Legendary agent Ed Victor was famously supposed to have said that if a client earned royalties it meant that his agent had not negotiated a big-enough advance. In its time this statement was seen as a sign of his big-beast bravado and how good he was at getting money out of publishers on behalf of his clients.
I was reminded of it because Jonny Geller, CEO of Curtis Brown, the UKs largest literary agency was quoted in the as complaining, diplomatically, at the lack of ‘partnership’ with publishers and a