In the middle of the 20th century, the profession of literary agent in Spanish was almost non-existent, Maribel Luque tells Catalan News. Then came Carmen Balcells: “It was a revolution.”
Carmen Balcells is known as a literary super-agent who was the driving force behind the Latin American boom of the 20th century and represented superstars of the continent such as Gabriel García Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Isabel Allendeand many more.
A large part of their success was based on the fact that they Publishing industry in Spanish-speaking markets to offer authors much more favorable conditions so that they can focus exclusively on their work. Balcells also took a very practical approach to her work, solving for her clients any problems she could, far beyond those of the site and the publishing contract.
Balcells was born in 1930 in Santa Fe de Segarra in the western Catalan province of Lleida and initially worked in the industry at the publishers ACER and Seix Barral before finally founding her own agency and making use of the contacts she had already made in Latin America.
Maribel Luque started working at the Carmen Balcells literary agency at the age of 18 and learned from Balcells every day from a young age. “Just listening to her on the phone was a master class. I was studying Spanish philology at the time and left the agency after many, many days with the feeling that I was learning a lot more from this woman by listening to her tone of voice, the way she expressed her ideas.”
Luque has since climbed the career ladder and is the agency’s literary director. She told Catalan News that in the early years of her career, Balcells immediately recognised the gaps in the way the publishing industry worked, which were skewed in favour of publishers and to the detriment of authors. “She had recognised the type of contracts that authors were signing.”
At the time, authors received “almost no money” up front for their works, and publishing contracts were usually valid “for the entire duration of the copyright, for the whole world.” This meant that authors lived in very poor conditions and were “almost slaves to the publishers,” says Luque; Carmen Balcells “has absolutely changed everything.”
At the head of her own agency, Balcells negotiated with publishers on behalf of the authors she represented and fought for significantly better terms. “She was a completely new character, a new personality, for all these publishers.” Temporary terms of office were initially attached to contracts, meaning that the author transferred licensing rights to the publisher, but only for a limited period of time. After that period, the rights reverted to the author and could be sold again, possibly to another publisher, wherever the best deal was available.
In addition, Balcells did away with worldwide rights for publishers and instead handled each market separately, which also earned authors more money for their work. Today, such practices are industry standard, but they only became so after Balcells made this change with the force of her character and hard work.
The pioneering agent continued her hard work all the way to the highest office in the country to fight for her authors. “She went to the Spanish government headquarters in Moncloa and had a very important conversation with the government,” says Luque. There, Balcells negotiated with then-Prime Minister José María Aznar “to change the way publishers pay taxes for their work.”
“It makes no sense for an author to declare the money he has received for an advance in one year, because he may not receive anything else during the entire contract period, and that makes no sense (from a tax perspective). Therefore, it is much more convenient and fairer to spread this advance over different years,” explains Luque.
“This is the clause we know as the Balcelles clause in contracts. And all the other agencies learned the basics of the job for all these strategies developed by Carmen.”
With her incredible instinct for emerging talent, her personal touch in nurturing their talents, and the courage and audacity to support them and challenge a well-established industry, Carmen Balcells managed to turn publishing on its head. In the process, she is credited with helping to drive the Latin American boom, or at least creating the conditions in which such a cultural phenomenon could thrive. As Maribel Luque sums it up, “She was truly one of a kind.”
