Week Six:

Readers and Agents Response

I believe that one of my favorite parts of the Introduction to book History is the “readers and agents” section in the “Printers, Book sellers, Publishers and Agents” chapter. I discovered a new job developing in the 19^th century that I hadn’t heard of before. This position was affected by “more complex negotiations over publication sources, royalty payments, and serialization rights” (95). A PUBLISHERS READER is contracted as an individual “who actively sought out, worked with, and encouraged potential additions to particular publishing lists, or as individuals providing assessment based solely on material passed to them by publishers and journal editors” (95).

I hope that that job description sounds familiar because that is the job of a modern day literary agent. As described by Fritschner, “the reader’s place… involved a powerful mediating role between producer of manuscripts and producer of finished printed product” (96). The readers played an influential role in the acceptance, rejection, and revision of texts. Because of their role, the readers found themselves caught up in the commercial, profit driven structure of the copinng with “multiplicity of media outlets for printed products” (96).

According to our "friend" Wikipedia, this is what a publisher's reader does:

What I find the most “interesting” is the shift from a “readers”/”agents” role of reading and publication rights to the “material publication rights in…new outlets extending beyond standard print media boundaries” (97). Agents now were responsible for negotiating rights for playing cards and cigarette pack pictures.

There was a lot of controversy and discussion as to the real worth of a literary agent, but I think that if one takes a step from the 19^th century to the 21^st century one would see how the role of a literary agent is pivotal in printing your own text, unless your self-publishing, and if you’re self-publishing then you’re using a literary agent for publicity.

This built in PR expert can either help get an author published, and/or get that person acknowledged for their work. Today consumers want to be able to fall in love with the author along with the writing. I believe that one of the reasons that J.K. Rowling was so popular was because she was a marketable woman that would appeal to a large audience. As a single working other, she only found time to write her first novel on her brakes at work. (*bing-bing* working class gal ---that is sellable) (*bing-bing* single mother? Well that’s a shoe in—look how hard she has been working to provide for her child). On a human level, she was a sellable person—lovable).

A literary agent would have taken her text and her, and ran them together. (I honestly don’t remember much about the early publication of HP because I was focusing my research on Superman, but I do remember the decision to market her book with a masculine name (the initials of the first two letters appear more masculine on the text)…. (Just a side tangent….not everything about an unknown author is popular---but when they become known, her story is something that people would love---the underdog)

Overall, what I appreciate about the history of the modern day literary agent is the transformation from someone that had responsibility of the text and author to someone that has an influence on the whole enterprise. I also wanted to note that within a publishing firm today an editor and the editorial assistant would have control over where a text went, reject or continued to publishing.