An agent you pay is a vendor. A vendor who holds your royalties is a publisher. Come September, your agent can be both.

The Association of American Literary Agents just revised its ethics guidelines, effective September 1. Agents may now charge their own clients for marketing, web design, and editing. They may even publish their clients' books outright, controlling the KDP account, the data, and the money. The hosts at Author Update said the change "basically breaks the word agent." I can't improve on that.

The statistic that explains everything: roughly 39% of these agents earn under $50,000 a year from commissions. A gate that pays its keeper that poorly will eventually sell tickets. The guild didn't fail its ethics; the business model failed the guild, and the ethics were revised to match.

Government acquisition law is built on a blunt assumption: not that contracting officers are crooks, but that incentives outlast virtue. So it builds walls where interests collide, and it never settles for disclosure. The AALA went the other way. Its new rules require agents to disclose affiliate relationships and forbid conditioning representation on buying services. Fine. But disclosure is not a wall; it is a sign hung where the wall used to be.

Picture the negotiation. Your agent's job is to sit on your side of the table and extract the best deal from a publisher. When your agent is the publisher, who is sitting on your side? The chair is empty; the commission is not.

None of this means every agent turns service-seller tomorrow. Plenty won't. But incentives are patient. The author's move is the same as ever: read the contract, ask who profits from each clause, and remember that "agent" is a job description, not a character reference.

If your agent offers to publish you, at least the mystery is solved. You finally know whose side of the table they were on.