Agents and ePublishing Opportunities

Agents have a wide variety of thoughts and plans about how best to serve their clients and maintain their businesses in this time of digital change. This panel presents three agents with very different practices and approaches. Scott Waxman has not only actually created a new ebook publishing imprint called Diversion; he’s already has had a NY Times Bestseller emerge from his efforts. Jane Dystel represents two of the more successful self-publishing authors: Joe Konrath who went from established publishing to self-published digital and John Locke, who launched himself online and has now made a first-of-its-kind deal with Simon & Schuster to sell print versions of his novels. And Robert Gottlieb of Trident represents a gold-plated list of authors; his agency is yet to announce its digital plans. All of them will discuss what makes sense for authors and agents in these times.

Moderator

Michael Cader
Publishers Lunch and PublishersMarketplace.com

Michael Cader is the creator of Publishers Lunch, the largest-circulation book publishing industry publication in the world, and its companion website PublishersMarketplace.com, which offers comprehensive news, databases, tools and more for book publishing professionals. For 15 years he created and produced over 300 books through his book packaging company, Cader Books.

Panelists

Jane Dystel
President of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management

Jane has been an agent since 1986. Her publishing career began at Bantam Books. She then moved to Grosset & Dunlap, where she was a managing editor and later an acquisitions editor. From there, she went on to become Publisher of World Almanac Publications, where she created her own imprint.

When she joined the agency that would soon become Acton and Dystel, Inc., she quickly developed a reputation for honesty, forthrightness, hard work, and real commitment to her authors and their writing careers. In 1994, she founded Jane Dystel Literary Management, which became Dystel & Goderich Literary Management in 2003. The agency is the product of Jane’s innovative vision of author representation as a full-service enterprise.

Robert Gottlieb
Chairman of Trident Media Group

After 24 years at the William Morris Agency, Gottlieb started Trident Media Group, LLC in September 2000 where he now serves as Chairman. Robert Gottlieb presently represents many best-selling authors. He has consulted with the Vatican and the Russian Cultural Ministry in connection with intellectual property rights. He attends the London Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair each year with his team of foreign rights agents and oversees the foreign rights department as well at Trident.

Mr. Gottlieb built his stellar reputation by being the first and the most effective literary agent to brand authors. He works across all genres, in both fiction and non-fiction. His successes over the years include international bestselling authors Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz and Janet Evanovich. He continues to grow his list of authors which currently include international bestselling authors Deepak Chopra, Catherine Coulter, Elizabeth George, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Kat Martin, Mary Alice Monroe, and Karen Robards.

Scott Waxman
Principal of the Waxman Literary Agency, Chairman and Co-Founder of Diversion Books

In 1997, Scott founded the Waxman Literary Agency, a mid-sized agency with a roster of more than 200 authors, including many national bestsellers in a variety of fiction and non-fiction categories.

More recently, Scott has founded Diversion Books, a new arm of the agency focused on providing the agency’s authors as well as authors outside of the agency with the benefits of electronic publishing. Diversion has successfully published dozens of frontlist backlist titles, offering authors and agents a total epublishing solution that includes editorial, design, conversion, distribution, marketing and accounting.