AALA Resignation Statement

Dystel, Goderich & Bourret has made the difficult decision to resign from membership in the Association of American Literary Agents (AALA). We firmly believe that literary agents need to be held to high ethical standards in their dealings with authors. To us, that means that there must be no conflict of interest in the services that we provide. 

Unfortunately, the AALA has recently amended its Canon of Ethics to a degree that we cannot support. Among other things, the new Canon allows agents who have separate editorial businesses to charge editorial fees with the potential to then sign those authors as clients and retain those fees. (For more information, please refer to this article by Jane Friedman.) Whether or not an agent claims that paying for their editorial services will result in representation, we know many authors will pay for these services explicitly in the hopes of landing an agent. Moreover, dishonest agents will take advantage of authors desperate for representation.

When the changes to the Canon were announced, we sent a letter to the AALA Ethics Committee expressing our strong objection and then met with the full committee to discuss our position. Unfortunately, though they were open to our thoughts, they were unwilling to make any changes to the Canon. While we share their stated goals of diversifying agenting and supporting newer agents, bending the ethical bounds of our business in support of that goal doesn’t benefit authors or agents.

We know that these new rules will not help authors who will pay large fees for work that may never be saleable in the hopes that they will get an agent out of the process. And we know that the rules will also not help new agents trying to establish themselves legitimately. In a challenging publishing environment, it is more important than ever that authors have representation they can trust to shepherd their best interests.

Despite our longtime membership and respect for the work the AALA does, we cannot endorse their new Canon of Ethics. It simply no longer reflects our own professional ethics.