Page 34 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL10

Julian Friedmann and he wanted to concentrate on television and film rights while I was looking for someone to sell those rights for my books. We looked at each other and we thought we could put these two small agencies together. That worked so well we got married.”With the merger, the Blake Fried- mann Literary Agency was established. As the agency grew and nurtured new agents with particular reading tasks, it represented a broad range of genres including romance, fantasy and juvenile fiction. Due to her personal interest in commercial fiction, Ms Blake mainly focuses on romance, crime, historical novels and a few literary authors. It is necessary to work with material you have a passion for, she emphasizes, and as well as a love for reading an agent must have the persuasive ability to sell rights.Literary rights are much morecomplicated now than in the late 1800s, when the first literary agency was founded in the UK. With publishers maintaining a well paid legal department, it is hardly possible for an author as an individual to negotiate with huge international publishers and expect to get the fairest deal. In the past, a publishing contract might have consisted of a couple of pages; modern contracts have up to 20 pages covering all standard clauses, including royalty rates for print and digital platforms as well as the terms of warranty or insurance. It is not unknown for it to take a year or more to negotiate a boilerplate contract between a major publisher and a literary agency. Few authors could achieve this on their own.Books are competing with all other forms of entertainment and are going through a challenging period. Newly published titles not only compete with32 Elite+