By Stephen Windwalker
Editor of Kindle Nation Daily ©Kindle Nation Daily 2010

Here’s wonderful news for serious Kindle readers, and another stunner for the publishing industry!

Amazon has just announced a hugely significant deal  to publish $9.99 Kindle exclusives of, for now, 20 of the great classics of contemporary literature from, mostly, the second half of the 20th century, and the publisher is a literary agency, The Wylie Agency. This news will have earthshaking ramifications for the Kindle catalog, for readers, and for authors, publishers, and literary agencies: yes, The Wylie Agency is a literary agency, not the publisher John Wiley, and this represents the first major foray by a literary agency into the world of Kindle content publishing, but not the last, but more about that later.

For now, let’s look at this from the point of view of readers. We’ll share the full list with you in just a moment, but as you look it over and download a few of your favorites, imagine how the success of these books on the Kindle platform will affect the authors and authors’ estates behind other backlist classics. There will be plenty for them to sort out with agents and publishers, but this first trickle of backlist classics is bound to create a flood:


The 20 books being published by Odyssey Editions and made available exclusively on Kindle are:

• “London Fields” by Martin Amis
• “The Adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow
• “Ficciones” (Spanish Edition) by Jorge Luis Borges
• “Junky” by William Burroughs
• “The Stories of John Cheever” by John Cheever
• “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
• “Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich
• “The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer
• “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
• “The Enigma of Arrival” by V.S. Naipaul
• “The White Castle” by Orhan Pamuk
• “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
• “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
• “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks
• “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson
• “Rabbit Run” by John Updike
• “Rabbit Redux” by John Updike
• “Rabbit is Rich” by John Updike
• “Rabbit at Rest” by John Updike
• “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh

The deal comes as authors, agents, and publishers are battling to sort out a new ebook royalty structure against the backdrop of Amazon’s new 70 percent royalty structure through the Kindle Digital Text platform.  As I wrote in a post yesterday, “Publishers who try to lowball authors and agencies on ebook royalties will find themselves sending their established authors in the direction of the DTP or to innovators like Open Road Media and RosettaBooks.” Obviously, we can now add to that list The Wylie Agency, one of the world’s most successful, venerable, and controversial literary agencies in the world, with 30 years of history, offices in New York and London, and a Hall of Fame client list.

The Wylie Agency has created its own publishing imprint, Odyssey Editions, which Amazon’s release said “is the first digitally native literary imprint launch of its kind.”     





“As the market for e-books grows, it will be important for readers to have access in e-book format to the best contemporary literature the world has to offer,” said Wylie, President of Odyssey Editions. “This publishing program is designed to address that need, and to help e-book readers build a digital library of classic contemporary literature.”

Writing in the current issue of Poets and Writers Magazine, Grove/Atlantic senior editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler  said, “In case you don’t know, people do not like Andrew Wylie. I would not go so far as to say that most people in the publishing industry actively want Andrew Wylie to die, but I would sat that most people in the publishing industry are excited by the idea that Scott [Moyers] may take over for Andrew Wylie some day. Now that I think about it, hiring Scott probably proves that Andrew Wylie is some kind of genius.” Well, I think we can turn up the dial a bit both on the publishing industry’s dislike for Andrew Wylie and on the notion that he may be some kind of genius, but for anyone who is thinking that publishers will stop accepting Wylie manuscripts now that the agency is a competing publisher, best to take a look at the Wylie client list. More likely the major publishers will be begging Wylie not to take those A-list clients directly to the Kindle without the publishers’ profitable (if only for the publishers) intermediation.

This is the first time any of these titles have been available electronically, and all of the books are exclusive to the Kindle Store for two years, Amazon said in its news release. It will be interesting to see how publishing insiders cover the deal, and how long it takes them to find out the structure of royalties for affected authors.

The 20 e-books published by Odyssey Editions carry an elegant and unified new look designed in collaboration with Enhanced Editions (www.enhanced-editions.com), Amazon said. Features include:

• Newly-designed jackets
• Interior typography adhering to best conventions of book design and reading on Kindle
• Colophon, book covers and series design optimized for the Kindle screen