Okay. So I don’t usually use this blog to air my personal peeves. But sometimes I see something so bad happening in the literary world that I just can’t let it slide. And one of those somethings has just reared its ugly head.
James Frey is back. Remember him? Yeah, I thought not. He was last seen earning big bucks and bad publicity when he sold a novel about drug addiction as a "memoir" and then got caught on Oprah. But apparently the lesson he learned was not quite the one Oprah intended....
Now he's come up with a new and even more unethical scheme to make James Frey lots and lots of money. He's going around to MFA programs recruiting students to write work-for-hire books for his company, Full Fathom Five. (Read all about it
here ... if you have the stomach for it.) Apparently Frey thinks this gambit is going to bag him "the next Twilight." It ain't. But that's not the point. The point is the unbelievably abusive terms he's offering these hapless young writers. Basically, he's paying them $250 up front to write an entire novel themselves, hand it to him for editing, and then walk away with a mere 30% of the normal author's royalties, the rest of which go to James Frey. Frey also gets a 70% cut of all world, film and TV rights. Oh and did I mention that Frey's for-hire writers are also never allowed to publicly claim authorship of their books?
This is as bad as it gets, folks. Truly. Please, if you are an aspiring writer considering entering into such an agreement -- with Mr. Frey or anyone else -- let me deliver a dose of reality.
If you write a book then you, and you alone, should reap the entire profits from it. The advance is yours. The royalties are yours. The movie and translation rights are yours. It's all yours. Because you wrote the damn thing.
The only exception to this rule is if a literary agent sells your book for you. In that case he or she rightly claims somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the take. This fee is well worth paying, because a good literary agent can usually get vastly bigger advances for your work than you could on your own. Also, a good agent is a sort of career mentor, steering opportunity your way, giving you high quality editorial advice, and helping you develop the overall arc of your career in what has become a brutally tough, highly competitive business.
What Frey is essentially doing is serving as a literary agent. He claims to be offering more than than agents offer, but that’s hooey. All the things he brings to the table -- editing advice, marketing advice, in-house publicity, contacts with major movie producers and top editors -- are exactly what established literary agents give you for their 15% agent's fee.
Trust me, Sonny Mehta does NOT trust James Frey to pick good novels (let alone deal professionally with him over the course of a multibook contract) more than he trusts the top twenty or so literary agents in New York. And the same thing goes for every editor, movie producer, and TV exec you’ve ever heard of. These people are professionals. They want to work with other professionals, not con men.
Frey is just milking the eternal desire of aspiring writers to believe that there is a secret club or a secret handshake that will let them skip the hard work of writing their first novel themselves and finding an agent who wants to represent it.
There isn’t. You just have to do it. Period.
But here's the thing that Frey has carefully not told these poor writers. If you have written a good first novel (and can write a reasonably professional one-page query letter), then you will always -- and yes, I really do mean ALWAYS -- be able to get reputable agents to read it. My agent is one of the top people in the business. And like many other top agents he reads unsolicited manuscripts. He doesn't do it for charity. He does it because -- like every other agent in the business -- he's always looking for the next hot young writer. This is true in every genre and for every conceivable kind of book. Young writers are the lifeblood of the business, and agents who don’t actively recruit them don’t remain top agents for long.
That's how the business works, and don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. As an aspiring writer YOU have something valuable to offer: your talent and your ideas. Agents know it. James Frey knows it too. The only difference between him and a reputable literary agent is that he’s trying to steal it from you.
