The most consequential object in publishing may be a document that almost nobody reads for pleasure: the rights clause. To a reader, a book is a book. To Aevitas Creative Management, it is a small bundle of possible futures. One future is printed in English. Another speaks French. A third comes through headphones during a commute. A fourth stars Reese Witherspoon. The literary agent's peculiar job is to notice all four while the thing is still a manuscript.
Aevitas is a New York-headquartered literary agency with more than 50 agents across ten cities in the United States and Europe. It represents novelists, journalists, illustrators, academics, performers, public figures and estates. Its agents find and shape projects, pitch publishers and negotiate deals. The wider firm handles contracts, royalties, foreign editions, audio, film and television rights. It also develops original content and advises leaders, institutions and brands on communications. In other words, it sells books, but it is built around everything a book can set in motion.
Two years before the name
Aevitas did not begin with a pitch deck about synergy. It began with two agencies sharing an office. Kuhn Projects, founded by former magazine editor David Kuhn, and the older Boston-rooted Zachary Shuster Harmsworth began working from the same New York space around 2014. For two years, their leaders watched the ordinary evidence accumulate: whose lists complemented whose, how colleagues behaved, whether the operating cultures produced friction or relief.
Only then did they combine. In December 2016, the firms announced Aevitas with more than 20 agents in New York, Boston and Washington, DC. David Kuhn, Todd Shuster and Esmond Harmsworth became managing partners. The launch letter promised the best practices of both predecessors and more opportunity for younger colleagues. It was less a blind date than a marriage after a long lease.
The first thing to crack was the calendar
The firm has kept growing by solving a problem familiar to every successful boutique: the founder's calendar eventually turns against the work. Toby Mundy, who folded his own agency into Aevitas and now leads ACM UK, gave the sharpest account. In a sole proprietor's first year, he said, perhaps 5% of the time goes to administration and 95% to chasing clients. Around year ten, the proportions can reverse.
Illustrative estimates offered by ACM UK CEO Toby Mundy for the share of a sole proprietor's time consumed by administration.
Aevitas's answer is not to automate taste. It is to consolidate the dull machinery around it. Contracts, royalty statements, international rights, film contacts and accumulated solutions to old problems live in a larger system. The individual agent still decides what is good. Mundy has described junior staff running meetings and a shared archive of problem-solving forums - small details that explain why culture, rather than mere size, changed his mind about joining.
“Agenting needs scale these days. We have to have great services for clients and a global perspective. We have to be able to justify our 15%.”Toby Mundy, CEO of ACM UK, speaking to The Bookseller
That 15% is the clearest public answer to what the service costs, though exact agreements can vary. The commission aligns the agency's income with the author's. There is no known venture round to subsidize the bet and no public valuation to decorate it. Aevitas is a private service company whose most valuable assets leave the office every evening and occasionally miss a train while reading a proposal.
One manuscript, five markets
A beginner may imagine that an agent sells a book once. In practice, “the book” contains a set of rights that can be separated, retained, licensed and re-licensed. An American publisher may acquire North American print and digital rights while the agency sells translation rights territory by territory. Audio might go to the same publisher or a specialist. Dramatic rights can be optioned by a producer. Large-print and book-club rights still exist, unfashionable but spendable.
Aevitas agent Mary C. Moore has explained the practical consequence neatly: subrights can become another source of author income, and a good agent either knows how to sell them or works inside a system that does. The agency maintains dedicated public contacts for audio and dramatic rights, issues seasonal rights guides and collaborates with producers, talent agencies and studios. Todd Shuster's own list shows the span. He represented books that became Wild and The Pursuit of Happyness, then served as an executive producer on George Clooney's The Midnight Sky.
The Sony lane
In July 2025, the screen route became more direct. Columbia Pictures, 3000 Pictures and Sony Pictures Television entered a relationship to develop film and television projects based on books represented by Aevitas. Sony also received a first look at projects from Aevitas Entertainment, the agency's production arm.
The arrangement does not mean every manuscript is secretly a streaming series. It means Sony gets a systematic view into a curated pool of intellectual property, while Aevitas can bring selected projects toward the screen with a recurring buyer already paying attention. For an agency, that is leverage. For a studio, it is organized discovery. The bookstore and the studio lot are still different planets; Aevitas has scheduled a shuttle.
A shortlist, not a supermarket
The roster is broad enough to look improbable: Cheryl Strayed, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Marina Abramović, Pamela Anderson, journalists, chefs, children's authors and the estate of Louisa May Alcott. Its clients have collectively won Pulitzers, National Book Awards, a Nobel Peace Prize, and Tony, Grammy, Emmy and Academy awards. Yet the service remains deliberately selective and personal. A writer queries one agent, not a faceless procurement department. Simultaneous submissions to several Aevitas agents are automatically disregarded.
The submission form reveals what the firm thinks can be assessed early: a one-sentence summary, comparable books, a biography and the first 50 pages. Original screenplays are excluded. That boundary matters. Aevitas can exploit screen rights in a book because the book is the source asset; it is not presenting itself as a general talent agency for screenwriters.
What the rest of us can steal
The transferable idea is not “get bigger.” It is “centralize repetition, preserve judgment.” A design studio could share finance and legal work while leaving creative direction with small teams. A consultancy could build a common archive of solved problems without forcing every partner into the same point of view. And anyone considering a merger can copy the most sensible part of the Aevitas origin: work beside the prospective partner long enough to observe the Tuesday afternoon version of the culture.
The conditions matter. Shared infrastructure earns its keep only when there is enough recurring rights, contracts and royalty work to support it. A creator seeking a quick transaction, total control or help with an original screenplay may prefer another route. Scale also cannot rescue weak fit between agent and author; a global rights department is impressive, but the person who loves the manuscript still has to pick up the phone.
Aevitas's wager is that the intimate and the industrial can coexist: one agent with specific taste, backed by a machine large enough to follow an idea wherever it earns another life. The name comes from a Latin word associated with endurance. That sounds grand until you look at the work. Endurance, in this business, is contracts, calendars and one more rights guide before Frankfurt.