more cohesive, because we all got together to shake things up and to do things differently. Once we put that initial team on the ground here, it just all started growing naturally. The plan wasn’t at all for us to build an office of 25, it has just happened because people kept coming and joining us. But because we have the backing of these huge departments across film, television, podcasts, music and brand- ing—and a big US literary division—we kind of feel like a start-up with corporate muscle.” Of course, that muscle is enviably Herculean. Like most US-headquartered private firms, CAA does not publicly disclose earnings, but a majorit stake of its global business was acquired last autumn by a firm led by French fashion mogul François-Henri Pinault, and the agency’s valuation at the time was widely reported to be around $7bn. Figures bandied about in this kind of deal are oſten pie-in-the-sky (and may serve more to enable other employees to stomach bosses’ windfall payments), but it gives a sense of scale. At any rate, in Britain the combined revenue for the most recent annual reports of the various CAA businesses that file to Companies House was £107m. Obviously, CAA London’s books depart- ment is not the main driver of these numbers, but Suton says a big part of what enticed her over was the abilit to tap into some of CAA’s non-book resources to look at agenting “in a whole new way”. She adds: “We still start from the basics: everything we do is author- led and we will always want to start with the author’s needs. But then we will build a team and methodology that is not one-size-fits-all. Other agencies oſten have corporate diktats: a book is assigned to a particular translation agent because it is their territory and not necessarily because it’s right for the book. “We are changing that, giving authors direct access to the translation agents, podcast agents, book-to-film agents—because of our range we can build, in a sophisticated way, to match the project with the right people. This will change from book to book—Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir or [Mann’s client, the Granta Best of Young British Novelists listee] Eliza Clark’s latest are very different. But it is a tailored approach to representation, not a blunt tool imposed from above.”
Digital futures
One resource that CAA has that most agencies don’t is a fully-fledged AI department, led on the Hollywood side by CAA Vault which, with the not-scary-at-all sounding AI company Deep Voodoo, clones the agency’s actor clients’ output digitally to control the licensing
TheBookseller.com
On... Unexpected markets
There’s a lot happening in Ukraine at the moment, with a huge amount of deals going through. It was sort of surprising when [the bids from Ukrainian publishers] started coming in, but welcoming: aside from the business side of this, it has been moving emotionally with everything that is going on in the world.
Helen Manders On... Book adaptations
The market is still buoyant, even with the pause from the Hollywood strikes. If you look at what’s being made, so much of it is coming from books. I was talking to a colleague in LA who said that’s because filmmakers are looking to books as they want real ideas, as the film scripts coming from LA are lacking in originality.
Karolina Sutton On... Struggling territories
The Dutch market is having a very tough time, with a lot of publisher redundancies. Much of that is down to the dreaded UK English-language export edition issue. This has been happening for a while there, but we’re starting to see it elsewhere—like across Scandinavia—and even Germany is being impacted.
Daisy Meyrick
of their duplicates rather than studios doing it without permission (a major bone of contention in last year’s writers/actors strike). Suton says CAA wants to replicate that sort of innovation for books and be “dynamic and ahead of the curve, even if that means turning things upside-down. Some of our publishing contracts are no longer fit for purpose and are so antiquated. If you look at where generative AI and the legislation are, there is no meeting point. We need contracts to reflect realit”. Does that mean the book industry is not engaging with the issue properly? “Everyone is engaging with it,” Suton answers. “I think we need to be beter at education—educating ourselves, but also others. In the US there is [the authors’ class action suit against OpenAI], which is welcome. The situation is different in the UK. We need to be beter at working collectively and presenting a narra- tive to legislators of our value to the economy, so we are at the front of their minds when they look at the issue. It’s an enormous challenge, but it’s exciting and it shouldn’t be beyond us. Aſter all, we represent writers and know how to pitch stories. We need to pitch ourselves to government beter.”
Back to basics But let’s not get overly carried away here, as a lot of CAA’s business is some of the more traditional nity-grity that will be done in Olympia’s increasingly cramped International Rights Centre next month. Echoing many in the rights-trading communit, the trio say the earlier LBF is not ideal; Suton wonders if it “will be a quieter fair, because we haven’t had the runway to build that industry-wide excitement”. But Meyrick points out that “things have changed and we’re always selling. Those two big bookends of LBF and Frankfurt are still important, but not as much as in previous years, because we are doing deals much more consistently throughout the year”. CAA’s London spree comes at a time of something of a Hollywood arms race in Britain literary agenting, such as United Talent Agency’s acquisition of Curtis Brown and WME bolstering its UK outpost, including luring Hellie Ogden from Janklow & Nesbit. Suton says: “This is a time of global expan- sion. But CAA’s way of doing it is organic, fast and powerful. It said to us: ‘We’re not going to interfere with you, you’re the local experts, we’ll just give you the infrastructure.’ So we leant into being given that blank sheet to do things differently, to make a team that is egali- tarian—we have no job titles—and creative. Oh, and we’ll be hiring more agents; we are going to keep expanding”.
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