In other parts of this site we'll tell you more about Agent Research & Evaluation and what it does.

Here we'd like to tell you a little about who started it, and how and why.

OUR STORY

The 80s
Bill Martin began the project that led to AR&E in the early 80's. His wife is a novelist. (CITY OF DREAMS by Beverly Swerling, was an October 2001 hardcover from Simon & Schuster, SHADOWBROOK was out from the same publisher in March 2004, CITY OF GLORY was published in January 2007, and CITY OF GOD in December 2008. There is to be at least one more book in the City series.)

Twenty five years ago Beverly was seriously unhappy with her literary representation. "Her agent sold her work, but he didn't understand who she was as a writer or where she wanted to go."

Bill, whose instincts for seeing that the consumer gets a fair deal were honed by the cooperative movement and President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, decided to research the published results of various literary agents. A year later Beverly had left her former agent and signed on with a new one - who sold the first book he marketed for her for six times the amount of her previous advances. To the same publisher. "It was pretty obvious that a writer doesn't only need an agent. A writer needs the right agent."

The Martins were living most of the year in the Canary Islands at the time, and that was back in the pre-Internet days, so doing anything commercial with Bill's research wasn't practical, but one way or another he continued to accumulate data.

The 90s
In 1996, after a return to the U.S., Bill was ready to turn his "fooling around," into a business.

In early '97 AR&E was incorporated and began serving the writing community.

The basic mandate was and remains pretty simple: empower authors by providing them with extensive information about virtually every active literary and dramatic rights agent in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Then encourage them to use that data to select the agent who is right for them. If the writer is brand new, the data helps her/him prepare a query that will convince the agent to take a serious look at the writer's work.

The Team
AR&E has grown a great deal since it began, but the Martins still maintain steady hands at the helm.

Bill is chief researcher and chief of just about everything else.

Beverly makes sure the newsletter and client reports are written in English and brings her twenty years of writing and publishing to overseeing our most popular service, the Customized Fingerprint..

There's a small office staff who handle all the rest, and they're invaluable.

Finally, the spirit of the Martins' son Michael is very much present in all parts of the operation, particularly this website.

IN MEMORIAM

A Web Pioneer
Of course nowadays every entrepreneur wants a meaningful presence on the web, but that goal has been particularly important for the Martins because Michael who died in February, 1997, was one of the net's true believers. He was the creative director of Online Magic, the web design company who built the original of this site that's now looked after by our webmaster.

A Prime Talent
Michael came to web design from a background in tv editing, and he had enormous belief in the power of this new medium to tell stories - by which he meant convey information - in new and more compelling ways. He died while in Cannes, attending an international multimedia conference where two out of the ten projects nominated for awards were his creations.