With France as the official guest-of-honor nation at next week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, we recently discovered that publishers, not agents, represent their authors’ rights—a normal situation in the Francophone publishing world, which includes Quebec and Belgium. (In the Anglophone industry and in Germany and Italy, it’s far more common for agents to represent authors.)
But there’s a group looking to bring better awareness of agents to the Francophone market. The Alliance des Agents Littéraires Français, or AALF, was formed in spring 2016 by several key agents in France. The alliance’s goal is to raise their own profession’s visibility and generate more of a conversation between authors, publishers, and agents.
We’ve spoken with several agents in the group, including Gregory Messina of the Paris-based Linwood Messina Literary Agency. The agents stress that representation is in the eye of the beholder. “Some French publishers,” Messina tells us, “are used to saying that they’re their authors’ agents. Actually, they are not.” They’re not, Messina says, because those publishers can own the rights, themselves, outright, “including publication, translation, film, audiobooks, … for the duration of intellectual property, which is 70 years after the author’s death. They can license or not license to whomever they want, without even consulting the author.” Complications arise, needless to say, when authors’ rights are handled by more than one publisher—possibly competitors—for different works.
In the publishers’ defense, Messina notes that agents haven’t been operating in the French market to a great degree for very long. As recently as 10 to 15 years ago, he says, “There were only a handful of authors’ agents. So it was really only up to the publisher to sell the translation rights of an author’s book.” Sometimes rights departments do consult with authors, Messina says, “out of respect, although in truth they don’t really need [an author’s] approval before licensing rights.” But this varies widely from house to house, he says, and even from author to author within a given publishing house.
Bottom line: Many Francophone authors need to be educated about the role of an agent, Messina says. Further, stronger representation for authors is important not only because of the scope of the rights at stake but also because contract boilerplates today call for subsidiary rights revenue to be shared 50-50 between the house and author, “which is clearly disadvantageous to authors,” Messina says. If any go-getter agents have a mind to hang out a shingle in Paris, it sounds like there’s interesting potential: an old and honored literary culture turns out to be very fresh territory in terms of author representation.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
