I found out a while back that my agents in New York fired me.

I’m no longer listed as one of their clients on their website.

Damn, what a predicament! Whatever shall I do?

These guys didn’t have the balls to tell me they’d fired me. They just decided they weren’t going to represent me anymore because of something I wrote in one of these blogs. I’m not sure which thing it was that offended them, but it could have been any one of many. It might have been because I said they were worthless, or gutless, or irrelevant. Who knows? I can just see them running around their stuffy little office in the Hamptons and saying things to each other like, “Can you believe this guy? We’ll show him. We won’t represent him anymore.” Like it mattered.

I found out by accident, when I sent an email up there about getting an advance on an advance that was owed to me and had been owed to me for several months. They didn’t file a tax document that should have been filed, which delayed the advance, so I asked them to go ahead and send me the money and then they could keep the check that would eventually come from the publisher. I was told by the office manager – a guy I really like – that I would not be given an advance on the advance and that I had been fired for insubordinate blogging.

I guess this means I won’t have to give them fifteen percent of the five or six or eight hundred thousand dollars (maybe a million) I’m going to make selling ebooks this year. I also won’t have to give them fifteen percent of the audio book deal I just made. I’d asked them to get me an audio book deal several years ago. They never bothered. I have a sweet deal now that’s going to make me another boat load of money that I won’t have to share with them.

And oh yeah, I won’t have to share all the money I’m going to make in England, where they never bothered to get me a deal. “An Innocent Client” is the Number One best selling legal thriller on Amazon.uk right now, and the rest of the books are in the top fifteen. The Brits seem to like ol’ Joe Dillard. I knew they would. I just knew it.

It also means that the agents won’t get to go to cocktail parties in New York and regale their companions with stories about how they discovered the guy that has FIVE BOOKS IN THE TOP TWENTY BEST SELLING LEGAL THRILLERS on Amazon. That’s too bad, really, especially since they did so much to nurture my writing career, like selling me out to a pisant editor at New American Library and telling me that the Dillard series was dead and that I should write something else.

It also means they won’t have to talk to me on the phone once a year or ignore my emails. That should be good for them, because I’m sure it bothered them to make me feel like I was invisible, unimportant, and had no chance of succeeding in the book business. I’ll bet they lost sleep over it, had trouble eating, and suffered from gastro-intestinal problems. Guilt will do that to you.

All the mickey mouse crap they did would have been okay, I guess, if they had told me up front what they really were.  Literary agents, when you first start dealing with them, tell you they’re advocates for writers, and while that may be true to a limited extent, what they don’t tell you is that they’re basically self-important shills for the publishing industry. Agents can’t do anything the publishing houses don’t want them to do and they can’t make the publishing houses do anything at all. The publishers tell them the terms of the contracts and the publishers draft the contracts. All agents really do is serve as a filtering system for the big publishing houses. They read solicited and unsolicited manuscripts in the hope that they’ll find something a publisher will pay for. Once they do that, they have no more input in the process with the notable exception of collecting the money. The money goes from the publisher to the agent and the agent sends a (measley) check to the writer.

Now that Amazon, digital books and indie publishing have come along, the agents have nothing to do.

They’re pretty much irrelevant.

So things really haven’t changed much at all, have they?