An Agent Of Change Bows Out

The Sunday Age

Sunday April 15, 2001

Jane Sullivan

TIM CURNOW has been watching Bryce Courtenay in a big bookstore chain on national television news, promoting the new government campaign to get more people reading. He's unimpressed. ``That program is preaching to the converted," he says. ``They're offering bookmarks. Who needs another bloody bookmark?

``I'd rather they put all those millions they're spending on advertising straight into education. That's where they should be promoting books, at school level. It's the next generation who need these programs, especially boys. There's not enough written that will appeal to them."

Curnow's grumbles have a certain authority, after 38 years in the book business, 30 of them as one of our premier literary agents. When Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country came out in 1975, it was a huge event for Australian publishing. The book was sold everywhere, from the United States to China and Japan. And now Curnow, who sold the book on Herbert's behalf, has the gratifying feeling of coming full circle. One of his last jobs as a literary agent was to finalise a film option deal for the novel with the producers of the Geoffrey Rush-Marquis de Sade vehicle, Quills.

Curnow recently announced his retirement from his job at the head of Curtis Brown Australia (leaving the company in the hands of Jonathan Lloyd as chairman, and Fiona Inglis as managing director). As he bows out, I asked him about his impressions of the dramatic changes he'd seen in the book industry, and how things stood for writers now. The answer in a nutshell was: great progress on some fronts, great threats on others.

When Curnow took over the country's first literary agency in 1971, he managed about 40 clients from a front bedroom in Paddington, Sydney. These included Patrick White, Xavier Herbert, Eleanor Dark, A.D. Hope and most of an older generation of writers who had forged their careers in a climate where you virtually didn't exist unless your books were published in London.

It was, as Curnow says, a frontier culture. In Australia, writing was generally regarded as a hobby. The Australian Writers Guild and the Australian Society of Authors, both relatively new, were struggling to make an impact. There was no Literature Board of the Australia Council; no Public Lending Right; precious few literary prizes; no writers' festivals or writers' centres in every state; no creative writing courses in all tertiary institutions.

Some of those early writers on Curnow's list, such as Eleanor Dark and Ruth Park, were extraordinarily professional about their work. Others were fiercely creative, writing out of passion or political conviction, without devoting much thought to how they should be paid for their labors. Publishers and writers had a master-servant relationship. Book contracts were quite a new idea. The publishers' attitude, Curnow said, had been, ``Trust us, we'll give you 10 per cent". Next, it was ``I suppose we'd better pay out the royalties".

What a radically different climate for writers today. Curtis Brown has about 250 clients, and at least half a dozen more major literary agencies have sprung up in Australia. ``The thing that's really exciting is a lot of writers now can make a living out of their writing in this country," Curnow says.``With a really strong new voice, publishers will get very excited and compete hard and pay very serious money."

While the international market is still a hard one to crack, the agency's clients today - especially those working in the world of popular genre fiction - are consummate professionals, often global operators with a shrewd sense of what they are worth and what technology can do. For her first novel, The Maiden and the Unicorn, romance writer Isolde Martyn carried home a Rita - the top award from Romance Writers of America, their equivalent of an Oscar statue and twice as big.

But Curnow warns that agents have to face some big future challenges. ``The book is undoubtedly under threat in certain areas." The GST, he says, is one of the most damaging changes to the book industry. And now we're facing the dreaded open market, which the Federal Government wants to introduce by abolishing territorial copyright.

At present, rights to books as diverse as Michael King's biography of Janet Frame or Pamela Allen's picture books for children have been sold four times over in Australia, the UK, New Zealand and the US. ``That means four separate advances and four publishers, each with a financial commitment to the book," Curnow explains. ``But if you sell world rights to one publishing group, you can't expect other companies to have the same enthusiasm and attention to detail, because they haven't put the money down."

With an open market, an American edition of an Australian book can be remaindered, the publishers can ship their stock to Australia or New Zealand (already an open market) and flog it off cheap in direct competition to the local publisher.

Curnow is also worried about Australian publishers' lack of emphasis on editing. ``Publishers don't put in the same level of editorial effort as they did in the past. These days it is more often the agent who works editorially with their client, developing the writer's skills through a number of drafts before the typescript is even offered to publishers. And at a time of high staff turnover, the agent is now the constant figure in the writer's life, rather than any publisher or editor."

We'll end with another Curtis Brown success story, albeit a bemusing one for the author. Colin Falconer's toga-ripper When We Were Gods: A Novel of Cleopatra is a smash hit in Germany and has just been published in New York and Australia. His second novel AZTEC has become a bestseller in Mexico. ``He went to Mexico City and was interviewed on radio and TV," Curnow says. ``He didn't quite understand it all because he doesn't speak Spanish."

e-mail: jsullivan@theage.fairfax.com.au.