managed to bring the business up to where we were before we left Peters, Fraser & Dunlop."
Kirby was one of the agents who left PFD en masse, over issues of control, to start a rival company. He describes the move itself as "pretty, erm, interesting". He adds: "You don't want to inflict that kind of thing on yourself voluntarily but it is something that had to happen. It was about ownership of the business and what we, as a group of agents, wanted and couldn't get."
Anyone at United Agents who earns income as an agent owns a percentage of the company, and as such it has "the biggest board of directors you will ever see. ... Which is fine, as the temperament of agents is that they're not generally keen on getting involved in managing big companies. We're more of a collection of small businesses that happen to reside in the same offices.
"Although we work in different areas, we all have the same ethos about being involved for the long term—the way we do business is generally perceived outside as being firm but fair, and I think people like doing business with us because they know where they stand."
Range management
United Agents has clients from across the creative industries, from actors and authors to make-up artists and directors. Kirby himself has a mixed bag of celebrity clients, including Ricky Gervais and Rob Brydon, alongside bestselling authors such as Anthony Horowitz and Joe Abercrombie. His ability to manage this range of clients was one of the reasons he took home The Bookseller Industry Award for the Orion Literary Agent of the Year in May.
In 2010 he also repositioned Dawn French as a successful fiction writer, enabled Horowitz to branch into adult fiction and successfully monetised the YouTube sensation "Simon's Cat" (120 new branded merchandise products will launch in a dozen countries before Christmas).
Kirby's better known clients don't just help keep the balance sheets looking healthy, they also help him with some of the broader questions within the industry— such as how to make money from digital products. "We've had amazing success with Ricky Gervais' podcasts, so we've had a little bit of experience at dealing with something that is free to listen to, but then [also] creating a product that fans are willing to pay for, without feeling like they are being ripped off."
As for the other big digital issues, like the tussle between agents who are publishing digitally and publishers who are bypassing agents and going straight to authors, Kirby is clear: "We are in interesting times and there is a shift that needs to happen from just acquiring and controlling digital rights and actually properly publishing and properly monetising. People are aware of this, but that shift hasn't happened yet as the market just hasn't matured."
New opportunities
Kirby "doesn't have a problem" with agents or publishers encroaching into each others' camps but questions their effectiveness thus far. "What agents are doing, and I haven't seen anything to the contrary, is simply making available their clients' backlist as e-books which is very simple and very cheap to do, but is that publishing? I don't see that as publishing.
"I think on the other side publishers are acquiring these rights, for no advance investment, and apart from a few exceptions I don't see any real publishing plans there either. We're at that in-between stage where people know there is a value there but can't fully see what that value is."
Despite the "interesting times" the industry is facing, Kirby remains positive: "The frontlist is completely different, and the figures you get from Amazon in the US seem to suggest that it is more or less the end of the mass market paperback for commercial fiction authors. But we still have our product, the book, and now there is just an expanding number of opportunities as to how that might be sold or read."
He insists that agents are in a "solid position", explaining: "We manage author rights, so as long as we're doing deals in different areas I don't think those new directions are going to cause harm. Agents just have to be slightly more careful and a little bit more beady-eyed.
"There is a renewed interest in limited edition hardbacks and there are companies developing and structuring the reading experience to match different digital platforms like Facebook—and although that might not be the big way forward, [it could] be one of a dozen new opportunities."
This article first appeared on www.thebookseller.com
