good faith… to a major literary agency… that has apparently just been THROWING OUT anything that arrives in their offices with -my- name on it ever since I left.

(Frankly, it does make me wonder what ELSE has arrived in that agency for me since I left that I don’t know about and will probably never know about.)

My lawyer and I are sorting it out with the publisher.

But, good grief, I swear, I have reached a point where I would PAY my former agents to stop causing me unnecessary headaches with their irresponsible and unprofessional behavior.

Usually, when people say they are doing something to protect someone else, it’s at best a misrepresentation, and at worst a flat-out lie.

In context, that line is there to simply say that authors would be taken advantage of if agents charged fees instead of commissions. Hidden in the text is the assertion that authors are too stupid to know they’re being taken advantage of (which might just be true), and that the commission system somehow protects them from that stupidity. Also hidden is the assertion that by charging commissions, agents ensure proper care and treatment of their authors, because since they’re only being paid on commission, they will try like hell to sell their work.

That’s several of the myths rolled into one statements right there.

Not AAR, an agents org.

MWA, a writers org.

Not AAR, an agent org.

SFWA. A writers org.

People are SO DESPERATE to be published, and SO DESPERATE to have an agent, and not smart about researching and learning this -highly- competitive profession that they aspire to enter, the upshot is that an alarmingly large percentage of aspiring writers are very vulnerable to scams. This means that our industry attracts quite a LOT of scam artists.

And, of course, to collect your income strictly on commission based on selling books means you have to, oh, SELL BOOKS. Whatever one may say against the traditional agency business model (and we’ve certainly said plenty here), under that system, an agent’s income relies entirely on working with clients whose manuscripts generate income via book sales to legitimate publishers. In that system, there’s no way for someone to access your money until/unless your work is selling to publishers. Which is certainly a big point in its favor, in terms of eliminating scam artists who milk a desperate aspiring writer’s bank account via up front fees.

And thus alternative fiscal structures… probably won’t work. Because the field is plagued with scam artists. And you know who (a) polices this and (b) suffers for it? Writers. NOT agents.

Have all noticed, for example, that the major watchdog orgs and efforts battling scam agents are run by and paid for by writers orgs (ex. Writer Beware, supported by SFWA and MWA) and writer lawsuits and non-agent businesses and orgs (ex. Preditors and Editors, AgentResearch.org), and that education about this subject is primarily pursued by writing orgs (ex. RWA).

For all that they claim that fee-charing is evil because it enables those nasty scammers… Literary agents and agent orgs like AAR do remarkably little to clean up their own profession or patrol their borders. It’s largely left up to writers.

Granted, I’m taking the one single line *out of context*. I do understand her point about how a fee system could potentially enable scam artists.

But that line still just really jumped out at me.

And then, of course, the question is, who would care or be able to do anything about a scamming agent? The myth of agents is so deep that young writers just flat go brain dead when faced with “getting an agent” and thus even if it is common knowledge that an agent scams, the agent will still have more than enough new clients to scam. Sad, sad problem with this agent myth stuff. We writers can’t even police ourselves in any fashion at all. Or do audits.

It is allowed to do an audit of your dealings with a publisher and often the language is in your contract. But, of course, writers don’t think to have a contract that they give their employee to check on them.

I’m the volunteer Treasurer for a local non-profit. I handle about $30,000 in income each year. I’m getting ready for the annual audit of the financial records by an independent CPA, since the non-profit’s fiscal year ends this summer.

It’s not a full-blown audit, just a quick one to randomly search for irregularities in the books. Also the CPA often recommends better ways for me to do things.

For those writers who don’t do the 85/15 split with their literary agent until after they go their separate ways, do at least the larger literary agencies have an outside auditor come in to do a check-up of their financial records?

I have the horrible suspicion the answer is “never.” I hope I’m wrong.

Not me, even though I’m very much introverted and non-confrontational in person. Fortunately (or unfortunately — depending on your perspective), my last employer, a MAJOR cellular telecom company, was in the habit of screwing up a lot of my paychecks. Consequently, I was constantly hounding them about the mistakes. Sometimes I found that what I thought was a mistake was simply a misunderstanding on my part, but it was a misunderstanding that was engendered by what I thought was a very wacky way of presenting the numbers on my paystubs.

I might have been reluctant or afraid to do such a thing in the past, but no more, thanks to that employer.

Further, not only did they make a fairly regular habit of screwing up my paychecks, they also made a regular habit of screwing up my state income taxes. One year, when I called their finance department and spoke to a supervisor, and I described the problem, their idiotic response to me was, “We’re not here to offer financial advice.” (Funny. I wasn’t asking for any.) The response even included what sounded like a canned response designed to deflect attention away from them (almost as if they were having a lot of similar complaints from others). This company was having some financial difficulties at the time, thus a major reason for the layoffs that led to my current unemployment. What makes it even sadder, in my view, is that this is the only employer ever with whom I’ve had such problems.

Fortunately, having been laid off, I’ve since received my last check from them and shouldn’t have to deal with that problem any more. Almost makes me want to thank them for laying me off. (Well, I might have to deal with it one more time, depending on how my state income taxes look when I have to file them next year.)

My point in bringing this up, though, is simply that it would appear that this experience, like my divorce, has also given me some tools that will prove useful in a writing career.

When Lynn Viehl showed her royalty statements online after hitting the bestseller list a few months back, I poured over those puppies with an electron microscope, to make sure that I understood everything that was there because I want to understand as much about this business as I can before I get a publishing contract in hand. Dean’s Killing the Sacred Cow blog posts here are certainly adding to that knowledge, too.

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2010/03/we-interrupt-this-q.html