Ten Percent of Nothing. The Case of the Literary Agent from Hell (review)

Former FBI agent Jim Fisher writes a fascinating account of a story worth telling, but it is populated by a cast of characters that, with very few exceptions, failed to engender any feeling of empathy. I read Ten Percent of Nothing (TPN) like a work of fiction, perhaps because I didn't want it to be true. There is more to my world of publishing (as an author, editor, and reviewer) than just making money - but not so for most of the characters in Fisher's account. The line between the 'good guys' and 'bad guys' is well defined. Both sides are driven by greed, apparently; it is only their methods that differ, the one feeding the dreams and desires of the other and, in return, having their own lusts nourished by hard cash. The 'bad guys' in question had but a few tricks, yet played them so well that the victims fed millions of dollars into the pockets of bogus literary agents and shyster publishers.

Who are these 'bad guys'? Centre stage is taken by the literary agent from Hell herself, Dorothy Deering. Deering was convicted for embezzlement before she ever got into the literary 'racket.' She failed to publish her own novel, and Fisher speculates that, after paying fees to three literary agents, 'Dorothy realized that it would be a lot easier to become a fee-charging literary agent than a published writer' (4). Deering founded the Deering Literary Agency, through which, for an annual fee, (mainly unpublished) authors hired Deering, a convicted felon lacking in any literary experience and working out of her garage, to represent their literary aspirations. Thanks to mendacious advertising and the anonymity provided by a business intended to be run away from the prying eyes of clients, she was able to maintain a flourishing trade. Even when Ted Nottingham, the agency's first client, visited the 'office' and realized that all was not right, he still stuck by Deering; if even first-hand observation didn't drive clients off, what chance did those at the end of a telephone line, being strung along by a sweet pack of lies, have of discovering the true nature of Deering's business? 'Dorothy Deering was not your ordinary swindler. She was a con artist, an imposter' (181). She never made the mistake of hiring anyone with experience in publishing; members of her family were there to help her run the 'business.'

But the Deering Literary Agency was only the start. It spawned a second, equally dubious literary agency, A Rising Sun Literary Group, and Atlantic Disk Publishers, a vanity publisher that allegedly would put your book on CD. Then came an association with Northwest Publishing (NPI), run by James Van Treese, who squeezed money from authors by promoting the concept of 'joint venture publishing,' whereby several thousand dollars of an author's money were supposedly matched by the publisher. Investigators later 'discovered that some twenty-one hundred writers had paid Van Treese $10.5 million to have their books published' (61). Of these, only a third were 'published' (in print runs of fifty to 100 copies), and there was no advertising. Commonwealth Publishers (CPI) was another joint venture publishing front, followed by Deering's own Sovereign Publications; this business's approach frustrated the marketing director, who quit because there were no books to sell!

The truly appalling aspect of TPN's story is the fact that thousands of authors paid money - millions of dollars - to people they had never met who demonstrably had no qualifications in publishing and no history as publishers and who didn't deliver any of the dreams (that is, published books) they promised. 'Dorothy Deering, like others before her, had found a way to become a successful literary agent without having to sell manuscripts. All she had to do was sell herself and the writer's dream of being published. She...