Why Japanese authors don’t have agents: the main reason I’ll create a new platform
Since my last post, I’ve been frequently asked what the main revenue stream is for my new project, Reposeed. Some people suspect a crowdfunding model for journalism would hardly attract much of an audience, except for particular top authors. Assuming I want this venture to yield consistent revenue, they say, commissions and fees may not be sufficient to sustain the business.
From my observation of other crowdfunding sites all over the world, I have to admit they’re right. However, the fundamental idea and chief revenue of Reposeed is not crowdfunding itself. It is a new business for authors to have agents in publishing their articles. Americans may find it hard to believe, but the Japanese publishing business doesn’t have agents, even for top-ranked novelist or journalists, who usually set contracts directly with publishers, without agents.
This strange situation in Japan is historical. After World War II, most publishing houses in Japan founded their businesses not only on books, but also on magazines. Publishing both formats led to fixing the way for the authors to publish and get revenue. In most cases, their book business, either fiction or nonfiction, has worked like this: first, authors publish serialized articles monthly for three months to two years in the company’s literary or journalistic magazine, where they are paid a monthly manuscript fee monthly and are reimbursed for the cost of doing investigative research associated with their articles. After that, the same company gathers the serials, edits them, asks the authors to add more material, and publishes the book. The whole process works without an agent. Instead, the magazine editor works with the author first, then the editor in the books department.
In the US, an author has an agent who has close relationship with editors at specific publishing houses, which leads the author to publish multiple books with the same publishers. The agent’s role is essential to the great works while editors pay attention to acquiring the best book rights. In Japan, authors have published with different publishing houses mainly because they have no agent. Thus each author has to choose the appropriate publishing house to guarantee monthly revenue and the cost associated with the work by publishing the serialized articles before the books. For example, Takashi Tachibana, one of the most respected journalists in Japan, always works with five or six different publishing houses. Haruki Murakami, one of the world’s most prominent novelists, made his debut with my company, Kodansha, and has continued publishing his books with my company as well as its competitors, like Shincho-sha or Bungei-Shunju, depending on his theme. This is very common in Japan.
When the system where the magazine media was a bridge for the books was working well, no book agent was needed, because the magazine editors practically worked as the author’s agent. The editor supports all the things the author wants, including suggesting the theme, gathering material, conducting interviews or connecting authors to book editors, who in most cases were colleagues in his company.
However, the situation changed after the magazine media collapsed in Japan five years ago. Even the top-ranked magazines can no longer afford to pay writers as much as they did 10 years ago. In addition, the number of magazines specializing in nonfiction is decreasing. So authors lost outlets that not only paid them but also guaranteed their books’ quality before publication. Many authors now have to write an entire book from scratch without a good editor, paying coverage costs themselves.
I believe that the existence of editors in magazine media and its close relationship with the book world didn’t require an agent model in Japan. In my case, when I was an editor of G2 magazine, a quarterly focusing on investigative journalism by Japanese writers, I handled a lot of top-ranked journalists on crime, business or politics. In general, I edited serialized long-form articles by specific authors for two or three consecutive issues (which was a limitation as a quarterly magazine), before I published them as a book. Fortunately, in this case, I was a magazine editor as well as a book editor, which was rare in Japan.
On the writer’s side, this system without agents had advantages and disadvantages. The pro is that they can select the appropriate publishers regardless of other suggestions. Each publishing house has a unique corporate culture, which affects the publications, so writers can choose which publishers fit their current theme. The con is that they have to handle everything associated with the writing themselves. They sometimes need to respond to email asking them to speak publicly or to agree to secondary use rights fees for books’ publication. But the cons were not such big issues because in many cases the editors were doing them as their job, even if such things were not written in the written agreement. Many editors tended to think they had to serve writers. I know some editors who help even with family issues like babysitting. It was a kind of great tradition in the publishing world.
Even after the decline of Japan’s magazine media, there remain a lot of nonfiction publications. However, their quality and quantity have decreased because they are not based on the investigative research that was once guaranteed by the magazines with enough money and time. Five years ago, Shinichi Sano, one of Japan’s splendid journalists, used to publish three titles a year with average sales of up to $1.5 million a year. Now he can publish only one title a year.
My conclusion is to create not a new framework for magazine media, but a new platform where editors can work as authors’ agents on a project basis and authors can have their costs paid by readers who could engage in the project until the new book is published. That’s my idea for Reposeed. Of course we can see some agent business in literature and manga sector in Japan (http://corkagency.com/en/). But the agent system alone can’t save nonfiction because people mainly care about the specific theme with the appropriate authors. So in Reposeed I have added the agency system with the crowdfunding approach. I believe it will be the key to changing the system for publishing nonfiction in Japan.
Katsunao Ishii is a Tow-Knight fellow in entrepreneurial journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and an editor at Kodansha Ltd in Tokyo. He is now launching Reposeed, the first crowdfunding service for Japanese journalists.
