Becoming a Co-Agent
By Bill Stephens - Apr 14 , 2008
I just became a co-agent on a book publishing project. I don’t know if agents often invite clients to share in commissions when they bring good stuff to them, but mine did. I didn’t refuse the offer. And if you are a publisher, you need to check this story out.
A reporter interviewed me for a newspaper article on www.horizonspast.com and the concept of offering my novel in free serialized form on the Blog and as free PDF chapter downloads.
During the conversation, the reporter mentioned he had been working for over a decade on a book with the working title. “Messages from the Sea.” He took leave of absences from his reporting jobs over the years to tour all three coasts looking for people with message-in-a-bottle stories and/or the message itself. I became enthralled as the story unfolded.
His approach was to run classified ads in the often-weekly newspapers in small coast towns asking for message-in-a-bottle-stories. To date he has collected hundreds of them. His wife, a newspaper photographer, has logged dozens of beautiful photographs of the messages themselves.
Some of these “Messages From the Sea” defy imagination:
An Australian mother’s newborn baby died. She wrote a letter to the child, put it in a bottle, and threw it into the Pacific. Years later the bottle landed on the West Coast. The letter will rip the heart right out of you.
A teenager throws a message-in-a-bottle in a creek in Kansas. Thirty-five years later the bottle is discovered on the beach at Matagorda Island, Texas. The author goes to Kansas to find the now adult teenager and learns she has since died, but a relative remembers the episode well.
As I read his book proposal, I was enthralled. I bundled it up and sent it to my agent who is now quite excited about the book, and I am co-agent on the project.
As a coffee table book, it will reside on every coffee table in every seaside community in the country. In illustrated non-fiction reading format, it will be a bestseller. Publishers should get in line for this one.
I would have been happy to just help get the book in print, but I will admit I like the idea of co-agency. So if you run into something good, you might pick up a little extra cash by asking your agent to share any commissions.
