The book brokers

The literary agent is becoming a thing of the past. The aesthete in a dust-choked office, scanning a slush pile of unsolicited submissions for buried genius, has given way to the Armani-suited hustler who is more likely to be negotiating his authors on to television game shows than into any bookshop.

"The days when it was just an agent reading a manuscript are gone," says Robert Harris, author of the best seller Enigma. "There is so much more media. You can sell serial rights, radio rights, theatrical rights, e-book rights."

This year's agency coup was not a book deal, but Peter Robinson of Curtis Brown selling the historian David Starkey for £2 million to Channel 4, thus turning the Oxford don into Britain's most highly paid TV presenter. At £75,000 an hour, Starkey earns more than Cilla Black.

"Times are tough," says Jilly Cooper, who moved from the solo agent Desmond Elliott to Curtis Brown. "One needs every single outlet - film, telly, everything you can get your hands on, even commercials."

Another Curtis Brown client, Jenny Colgan, who wrote Amanda's Wedding, says a more versatile agent is just what authors need. "It's fantastic having agents who do this, because it means you do one piece of work and, ideally, they can sell it on to different media for you. I want Amanda's Wedding: The Board Game."

But the loss of the literary specialist entails serious cultural risks as agents, their heads more in media bars than manuscripts, ignore obscure authors and restrict what is published in print to whatever looks good on screens large and small. "If we are going to get more diversity," says Clare Alexander of Gillon Aitken Associates, "we need to look at our slush piles. Otherwise, how on earth will the author who is not part of the London scene ever get published?"

The transition from old-style to new-style agenting is epitomised by Curtis Brown. In January, five of its young agents engineered a £7 million management buyout, slashing the average boardroom age by 20 years to 38. The 113-year-old company, whose list of literary estates reads like a GCSE set-book list - John Steinbeck, CS Lewis, Winston Churchill, Daphne du Maurier - was said to be split by arguments over what do to with a £7 million windfall from Disney. Its young turks want more Disney, less Daphne.

Another traditional agency, Peters Fraser Dunlop, which has Nick Hornby, Alan Bennett and Robert Harris on its books, last year sold out to the global sports and celebrity group CSS Stellar for £11.6 million. The fastidious Bennett now shares a management with the Football Association and several Hollywood stars. Robert Harris is all in favour. "PFD doesn't just handle my book rights," he says. "It also handles Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay for the film of Enigma, Kate Winslet who starred in it, Michael Apted who directed it and John Barry, who wrote the score. It worked very effectively."

Packaging, as the practice is known, started in the United States at the William Morris agency, which put together its client, the director Spike Lee, with another of its clients, the novelist David Benioff, for a multimillion-dollar deal with Touchstone Pictures for Benioff 's The 25th Hour. "Being a multimedia agency is a way of providing source material for A-list actors and directors," says WMA's UK chief Stephanie Cabot.

The downside is that it puts authors at the mercy of media needs. "We are in the career business," sighs Jonathan Lloyd of Curtis Brown. "Like many other companies, we believe that the best service for our clients is the one-stop shop and that we should be in a position to exploit - though that is a rather crude word - their talents in every conceivable way."