 |
|||
|
(Updated 3/29/2011) In other parts of this site we'll tell you more about Agent Research & Evaluation and what it does. Here we'd like to
tell you a little about who started it, and how and why. Bill, whose instincts for seeing that the consumer gets a fair deal were honed by the cooperative movement and President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, decided to research the published results of various literary agents. A year later Beverly left her former agent and signed on with a new one - who sold the first book he marketed for her for six times the amount of her previous advances. To the same publisher. It was pretty obvious that a writer doesn't only need an agent. A writer needs the right agent. Back then the Martins were living most of the year in the Canary Islands. That was back in the pre-Internet days. Doing anything commercial with Bill's research wasn't practical, but one way or another, he continued to accumulate data.
In early 1997 AR&E was incorporated and began serving the writing community. The basic mandate was and remains simple: empower authors by providing them with extensive information about virtually every active literary and dramatic rights agent in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., then encourage them to use that data to select the agent who is right for them. If the writer is currently unpublished, the data helps her/him prepare a query that convinces the agent to take a serious look at the writer's work. THE NEW MILLENIUM We were among the
first e-businesses on the web. (We began to accept online credit
card payment in 1998, well before almost anyone else did. Today
we
do so through PayPal.) By the beginning of the new century, a
changed publishing environment had impacted the nature of the services
we offer. As more and more data became available throught the
Internet, we learned that writers wanted more from us than just the
facts; they wanted information. What makes us unique is that we
offer agent expertise - a LOT of agent expertise, and the input of
folks who see publishing from the writers' point of view. By 2003 Beverly was
mentoring a select group of authors with whom she works closely,
offering the benefits of her 25 years of experience, in the very select
one-on-one master class called Manuscript
Analysis. A short time
later we developed the Agent
Recommendation Service, where, for authors
whose work is ready, we can not just recommend the right agent, but
bring author and agent together. We also provide Copyediting at a
highly competitive flat rate. At the same time, we continue to
offer our Customized
Fingerprint,
our core product. This
is the service that looks at you and your writing at the current stage
of your career, provides the names of the top seven or eight agent
choices for you and the reasons why, along with strategies for
how to approach them. The Team Bill is chief researcher and chief of just about everything else. Beverly brings her
writer's point of view to all the services we offer. Check out
her Blog. Debbie is new to the
venture. Her presence is the most exciting development at
AR&E in many years. She brings extensive and high-level
computer expertise, as well as a love of books and reading. The
site will be changing and improving as she assumes control of its
digital future. Check out Debbie's Musings Blog. There's a small office staff who handle all the rest, and they're invaluable. Finally, the spirit of the Martins' son Michael is very much present in all parts of the operation, particularly this website.
A Prime Talent |
|||