From the Authors Guild’s spring-summer 2024 issue:
“The first literary agent was A. P. Watt (1834–1914), an Edinburgh bookseller who moved to London and worked for a publisher until the house failed. [That sounds familiar.] In 1875, a friend asked him to market his stories. Watt did this as a favor, but sensed opportunity. He soon charged 10 percent of the gross to represent Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. Watt’s 10 percent commission remained standard until the 1980s, when agents bumped it to 15 percent.”
“The first American agent was the Bostonian Paul Reynolds (1864–1944).”