I had heard that Amazon flew a bunch of high-profile New York City literary agents into town last week, but Amazon, as per usual, refused to comment on the matter. I was contacted by several people who were concerned that Amazon was going to start trying to publish authors on their own, removing publishers from the equation entirely. That didn't sound like Amazon to me, but I couldn't get anyone to confirm or deny the rumors. Crain's New York today reports on what happened in a post titled "Amazon sucks up to literary agents."

Amazon flew a dozen agents out to Seattle for a daylong conference in which they basically pitched the Kindle as a source of profit for publishing.

The agents wanted specific information about sales of Kindle editions and devices, which could help them in negotiations with publishers. Amazon executives, famously tight-lipped about all Kindle-related data, said that for competitive reasons they could not give out that information.

The two sides agreed that publishers stood to make a lot more money selling e-books than hardcovers.

Of course, publishing could also make a metric shit-ton of money by abolishing the hardcover and publishing affordable paperbacks at ten bucks a pop or less, too, but that doesn't mean that they're going to.

Still, this attempt to woo agents represents a remarkable change of policy on Amazon's part. They usually don't play ball with the New York big-shots, and putting agents like Melanie Jackson, Ira Silverberg, Charlotte Sheedy, Nicole Aragi and Melanie Jackson at the Hotel Andra is a big deal for the company. And there's a positive angle for the local literary scene too: If Amazon keeps trying to play with the big dogs this way, shipping them out here for conferences and fancy dinners, Seattle will finally get the attention it deserves from the major publishers. I've heard that publishers were going to send fewer big touring authors to Seattle in an attempt to save money. Amazon's increased profile, at least, should remind them that there's more to Seattle than they can monetize in a simple cash transaction from a reading: With the exception of New York City, we're the most important book town in America.