// For literary agencies
The catalogue, the contracts, the royalty statements, the submissions: the admin that buries an agency lives in one shared brain that knows every deal you've ever made. Agents do the part only they can: the taste, the relationships, the next book.
// The Strategic Failure
An agency's real asset isn't the office. It's the years of who bought what, on what terms, in which territory, and what's free again now. Most of that lives in one person's memory, and memory leaves.
// The Memory That Walks Out
Your senior agent knows which titles reverted, which options lapsed, which territories are still open, and what an author was promised in a side letter in 2009. None of it is written where anyone else can reach it. The day they retire, the catalogue is still on the shelf, but the knowledge of how to sell it walks out with them.
The backlist stayed. The memory didn't.
// The Statement Pile
Royalty statements arrive in a dozen layouts and several currencies. Someone opens each one, finds the amount due, splits it across the author, the co-agent and the house, and keys it into a spreadsheet by hand. A wrong split surfaces months later, in an email from an author who did the math.
The numbers were always there. Just never reconciled.
// The Right Sold Twice
An editor asks at the fair. The agent answers from memory: yes. But German translation was optioned eighteen months ago and never logged where it counts. The deal gets offered, the conflict surfaces in due diligence, and the agency spends the relationship capital it took years to build.
One confident answer. One contract that should never have existed.
// The False Fix
So you built the rights grid. A master spreadsheet, colour-coded, painstakingly maintained, by whoever remembers to update it. It tells you what was true the last time someone touched the cell. It can't read the contract, can't reconcile the statement, can't answer the editor at the fair. It's a snapshot of a memory, not the memory itself.
Every agency has one. Every agency has watched it drift out of date.
// The Solution
Contracts, statements, submissions, rights guides: read together, kept current, answered in plain language.
No migration. Your files stay where they are.
Contracts, royalty statements, submission logs, rights guides, author correspondence. Drive, SharePoint, Notion, email. Everything flows in. Nothing has to move.
One Eko for rights, one for royalties, one for contracts, or one per imprint, per territory, per author. The same scope and the same confidentiality as the people who do the work.
Agents stop hunting through folders. They ask (what reverted, what's open in Spain, what did this statement actually pay the author) and get an answer drawn from what's signed.
// Use cases
The same catalogue, answering whichever desk is asking.
Availability lives in heads and a spreadsheet. Before every fair, someone rebuilds the list of what's open by hand, hoping nothing was optioned since.
Ask what's available in any territory or format and get an answer traced to the contracts. The rights grid is the brain, not a tab someone forgot to update.
Statements arrive in every format and currency. Each one is opened, read, split across author and co-agent, and keyed in by hand. Errors surface months later.
Statements are read as they arrive, whatever the layout. Amounts are reconciled and split per beneficiary. What can't be matched is flagged, not guessed.
The option clause, the reversion date, the sub-agent split: all of it is somewhere in a PDF, in a folder, named by whoever filed it. Checking a term means a hunt.
Ask the term and get the clause, from the signed contract, with the date. Reversions and lapsing options surface before they cost you, not after.
Who has the manuscript, who passed, who's still reading: it's in one agent's inbox and head. Coverage and editor preferences get rebuilt from scratch each round.
One memory of who saw what, who said what, and what each editor actually buys. New submissions start from everything the agency has already learned.
Rights guides are rebuilt every season. Availability, pitches, deal history: assembled by hand under deadline, the week before Frankfurt or Bologna.
The guide drafts itself from the catalogue (what's open, what sold where, the pitch in your house voice) ready to refine, not assemble from zero.
The backlist's value is locked in the senior agent's memory. When they leave, the list stays and the knowledge of how to sell it goes with them.
Every deal, every reversion, every promise is in a brain the whole agency shares. The backlist keeps earning, whoever is sitting at the desk.
// Governance
Advances, statements, side letters: scoped to who should see them. Per-author isolation. Co-agent splits visible only where they belong.
The catalogue is shared. The confidences are not.
// The discipline
A rights answer that's confidently wrong is a liability: a right offered twice, an advance miscalculated, an author misquoted. ekory won't confirm a right it can't trace to a signed contract, won't reconcile a statement line it can't match, won't fill a gap with a guess. When it isn't sure, it says so, and shows you where to look. In a business built on trust, refusing to invent is the feature.
// The two things nobody else does
In a private chatbot, you can tell it "remember this", and only your screen knows.
In ekory, the people who own the relationship correct the brain in chat.
A reversion, a new option, a side letter: logged once.
Live for every agent. Across every Eko. Immediately.
Correction: world Spanish on the Conti title reverted to the author in January. It's open again, we can sell it.
Got it. Spanish (world) on the Conti title now reads open, reverted January 2026. Every Eko in the agency will use this.
// Above the spreadsheet. Above the grid. The agent closest to the deal decides what's true.
Ekos are scoped to a title, a territory, a desk.
Your SuperEko is scoped to you: your permissions, your authors, your files.
It preps the fair while you're still on the call. Never reaching past what you're allowed to see.
Frankfurt in two weeks. For the Bianchi novel, pull what's still open by territory, the deal history, and draft a one-page pitch in our voice. Put it in a new folder called Bianchi_FBM.
On it. Checking the contracts and the rights grid.
Open in several territories, the pitch leads with:
// Same permissions. Same authors. Same accountability. One avatar per agent, never broader than the agent it stands in for.
Yes. Statements are read as they arrive, whatever the layout or currency. Amounts are reconciled and split per beneficiary; anything it can't match is flagged for a human, not guessed.
Yes. Visibility is per-author and per-client. The catalogue is shared; advances, side letters and splits stay scoped to who should see them.
No migration. ekory connects to where your contracts and statements already live (Drive, SharePoint, Notion, email) and reads them in place.
We build a working Eko on your real materials within one business day. You use it with your team for two weeks, then decide. No commitment, no migration.
We'll take your contracts and statements, build a working Eko on your real list in a day, and show you side by side what changes. No migration. Just proof.
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