Found this tonight via Booksquare: The New York Observer‘s got a feature by Sheelah Kolhatkar about literary agent William Clegg who, in 2005, “suddenly stopped coming in to his office or returning phone calls.”

Here’s how Kolhatkar describes Clegg:

[His] reputation in publishing circles is as an attentive agent who garners significant (sometimes inflated) advances for his authors, but who was perhaps less focused on the nuts and bolts of his writers’ careers. (“Sometimes they were better-known for the advances they got than for their sales,”  joked one editor.) One of Mr. Clegg’s former authors described him as good at “holding your hand, calling you and telling you you’re fabulous and that no one’s more talented than you … he was almost like a personal manager. He was a cheerleader. I think that’s what a lot of people miss.”

He is described as a charmer who could be very aggressive in business dealings and who was, at one time, a fixture on the social circuit, known for hosting parties at the apartment he lived in on lower Fifth Avenue.

Okay, so imagine this. You have an agent. He’s brilliant. He tells you you’re fabulous. He’s gotten you an advance that would make other writers in your genre roll over & wet themselves.

You’re an active client, so maybe he’s got your latest book out with publishers, or maybe you have a contract that’s being negotiated.

And suddenly, with no warning, your agent just vanishes.

Would you want this type of agent?

If he reappeared months later and called you, would you go back to him?

:-)