Speaker 1: So, okay, contract time. You've got an editor, you pitched it by phone, they were utterly charmed, they read the manuscript, they're in love. What kind of negotiations, what do you do to make sure you're getting the best deal for your clients?

Speaker 2: So I mean, I can't and won't go into too much detail.

Speaker 1: Don't share anything you'd be uncomfortable with.

Speaker 2: But I mean, I think that having an agent who knows what is going on inside your contract is really important. And I think that there are a lot of places that do not make understanding what's in the contract a very big deal. For their agents, like, they're very concerned with like, the amount of the advance and the grant of rights and that's it. But there are so many little things inside a contract that can really impact the revenue stream that you see down the road. Like escalators on royalties, especially in kidlit where the royalties are non-standard, they're negotiable. So like in adult fiction, it doesn't matter, like if you like won a contest and they gave you like their worst boilerplate contract, it would still have the same royalties as like my best biggest New York Times bestselling author has for hardcover, because they're standard. The whys and hows and wherefores of like why kidlit contracts are not this way are something I sort of constantly tapping on like a velociraptor checking to see if the fence is still lit. But like that stuff really matters. High discount royalty rates, export rates, like this stuff is so boring. I once, one of my favorite editors had this like, we had this terrible groove where every time he saw me, I was just like holding forth about something just deeply boring, like Canadian royalty rates. And I was like, I promise I'm fun and he was like, I don't know, man, every time I see you're talking about Canada export, like great party talk route. We turned it around eventually, it was fine. But it like that stuff really matters. And it's so deeply nerdy. And you can't, every contract, you can't always get improvements in every single contract on every single front. But knowing which things matter for the kind of book it is, and the kind of deal it is and pushing for the best iteration you can get. And they're always sort of constantly a conversation. So I wish that we could unilaterally change our boilerplates with the frequency that the publishers unilaterally change their boilerplates, but we can't. So anytime you get a new contract, you're constantly looking for and we work with a contracts consultant too. So there's two sort of layers of vigilance on contracts at our shop. So every time you get a contract, you're sort of looking for like, what new delight awaits? Like lately, it's been these morality clauses, which on the one hand, you're like, yeah, like I don't know that I'm interested in like, repping someone who, you know, goes on the record in favor of something awful. Like, so on the one hand, but on the other, my job is to stand up for my author. And so what does that look like in terms of pushing back on a morality clause? Like it's not really the publisher's business, what a person thinks, says, and does. And so we're constantly fighting those battles. So yeah, the contract is a really, really big thing. And it's much bigger than just, you know, do you get world or world English? How much money are you paying us? And I think that there, you know, I have clients who've been repped other places before. And it's always interesting to see, you know, different agencies sort of are focused on different things, you know, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, like just different priorities. So it's always interesting just to kind of talk through a contract with a client and clarify sort of like how and why we arrived at certain places, and also to give them the backstory on like, if there's a clause that like, isn't great, but like, that's as far as we could get it. And like, let's talk through what that means for us and how we're going to work around it. Yeah, I mean, I have definitely not necessarily proud of this. But I was once very, very, very, very, very pregnant. And literally like hiss screamed at someone about the Caribbean Commonwealth in a grant of rights. So...

Speaker 1: Must have had very passionate feelings at the time.

Speaker 2: I think I like, if I recall correctly, it's been a minute, I think I said, I look forward to seeing pictures of it in every bookstore in St. Bart, and then like hung up dramatically.

Speaker 1: The person on the other end just began to drink, oh, devastated.

Speaker 2: We talked later, it was fine. But it was definitely it can get it can get heated, it can get heated.

Speaker 1: I think it's good. I think it's good for authors to hear this side of you. And to know that under the very pleasant, smiling, friendly Nashville girl, who's who's gone on to become an agency superstar, there's a fierce determination that will work in your favor if you'll, if you'll let her. So okay, you, you, you nail the contract, you get what you want. How, how much involvement do you continue to have in that process versus going off and working to negotiate a new contract for somebody else?

Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, that's when the work starts. Like you, I mean, selling it is in many ways, the easy part, which is crazy, because selling a book is not always easy, but the, there's so many more variables as you move down the road. And again, this is where I talk about the idea of like, success is going to look different for everybody. So you, you know, you can't just set these like outside arbitrary things, because if your book is, has been P&L'd, profit and lost, like projected by your publisher at a certain level, and you surpass that, you may not ever, you know, hit a bestseller list, which is really about velocity, not just about number of copies sold. Like I have a lot of books that have sold a whole lot of copies, and I've never seen a bestseller list. So you know, we, we celebrate the wins when that win serves us, but there are a lot of ways to be successful that don't have anything to do with any of that. You can be a huge hit for a house, like you can return a ton of money on their investment, and we're in a great position to get you a better contract next time, because your book outperformed expectations. So there are a million ways for that to go well. But having a book that does that might look really different than if I'm trying to make sure that, you know, an announced half a million dollar marketing campaign, that that half a million is going to the places that really are going to be impactful versus the things that like, will feel really good for us on an ego level, but like probably don't actually matter. So like that, those are two really different ways of agenting. And it's important for us to be able to do both. And that, again, is about like, not comparing clients and not letting clients, like sometimes clients will be like, well, it's not like I'm, you know, whoever, I'm like, but you, but like, that's okay, you're you, and who knows what you are in three years, you know, like, if what if what we're doing now pays off, in three years, there's going to be somebody sitting there going, well, I'm not that client. And like, that's, that's what we want. And it's not, it is a long game, like publishing is so slow. And I feel like people think that their future in it is made or broken in like the first month of on sale. And that just simply isn't true. You just have to stay in and keep running. And then it can get really interesting. Transcribed by https://otter.ai