Volcanic Dust hits PFD
I breakfasted this morning to learn from today’s Guardian newspaper that Peters, Fraser & Dunlop the agency that represents me as an author is to become part of a new company called The Rights House, owned by the public relations entrepreneur Matthew Freud and a rival agent Michael Foster.
It was news to me as I suspect it will have also been to other more illustrious members of the PFD stable, which include Simon Schama , Sir Max Hastings, Chris Patten, Douglas Hurd, and the coalition government’s foreign secretary William Hague.
Just two years ago, we were among a group of loyal authors who stuck with PFD when it was purchased by a consortium led by Andrew Neil. Other authors including Julian Barnes, Nick Hornby, and Joanna Trollope, defected to the United Agents agency, set up by disgruntled ex PFD employees, including my former agent Caroline Dawnay.
In 2008, I gave serious thought to moving elsewhere, but was persuaded over a lovely lunch at The Ivy by PFD’s then new chief executive Caroline Michel to stay on with the revamped agency and a new representative. It’s hard to say no to Michel. She is one of the most beautiful and energetic women I know, and hugely persuasive and at that lunch she made a pitch for my heart and soul that Jerry McGuire would have been proud of.
I have known Michel since the mid 1980’s when she did a fanatstic job at promoting me and my first book, The Land that Lost its Heroes, as one of Bloomsbury’s first authors. (She was in publicity director at Bloomsbury at the time). I remember her telling me then that you need not have had to have read a book to know how to sell it. Thankfully, the book went on to be read by a panel of very eminent judges, and won the Somerset Maugham prize for non-fiction.
Neil, we are told, has now quit, leaving Michel as a senior partner of the Rights Company. Quite what it al means for us lowly authors in these troubled times, God knows. Though I fear redundancies are on their way at PFD, it may not all prove to be bad news.
PFD has been struggling for a while to persuade some of its authors, as it promised it would do two years ago, that it has been doing enough for them across the range of promotional activities from book contracts to public speaking and TV and radio spin-offs at a time when publishers have been cutting back on their own promotional budgets, and advances. It remains to be seen whether the loyalty of authors count for anything any more . But I for one look forward to getting a decent explanation that might help me see the woods from the trees.
