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THE STORY MERCHANTS by Sue Berger Reprinted from The Rights Report Ken Atchity on literary production and management as a holistic activity Former academic Ken Atchity founded AEI Entertainment in June 1996. It has turned over $16m in three years and already has six or more component parts, including an editorial service, website construction, literary management, licensing and merchandising, publicity and promotion, speaker/lecture booking, and a video production service to writers to be set up next year. All parts of the company are entrepreneurial, Atchity explains. They all use their own start-up capital to get them going. "If managers want to join us we give them incentives to do it, but we're not hiring employees. This isn't a job, it's a passion. We have six associate managers in places ranging from Honolulu to Boston, the Bay Area to New Orleans." AEI is based in Los Angeles, though Atchity and his partner Chi-Li Wong spend half their time in New York. AEI has seen five books on bestseller lists, including Steven Alten's Meg, Governor Jesse Ventura's I Ain't Got Time to Bleed, James Michael Pratt's The Last Valentine and Cheryl Saban's Sins of the Mother. It has sold 47 books to publishers, set up 13 feature films with studios, 18 films for television, numerous other film and television development deals, and many more books also in development. But the story of AEI starts with the story. "We think of ourselves as story merchants rather than sellers of novels or non-fiction books or screenplays. We try to get the concept at the earliest possible stage, because we feel that writers have been underexploiting their material. They are often not reaping the rewards of their own ideas. We believe that intellectual property is worth more than real property. Who would you rather be, Donald Trump or Bill Gates? Writers don't always realise how powerful their ideas are and how much can be done with them. "What usually happens is that a writer writes a novel, a publisher buys it with all the electronic rights; a studio buys it with all the merchandising rights; and if the writer is lucky he'll see a tiny fraction of the merchandising if it's wildly successful. What we're trying to do is exploit the merchandising from a story at an earlier point in the game, so the writer has a real share of it. "For example, our affiliate company All Media Entertainment already has a site up [megsite.com] for Steven Alten's Meg and its sequels, and we're negotiating for a video game and a theme park ride. Alten has published two Meg novels and is planning a third. So if we make a studio deal for a property, the studio will still want merchandising rights, but they are now negotiating with a different sort of creature than the writer with hat in hand selling his idea and hoping that they'll give him a little piece of it. "We're not agents, and the reason why I am not interested in being an agent is that in Hollywood, at least, agenting has the reputation, as one of the big agencies says, of "Sell it, don't smell it," which means keep your distance from the property, just make the sale. Though it's terribly time-consuming and heart-rending, what we do is the opposite. We have about 15 editors who work with our writers every day of the week. We stay on a project for ever until it sells. More than once we've sold a book long time after the writer has given up on it. "Literary managers are entrepreneurial brokers who do everything that can be done with literary business, from editorial to promotion to merchandising. We've even translated books and revised them for the American market. And now we're starting a production division, which will help writers create pilots for their own work, actually showing a story on tape instead of just turning in a treatment or script. We will be funding that as joint ventures with writers. "We look on writing as, first and foremost, a serious business. We don't look at it as a missionary activity, crusade, artistic tour de force, or academic exercise. We want our writers to be business men and women too. My son [Vincent Atchity] is the head of Writers Lifeline, as we call it. Writers pay fees to us to help them develop their work, and 70% of our $16 million in booked gross sales are writers who have been 'graduates' of the Writer's Lifeline programme. We help them to get to the point where their technical skills are equal to their ideas. We get half our referrals from production companies, publishers, agencies and studios. The others come through directories and a large number hrough out web site. We're getting about 100 enquiries a day on our site, and around 300 submissions a week. My partner Chi-Li Wong and I wrote a book called Writing Treatments That Sell, and we get a lot of referrals through that book as well as another I wrote called A Writer's Time. "We've just acquired a three-novel deal by Debra Bruce from a French agent entirely through email, from reading the material to signing the contract. Bruce is an American living in France who wrote a novel, The Winds of Kinchloven, in English and sold it to a French publisher. We now represent all the non-French rights throughout the world. Only about 10% of our writers are not American, and our sales are primarily to American publishers, but our plan for next year is to branch out and to place good books with publishers overseas, especially on the strength of their film deals. To that end I'm keeping my eyes open for an Associate Manager in London and in Hong Kong. "It's typical that people will bring us a project, be it book or film, that they have tried to sell, and we will work with it for nine months to a year, give it a new name and go out and sell it, having transformed it into something commercial. Our goal is to train people to become better writers. "About 20% of the projects that come in don't need any editorial help, so we just sell them. Joy and Gary Lundberg's book I Don't Have to Make It All Better was self-published and sold 70,000 copies. We ended up selling it for $450,000 to Viking and so far have earned $400,000 in foreign sales. We co-wrote Governor Jesse Ventura's book for him, sending our Writer's Lifeline editor Julie Mooney to Minneapolis to spend two weeks with him, and then provide him with a draft which he edited and worked on. Last we heard from Villard we'd sold 160,000 copies in hardback and it's had 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. NAL is publishing the paperback next summer, and we'll be preparing the new chapter for that in time for publication and the upcoming election. "We think that screenwriting is even more demanding than writing books. It's high-precision writing. You can't waste a single word in a screenplay. In a novel you wouldn't call it waste, you'd call it texture, but if there are five words too much texture in a script, it deadens it. "Screenwriters are the rarest of literary technicians. We've spent three years developing screenwriters, the very successful John Scott Shepherd included. We have made six deals for Sheppard in the last 12 months, and introduced him to his agent, Valarie Phillips of Paradigm. We work with screenwriters in the same way we work on the books, and if they can't afford our editorial fees, and if we find them talented, then we work out a different percentage arrangement. Unlike other editorial companies, we stand behind our writers by selling what we develop, and we have a good track record of doing that, though we won't be happy until we've sold every one of our writers. "We've published one project ourselves under the AEI/Calcasieu imprint, The Cruelest Lie by Milton Lyles, and helped him organize a book tour. We'll experiment next year with more independently-published titles. About 20% of the books we've sold to mainstream publishers have been previously independently published, and it seems to me that the world is becoming more entrepreneurial than ever before and there's much less disparagement cast on what used to be called self-publishing. "We've sold 12 books in the last 60 days (18 if you include a six-book deal), and about a third of them have been to small to middle-sized publishers, which I think are going to become a bigger market. Some of the advances are small, but if the books work, then that's where the money is going to be. Meanwhile the writer gets the book out there and can promote it. As far as independent publishing is concerned, you can get listed on amazon.com as an independent publisher. AEI's strategy is to assist writers in independent publishing only for the sake of getting a book out and selling enough copies so we can take it to a larger publisher. If it doesn't work then the person who cares most about it, the writer, has paid to find that out. Writers have to be serious about what they're doing and be entrepreneurial. "I think that what will happen in the future is that writers who can afford it will pay for the production of their books, and just arrange for distribution, so they'll get, say, a 30% return instead of the usual. Writers who are established brands like Grisham, King and Clancy will make more deals like this with publishers which will, in effect, become joint ventures. It's already happening. "When we take on a book we handle all rights to that property. And we produce the books that we sell to film or television. We're really producer/ managers. We were producing before we became managers, and the reason why we became managers is that we discovered that too few producers develop any more, and that's what we do. Management is holistic development, from cradle to rave, from the concept to marketing, and that's what producing is too. "I came up with the concept of producing for television when I was a professor at Occidental College teaching a class on courtly love alongside a class on publishing. The dimensions of today's romance novels are the exact same formula as used by Boccaccio's Decameron and in the Roman love poetry of Ovid, Horace and Catullus. The romance novel phenomenon is nothing more than a continuation of an ancient and great tradition. "I came up with the idea of producing little TV movies that mirrored romance novels, and I sold a concept called Shades of Love--each story had a colour theme--to Lorimar Home Video, and I executive-produced 16 straight-to-video movies. I came up with the story ideas, found romance novelists to write them as treatment, hired staff writers to work on the screenplays, and was supervising editor. After that I returned to LA and started making movies for TV, and then wanted to make all sorts of films. My partner Chi-Li suggested that we go back to developing writers, which I had done for many years as a professor, rather than acquiring rights to books." Atchity does some packaging among AEI's own clients. "We're doing that more and more now because we have so many clients. We have one client currently rewriting a novel for another client who initially wrote it as a screenplay. We draw up a joint venture between the two writers and we take a packaging fee, supervise the project and then sell it to a publisher and to a producer. Sometimes we develop two different manuscripts, a publishing version and a film version, which is 70 pages shorter with the action starting earlier, because the two markets are different and people read differently." As Atchity divides his time between LA and New York, how does he see the differences between them? "If it weren't for the 3,000 miles between New York and LA we wouldn't be as successful as we are. It's very useful to start a buzz on one coast and have it picked up on the other. New York publishing is very attuned to what's going on in the film business and vice versa. So we communicate between the two. They definitely have common interests, they both track ideas and fight fiercely for ideas, pay a lot of money for ideas and try to make them into something bigger than what they were." |