I can’t guarantee that agents always get paid faster — check requests seem to disappear on the publisher’s end with such frequency that authors often feel it must be on purpose — but the larger agencies such as Waterside and Studio B have accounting managers who work closely with their accounts payable cohorts at the publisher and they can often resolve problems more quickly than an independent author. This goes for errors and omissions on royalty statements as well.

As for the smaller agencies, now that I’m on my own I will make it my mission to know ever last person I can in accounting.

I have found that as publishers are acquired or merge, they tout the great benefits that the new economy of scale will bring to their back office functions: and inevitably, you see their accounting systems moved lock, stock and barrel to New Jersey. So, where once you had an editor you could call to find a check and that editor would walk down the halls to accounts payable to get you an answer, you now have a huge system of folks who are twice removed, people your editor doesn’t even know, and you’re waiting at their behest. These great economies of scale, to me, mean vastly slower payments.

I know this is even a problem for the editors at these houses, as they have to wait months themselves to be reimbursed for their expenses.

Regarding crooked or just plain insane agents, I’ve heard plenty of horror stories. It ‘s always been standard industry practice that agents receive monies on their author’s behalf, and that we invoice and chase those monies as well.

It’s critical that author funds are placed in a separate author account and not co-mingled with general agency funds. I know that in the past I did books with you both ways and I’m not against being open to various scenarios, but I think that agents distrust anything that might limit their involvement with a book, and we also want to be in the thick of things when checks and statements arrive.

Some books need help, and advance and royalty scenarios might change a great number of times before we know what the various authors are ultimately paid. In that situation my authors had always trusted the agency to disburse funds as agreed, appropriately and quickly.

Waterside shoots for 48 hours on check turnaround, but it’s most usually 24. I’ll shoot for the same. The AAR allows for ten days in their canon of ethics. I think that the only time a check should ever take ten days is perhaps during royalty periods where agencies are inundated (hopefully) with hundreds of statements.

This is not good. Presumably an agent is better at threatening publishers than writers are.

On the other hand, there is that story I tell of the agent that went crazy and stole between $100K and $200K from his authors. Which is why I always have the publisher split the payment between the agent and me and send out two checks; it’s easier than relying on the agent to forward the money.