Viewing Post from: The Knight Agency Blog
The official blog of The Knight Agency, a boutique-style literary agency with offices on both the east and west coasts. TKA specializes in discovering authors of vivid fiction, particularly in the areas of young adult, middle grade, women's fiction and romance. We are open to unpublished authors, newly published ones, and certainly top-tier published authors who are looking to take their careers to the next level. We believe in a multi-pronged approach to career management that focuses not only on front list titles, but nurturing the backlist in all subsidiary rights categories. With four agents in-house, our tastes are broad and widely represented at TKA, and that translates to a diverse author base--and means that we never get bored!
What are we eager to find in 2008? More authors of young adult and middle grade, nonfiction authors of all types, and women's fiction authors. Some romance also, especially in the teen lit area.
Since the inception of our agency in 1996, we have taken every step possible to ensure that we advocate for our clients by offering a broad spectrum of services. For instance, we were one of the first pioneering agencies to hire a full-time marketing director and have maintained that position for the past six years. We take our position as advocates for our clients very seriously, and so it was only after six months of intense research and planning, involving conversations amongst ourselves and with our clients that we decided to start an assisted self-publishing program. Additionally, we've brought in outside consultants and developed strong relationships with representatives from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony and Kobo; we also continue to reach out to and develop relationships with others.
We did not enter into this lightly, but felt that is was necessary to create this service as an option for our clients. This program is an extension of our current services meant only for current clientele, not a publishing arm. We are taking our standard 15%, and will pay all upfront costs with the exception of copyediting. This is in no way a mandate or a requirement for those wanting to self-publish. They can take advantage of our program or choose to handle the self-publishing portion of their career alone; regardless of their choice, we fully support their decision. But we felt that in the current climate, we’d be remiss to not supply an option in this arena, for those clients wishing to self-publish without handling the details, marketing, publicity, social media, content editing, and such on their own.
Our clients are fully aware of our plans. We surveyed them to gauge their interests in such a program because we treasure their input and want to make sure we are giving them the best and most comprehensive representation possible. Many of them have lined up to participate in the initial launch this coming September, and we are thrilled to be able to assist them in this way.
Today an author stated on a blog that we are “becoming publishers,” which is wholly untrue. In light of that miscommunication about our plans for the future, we felt it was critical that we post the letter sent to all Knight Agency clients to further clarify our position. You can view the letter below.
____________________________________________
Dear Authors:
As you know, The Knight Agency has been working on a very exciting assisted self-publishing initiative that will aid authors in digitally republishing backlist titles, as well as allow clients to publish select front list titles which the author and agency will hand-pick together. For example, clients and agents may select novels, collections, or shorts that mainstream
Your clients must be thrilled that you are offering this option to them.