As I said with the last series of Life After Returns, I am a fan of the History Channel series Life After People. So I thought it might be fun to take a look at some areas of the publishing industry in that format. All of what I am saying here is just my opinion of what might happen. Remember that. Comments are welcome.
To start off with, any writer at any moment can simply fire his agent and have a “life after agents.” But I’m going to pretend that agents suddenly didn’t exist in the entire industry. No reason why, just that the job is gone, vanished into thin air.
Now understand, I have some good friends that are agents and I am in no way saying they should vanish. Just saying they suddenly are looking for a new job is all.
So, in the same way the History Channel looks at things, I’ll start one minute after the job vanishes and go from there.
Life After Agents: 1 Minute
No one would really notice except the former agents suddenly realizing they are looking for a new job. Sort of silly to start at one minute, but it gives me a moment here to explain what agents actually are in this business.
Agents are employees of writers.
Now, let me say that again simply because many, many newer writers are confused at this moment in time about what an agent is. An agent is a writer’s employee. They are not a salvation, they are not a god to be worshiped, they can’t write you a check for your book, and they earn all their money from you. They are an employee. Nothing more. They work for you and do what you ask and if they don’t, like any employee, they should be fired. They do not run your business, you do.
Agents are not your editors. I know this part has really been confused lately, so let me say that again as well. Agents are not your editors. An editor works for a publisher, an agent works for you. An editor can fight for your book in editorial and sales meetings and put good covers on them and get your book published and write you checks. An agent can do none of that.
What does an agent do? They help you fight for a better contract with a publisher. Agents can say things on your behalf that are hard for you to say, so in essence, they are a negotiator. They do not sign the contract, you do. They just help you, but you need to understand the contract better than they do because you are signing it. Often an agency will have already negotiated the basic boilerplate with a big publishers, so you get that as well depending on where your agent works.
An agent fights for checks from the publisher when they are late. Agents can help at certain levels with dealing with the publicity departments and such. Agents get your books into Hollywood and to overseas agents. If you want them to, an agent will even will mail a book for you to an editor or editors that you tell them to.
A personal aside here. I have sold over 90 novels. No agent has ever sold one of them for me. I sold every one myself, but had good agents on the contracts and secondary rights and such.
A little history of agents in general. In the early part of the last century, they didn’t exist in the book publishing industry. They did exist in Hollywood and in theater in New York, but not in books. Editors and writers worked directly with each other.
Into the late 1930s and early 1940s, book and story agents started to drift over from the Hollywood and theater side, and a great deal from the early days of television. Authors had agents to deal with Hollywood or television and often the agent would just deal with the book contracts as well. And authors who lived outside of the New York area could get their books delivered by hand if they had an agent who lived in New York.
From the 1950s until about 1990, agents negotiated contracts and chased the money and didn’t do much else, maybe mailing books for clients who wanted them mailed. When I sold a book, I would tell the editor my agent’s name and then call my agent and tell the agent that the editor would be calling to negotiate the terms. A very simple system that most of us long-term writers still use just fine.
Life After Agents: 1 Hour
From the former agents side, they would be making calls, trying to find jobs as editors or in sales or maybe starting to think about writing that book they had never had the time to write before. Just as with factory workers in a shutdown car plant, they would be looking for work.
Long term professionals like me would just shrug and find the name of a good intellectual property lawyer to hire when we needed one to look over and negotiate some contracts.
Beginning writers would be in a complete panic. More on why later.
Publishers would start having meetings, as they tend to do just about all the time anyway. Why would publishers and editors care? Well, again I need to back up and give some history as to how we got into this position.
In the early part of the last century, writers would deliver their manuscripts by hand to editor’s officers in New York. When the editor’s door was closed, it meant they did not want to be disturbed or were not in the office, so the writer who had just hauled his manuscript across the city on the subway would toss the manuscript through the window over the top of the door. The bar over the top of a door is called a transom and thus the term “over the transom” was born. Writers tossed their books through windows to get editors to read them. Not kidding.
The door was closed. Writers found a way around that problem to get a manuscript into an editor’s hands. Keep that thought in mind.
When an editor pushed open his door after coming back from lunch, it would pile the manuscripts up into a white and black pile that looked a lot like the dirty slush off of the street, thus the term “slush pile” was born.
Into the 1960s, the publishing industry started to explode and often as editorial departments got bigger, they would combine the slush pile in rooms. These slush pile collections lasted through the boom of the 1970s and into the eighties when publishers starting putting on guidelines “no unsolicited submissions” to try to slow the wave of garbage headed to them.
If you have never read slush for a magazine or book publisher, you have no idea how much complete garbage is sent in. A manuscript done in manuscript format, with an exciting opening, jumps out of the piles. Hard to believe, but completely true.
Now, for anyone with a half a brain, this “closed door” was easy to go around. You met the editor at a conference and talked to them about your book, or you sent them a query letter and they said “Sure, send me the book” if they were interested and the book seemed to fit their line. (Today you can still meet editors at writers’ conferences and have this same system work just fine.)
But then into the late 1990s as houses merged and the distribution system collapsed, editors were forced to take on much more and they found that too many writers were figuring out ways around this “closed door” so they came up with a new one to keep the mass of junk out.
They simply put on their guidelines “No unagented submissions.”
To put it simply, the publishers simply shoved off their slush piles onto the agents, who work for the writers.
To put it in business terms, a publisher was forcing a supplier of a product to hire an employee before they would look at the product. Anyone in any normal business would look at this as head-shaking, and it is.
Of course this slammed the existing agents with a ton of work. When this happened, most of the existing agents already had a bunch of writers they were working for, so they mostly just shut down new writers coming in, and many of them went and hid. Finding some of the top agencies is a tough thing for a beginning writer to do because they just don’t want the mass of garbage coming at them that the publishers are forcing at them.
Back to the original concept. An agent is the employee of a writer. If I have an agent, I want that agent working for me and my books, not reading through some lazy publisher’s slush pile. I want my employee working for me.
Interesting isn’t it how this industry has gotten sort of screwed up? Bookstore owners take no responsibility for their own inventory with the return system and publishers take no responsibility for their own slush piles.
So this change and other factors in the business forced a ton of editors to quit and move over to agenting (more money was the major factor), and when editors became agents, they brought along what had been their right as editors with publishers, to make writers rewrite books. They forgot that when they left editing and crossed to the other side of that contract line, they worked for the writer, not the publisher, and thus was born the nasty habit of having an agent tell a writer to rewrite.
And for almost ten years, younger writers have let their employees do this to them, all because of that stupid closed door and younger writers inability to think their way around or over it.
During this time, some agents started to think of themselves as a lot more than just an employee of the writer, they started thinking that they were in charge of the writer. And everyone knows when you start letting an employee run a business what happens: Nothing pretty, and that’s where we sit now.
At this point in history, the system has become so warped, it’s almost funny if it wasn’t killing so many writer’s dreams. An employee who works for an employer is telling the employer they can’t sell their product. Imagine that happening in any other business? You work at a production factory (which is what a writer is) and you tell your boss that you won’t sell their product. What would happen? You would be fired, of course.
Yet beginning writers let agents do this exact same thing to them at the moment and even some writers with a few books under their belt fall into this pit, writing and rewriting over and over for an audience of one. And the audience works for them. Let me simply say that’s impossible to do. Not even my wife loves everything I have written and have sold to major houses. And she’s won a Hugo Award for her editing.
One side note that most don’t know. Agents need nothing to become an agent. No training, no license, nothing. Anyone who says they are an agent and can get a card printed can go to writers’ conferences and get new writers to sign on. Scams are everywhere.
Now at this point in time, not surprisingly, editors and publishers on the other side are finding it difficult to find books that are new, that are different, that have a new voice. I wonder why?? Duh. The agents aren’t mailing them, or having their writer rewrite all the newness and excitement right out of it. In other words, the publishers have set up a road block, a closed door, that is just a little too good. I even heard of a few agents who had decided lately to not send out anything for six months because they didn’t think they could get enough money for the projects right now.
I would fire an agent like that so quickly, they wouldn’t even have time to know what happened. After all, I need to make a living as well.
Right now let me state a few real basic principles of book publishing.
1) There is no perfect book.
2) Editors can’t buy books they don’t see.
3) Agents work for writers.
Writers have to do their best with every book, then get it on editor’s desks. It is not the agent’s responsibility to get a book to a publisher, it is the writers. History is full of stories of books being rejected 50 or 60 or more times before finding the right editor and going on to become a bestseller. Books that are different and really new face a lot of rejection before they are bought. When your agent refuses to send out a book, you are letting one opinion, one rejection stop you. Silly, just flat silly.
One more fact right here. Agents in this business gain their power to have their calls returned because of who they represent. The writers are the power base and if an agent represents a major bestseller, that agent gets his phone calls returned by publishers and editors and vice presidents of companies. If an agent lives in the boondocks and represents only writers who sell at 5,000 copy levels, that agent gets no phone calls returned and has to mail books exactly as a writer would mail them to editors. The power is always in the writers.
So today we find ourselves with two different kinds of agents. There are still some old-fashioned agents who understand who they work for, and the new must-rewrite agents who think they are in control of the writer. Both exist, but let’s go on pretending they have all just lost their jobs.
So at one hour after agents have vanished, publishers would be working to set up systems to allow the slush back in the door. Actually, this is being done in experiments in a couple publishers right now, where authors post on a web site part or all of their books and readers read them and if the book gets some good positive reviews from readers, the editors ask the author to see it. Interesting way to get readers to read slush which makes a lot more sense than agents reading it.
Other new systems of online submissions would be set up. I doubt highly if any of the publishers would go back to the big rooms full of submissions. Too expensive with New York prices. I can see a publisher setting up a couple assistant editors in a place a hundred miles outside of New York in a cheap warehouse to do nothing but read slush. That would be possible and worth the occasional good book they would find. At one hour, discussions would be starting about all of this.
More than likely, in one office or another, an editor thinking ahead will be suggesting they start sponsoring contract workshops for writers to learn contracts through different writer’s organizations. Romance Writers already does this, and this summer Kris and I are teaching a contracts/copyright workshop. But at the moment, most writers do not understand copyright and contracts until faced with that 12 page novel contract for the first time. And by that point, it’s too late without good help.
More contract lawyers would be thinking of shifting to publishing law as word got out.
Without overseas agents, writers would be going directly to those publishers as well. The Hollywood system would break down completely and I honestly have no idea how it would rebuild, so not talking about that area.
Life After Agents: 1 Day
Many, many beginning writers will be giving up at this point because they just don’t understand how the business could function without agents. These are the type of writers you hear say, “I don’t understand business, that’s why I want to be a writer.” This statement shows a vast lack of understanding about publishing and writing, and if these writers do end up selling a novel, they always end up sitting in a bar, not being able to sell their next book, and complaining they got screwed.
Nope. In all our workshops, Kris and I put a sign up. It says simply: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN CAREER.
No one else. You sign the contracts, you write the books, you make the decisions. It’s your career and if you expect others to take care of you, you are lost. It won’t happen and like any employee, your agent won’t really care beyond the next paycheck. Nature of employees. We all know that.
So after one day the writers who are giving up because there now are no agents to “take care of them” are better off staying in their day jobs anyway. Blunt but true.
Publishers will be getting ready to handle books flowing at them. You see, the ugly truth about publishing is that it is a machine. Every book line must fill its list every month, and if there are four books on that list, the editor’s jobs are on the line to fill those spots every month with books that will sell.
Writers must get their books to those editors, so with agents suddenly being gone, this temporary roadblock that publishers have made up will allow books to start flowing back at them. With e-mail and online submissions, the process can become much, much easier, and after one day publishers would be scrambling to set up the new systems and get out the new guidelines.
Will the vanishing of agents effect anything else in publishing? Nope.
Again, agents are employees of writers. Books flow from writers to publishers to distributors to bookstores and then into customer hands. Notice that nowhere in that traditional model does a book have to go through an agent. Having them vanish will make no difference to the system in general or readers who buy books.
In a few minor ways, some writers are already trying to go around publishers and distributors and bookstores and go direct to readers, and this might get even more of a push from some writers who think their one hope of getting into a regular publisher has vanished with the agents. It might be a good thing in some ways, bad in others. It’s a huge topic I might cover later in another article.
Next up, Part Two of Life After Agents. Stay tuned. Comments welcome.
Excellent post!
I’ve attended a few writing conferences and I tend to get the feeling from the agents that we [the writers] are there for them–not the other way around.
Additionally, I’ve always heard that the money should flow toward the writer, however, I’ve been considering just hiring a quality freelance editor and posting my first novel on Amazon for Kindle downloads.
I’m not certain at this point, as a newbie writer with only a few short story sales, if it’s wise to do this with a novel or if it’s wiser for me to stick with the traditional route of submitting to the big publishers and agents. Is there any reason I can’t do both? Publishing rights might be an issue, but it didn’t seem to be a problem for John Scalzi–would my story selling on Kindle be any different?
I also wonder if just selling to Kindle isn’t such a bad thing. Granted, I would never see that lovely book on the shelves at my local Barnes & Noble, but I might be able to publish four to five novels a year and build a solid fan base.
I guess, knowing what you now know about the publishing industry and about today’s current technology and where things seem to be going, if you were starting from scratch, what route might you take?
I’ve asked a lot of questions here, and completely understand if you don’t have time to address them all. I just want you to know that this sort of information is extremely helpful to us newbs.
Great post, Dean. And I do think a lot of people would like to hear your take on going direct to readers — the pros and cons, etc.
Wow Dean,
These “Life After” thought-experiment essays you’re writing are a great tool for looking at the publishing industry with fresh eyes. Also a great way to explain things to new writers. Would make an interesting column for one of the writer magazines.
I worked in the software industry for a number of years, and went through a bad case of culture shock when I got to know how the publishing industry runs their business. There were times I was like “What the f***!” and tried to quit writing because it seemed so crazy.
And with the current recession, I’m seeing new agencies opening up by laid-off editors. Many of them never worked for a literary agent before opening their own agency, so I suspect the “agent as editor” meme is going to get even stronger.
Anyways, I’m looking forward to the next installment of this series, and letting others know about what you’re doing.
Wow, Dean, thanks for that. Between you and Kris, I’m getting a really good idea of what the business is like and what I’ll need to do to be successful. You know, I always thought it was better to have an agent, but after that, it might be better to go it alone at first and establish myself. I actually had the opportunity to “sit down” with an editor and tell him about my book. He was interested, but unfortunately, it wasn’t finished. I wonder if that’s the better way to go? Yeah, it’s a small publisher, and I probably wouldn’t get many readers, but I wouldn’t have to fight with an agent who thinks they know what’s best for their “boss.”
Shawn,
Not sure if there are any “right” answers to your questions, to be honest. Every writer seems to come in on a different path, with the main aspect being that they grow to understand the business and all its weirdness and they continually work to improve their story telling crafts.
Money always flows to the writer, and my gut sense is that anyone you could hire to help you wouldn’t do you any good. There are book doctors of good repute, but they only work for the publishers and are hired by the publishers to help in mostly nonfiction areas. Anyone you could hire would more than likely be on the verge of a scam. So caution. Money always flows to the writer except for continuing education, such as conferences and workshops.
If you have a few pro story sales already, you might want to look at the workshops Kris and I put on. They are designed to help writers who are selling make the jump to the next level.
As for where or when in the e-book side of things, such as Kindles, your guess is as good as mine. Kris and I will be bringing out a lot of our back lists of short fiction and a few novels in different forms over the next year or so, some sold on our web sites, some through other forms, including Kindles. It’s nice pocket change for writers and does add up over time, but is still a very, very minor part of publishing. Traditional book publishing is still the 99% monster you should always aim for.
Scott, going to do that, with a future article maybe called “Life without Publishers.” That might get real interesting, but first I have to finish this “third rail” of publishing called agents.
L.M.,
Yup, I’m afraid you’re right, until writers start firing the rewriter-agents or force them to just mail the book, this will continue. Writing by committee is never a good thing, and an agent as collaborator is just as bad. If they could write, they would be doing it because most of them are smart enough to know the big money is on the writing side.
Amanda, the classic way of getting a top agent is to sell your first book, not agree to any terms, then call a top agent and ask them if they would handle the contract on your book with the offer. You have to have the offer from a major publisher, not a small press, but seven of the writers who attended our workshops in the last year have gotten agents in just that fashion. They sold their books first. That’s been the way to do it for 50 years and it doesn’t seem to have changed.
And there is an old saying about agents. The agent you can get as a beginning unsold writer is not the agent you are going to want when you start selling regularly. That’s also very, very true.
So no right way to do it. The key is think through the myths and around the closed doors. That’s the key to opening the door to sales.
Cheers
Dean
Excellent…
Thanks for this, I’m starting to understand this whole crazy process and realise that the writer must have or acquire a business head or else.
It’s interesting, Dean.
I’ve been writing for years, trying to fine tune my stories and make them the best they can be. As I now begin to look further I see that agents, the art of writing best synopses, the perfect query letter, appropriate and suggested pre-publishing strategies, ways to market yourself as an author, blogging, websites–all these things seemed a wall of years and years to climb.
Your article ‘Life After Agents’ was a good one for me to read right now; it made me more comfortable with my spot within the gray areas, and more comfortable with not towing the line exactly, showing me that it’s not such a bad thing. Thank you for that.
I like the format of this ‘Life Without…’ and hope to read more. Even if I follow conventional routes, and meet conventional expectations, I am aware and appreciate there’s more room to vary from the ‘path’.
If I can’t find an agent to represent me when I begin looking, they I can find a way around that.
Pat
Dean, thank you for this fantastic post – you’re saying what many new writers really need to hear. I have a great agent who wants to support and foster my career. But before I found him I went through an agent search that was a bit like stepping into the Twilight Zone. I spoke with some truly wonderful, classy agents, but also encountered some who treated me like I was an inept five year old. It was bizarre, because I do have a contract with a NY publishing house. The whole experience was a real eye-opener.
Great post Dean.
As a newbie to the industry I found it very thought provoking as it challenged quite a few “truths” that I’ve been hearing from “seasoned” authors &professional in the industry. I’m not saying (nor do I think you are) that there’s no need for agents, but just that their roles and responsibilities should be clarified.
Great post!
I am constantly stressing in my workshops that when we attend a pitch session at a conference, WE ARE LOOKING TO HIRE THE EDITOR/AGENT… not the other way around.
Thanks, Dean. I think I’ll continue going the traditional route then. Looks like it’s still the most common path to success.
At the last CONduit, Dave Wolverton and a few others stressed the importance of “face time” with other pro writers and with editors. Attend the cons. Local or national. Get your face and name known among Name writers and even some of the editors who attend. If they pick up the vibe that you’re serious, and especially if they’ve already seen your stuff and liked it, you’re making good progress. If a pro writer or editor remembers you, and remembers that you’re a quality “producer” of fiction, and either asks to see your stuff or knows what you’re working on something they might want to see, opportunities can happen.
Wolverton told us all at CONduit a story about lunching with a big house editor, and the editor complained he had a manuscript that was not buyable, but which contained a neat idea. Dave happened to know a WOTF entrant — the quality of whose work Dave could vouch for — who had a book manuscript with almost the same idea in it. Dave name dropped the writer to the editor, the editor called the writer and asked to see the manuscript, and boom, book deal in the can. No agent necessary.
Which is not to say agents can’t help. As Dean notes, they’re very useful for negotiating the contract once the publisher wants to buy.
I think the key discovery I am learning is that agents should not become the sole gatekeepers of fiction. They can’t pay you, you pay them, so why let them tell you your manuscript is no good, or can’t be sold? Only an editor can do that. The agent’s job is to simply get you as good a deal as they can on your contract, nothing more. They can’t predict trends, guarantee sales if you change your book to match their suggestions, nor can they give you any money for the time you spend making changes. Let the editor suggest changes. The agent should only be there for contract time.
If I’ve missed the boat on this one, I am sure Dean will correct me. Dean, do I have it right?
Pat,
I agree, when standing back and staring at this business, it seems impossible. Kris and I call that “Eating the elephant.” When you stare at the elephant and think of eating it, you know it’s impossible, but if you take it one bite at a time over a long period of time, you can do it.
The key in publishing is always the story. You write good stories, and put them in front of editors who can buy them, they will. But the key to that is try to get better every day at story telling. Not sentence-by-sentence writing, but the craft of telling a story. Two different things.
LaTessa, you’re right, not saying you don’t need an agent to help you negotiate the contracts and all the rest of the things an employee can help you do. I am saying it’s silly, flat silly, to have an agent tell you how to write a story, and completely silly to think you need an agent to sell a book.
Kelly, that’s right when it comes to agents. You’re not looking to hire an editor however, you’re looking for a business partner (with the contract defining the terms of the partnership) so that your product is produced and sold. Editors and publishers are business partners to writers. Agents are employees. Very simple, but vastly screwed up at the moment.
Vanessa, yes it can get really strange in this new world. I had one writer friend who had an offer on the table with a major house, called up an agent and got yelled at for even thinking of selling that kind of book to that imprint. Everyone knew they didn’t take those kind of books. Yet the author had an offer from that imprint. Needless to say the author thanked the agent for their opinion and hung up. Some agents have really lost track of the concept.
Shawn, by tradition, I assume you mean write a good book, let enough editors read it so that one of them makes an offer. Right? Then get an agent. Good plan.
Cheers
Dean
Brad, pretty much got it in one, and I agree with Dave completely. But without the skill, of course, going to a thousand conventions won’t help. You have to produce the words and keep working on improving the story telling skills. That comes first all the time and never ends no matter how old or how much you know.
Agents are valuable when it comes to contracts, but they also do other things, such as chase the money when it’s late, get your book into overseas publisher’s hands, deal with Hollywood when that sort of thing comes up. Granted, many long term professionals I know do all of this themselves, but early on you want an agent helping you.
The key is never let them slow you down for any reason (they are an employee after all, there to help you, not slow you down), so on all that, you are correct in my opinion.
And one thing I didn’t stress very much because it didn’t fit. Anyone can be an agent. It takes no school, no permits, nothing. Thus someone like me who has been working in publishing on both sides of the desk for twenty plus years now full time knows a ton more than some beginning agent right out of college, so why would I hire an employee I would need to constantly fight and train? So the longer you are in the business, the less you need an agent of any nature, unless the agent has been around as long as you have.
Cheers
Dean
Amen, amen, amen! This series should be required reading for everyone in the publishing industry – agents, publishers, writers, publicists…
I for one have never understood why the publishers don’t understand the tragic error they made in giving the power of control over what they see to agents. It’s an inversion of natural flow.
I wonder just how many agents really believe they are employees of the writers? Instead, most of them act like prima donni/uomi who deign to step down from their Olympian heights to allow you to work with them – as if they are doing you a favor!
Janis, not all agents are like that. Most are great people who love the business, and many are still very clear as to where they fit. But the ones that you mention are out there, no doubt and it’s not the agent’s fault that they act that way. Let me repeat that.
It’s not the agents fault.
Writers, as their employers allow them to continue such behavior. You have an employee that suddenly thinks they run the business, you would fire them. Writers let the type of agents you mention exist by going to them, rewriting a book two or three times for them, allow them to not mail a book to an editor. Just yesterday I got a letter from a writer friend who was having trouble getting his agent to mail a book to editors, a completed book. It’s just head-shaking to me.
But in defense of a large percentage of agents, they haven’t bought into much of this and are great people. It’ mostly the new agents who have this way of thinking, interestingly enough, the agents that know the least about the business.
Cheers, Dean
Wow! This is huge for me. I am a new writing in the process of finding an agent. I was led to believe that agents are god like and that you cannot succeed without one.
Thank you for your insight. It has given me hope of success, no matter how that comes to pass.
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Great blog, Dean. I’m in total agreement. I’ve had the pleasure of attending one of your workshops in Reno many years ago. We were both presenters at a SWW conference back in the nineties. I just discovered your website and blog today through the Murder She Writes website and wanted to say hi. I’ve bookmarked your site and will visit often. If anyone knows the business and how it works, it is you and Kris. I’m eager to explore the archives and catch up.
Unanswered queries, lost queries, poorly zeroxed form letters, insolent, arrogant form letters . . . I could go on and on. The important point is that agents are employed by writers, and the writer is the customer and/or the potential customer and has a right to expect a minimum of professionalism and courtesy. I don’t go so far as to say, customer service.
You are certainly right on in stating that publishers can’t buy what they don’t see.
Sign me disillusioned, jaded and after all is said and done, still looking for the right agent.
Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.
I totally agreed with all the prior comments.
All you describe is happening in some way or in a variation on the form of what you lay out.
I particularly like the way you highlight in the context of you hypothetical world how many would-be writers who “don’t know/like/care for” business would give up.
With all the streamlining of printing and binding a book, simply making it available to readers, the onus is finally where it needs to be for writers–crafting and refining an engaging story.
The writers who never were about that are seeing the blaring truth–that computers and digital technology cannot and do not write books. That art remains the terrain of the human imagination and perseverance at craft.
Fantastic article. Thanks so much.
What a fabulous post! I’ve sold about 100 books over the past 27 years after being discovered in slush piles two weeks apart by two different publishers. (Fortunately, they were different books, but I did hire an agent to get me out of option problems.) I’ve since sold books with agents. Without agents. Some without an agent, but using an attorney.
I am beyond happy with my current agent, but believe different agents can be helpful at different stages in a writer’s career because they all come with different skillsets. Super high powered agents can get you buckets of money. Which can be a good thing. But sometimes not.
Other agents are great at quiet, behind the scenes maneuvering when you’re thinking of moving houses while still under contract. Also, in these economic times and treacherous publishing waters, it can be helpful to have an agent who’s been around forever and knows everyone. One who’s also been through — and survived — several tough cycles and brings a lot of publishing history to the table.
I totally agree that the most important thing is that both writer and agent understand that the agent is an employee of the writer. (Though a good author/agent relationship can make for a very effective team. Especially if a great editor is making up the third side of the triangle, which is what I’m fortunate to have now.)
Also, yes, every writer must learn what contract clauses mean and read every contract line by line. And never be afraid to ask about things or sudden changes you don’t understand. Or agree with.
Great post. I always knew I wanted to get a good agent first because I want as much time writing as possible and wanted someone who knows the industry inside out in my corner. It’s a tough time for new authors – all we can do is write the best books we can and work as professionally as we can.
Judy, why even look for an agent? Trust me, you can get a top agent to negotiate a contract for you once you have an offer on the table from a New York publisher for a book.
Cheers
Dean
Thanks for the great comments, JoAnn. I got a ton of responses from long term pros such as yourself about this post, almost all saying the same thing you just said. Glad I wasn’t out there on a limb too far. Next up I’m going to try killing a few myths in publishing. That ought to be a fun series of posts. Thanks again.
Cheers
Dean