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• We provide editorial support, facilitate publisher relationships, negotiate contracts, and help shepherd your project from the page to the bookshelf, and beyond.

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• We only make money (a 15% commission) after we sell your project to a publisher and there are never any up-front or hidden fees.

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• We represent book-based projects and the subsidiary rights derived from those books. We neither represent nor charge commission on non-book work such as magazine or newspaper writing, editorial illustration or public speaking.

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• Payments, tax information and royalty statements we receive are delivered promptly, and we are available and happy to answer questions about them.

 

• There is full transparency before and during the submission process – you will know who your book is being submitted to, and when. (Whether you want to hear the editors' feedback is up to you!)

 

• We consider ourselves “Career Agents” rather than working on a book-by-book basis and our agency agreement with clients is set up to continue indefinitely. That said, should the partnership not be working out, either party can terminate the agency agreement by giving written notice with no "cooling off" period or restrictions on where and how you can sell your new works.

 

• We manage the subsidiary rights for the books we have sold for you and we facilitate and manage TV/Film connections, merchandising opportunities, and audio rights.

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• ABLA will remain the agency of record for any books we sold for you (and the subsidiary rights that go along with them), but we do not have any claim to books you sold before you joined the agency or after you leave.

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• We are fiduciaries for our clients and deal ethically and act in our client's best interests. 

 

• Our goal is to empower our clients with the best possible options and guidance for long-term success and we will offer our professional opinion as you navigate this journey. Ultimately, though, your book is YOUR book, and all final decisions about selling it are made by you.

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• Each of our agents works with their own list of clients and across a variety of locations but we are an extremely tight-knit group who is constantly in communication with one another. We often share manuscripts and submission lists with one another, brainstorm titles, work through sticky negotiation problems together, and work cohesively to make sure our contracts are strong. This "brain trust" is truly among our biggest strengths as an agency.

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After over 40+ years in business, ABLA now has 16 agents with a variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise (editorial, academia, business, filmmaking, bookselling, education), each of whom are passionate about representing creators. We are not competitors but, rather, collaborators who can all learn from one another, and each of our individual successes lifts the whole group.

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This ethos of cooperation and camaraderie extends to everything we do as an agency, and it is no doubt why, over the years, we've had virtually no agent turnover, and remain among the most successful and stable agencies in the business.

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