Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Trident Launches eBook Division

PublishersLunch
Trident Media Group has become the latest--and by far the largest--literary agency to announce an initiative to help their clients epublish, often independently of established publishing houses. The new initiative, called Trident E-Book Operations, will "create, manage and implement innovative e-book strategies for its authors, including the distribution of a variety of e-books directly" to major etailers. (Though they also see establishing "new business relationships with traditional and non-traditional publishers.") Lyuba DiFalco and Nicole Robson will serve in the new position of co-directors of E-Book Operations, supervised by Trident's top executives.
Chairman Robert Gottlieb, who has been outspoken in the past about agents who establish publishing operations, says in the announcement, "Trident will devise strategies to maximize value for its authors in the new and complex e-book publishing field. Trident will not become a publisher, but will instead continue in its new e-book operations to have itself aligned with its clients whose interests we serve as an agent and manager." Trident intends to charge its standard agency commission on revenues generated for authors through the new unit.
The announcement indicates Trident will provide a "comprehensive suite of services" comprising much of what authors need in order to bring works to market electronically, from copy-editing, marketing and cover design to digital conversion. They foresee covering properties of all types (out-of-print, backlist, frontlist and unpublished short-form) in multiple formats (ebook; enhanced ebook; print-on-demand).

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