The Swifty Lazars Of Software

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One of the hottest agents around these days is a fellow by the name of John Brockman. He does not represent movie stars, or rock singers, or professional athletes, and his stable of writers includes no luminary on the order of, say, Norman Mailer, or even Judith Krantz. But, in April, Brockman negotiated the largest advance ever paid for a trade paperback book. The much-publicized price tag was $1.3 million. The book is The Whole Earth Software Catalog, to be edited by Stewart Brand, the creator of the original Whole Earth Catalog.

The sale to Doubleday & Co. points up the huge popularity of computer books, which already account for about 10% of he trade book market, with total sales expected to eclipse the entire trade fiction market by the end of next year. At the same time, it highlights the emergence of a new figure in the computer landscape -- the software agent. For Brockman represents not only authors of software books, but also software authors. Indeed, the ink was not yet dry on the Doubleday contract when he announced another deal of potentially greater significance for the software industry. Bruce & James, Program Publishers Inc., creators of the Vision line of personal computer programs, had concluded an exclusive U.S./Canadian distribution agreement with Simon & Schuster. The deal means that Bruce & James's word processing program, WordVision, will soon be available in bookstores, where it will sell for $49.95 (compared to about $300 for the popular WordStar).

Brockman is, in fact, the drum major in what promises to be a long parade of literary agents moving into software. Others are already falling into line. Judith Krantz's agent, Morton L. Janklow Associates Inc., has shown interest in the field, and there are rumors that William Morris Agency Inc. raay be moving in as well. Two other New York literary agencies and one in Boston have formed a consortium called Software Agency Inc.

"A literary agent looking at the book market today is struck by two things," says Peter L. Skolnik, a partner in Software Agency. "One, book publishing is very slow; and two, figures on the growth of the software market are astonishing. Right now, the software business amounts to several hundred million dolars in sales, but it's predicted to reach $5 billion by 1985. For a literary agent to overlook the software market, [he has to be] either short-sighted or lazy."

And literary agents aren't the only ones getting in on the action. "This is very fertile territory," says Roger Sparks, the erstwhile president of MAI Applications Software Corp., who resigned last February to form Basic Business Systems Marketing Inc., a software agency in Newport Beach, Calif. "It used to be that the software guy would sit down with the hardware people, haggle over an agreement, and then go off to wait for his royalties to trickle in. Not only was he inexperienced at negotiating, but he had no way to do the follow-up work on a marketing plan or a distribution arrangement. We can monitor all that for him."

Sparks, who earns 30% of authors' royalties for his services, cites a deal he struck for Tel-Trac Systems Inc. as a good example of what a software agent can do. Tel-Trac makes a telephone monitoring system, which it licensed to Micro Five Corp. Last year, that company did $4.5 million in business. This year, after Sparks negotiated the deal to distribute the Tel-Trac system on Micro Five computer systems, the company is projecting $15 million in revenue.

Brockman, who takes a 15% cut, views his role in traditional book-publishing terms. "Writing software is essentially a literary endeavor," he says. "Publishing houses were going right back to the 1930s [in] dealing with software authors. They thought they could offer a flat fee and walk away. It's part of what I call the mainframe mentality, and it stems from the way publishers bought software for their own systems -- boom, in one-shot deals. They have to be reminded that authorship is authorship, whatever the field, and that authors should retain all the rights that relationship implies."

But if agents are protecting authors' rights, they are also responding to the needs of publishers. Indeed, Software Agency's Skolnik contends that book publishers provide the main impetus behind the rise of the software middleman. Faced with the decline in their traditional markets, they are searching for ways to enter the computer field. "Right now, [they are using] book/software combos to ease the transition," he says, " . . . even if that only means slipping a floppy disk into the back flap of the dust jacket."

Similarly, the success of the literary-cum-software agents may ultimately be tied to the publishers' ability to capture a good chunk of the software market. Brockman, for one, feels it is only a matter of time. "Five years from now, when a customer thinks about buying software he will think of going to B. Dalton or other bookstores to find what he needs."