It was an issue that would have been good to square away before the memoir's publication. The fact that amends were never made would surely leave Mr. Clegg—who has been an agent at William Morris since his return to publishing four years ago—vulnerable to some pretty bad PR, when reporters writing potentially helpful fluff pieces started calling around asking questions.

So, in a meeting at Little, Brown offices with Mr. Clegg and agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Mr. Pietsch brought up the question of apologizing to Ms. Burnes. The expectation after that meeting was that Mr. Clegg would reach out to Ms. Burnes.

But the years-long silence from Mr. Clegg continued for at least a while longer, say two sources close to the situation: In a subsequent conversation with Ms. Burnes, Mr. Pietsch expressed dismay upon learning that Mr. Clegg still had not contacted her.

Ms. Burnes received an email from Mr. Clegg shortly afterward.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, which Little, Brown published this week, recounts Mr. Clegg's double life as a literary golden boy and drug addict: His world of book parties and supportive relationships includes periodic breaks for crack and Ketel One in the high-end hotels of Manhattan. This balancing act falls apart over the course of an extended binge, wreaking both personal and professional havoc.

In the book, Mr. Clegg describes dissolving his business with Ms. Burnes—pregnant at the time and preparing to go on maternity leave—via email: "Before I press Send, I look out the window at the thick flakes of snow coming down in slow motion between the buildings and think I am doing her a favor. Giving her permission to get out and move on. I feel next to nothing as I end our partnership, our business, my career."

Burnes & Clegg, the boutique agency that the two had founded, shuttered. Their authors scrambled for new agents, and the new agents scrambled to make sense of Mr. Clegg's deals. Ms. Burnes went to the Gernert Company. After rehab, Mr. Clegg took a job with Ms. Walsh at William Morris Endeavor.

"Bill welcomed the opportunity to make amends," said Ms. Walsh, who is Mr. Clegg's agent as well as his boss. According to her account, Mr. Clegg only learned it was a possibility in the meeting, from Mr. Pietsch. She said that Mr. Clegg's previous understanding had been that Ms. Burnes wanted no contact with him, a wish that her lawyer had conveyed in the aftermath of their company's dissolution.

"It was unbelievably sympathetic," said Ms. Walsh of the conversation that took place with Mr. Pietsch. "It was not a ‘you should do this' by any stretch of the imagination."

Mr. Pietsch was on vacation and could not be reached. Neither Ms. Burnes nor her colleagues and the Gernert Company would comment; and in an email, Mr. Clegg declined, as he has every time anyone has asked, to speak about Ms. Burnes.

Mr. Clegg touches on the subject of amends and forgiveness only delicately in his memoir.

"There is a time, much later, when I imagine what it was like for everyone else, those who were by blood, accident, or inclination involved," he writes. "At first I'm consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, with the help of kindred spirits, these feelings evolve, are still evolving, into something less self-concerned."

Several sources said the writing sample that Ms. Walsh sent out to editors is partly concerned with Ms. de Rossi's struggle with anorexia, which reportedly hit its worst period when the actress hit 82 pounds while on Ally McBeal.

Mr. Abate was left to plan his next act when the merger was finalized at the end of April and it was confirmed that he wouldn't be joining the combined company's book operation in New York. That division will be run by longtime William Morris literary co-heads Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Suzanne Gluck when the merger receives governmental approval.

It was unclear at the time whether the squad Mr. Abate had built up at Endeavor over the past two years would follow him wherever he goes next. But according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the situation, he is saying goodbye to literary agents Kirby Kim and Rebecca Oliver, as well as his subsidiary rights manager, Laura Bonner, all three of whom have resolved to leave their old boss and have committed to joining up with the ladies at William Morris instead. Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Bonner joined Endeavor in the last year or so. Ms. Oliver has been there since May 2007.

As for the rest of Mr. Abate's people, it remains unclear what's next for Shawn Coyne, who has been with Endeavor since the fall of 2007, or Trena Keating, who was the editor in chief of Dutton before Mr. Abate brought her on as an agent in the fall of 2008.

Mr. Abate's plans, meanwhile, are anyone's guess at this point, though he is rumored to be in the process of forming his own agency.

All those involved either declined to comment or did not return emails from The Observer.

According to our source, who will be part of the combined WME Entertainment, no one from the William Morris literary department—which includes agents Bill Clegg, Wayne Kabak, Erin Malone, Jay Mandel, and Eric Simonoff—will be leaving the company.

Mr. Abate, who is in his early 40s, oversaw a number of seven-figure book deals during his brief tenure at Endeavor and built up a staff of several literary agents while cementing his reputation in publishing circles as a brash and sometimes sly businessman. Now he is rumored to be in the process of reconstituting his operation as an independent literary agency. Whether his staff—which included former Dutton editor in chief Trena Keating, as well as Shawn Coyne, Kirby Kim and Rebecca Oliver—would join him there could not be determined. 

What spurred Mr. Abate’s exit from Endeavor, of course, was the firm’s long-planned merger with rival William Morris Agency, which was approved on Monday afternoon by the governing bodies of both companies after months of negotiations. 

Variety called the merger “a giant leap into showbiz’s future,” but what it means for the publishing industry has not been the subject of much discussion in the Hollywood press, because as major as both companies’ literary departments have been in the New York book world, neither generates anywhere near the sort of revenues the two firms take in from their work in film, television and music.  

Once the merger receives governmental approval, the literary department for the combined William Morris–Endeavor firm will be run by Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Suzanne Gluck, who have spent the past eight years as co-heads of the lit department at William Morris. Ms. Walsh, a high-octane 42-year-old who started her career in publishing about 20 years ago at the Virginia Barber Agency, will serve as the only literary department representative on the combined company’s nine-person governing board.

The reason why Ms. Walsh got the board seat instead of Ms. Gluck, who is several years older than she and no less accomplished an agent, can be explained by Ms. Walsh’s demonstrable will to be a leader in the company and Ms. Gluck’s relative lack thereof. (Unlike Ms. Gluck, for instance, Ms. Walsh served on William Morris’ seven-person executive board, spearheaded the implementation of a company-wide yearly retreat and helped created internal evaluation systems for employees and board members.)

“Jennifer Rudolph Walsh drips ‘alpha female,’ whereas Suzanne Gluck’s m.o. is much more … sweet,” said an editor who has done business with both women. “Jennifer Rudolph Walsh carries herself like she has a razor-sharp mind and a ninja’s body.”

The fact that Mr. Abate will not be working at William Morris Endeavor was for all intents and purposes a done deal after he and Ms. Walsh got together in March to discuss the merger. Despite Mr. Abate’s relationship with Endeavor founder Ari Emanuel, who will oversee the new company’s day-to-day operations as co-CEO, it seems that Ms. Walsh’s leadership position in the lit department was never in much doubt. This was in part because her department was many times bigger and more firmly established than Mr. Abate’s, but also because Mr. Emanuel’s priorities lie with the more lucrative film and TV business, and so giving William Morris control of the book business was an easy concession. As one senior publishing executive put it, “Jennifer’s ascension is the bone being thrown to William Morris.”

The notion that Mr. Abate would be satisfied reporting to Ms. Walsh or Ms. Gluck after running his own show for two years was a tough one to visualize during the run-up to Monday’s announcement. As one literary agent put it this week, “This is a guy who for the first 10 years of his career worked for two very strong-willed women [ICMers Esther Newberg and Amanda “Binky” Urban]. Would he really want to do it again?”

Mr. Abate had indeed been working in the literary department of ICM for a decade when he decided that it was time to run his own shop. According to a breach-of-contract lawsuit ICM filed against him when he announced his intention to defect to Endeavor in February 2007, Mr. Abate started at the firm as a lowly assistant making just over $20,000 a year. He was made an agent just two years later, and before long, according to the Publisher’s Lunch database, was doing deals for celebrities like Bernie Mac, journalists like Andrew Schneider and several first-time fiction writers.

Since leaving ICM, Mr. Abate has brokered a number of lucrative book deals for Endeavor clients. Last April, he sold a trilogy of thrillers co-written by Heroes creator Tim Kring and the novelist Dale Peck for $3 million. The following September, he got $3 million more for a vampire trilogy by the director Guillermo del Toro. In October, Mr. Abate scored a deal worth $6 million for Tina Fey; two months later, his colleague Ms. Keating got $2 million for Kathy Griffin. In between, there were also good deals for Endeavor clients such as James Franco, Tracy Morgan and Artie Lange.

But Mr. Abate, who began his career in publishing at the age of 30 after completing a Ph.D. in American Studies at N.Y.U. and teaching high school for two years, also has a list of clients of his own, most of whom would presumably follow him to his next gig. When he defected from ICM, he reportedly brought nearly 50 clients with him—among them Evan Wright, It Girl teen-lit author Lisi Harrison, James Swanson and Kate Christensen—and a substantial number of the deals he has brokered since joining Endeavor were for authors who have no affiliation with the talent side of the agency.

Mr. Abate and Ms. Walsh both declined to comment. Ms. Gluck did not respond to an interview request.

lneyfakh@observer.com

“Mort and I are far from retiring,” Lynn Nesbit said on Friday afternoon. “It isn’t a question on the table at the moment. It really isn’t.”

The night before, one of the stars at the boutique literary agency Ms. Nesbit runs with Mort Janklow abruptly announced that he was leaving for a job at the global, multiplatform talent agency William Morris. Eric Simonoff, who represents Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri and others, had spent 18 years at Janklow & Nesbit. Apart from a stint as an assistant at Norton the year after he graduated from college, it was the only job he’d ever had. At 41, he was widely thought to be the prince of the firm, in line to one day take over for Ms. Nesbit and Mr. Janklow alongside his equally heavy-hitting colleague, Tina Bennett.

Precisely what such a takeover would potentially entail depends on who you ask, but until last week, the consensus assumption among publishing people was that the agency’s namesakes, 78-year-old Mort and 70-year-old Lynn, had been deliberately grooming Mr. Simonoff and Ms. Bennett, and would hand the reins to the agency over to them when they got tired of steering it. 

Because of this, many found Mr. Simonoff’s sudden defection puzzling, and the motivations behind it have been intensely debated.

Though Mr. Simonoff could not be reached for comment, Ms. Nesbit said Friday it wasn’t really so complicated at all.

"I think what provoked him is the huge financial offer,” she said. “I think it’s as simple as money. He said they made him an offer he felt he could not refuse.” 

She added, “He’ll be the only alpha male in William Morris's literary department.”

Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, co-heads of the William Morris literary department, announced their new hire on Friday just as all of publishing prepared to pack into the New School’s Tishman Auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. The news appeared on The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog under the headline, “A Star Book Agent’s New Home.” Therein, Ms. Gluck was quoted as saying Mr. Simonoff had been her “dream date” for years.

Three well-placed sources who would not speak for attribution said Ms. Gluck and Ms. Walsh (neither of whom would comment for this article) had been actively looking to add someone of Mr. Simonoff's stature to their ranks for several years. Several industry people—knowledgeable ones, the lot of them, though obviously all too shy to speak on the record—said William Morris could use someone with literary sensibilities who can hit home runs with titles that skew more commercial than the high quality (but often narrowly targeted) stuff that Bill Clegg tends to do.

Publishing people were giddy when they heard about Mr. Simonoff's job change last week, and not even because they were happy for him—though some were—but because it was surprising, and exciting, and an undeniable show of force by William Morris that no one really knew how to explain off the top of their heads. Editors, publishers, agents, everyone wanted to talk about it, and they got into work on Friday still drunk on the news and excited to start calling and emailing one another about it. People asked if a “dominant theory” had emerged, the question invariably coming out sounding hopeful, but also cautious, because no one really wanted the fun to end.

The last time anyone felt this way was in June, when News Corp. fired Jane Friedman. With all that had happened since—the wrenching reorganization of Random House, the closing of Collins—that felt like a lifetime ago. 

"Was I shocked? No,” Ms. Nesbit said on Friday. “I was surprised but not shocked. I think Eric has to spread his wings. Maybe it was all too much like family."

But what exactly was behind Mr. Simonoff’s defection? His colleagues in the industry were left scratching their heads over the weekend.

“There had to have been something material that prompted it,” one editor said. “It’s not something you would do just for the sake of it ‘I just want a change’— agents don’t do it.”

Was it as Ms. Nesbit said? Had William Morris just offered Mr. Simonoff a dizzying amount of money? Or was there more at work—like, say, unresolved succession issues at Janklow & Nesbit that might have caused the famously ambitious agent to lose his patience with the firm and seek out something more secure? 

In a sense, there are two stories here, one about why Mr. Simonoff is joining William Morris, and the other about why he is leaving Janklow.

One theory is that he was tempted by all the perks that come with working for a large multimedia talent agency—namely, access to in-house film and TV agents who can help him not only by selling his adaptation-ready literary properties but also by giving him business whenever one of their celebrity clients wants to write a book.

In an interview Friday, former William Morris literary head Owen Laster, who retired from the firm after 46 years in 2006, said many of the opportunities a large organization with many branches offers are simply not possible at a small, prestige shop like Janklow & Nesbit. He offered that when he was agenting at WMA, he “personally handled many film and television deals” for his clients, and “very often” collaborated with people in other parts of the company.

“That office [Janklow & Nesbitt], although primarily literary, has a pretty wide base, but not like William Morris,” Mr. Laster said. “Their connection with CAA and other offices gives them power in those areas, but at William Morris it’s more direct—it’s our clients.” 

While the possibility of multimedia domination may have certainly appealed to Mr. Simonoff, the real reason behind his decision to leave his longtime home probably had a lot more to do with the murky question of succession at Janklow & Nesbit and the sense of uncertainty that is clouding the agency’s future. 

For one thing, Mr. Janklow is said to have thought seriously about selling the company over the years—and though he has denied it, he has reportedly put a price tag on it that was rebuffed by potential buyers. For another, there is the matter of Mr. Janklow’s 41-year-old son Luke, a former rock singer and current restaurant owner who has in recent years been doing some agenting for his father's shop, and Ms. Nesbit’s daughter Priscilla Gilman—a recovering English professor who recently returned from a nine-month leave of absence during which she wrote a memoir about motherhood.   

Did the presence of the young Mr. Janklow and Ms. Gilman signal to Mr. Simonoff that the agency would always remain a family business? That all the loyalty in the world wasn’t going to make it any more likely that he'd ever be made partner?

Nonsense, according to Ms. Nesbit: “I don’t think it was about succession," she said. "I honestly, genuinely do not think it was about that."

"I think Luke has many strings to his bow,” she added, referring to the young Mr. Janklow’s various non-literary pursuits, which also includes collecting guitars and cars. “I have a very strong alpha male here, you see, in Mort Janklow. Eric felt more comfortable with another younger guy here. I don’t think Luke and Priscilla were in any way a threat to him.”

Regardless of why it happened, Mr. Simonoff’s departure unmistakably leaves Janklow & Nesbit with a future even more uncertain than the one it was already looking forward to, especially considering that whatever finally convinced Mr. Simonoff to flee could conceivably convince Ms. Bennett to do the same.

Several people noted that Ms. Bennett and Mr. Simonoff are the only major players at the agency bringing in new clients and making spectacular sales with any regularity (Update, 5:15PM: It should be noted that just two weeks ago, Ms. Nesbit placed the journalist Andrew Meier's The House of Morgenthau with Random House, and before that sold a memoir by young Iraq veteran Christopher Brownfield to Knopf). Mr. Simonoff has Ms. Lahiri and Edward P. Jones, for example, and in January, he showed his muscle when he sold Danielle Trussoni’s debut novel Angelology in a hotly contested auction for nearly $1 million. Ms. Bennett, in turn, represents Malcolm Gladwell, Fareed Zakaria, Laura Hillenbrand, Eric Schlosser and many others. Sure, the elder Mr. Janklow can still do a multimillion-dollar eight-book deal for Danielle Steele with his eyes closed when he wants to, and Ms. Nesbit is still putting up dizzying numbers with her Tom Wolfe and her Anne Rice sales. But as one publisher put it, “they’re not taking on new people. What’s the future?” 

That publisher, along with other executives, speculated on Friday about whether Mr. Simonoff’s departure might inspire Ms. Bennett to look for other work, or whether it would instead have the effect of forcing some of the succession issues at the agency to the fore.  

Though unlikely, Ms. Bennett could conceivably follow Mr. Simonoff to William Morris. Said one knowledgeable agent, “Jennifer Walsh used to say, 'I'll get Tina Bennett over here—Watch me.’”

Ms. Nesbit sounded cool as a cucumber when confronted with that scenario Friday. "I expect Tina to be here forever,” she said.

Ms. Bennett declined to comment for this article.

The convoluted authorial structure of Alloy books is anything but transparent.

“To me, all that stuff is such a black box,” said one author who has worked with the company. “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.”

Alloy also has a reputation among writers for not always sharing its successes with the underlings who contributed to them. A case in point, often repeated as a cautionary tale among Y.A. authors, is the story behind one of the book packager’s most lucrative hits, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

The Traveling Pants idea originated with a woman named Jodi Anderson, who was then an editor at Alloy. Ms. Anderson proposed the concept (a group of girlfriends who share a pair of jeans), which was based on some of her own college experiences. She wrote a proposal sketching out the idea that was sold to a publisher, and was under the impression that she might then get to write the book(s).

The concept was also sent to non-Alloy Y.A. writers, according to one writer who was approached, who were invited to write samples for the book. The writer said that she wasn’t paid for what she submitted and wasn’t contacted again or given feedback by the company. Ms. Anderson also wrote a sample.

In the meantime, Ann Brashares, who was then co-president of Alloy with Les Morgenstein, decided to write the book. Ms. Brashares’ The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was published in 2001, became a huge best-seller, was developed into a movie (Mr. Morgenstein is listed as executive producer), and spawned two sequels. According to three sources, Ms. Anderson was unhappy with this outcome.

In an e-mail, Ms. Anderson said that after the book’s success, her title was changed to “editor” from “assistant editor,” and she received a small “bonus” for her contribution. When asked whether she was bitter about the situation, she said: “[N]o. I asked about receiving a story credit when I found out about the movie, but I was told to look to the future instead of the past.” She no longer works at Alloy, but she published her own Y.A. novel, Peaches, with Alloy last summer.

“There are some very talented people at Alloy, and I have grown immensely as a writer by working with those people,” Ms. Anderson wrote. “Additionally, for a long time I had a personal attachment to the company I didn’t want to let go of. We were a very tight group.”

Alloy and Mr. Morgenstein declined to comment, and Ms. Brashares could not be reached for comment.

In the Traveling Pants books, Ms. Brashares opens her “Acknowledgments” section with the following: “I would like to express my great and unending appreciation to Jodi Anderson.”

FORMER ALLOY EMPLOYEES AND OTHERS in the publishing world sometimes point out that the company is run by men—president Les Morgenstein, vice president of development Josh Bank and editorial director Ben Schrank—but that young women provide most of the grunt labor on Alloy’s book projects. (These include sexy titles geared toward teenage girls, including the incredibly popular Gossip Girl and Sweet Valley High series.)

“It’s run by three guys, and 90 percent of what they do is for teenage girls,” said one adult publisher, adding: “It’s not usual, the packager thing. Packaging is almost always photo books or reference books. But with fiction?”

In the old days, before Alloy bought what was then called 17th Street Productions, there was a young, collaborative environment and lots of group brainstorming that could be inspiring, according to former employees and authors.

“It was a great place to work, and we all learned so much and we all respected each other,” said an editor who worked at the company.

However, over time, as the company’s ownership changed and its ambitions expanded, this atmosphere changed as well.

“You just got the sense that if you came up with an idea, there wasn’t much incentive for you to bring this idea into the fold and let it become a potential product,” said Ryan Nerz, a former Alloy editor and author who recently published Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit, sans Alloy, with St. Martin’s. “You’d research it, flesh it out, turn it into a proposal, then the company itself would take it and pitch it. At that point—unless they absolutely thought you were the best person for it—you rarely would be attached on as the author.” (An exception to this is the case of Cecily von Ziegesar, who developed and began writing the Gossip Girl series while working at Alloy.)

Mr. Nerz added: “If it sounds like I resent them, I don’t. I was able to pay my bills and get a little bit of tutelage in writing, and got paid for it.”

According to one former Alloy editor, the company used to pay $1,000 to $2,000 bonuses to staffers whose ideas had been sold, but nothing more.

The company was also known for commissioning outside authors to write on spec with the hope of ultimately receiving a contract.

“A couple of years ago, Alloy came to me with this proposal—they were looking for writers. I did 25 to 30 pages of sample work; I worked pretty hard, turned it in and never heard anything back,” said Mr. Nerz.

When authors are brought in to write their own books, as in the Viswanathan case, Alloy is known to take 30 to 50 percent of all revenues and shares the copyright with the author. When someone is hired to ghostwrite a series title, it’s a flat fee.

Opal Mehta’s journey to Alloy was not entirely linear. According to William Morris sources, Ms. Viswanathan first signed with agent Suzanne Gluck, who then passed the author to a junior agent in her office. The junior agent worked with Ms. Viswanathan and eventually hit a wall in terms of developing a commercial proposal. The junior agent then suggested that the writer speak with Josh Bank at Alloy. The Opal Mehta idea emerged from Ms. Vis-wanathan’s conversations with Mr. Bank; once an outline was ready, it was decided that another William Morris agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, would try to sell it to publishers, which she did, to Little, Brown. (Ms. Walsh also represents Ms. Brashares of the Traveling Pants.)

Ms. Walsh and the rest of William Morris’ literary department do a great deal of business with Alloy, which involves some complicated accounting. In the case of Opal Mehta, Ms. Walsh would have taken her standard 15 percent of Ms. Viswanathan’s reported $500,000 two-book deal, which works out to $75,000 for Ms. Walsh. It could be argued that William Morris was not necessarily representing Ms. Viswanathan’s best interests by sending her to a company that could potentially take 30 to 50 percent of the advance as well.

“To my mind, there is no conflict of interest,” Ms. Walsh said. “The relationship between the book packager and the author are very similar to the collaboration between two authors, or between an expert and an author, in that their interests are completely aligned in the project.”

William Morris recently picked up another Alloy-related client. Ms. von Ziegesar of Gossip Girls left her previous agent, Sarah Burnes, last fall, and went to Ms. Gluck. Ms. Burnes also represents Jodi Anderson.

But for all the tangled dealings in the Alloy book-packaging world, for a few, the more depressing concern is the content of some Alloy books. “Emotionally, there’s no progress,” said Francine Pascal, the creator of the Sweet Valley High series and an Alloy author. “It doesn’t touch on the classic values that Sweet Valley did—love, loyalty, friendship.”