30-01-2025
The £1.3m failed attempt to impose DEI on the publishing industry
It seemed a laudable enough aim. When The Good Literary Agency was launched in late 2017 with more than £500,000 of funding from Arts Council England (ACE), its mission was to identify exceptional writers who identified as black and minority ethnic, working class, disabled or LGBTQ, nurturing their work and ultimately getting them book deals.
Certainly its two founders, author Nikesh Shukla – who edited the 2016 groundbreaking essay collection
The Good Immigrant
, featuring the likes of Riz Ahmed and Nish Kumar – and literary agent Julia Kingsford, seemed to have the necessary credentials.
Then ACE literature director Sarah Crown described the duo as 'ideally placed to make a direct and meaningful intervention in this area.'
'We are glad to be able to support them as they go forward,' she added. And yet, seven years and £1.28 million of allocated public money later, The Good Literary Agency has announced 'with great sadness' that it has made the decision to close at the end of March. All staff are being made redundant, the future of all their authors and agents is up in the air.
Put simply, despite vast grants being handed out to TGLA – two awards totalling £379,959 were made in 2021 and it won NPO (National Portfolio Organisation) status in 2023, meaning it would receive £152,542 annually until 2026 – Shukla and Kingsford still couldn't make their idea work as a viable business.
Some commentators, such as philosopher and writer Kathleen Stock, have suggested that virtue signalling, holier-than-thou brands will always struggle.
'Perhaps they told themselves that the branding would hover playfully between 'we are good at our job' and 'we are good people', but the accompanying piety seems to have eliminated useful ambiguity from the start,' she writes.
Instead of actually being a good business, then, TGLA concentrated primarily on being 'Good' – as Stock puts it – 'with a luminous capital G, putting the gospel of diversity and inclusion into practice.'
Just the name, on its own, was ill-advised, she added. 'Calling a business 'The Good Literary Agency' [was] a strategy surely so hubristic that they were bound to come a cropper eventually.'
Ask Arts Council England about the demise of TGLA, though, and they maintain that almost £1.3 million was money well-spent, even if the agency itself is no more.
'The Good Literary Agency has made a valuable contribution to the cultural sector, platforming
The Telegraph
.
That much is true: in the past seven years, TGLA has represented more than 200 authors and developed publishing deals for over 100 – some of whom, such as Young Adult author
The Telegraph
but in some cases written for the paper too.
ACE also points out that TGLA sent six agents into the mainstream publishing industry, one of whom has been shortlisted for Literary Agent of the Year.
'The impact of these significant achievements will be felt across the sector, and by the public, for many years to come,' said the spokesperson.
However, critics say this could all have happened without the lavishly funded TGLA. It's fair to point out that as a Community Interest Company (CIC), directors Shukla and Kingsford have only been paying themselves £30,000 annually between them – they have been, er, 'good' in that regard.
But it was a line in TGLA's farewell statement – they declined to talk to
The Telegraph
directly – which really struck at the heart of this issue.
'We have been feeling the effects of investment in authors becoming more and more stretched and squeezed each year we've been operating and thus decreasing what we have been able to earn in commission – which we need to match ACE's funding.'
Basically, a tacit admission that there was never really a sustainable model in place. In which case, how did it come to pass that ACE gave TGLA more than a million pounds?
When CICs such as The Good Literary Agency apply for the annual NPO funding, they have to provide detailed business plans. In 2022, when TGLA would have made the last application, the accounts showed that the commission it received was just 16 per cent of turnover. Wages alone were triple the commission it earned. Put simply, it was nowhere near matching the Arts Council grant with its own income; the stated intention.
'We have received regular reporting from TGLA,' maintains the Arts Council spokesperson. 'Over the last several months we have come to understand that there were issues in recruiting and retaining staff. This resulted in the executive team and board deciding to wind down the company.'
No wonder TGLA was having issues recruiting and retaining staff – the last accounts filed at Companies House show the Arts Council funding didn't even cover the full extent of salaries. They were in obvious trouble.
But interestingly, this isn't the line that TGLA itself is peddling. It was less about staffing for them, more about the diminishing returns from commission. Frankly, TGLA has not been able to make the business work in terms of income – other than from grants – for years, and alarm bells should have been ringing at the Arts Council long before the 'last several months.'
So this isn't just a story about The Good Literary Agency, but how and why Arts Council England is making its funding decisions. A startling piece of research conducted last year by arts industry journal Arts Professional and financial benchmarking company
So, rather than making funding decisions to help the arts thrive, all too often it seems ACE are simply propping up what would otherwise be failing organisations or making snap decisions without proper scrutiny.
Take, for example, Wednesday's
By 2022, ACE had already received a complaint about the grant to Primary Event Solutions, but concluded that there had been no misuse of public funds. Then, last year, ACE admitted it would, after all, be conducting additional checks after further allegations that Primary Event Solutions was actually a security company, not an arts organisation (and in fact had changed its name from Primary Security a few months before the bid). Primary Event Solutions was wound up in 2023. Sacha Lord resigned his position last night.
In The Good Literary Agency's case, it is worth going back to the original funding award back in 2017. It came after The Canelo Report commissioned by ACE, which found that a decrease in book sales, advances and the price of books, in real terms, meant that writing literary fiction, for example, was only really viable for authors 'for whom making a living [wasn't] an imperative'.
'That has an effect on the diversity of who is writing,' said Sarah Crown at the time. 'We are losing voices.' It immediately promised to support more individual authors through its grants and to prioritise its funding of diverse organisations, particularly outside London – The Good Literary Agency being based in Bristol.
And hey presto, within months Sarah Crown was saying funding for TGLA represented its commitment to 'do more to promote and sustain diversity in the publishing sector in the wake of the Canelo report.'
One industry insider, who doesn't want to be named, says the decision to fund TGLA was a result of 'panicked box ticking' rather than thought-out, targeted support directed to the right places.
'Was there really much more scrutiny of TGLA other than 'OK, they have diverse aims, we know Nikesh, Julia is a literary agent, they're not in London… that'll do,'?' he says. 'They would have had to present their plans to get the funding but one wonders whether the campaigning ethos of what they were trying to do meant the bar was far lower.'
That sense that the whole enterprise was well-meaning but lacking in real financial rigour starts at the top; Shukla has edited and written some vital, necessary and brilliant books, but, before TGLA, had no real literary business experience.
Kingsford has at least got that as a literary agent of some standing – and she has a book out later this year, written jointly with her sister, called
Asperger's and Asparagus
. But right from her and Shukla's very first endeavour – a crowdfunding initiative on the website Kickstarter – there was an admission that TGLA would 'depend on receiving funding from other sources.'
Perhaps you can try and run a CIC in this way, but it won't be the sustainable, long-term initiative that Kingsford hoped for in 2017 when she said: 'We conceived The Good Literary Agency to blow open the pipeline for these writers and we're incredibly excited to have funding for three years to build a sustainable business that can help to finally redress this.'
The argument, then, is not that diversity of voices in literature should not be promoted and funded – otherwise the likelihood of the next George Orwell or Hanif Kureishi diminishes. But there needs to be a better approach to making it happen.
As for the Arts Council, it says it takes its role as custodians of public money 'very seriously and has processes in place to ensure proper use.' This, incidentally, is almost word for word the same statement it made this week about Sacha Lord's Primary Event Solutions. Only this time, it won't be asking for any money back from TGLA – in fact there's a pending final payment of £40,017.
Meanwhile, writers such as Lydia Wilkins – who is disabled and for whom TGLA was a lifeline – are now not just in limbo but let down by mismanagement.
'I don't know what will happen to my manuscript next,' she wrote on Instagram. 'We don't know if our agents will jump to other firms or if we'll have another agent in place by the end of March – so it's back to the drawing board of making enquiries.'
