Not in my agency, they don’t. I can’t say what other agencies do, but here we might spin, we might embellish, or we might round off, but no one flat out lies.
Some people have the idea that lying is all done with a wink and a nudge and that’s it’s all just part of the business.
It isn’t.
Maybe that’s what they do in other businesses, but in publishing, lying might get you thrown out of the professional agents’ organization.
Say you only have one offer and you know they will go up if only you had a little competition. It would be easy to pretend you do and to lie about it, but we don’t. What I do instead is to negotiate with the one offer I have. Sometimes they balk (you’re asking us to bid against ourselves??!?), but I don’t recall a single time when they wouldn’t improve their offer without competition.
My reasons are good. If there is no movement, the author will feel dissed and that’s not a good way to begin a relationship. The publisher knows they were expecting to pay more, and I’m not going to let them run away with the spoon. All negotiations are a piece of psychology. If one side refuses to budge, it’s not a negotiation. It’s a dictatorship. The other side will feel let down, the dictator will feel like they should have offered less, and no one will be satisfied.
There is also this. Lying is wrong. You knew that, didn’t you? But maybe you thought it was all part of an expected game. But consider that no one likes to be lied to. No one wants to be made a fool of. That includes business. The basic rules of life do not cease to exist in a business transaction.
And one more thing. Publishing is a small business. Word gets around. Publishers almost always find out what went on behind the scenes. People talk, and gossip is not outlawed. And when word gets around that you are a liar, that will permanently affect what happens after that.
So please don’t expect us to lie. We won’t invent offers that don’t exist, we won’t double the amount that was legitimately offered, and we don’t lie about how many books sold. Ultimately the truth will come out, and where does that leave you?
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