Sep 15 2009
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. Agents
The myth is simply: YOU MUST HAVE AN AGENT TO SELL A BOOK
To be clear, I like agents and have no desire to bring them harm. But the myths these days about agents are so thick and have become so ugly to new writers, I figured I had better tackle at least one of them next. And yes, there are more than one.
And in the last 20 years, the biggest myth that has blown up into a damaging myth is that you need an agent to sell a book.
This is, of course, complete hogwash, but I have no doubt some of you reading this are already resisting this idea. You want someone to do the dirty work for you, to do the research, to just “take care of you.” Yeah, that’s going to happen.
So to explain this myth clearly, I need to back up just a touch and run through some history to get to why this myth even exists and then move on into how to fight it.
Basic history. Book agents came over from theater and movies from 1900-1950. They were used by writers to help with the contracts, to get the books into movie and early television (in New York) and overseas, and to go get the coffee. They were simply a lower level employee used by writers to do some of the busy work.
It never occurred to most writers to have an agent sell a book for them. Writers worked directly with the editors, and the idea that anyone needed to be in the middle of that was just thought of as silly. Both the writers and the editors and publishers on the other side never stood for it back in those early agent times.
But then, as the industry got bigger through the baby-boom years, fewer writers lived near New York and thus mailing manuscripts to editors started to become the norm. Editors and writers still worked together, and the agent did the deal, negotiating the contract, helping with contacts overseas and in Hollywood. But up until the early 1990s, book deals between editors and writers were often done across a dinner table with a handshake, with the agent left to deal with the details later.
In fact, about twenty of my early novel deals were done over dinner clear up into the early 1990’s.
Also in those days, in the big New York publishers, there were rooms and rooms full of what is called “slush.”
Now the term “slush pile” came from the early days of publishing. An editor usually sat at his desk and writers brought him work. But when the editor was gone and the office door closed, the writer still wanted to leave the manuscript, so they tossed it through the small window over the door. The top of the door is called a transom, so thus the term “over the transom” came into being.
When the editor returned to the office and pushed open the door, the manuscripts on the floor would be pushed into a pile which looked a lot like a pile of dirty New York snow. Thus the term “slush pile” came about.
In the early 1980s, publishers had tried to slow down the growing wave of manuscripts coming at them by putting requirements that no manuscript be sent unless it was solicited. A simple thing to ignore, and it stopped only the really stupid new writers. Huge rooms of book manuscripts filled New York buildings and many, many assistant editors were hired to dig through the slush to find the gems among all the trash. And many, many major writers you read today came out of those slush piles.
Then in the 1990s lots of things happened in publishing, not the least of which was a complete distribution system collapse. Publishers had to cut back, larger presses ate smaller ones, and at the same time New York real estate prices went up and up and up. Publishers could no longer afford the huge rooms full of slush, or the assistant editors to wade through it all.
At this point in time, agents were doing more and more for writers, and the top writers had very powerful agents, simply because the agents worked for the top writers. (Agents always get their power from their clients. They have no power on their own.)
And also, writers became more of an unknown to publishers, a vast sea of people with a computer and a stamp who thought they could write and should be rich even though they had never spent any time practicing their craft or even learning how to spell. Very few of these new writers ever thought of going to a writer’s conference and actually meeting an editor, so editors became somewhat fearful of the nutballs out there.
Something had to be done to stop this massive wave coming at the money-worried publishers and overworked editors. So someone, somewhere came up with the idea “Let the agents handle it.”
So onto the guidelines went the simple line. “No unagented manuscripts accepted.”
Thus, for the last ten years or more, agents have been getting buried with the vast amount of slush. Older agents went into hiding, knowing their job wasn’t to read slush, and new scam agents popped up everywhere, taking advantage of this new guideline from publishers by milking the writer of their money and crushing their dreams.
Let’s step back for a second and look at the relationship of agent/editor/writer/publisher.
First: A writer sells a publisher a manuscript and there is a contract between the publisher and writer. In simple business terms, the writer produces a product and goes into a partnership with a publisher to produce and distribute the product.
Simple.
Second: The editor works for the publisher. Paid by the publisher, represents the publisher’s needs.
Third: The agent works for the writer, represents the writer’s needs. Nothing more.
Agents are hired to do certain chores a writer needs done, to help in negotiating contracts, to be a pit bull with late payments, to have connections with Hollywood and maybe overseas, although that job is falling away as well. They are the business contact between the publisher and the writer on business items, leaving the editor and writer to work on the craft side.
So suddenly, because of the situation, the publishers are demanding that a writer hire an employee before they will look at their product.
Excuse me?
Let me look at why this system is about to fail and fail big.
First off, it forces agents by the nature of the requirement to be the gatekeeper for all the bad stuff publishers don’t want. That’s not their job. When I hire an agent, I don’t hire a slush reader doing someone else’s work, I hire someone who negotiates contracts for me and has good contacts. I don’t want MY employee reading slush.
It allows young agents to think they are the boss at times over writers. Of course, no longterm writers think this, and no respected, longer term agent thinks it either, but beginning writers and early professionals fall into this trap, and even go so far as to rewrite a book on demand of their agent.
Excuse me?? If the agent could write, they would be, instead of taking 15% of what a writer makes for writing. Yet beginning writers and young professionals who don’t understand how the business really works fall into this ugly rewriting trap all the time. Agents are your employee, they don’t tell you what to do, you tell them. Duh.
This guideline also helps young agents believe they have a lot more power than they really do, and it makes new writers buy into that belief. I have heard new writer after new writer get excited about “getting an agent” and the agent is 26 years old, a former editor who got laid off, and has hung out a shingle. The new agent wouldn’t know how to negotiate a contract if their life depended on it, let alone have any contacts except for maybe a few people in the place they were fired. But as a former editor, they think they know what makes a book better, so they think their job is to have new writers rewrite. And thus years are wasted and no one makes any money.
Point right here: Anyone can be an agent. There are no rules, no regulations, no training. The old joke is “What does it take to become a book agent? Stationery.”
Yet new writers put their entire business, their entire dreams, their entire hope for a future on someone who only needed stationary to get started. See how silly this all is? And sad.
Also understand that agents are not regulated at all. We all have watched in the financial world how well unregulated people do with money, yet new writers, without research, hire an agent and give them control over all their income. If you don’t think the Madoff types don’t also live in the agent world, you are sadly kidding yourself.
Another reason this system is showing major cracks and about to fail is that editors are not getting the new and innovative books they are looking for. They are not seeing the new talent, the new dangerous voices, because the agents and the system itself are blocking these voices. Often these new voices fall into the rewriting trap shoved on them by a new agent in the business and if the editors see anything, they see the watered-down manuscript that fits into the next vampire/Da Vinci Code want-to-be.
Writer after writer after writer I have met are getting discouraged and when I ask how many editors have rejected their book they say “None. But I sent it to 30 or 40 agents before giving up on it.”
No editor had a chance to buy the book.
Makes me want to cry for all the good books lost in this last decade.
So, a few basics here that are standards of this industry and you can infer what you want from these standards to help your own writing and your own fight against this myth.
1… An agent is your employee and makes 15% of what you earn, nothing more. Their job is not to sell books or help you rewrite it. You are the writer. Trust your own voice and talent. If your employee won’t do as you ask, fire them and find another employee.
2… Money always flows to the writer except for education and research. Never hire an agent, or a book doctor, or any other scam artist and send them money. Money only flows to the writer. Period.
3… Editors need new books. They have to fill a list every month. Just in case your book is the next “big book” they have to look at your pitch or query or pages. If they don’t look and you become the next Dan Brown, they will be fired. Remember, they work for corporations, their job is to find good books, fill lists, make their publisher money, not dismiss a book out of hand because there is no employee on the letterhead.
4… A form rejection these days says simply “We do not take unagented submissions.” It means exactly what every other form rejection in the history of publishing has meant: Nothing. It means that the manuscript, for one reason or another, didn’t fit their line. Maybe your manuscript sucked, or maybe it was brilliant but didn’t fit. (More than likely you haven’t learned how to do a good query letter or decent proposal and no one got to your book to see how good it really was.)
5… Most agents you can get as an unpublished writer is not an agent you are going to want once you actually sell a book. This statement alone kills more writer careers than anything I have watched over the decades.
6… Books sell themselves. Agents can’t force an editor to buy a book. The book has to be good enough and fit the line before it will sell. Nothing more. Having an agent will not give you a magic way in. Actually, it often won’t help you at all find the right publisher, because the agent may have ideas where the book fits and never try a publisher that might be just looking for a book like yours to start something new.
7… Editors never know what they want to buy until they see it. An agent who tells you he or she knows exactly what an editor wants is just full of crap.
8… Agents who blog regularly (Other than a very occasional education blog or guest blog) are dangerous, since they clearly have enough time to not work for their clients. It usually means they are selling very little. Caution!! Think it through. If you had a business and your employee was blogging all the time about your business, would you as an employer stand for that? Not hardly.
Hint: Top agents are hard to find, their agencies have static web sites, and you won’t be able to get one until you have an offer from a major publisher in your hand. Then you simply call them to hire them to help you with the contract and such. (Oh, my, have I stuck my foot into it there. Here come the angry e-mails.)
9…What a publisher is publishing is frighteningly easy to figure out these days by either simply walking into a bookstore and looking at the shelves or going to the publisher’s web site and looking at their book lists. That’s not counting all the writer resources there are these days.
10… Lower level and new agents (meaning someone you can get without a book offer from a publisher) simply mail your book like a writer would mail their own book. It goes into the same piles as everything else the editor gets, including your manuscript that you talked to the editor about at a writer’s conference. But there is something you don’t know. Bad agents are often hated by publishers and editors and anything from that agent is automatically rejected. Also, sure, I agree that sometimes agents have contacts, but often they have made enemies as well, thus cutting off some places you could get to with your manuscript on your own. In other words, if you are letting your agent try to sell your work, sometimes having an agent can be a lot, lot worse than having no agent at all. The chance of this goes up the younger the agent.
11… Young agents don’t know contracts and how to negotiate a contract, which is the main reason you hire an agent. A short time back, I was reading a contract from a student of mine who had gone and gotten a young agent, even though he sold the book himself and could have gotten a top agent when he had the offer in hand. Everything, and I do mean everything, the agent added into the contract hurt the writer and helped the publisher. The young agent was new and a former editor. I have a hunch the young agent forgot which side of the fence he/she was working on. More than likely just didn’t know. Happens all the time I’m afraid. Nothing much I could say to the writer since the deal was already done. The writer had made the decision on the agent that got him a very bad contract.
So, in closing, I would like to state my credits. I have been selling books regularly since 1992 (one in 1988), I have sold almost 100 novels, not quite, but almost. I have been represented by three of publishing’s top agents, one for 17 years. I am friends with all three of them and would call each of them if I had a project I knew fit their interests that I had sold.
I have three years of law school and know contracts, especially publishing contracts, and am an expert on copyright law. However, with only a few exceptions (all work-for-hire that couldn’t be changed) I had an agent represent me for all of my books.
But all that said, I have sold every one of my books myself. None of my agents have ever sold a book for me.
Am I any different than any of you? Nope. I just don’t believe in the myth that an agent has to sell a book. And because of that, I’m still here, publishing regularly, and making a living with my fiction.
——————
Notice below that I have added onto this series of chapters a donate button where you can donate if you feel these chapters of this upcoming book helped you in some way and you want to keep me writing them and putting them up here. And if you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this article along to others who might get some help from it. Every week I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, workshops, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.
Thanks, Dean
Great stuff.
Dean Wesley Smith, pissing off all of New York one blog post at a time.
Another great post, Dean. I think you could use Scott’s comment above as the subtitle for the book that comes from these posts
Or maybe just the USP for the posts.
This is probably kind of sad, but I’m sitting here laughing maniacally as I wait for the angry responses to flood in.
One heads up that I’ll I give the angry posters (if there are any), keep in mind that this isn’t just Dean’s opinion here. A lot of long time pros feel this way about the author-agent relationship. Actually, I can only think of one long time pro who feels differently off the top of my head.
So think a little before you fly off the handle and do some research. A lot of the people out there promoting this myth either have never published anything (it amazes my the self proclaimed experts in this business that have never sold anything or have sold very little but present themselves as the end all be all) or are still fairly new.
Once again, just my two cents, and love the posts Dean. This is how I’m getting my ‘fix’ until the workshops start up in February.
Steve
What’s interesting is that I’m not bothering anyone who has been around for a while at all. I’m just trying to save newer writers years of dream-crushing problems.
We put up a sign at our major workshops. It says simply “You are responsible for your own career.”
When you follow that simple reality, you often don’t turn to an agent to “save” you and do the work for you.
By the time I’m finished, I should have an interesting book at least.
Cheers
Dean
I’m having a special on bodyguard and protective services this week, Dean …
Steve
Thank you for this installation, Dean. I love your and Kris’s advice about agents, and about writers being in charge of their own careers. I never liked the idea of agents as gatekeepers to editors, and there was the fact that they were getting 15% for the life of that work.
Do you go with an agent or with a publishing-savvy lawyer to negotiate and go over contracts? I’m interested to know what the pros/cons would be, as I would guess lawyers get a set fee and not a percentage.
Sophie, I always use a top agent when I get a book contract. You can use an intellectual property attorney, but never just a local attorney. Again, when you have a book offer in hand from a major publisher, it is very easy to just call a major agent and ask them to handle the book negotiations for you. Doesn’t mean you have to sign your life over to the agent, or rewrite your next book for them. They are an employee, an important one, which is why this myth hurts writers so much.
So I have no opinion one way or another with going to an IP attorney or using a top agent. I use agents at the moment, but many of my friends use an attorney. Plus and minus both ways.
Cheers
Dean
Fantastic stuff! I write for magazines and other such publications and I’m currently working on my second novel (which will probably be the first I try and sell). In preparation, I’ve been skipping all over the internet trying to figure out how to accomplish this so I’ll be ready when the time comes. The vast majority of the agent blogs make me angry, either immediately or at some point soon after I begin to read the content.
Now I realize why. When I pitch a story to a magazine, I only deal with the editor. Of course, the contract is simple, I certainly don’t need an agent to help me with it. But a novel is another matter. I don’t want some agent trying to rewrite my work, that’s what editors try to do; but I would certainly hire an agent to negotiate the contract, and I hope at some point you can share what we should know about that exchange.
You’ve pretty much unlocked why I get so angry at snarky agents, they almost had me believing that they were right and I was wrong.
You have a new follower, thanks for the information.
Dave
David, thanks for the comments. Always nice to hear from another professional writer.
Marketing novels is different from non-fiction in many ways. Kristine Kathryn Rusch (who used to be a full-time nonfiction writer before turning to fiction) and I teach a week-long workshop (twice next year) on just this topic. It includes how to write query letters (which I am sure you are good at for nonfiction), proposals, how and when to find an agent and what they will do for you, including the negotiating contracts, and also a bunch of the new technology fiction writers are starting to move toward. It takes us a full week to make sense of everything in this area for everyone and put it all together, so it’s hard to even talk about in a blog post I’m afraid. This agent post alone got very long, and that was just on agents selling books, a very small part of the marketing picture these days. An ugly part for writers who buy into the myth, granted, but a small part.
So more than likely I won’t go into agents much any more in the chapters of this book, except to talk about yet another agent myth that people, especially young writers, believe. That agents know the markets better than you do and you, the writer, shouldn’t have to learn them. Snort, that’s so damn silly a myth, it’s hard for me to even talk about, yet younger agents claim this all the time. That’s a future chapter down the road.
Thanks again for the comments. Much appreciated.
Cheers,
Dean
Great post on agents! Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
I have a question. I understand where the “no unagented submissions” rule came into being. How closely do publishers adhere to this rule? Will publishers actually look at an unagented manuscript if their guidelines say they won’t?
Obviously if a writer pitches a book at a conference and receives an invitation to submit, the editor will accept it. (And add it to the pile.) And if you’re D. W. Smith, you have a great track record as a writer and you’ve probably got a relationship with the editors you’re targeting. But what about Mr. Joe Unpublished who hasn’t had the opportunity to meet editors at conferences? Aren’t agents (good ones, with good manners and professional contacts) able to get Mr. Unpublished’s book onto an editor’s desk, where he can’t on his own?
Ginny, I seldom know or have met an editor I submit a manuscript to.
Let me put it this way. If a book package is really good, it catches the attention of whoever opens the envelope, you think they dare reject the next Dan Brown simply because there isn’t an agent name on the envelope?
The standard form rejection these days is simply. “No unagented submissions.” It means nothing more than any other form rejection means.
My attitude is simply this. I write a good book that could make them a lot of money in a partnership with me, if they follow some stupid rule like forcing me to have an employee before I submit to them, it’s their loss, not mine. I hire an employee when I want to, not when they tell me to. I hire an agent to negotiate book offers for me. Not before. I know more about my manuscripts and mailing them then any agent. That simple.
Cheers
Dean
Cheers
Dean
Hi Dean. I like the points that you make here reminding writers that they are ultimately responsible for their own career. I do have more questions about this post than for the other ones. Thankfully, you seem to welcome questions
1. You say several times that this agent system is about to fail catastrophically. What is your basis for saying that, and what are the symptoms that you see?
2. You talk about “top agents.” What is your criteria? Number of sales? Skill at writing contracts (and how do you judge that)? Size of their average negotiated advance? Why do you say as a blanket rule that none of the top agents take writers without a book deal? Is it simply an assumption that the good agents are in such demand that they can handpick their clients?
3. I get what you’re saying about the “no unagented submissions” form letter being just a form letter. I’m wondering though — how many unpublished writers do you know of who submitted to a publisher with a clearly stated “No unagented submissions” policy and got a book deal?
Thanks for reading through all my questions. Basically, there’s just so much contradicotry stuff floating around the internet that at this point I’m trying to get hard numbers behind the arguments
I understand if you don’t have time to answer them all in detail, but in case you have time 
Livia, let me try to answer your questions as best I can, without redoing the long post.
First off, as I detailed in the chapter, any system where the employee takes over a business is doomed for failure. Plus, agents are a huge roadblock, stopping a lot of high quality manuscripts from not even being mailed. Also, the system forces new writers right into the hands of scam artists. This is a huge industry, it won’t allow this for much longer. Cracks are already starting to show.
Top agents are the ones that work for writers and make a ton of money for their writers, not by spending months rewriting, but by negotiating great deals and good contracts and selling overseas rights and so on. There are about 10 Super Agents, but no need to bother with them. These folks don’t even look at a deal under a half million. And those folks don’t handpick million sellers. Writers are in charge. The bestsellers find them. Again, you are very, very confused as to employee, employer relationship with your questions.
As I said somewhere, I teach young professional writers here at the workshops we do, and in the last 12 months, six of the new writers we teach have sold novels without an agent on the sale to major publishers with that “unagented” rule. A couple others did have an agent first, but two of those mailed their own books and just had their agent do the contract. Honestly, I’m not making this stuff up. Editors need good books. If you write a good book and put it in the hands of someone who can buy it, and it fits their program, they will buy it and not care if you have an employee or not.
Understand, these myths are fantastically strong, especially the rewriting and agent myths these days as they feed back and forth for new writers. But they are myths.
I will have one more post about agents here. Take a look at a few of the posts I did between the Killing Sacred Cows post, and the Life After post about agents last spring. It might help fill out the picture.
Cheers
Dean
Despite my argumentativeness, I actually agree with much of what you’re saying. A writer friend of mine was recently treated very badly by an unprofessional agent. No permanent damage to her career, but it was alot of unnecessary trouble and headache.
And I get what you’re saying about employer/employee relationship — my handpicking question was more referring to the phenomenon you mentioned in your response — that some really good agents are so much in demand that they don’t even look at low figure deals, or writers who don’t have a contract. But I think that answers my question.
Do you ever plan to do a post (or maybe I haven’t seen it) on how to evaluate a prospective agent? I, for one, would find it very helpful.
As for my question about the system cracking — I was more wondering specifically what the cracks you see are. I currently don’t seen any sign of it — the number of publishing houses officially accepting unagented manuscripts doesn’t seem to be decreasing, and the number of agencies doesn’t seem to be drastically decreasing either.
Your numbers from your workshop regarding writers submitting directly to editors was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
Again, the same disclaimers today — I know you have many things to do besides responding point by point to my questions — so while responses are appreciated, they are by no means expected.
Actually, a couple days back I had a couple friends have issues with agents yet again, and these are working professionals. It made me just flat angry, how many stories about agents doing this or that, and often with the writers letting them get away with it. So maybe, if I’m really stupid, one of these days I’ll do a post about the conduct of a writer’s employee, and what an employer should expect from their employee. That ought to stir up some trouble, which I’m just not looking for to be honest, but this situation is getting so bad with agents, it’s gone way past funny and some of us older professionals need to start standing up and saying “Enough.” We shall see.
Oh, talking behind the scenes is how I know the system is cracking. Talking to editors who aren’t finding the good stuff, who are angry at all the scam agents, at the trash agents are sending them. It seems that by moving the slush piles to agents, the publishers hurt themselves and still ended up with slush piles, only with a billion different untested and poor agents names on the envelopes. I could have told them that was going to happen.
Also, do the math of what an agent makes, and if the agents are buried under slush and making their writers rewrite, that takes time, thus it decreases their income. You will watch a large number of agents quit over the next year as this math hits hard. They will, of course, blame it on the business and the recession, not their poor business model. It’s just starting. It will be interesting to watch.
Cheers
Dean
This post is both encouraging and discouraging because it confirms what I believe (that I interview a possible agent, not the other way around) but then in reading a comment from Betsy Mitchell at Del ray in her blog post about her 2009 acceptances where she says this:
And I’m left discouraged because it seems like editors encourage the agent-as-gatekeeper model. And so I would never mail Ms Mitchell a manuscript directly because that would put me on her blacklist (for ignoring her direct wishes).
Although I suppose the “other odd ways” could be taken as code for “unagented manuscripts.”
Alex,
Not trying to convince anyone, just trying to talk sense. And trust me, you send Betsy a novel that is fantastic, and will make her company a ton of money and is perfect for her line, she won’t reject it because you don’t have an agent on the thing at first, but you will after you get an offer. And if she does, you just have to take the attitude of “It’s her loss.” And if your book is good, it would be her loss. And then when you publish it someone else, in this modern world, you might mention that her policy kept her from getting the next Twilight. Yup, that’s what an editor wants.
They are fantastically busy people, and they do the work of gods, of that I have no doubt. But they still need good books from good authors, and that honestly is the bottom line.
Good luck to you.
Cheers
Dean
Thanks Dean – that’s what I was thinking. This has been an awesome series to read – exactly what I needed at the beginning of the year to give me the injection of energy-confidence to plow through the year ahead.
Cheers,
Alex
My question seems like a silly one but it popped into my head.
How much do you send. Query letter and 50 pages or whole book?
I would think the whole book is going to get tossed quicker than the 50 pages might.
Everyone has said I need an agent before I can even think about sent out my mss as a first-time author. Being a cynical old so-and-so, I had doubts, for exactly the reasons you outline – for which many thanks.
However, being located in Australia would appear to be a distinct disadvantage, if only in terms of sheer expense of postage to a publisher or publishers in the USA. Frankly the whole think just fills me with a sense of despair.
So I keep writing my murders, and try not to give in to the urgings of my lovely romantic friends to send a potboiler to HMB. (I did a few chapters as a joke birthday present once & they keep wanting more.)
I love to write, I write every day and when the muse strikes, I will write ALL day.
To reiterate thank you and I will take courage & ms in hand, pay an enormous sum to the post office and brave the “unagented” route.
Toni, your fine country has a very active publishing program. No need to even come to the states until you are selling regularly there. No worries at all. And once you start selling there, wow, will the publishers of this country and other countries in Europe and Asia look seriously at your stuff.
Keep the faith and keep mailing.
Oh dear. I am mortified. All those typing errors. So sorry. I blame my old glasses – lost my good ones.
Thanks for your response. I’ll take your excellent advice and send to some publishers here first – damn the “agents only”!
Excellent post. I’ve been battling this ‘agent’ syndrom for decades. I love my current agent. She doesn’t have a blog, doesn’t Twitter, doesn’t even have a web site. She doesn’t need it. She makes deals.
I do notice every time I confront one of the new breed of agents who act arrogant, they tend to disappear, to prey on people desperate to get published.
Just blogged about the Not What Not To Do syndrom.
This is certainly one take on it.
My take is different.
My agent is my business partner. She acts as a creative sounding board when I need it and a last reader before the project goes on submission. She helps me set goals for my writing career, not just on individual projects. She pushes back when she thinks my writing isn’t up to snuff; she is my loudest cheerleader when she loves my work. She is my biggest fan, period.
When she submits my work, she knows which editor from which house is currently buying what and for how much. She keeps on top of all submissions, nudging editors and convincing them to read my work sooner rather than later.
When there’s an offer, she negotiates a better deal. (To the tune of thousands of dollars better.)
When there’s a contract, she and other agents at her agency negotiate the hell out of it. Important point: agencies tend to have different boilerplate contracts in place with the major publishers — stronger ones — than those editors send to unagented authors. In other words, agented authors tend to start at an advantage over unagented authors when it’s time to negotiate the contract.
(Speaking of contracts, I’m not a lawyer. There are terms and phrases and words that confuse the hell out of me. And I’m damn glad I have an agent to help me make sense out of it.)
Does every author need an agent? No. In romance specifically, certain publishers accept unagented submissions. There may be others. Do your homework.
Do I think every author should have an agent? Absolutely.
Authors need to do their research very, very carefully when they’re looking for agents. There are plenty of scammers out there, to be sure. But there are also plenty of resources — available for free — for authors to use. For example:
Preditors & Editors
Absolute Write Water Cooler’s Beware and Background Check
SFWA’s Writer Beware
Publishers Lunch weekly newsletter
AgentQuery.com
And of course, authors must write a bang-up query letter. (AgentQuery.com has a number of sample letters.)
Like everything else about publishing, writers need to be aware of their options, and they need to make thoughtful decisions. Reading blog posts with differing opinions is an excellent way to start.
Jackie, very glad things are working for you. Always great to hear. But your first paragraph about having your agent read and be a partner and help you plan your business just gave me the shudders. You are still new, and I hope beyond hope that this method, which is all the myths wrapped into one about agents, continues to work for you. Talk to me in about twenty books and we’ll see. I really, really hope I will be happy it’s still working for you.
The rest of your letter gives some very fine advice for writers looking for an agent. Just your first large paragraph scared me to death. What are you going to do when you agent says to you “This book isn’t good enough to market?” Or says to you, “We’ve tried this new project at ten editors, no luck, I think you should table it and write the next project.” Or what are you going to do when you discover your “partner” as you called your agent is not sending on royalty statements. And so on and so on and so on.
Trust is fine, when placed in the right place. We all do it both we people we work for and people we work with and people who work for us. You are not a partner with an agent, you are an employer. My suggestion is to always keep that in mind and watch your employee. That will give you a much better chance of still being with that agent and still selling in twenty or thirty novels.
Thanks for the comments. Cheers, Dean
I just sold my first novel. (YAY, Happy Dancing!) I did my research and queried a few agents that came highly rec’d. Contract in hand, as they say. One asked me to snail mail my proposal, another said my work was too much like someone else that she reperesents and still a third agent just didn’t get back to me. Oh, then there was the one who responded with raging typos in the email. I didn’t even bother. If you can’t be bothered to read an email before you send it, why would I think you’d do a better job as my rep?
I really felt that the first two didn’t read or understand my query. I’ve already sold. I don’t need someone to rate the marketability of my book, or to sell my book, someone else already did that. I just want someone to negotiate my contract.
I was wondering if I’d developed a case of the ass by thinking that *I’m* hiring them, not the other way around. So, thanks for this post.
Sara,
Congrats!! If the sale is to a major New York publisher, you shouldn’t be querying agents, you should be picking up the phone and interviewing them. And if they ask to see the work, ask them why? You have a contract in hand, their opinion doesn’t matter, then hang up. Hire someone to help you negotiate, not sit in judgment on your work.
Good luck and congrats!!
Cheers
Dean
I don’t agree w/ all of this, of course, but you give some fantastic information. Really good for people to know what it means to have an agent–and research that agent before signing.
There is a lot of misinformation here, sadly. And your credits pretty much tell me why. Unfortunately, I lot of writers who have been in the business a long time just don’t understand how things work for writers who are trying to break in NOW. Things are different. They have changed drastically in an effort to keep up with the flood of submissions that have overwhelmed the market.
I’ll go point-by-point… not because I think it’ll change you mind, but hopefully so a newer writer has another opinion to consider before taking your sometimes bad advice.
1… An agent is not your employee. My agent works for a large agency, who employs her. A literary agent, much like a real estate agent, works on commission. Unlike a real estate agent, she will hopefully be my agent for much if not all of my career. (Not for the one-time sale.)
2… Money only flows to the writer. Period. (This I can’t argue with.)
3… Editors do not get fired for passing on books that become bestsellers. That would be a little ridiculous, as no one ever knows when or where the “next big thing” will hit. And while it’s true that they need new books, they do not break their own rules to read slush… which leads to the next bit of misinformation:
4… Editors who do not take unagented submissions, do not read unagented submissions. They don’t have time. They get enough submissions from the agents they work with. If you get a rejection letter from them, it’s because they rejected your book, pages unread.
5… As an unpublished writer, who cold queried agents, I got four offers of representation from fantastic agents, all of whom have proven track records of minor and major sales in my genre. The idea that unpublished writers can’t get quality agents to sign them is a complete and total myth. And while many people believe as you do, that doesn’t make it true.
6… “Books sell themselves.” This is very true, but maybe not for the reasons you list. The book itself is what will get you a contract, not your charm or credentials. It’s all about the book. But a good agent knows the editor landscape and can help match your book with a handful of carefully selected editors who love books like yours. Then they can keep track of your submission while you move on to write your next book.
7… “Editors never know what they want to buy until they see it.” This is also true, but an agent can help keep you from wasting your time on submitting to editors who would never be interested in what you’ve written.
Look. My biggest problem with what you’ve said here is that if a newbie writer submits to all the editors in town and then decides she needs an agent, she has already limited what the agent can do with their book. In fact, if a book has made the rounds, a lot of agents will no longer sign the author for that book. A new author can really shoot themselves in the foot by following your (really awful) advice here.
8… Agents who blog regularly… Oy. This is so uninformed. Agents who blog regularly do so on their own time, usually late into the night or on weekends. They do so to help inform this generation of writers, and I have nothing but mad respect for their willingness to give of their time like that. To make assumptions about what that means in how they deal with their clients is just ignorant and judgmental.
9…There’s some truth to what you say here. But with the way editorial staff changes with the wind these days, looking at what was acquired 1-2 years ago (which, as you know is when books on the shelves were actually contracted) tells me nothing about what the acquisitions editor of a major house is looking for today. My agent has a relationship with the editors that I could never have, and she’s hooking me up with some amazing editors who I would be lucky to work with–editors whose preferences I would never know without my agent’s help.
10… Yes there are bad agents out there. But the youth of an agent is no way to assess that. It’s all about track record, vision, professionalism. There were a lot of factors that helped me choose my agent from those who offered. But to say that an agented submission goes into the same pile as an unagented submission is a complete and total lie. ESPECIALLY since most major houses do not accept unagented submissions at all.
11… Again, whether an agent is young or old, knowing about the language in a book contract is their job. Some agents will be good or bad at contracts, but that has nothing to do with their age or time spent in the industry. A writer should make sure she is signing with an agent who is good at negotiating a contract. But to reject an agent because she is “young” is not going to ensure that.
In fact, the younger agents are the ones who are keeping up with all of the changes to the industry in this digital age. Just because an agent has been negotiating contracts for 40 years, doesn’t mean she knows about ebook clauses and how the language can keep you from getting all that you should in that ever-growing arena.
The publishing industry has made vast changes in the last five years alone. And no offense to you and your credentials, but since you’re not out there trying to break in for the first time right now, you have no idea what it requires these days. Frankly, your blog post here would lead many new writers down the exactly WRONG path.
CL, wow, great myth spouting. Much appreciated. You hit every point exactly on the myth. Spot on, actually, and very well said.
And your post will be a clear indication to others how very, very deep these myths are in the new writers coming in. Scary, just scary. If you do manage to either get lucky or make it around the myths and have a career, this will be a post you will just shake your head at yourself in ten years.
And by the way, I can speak to one of your points. If you would have bothered to look at the top of my web site before I made you angry by my posts, you might have noticed my wife and I have been for almost a decade now doing workshops for young professional writers, meaning writers who have not sold novels yet. I am very, very near to what new writers face today and thus the reason for these posts. But you would not believe that because to you I am an old fuddy, which to be honest, I would have thought the same thing from your position. So how about some numbers. In the last three years, 21 writers who have attended our workshops have sold first novels. Of those, 18 sold them without an agent in the mix for the offer, but all but three got an agent after the sale. Not one of their agents would be known to you.
So I want to thank you for the post from a new writer illustrating the myths perfectly. Someone is going to claim I paid someone to write that, since you just ticked off the myths. And, of course, anyone who knows me knows my understanding of new novelists. Anyone who doesn’t, often thinks I’m just spouting old information and the world has changed. But one more point. To stay a long-term selling fiction writer, you have to change with the world as well. So not only do I teach young novelists, but I follow my own practices and thus keep selling books. I have 96 published novels now that I can claim (meaning not a ghost project) and I sold EVERY one of them, including the one I am just finishing up. Read the surveys just done by writers. Of over 266 writers surveyed, only 55% used an agent. That means 45% sold their first novels on their own without an agent.
Spouting myths shows your youth. No issue. Thanks for the comments.
Hi Dean,
I appreciate your take on the current climate of agent/author and agent/editor relationships. But you seem to have completely closed yourself off to the idea that an agent can do anything helpful apart from negotiate.
The editor/author relationship has certainly changed, you’re right. Editors are interested in working on books rather than with authors, meaning they do not stay with an author throughout the entirety of his or her career. Good agents work with authors; they manage careers. They do not do this because they have a knack for contracts, they do it because they have a knack for books. They are voracious readers who love the literary world and want to do everything they can to see good authors get their work to the public. Getting it to the public means getting an editor at a publishing house to read it and buy it. And in the vast majority of cases today, you need an agent to do this.
Yes, of course the book is the author’s vision and filled with the author’s work and talent, and a good agent will respect that. But if there is character development, world building, or plot lines that need work before the manuscript is ready to be read by editors, an agent can see this, too. Do they send notes saying “this must be changed and in this way or I will not sell it”? No. Do they send notes saying, “I’m seeing a weakness here and I think it could be fixed by doing this, this, or this. Tell me your thoughts”? Yes. Agents act as editors; editors count on agents to do this because they no longer have the time to make significant changes to a manuscript; they want to buy something that is almost ready to go.
Times are changing. Agents are not there to mooch off your advance, they are there to help you, and to guide your talent–not control it.
Here is a response from an editor concerning this blog post:
http://editorialanonymous.blogspot.com/2010/03/to-boldly-give-advice-no-man-has-given.html
And here is a second editor’s opinion on agents in general:
http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-you-should-never-submit-unagented.html
Look at what editors are saying–why do they work with agents? Why can they not imagine life without agents? Do others say they would rather see manuscripts directly from the author? Why? For someone who is trying to convince people to do their research, it does not seem that you have done yours.
Your history of the literary agent is also incorrect. The first one made his living in the late 1800s. They’ve existed as a full-time career since then.
I appreciate your take on things, but it’s hard to take seriously when it lacks any research or evidence besides “a few author friends of mine have had bad experiences with agents.”
Elyse, thanks for your comments. Your belief systems are sure interesting and I wish you luck. Especially with the agent helping with the career. You might want to read the rest of my agent chapters and also all the comments following the rest to get a sense of where this is all heading.
But the key is every writer is different. And in no way am I anti-agent. In fact, I believe most writers need an agent. I just wish more writers would open their eyes, get out of the myths, and hire with thought and some business sense. I had three wonderful agents who I still like and admire.
So read the rest of my chapters and the comments and if nothing else, maybe a sentence or two along the way will punch into one of your firmly held myths and help you some. I hope so. Thanks again.
Here is my reply I put up on the editor’s blog. I’m sure she won’t let it through, but what the hell, I tried. I’ll post it here to let you know how I responded;
—————————————
Hi, interesting comments from an editor afraid to put her own name on her blog. And wow, do I now really understand why my mystery and thriller editors don’t want my pen names attached to my media name. I had forgotten that problem until your nasty comments about my 50 some media books. I haven’t worked in media for over six years and the last media project I did was five years ago when I was editing for Pocket Books. I only write original novels now, the last out that I can claim from Random House under D.W. Smith name.
I am not anti-agent in any way. I am pro writers using common sense business. I have done a number of chapters in this book I am writing about writing myths, and I teach young professional writers, not beginners. I flat tell them they need a good agent. Of course, over the last two years, writers who have come to my classes have sold 21 first novels. 18 were without agents on the sale, all but three retained an agent after the offer. I have had less than 65 writers attend in the last two years. A pretty good track record, since many who come are already published novelists as well.
Jim Hines just did a wonderful writer survey of a lot of writers, over two hundred, asking about some of these myths. 55% sold their first novel with an agent, 45% sold their first novel without an agent. So I stand by my statement, you do not need an agent to sell a book. An agent might help, she might not.
As you pointed out, I went to law school, but still always used an agent on all of my contracts. Top agents from Writer’s House and Trident and Sandford Greenberger. All are still my friends and if I need them, I call them.
My goal is to punch some holes in the myths, many of which you sprouted. Your attitude about media tells me you are very closed minded and that’s sad, since new writers will listen to you, even though you hide your real name.
Agents are employees. No other way around it. They are hired by writers to do a service, that is true. But if you would read the rest of the agent chapters and comments after each chapter, I’m sure you will see that I am pro agent, but I am also pro smart business. I know agents don’t care about writers first, but care about relationships with editors first. That’s why writers hire them. Duh.
But agents are employees, even under tax law. Just as hiring a lawn service to do your lawn is your employee. Just as hiring an attorney to help with a legal matter is your employee. My goal in stating that over and over is helping writers learn that they are in control of their own career. No writing career is the same. No advice is good for every writer.
But sound business practices need to come back to publishing. It’s fine to have an agent. Just remember that the writer is in control. If writers came to understand that, a lot of the problems would fade away.
Good luck to you and everyone who listens here.
Best, Dean Wesley Smith (old media whore by this editors belief system)
This survey you’ve mentioned is interesting, and I’d like to know more about it. You must realize that, without a little context, the numbers you cite don’t really mean anything. How was the survey conducted? Who was asked? Of those unagented books, how many ended up at major houses, and how many at small presses? Ditto for the agented ones? How many were original novels, tie-ins to licensed properties, work-for-hire, etc.? How many were published by genre-specific publishers?
Without knowing more about the survey those numbers come off as the sort of statistic Mark Twain was always talking about. Maybe you could link to the article?
Adam,
The link to Jim’s first survey is:
http://www.jimchines.com/2010/03/novel-survey-results-part-i/
He’s done a second myth-busting part of the survey, so check out his blog for that as well, but I don’t have an exact link at the moment. I will put it here if I spot it again.
Actually, I screwed up slightly. Jim’s survey only showed about 35 vs 90 selling without an agent up front. It was a second survey done by a young adult author who had the 45-55 numbers. I’ll dig that link up and post it here as well.
Very, very glad you are interested in actual numbers. Numbers and math are always the death of myth.
Well, then once again I’d like to see the other survey, because those are very different sets of numbers. This Jim Hines seems to have taken great pains to do a good survey, though of course he admits it isn’t entirely scientific. But if I’m reading Jim’s post-2005 graph right, it’s actually more like 35 unagented people vs. 97 or 98 agented people, or about 27% vs. 73% of those who submitted directly to either publishers or agents. In all fairness you might mention this on Editorial Anonymous’s blog (full disclosure, her blog is how I found you), since your 45%/55% figures make up a large part of the backbone of your argument. 27% is a healthy number, but it’s not really a mythbuster.
Please post the other survey by the YA author when you find it–I’m a children’s and YA author myself, and when I advise others, they’re almost universally people who also want to write for that age range. So a survey conducted by a YA author, presumably with a survey population slanted toward that field, would be of particular interest to me.
Will do, Adam. I’ll go dig it up later tonight.
But a point of interest. When someone tells you it is impossible to sell a book without a literary agent, seems to me that over 27% of all first books sold in one survey in one genre is not impossible.
And if you decide with a book that you must have an agent and every agent turns you down, why not try to sell it yourself? That’s basically just a thought.
Absolutely. I guess I didn’t realize anyone was literally saying it’s impossible to sell a book without an agent.
Adam, found it. I was looking in the wrong spot.
Megan Crewe is the author who did the survey. Here’s a quote from it:
“Agents: Only 55% of the respondents had an agent when they sold their first book! Pretty surprising, isn’t it? Cross-referencing the data, the genre in which the fewest people sold without an agent was young adult. 86% of the picture book debuts sold without an agent, followed by 54% of the adult genre, 36% of the middle grade, 25% of the adult literary/mainstream, and 16% of the young adult.”
The link to the entire myth-busting survey is:
http://megancrewe.livejournal.com/251212.html
Cheers, Dean
Just because you say something is a Myth doesn’t make it so.
Besides one livejournal poll with a relatively tiny sampling of authors, you just don’t have any real facts to back up what you’re saying. (And polling LJ and VerlaKay is hardly an actual “survey” that proves anything.) Everyone else in the industry is saying the exact opposite of what you say.
So who is spouting myth?
And who should a new writer listen to? You? Or the editors to whom they will be sending their manuscripts?
You also completely missed the point of her poll, which was not to determine whether you need an agent to sell a book (because you obviously don’t–especially not a picture book, which made up most of her kidlit sampling, or any book that would fit better on the list of a small press), but rather to fracture the myth that you have to have industry contacts to get anyone to look at your work, agent OR editor. She was trying to debunk the idea that the slush pile never works.
I do not in any way mean to disparage you for your experience. Despite your obvious condescension toward “young” authors (evidently, “young” agents as well), I actually enjoy hearing the varied ways that people navigate the industry. My point was to say that the last few years have changed the industry in such a way that the process for getting your foot in the door has shifted. And a lot of writers who have been in the industry for a while haven’t researched the shift enough to give quality advice.
The way my friend (a five-time NYT bestseller) got her editor and agent even seven years ago would never work for me today. At least she knows enough about the industry to understand that and counsels new writers accordingly.
You claim to have some kind of inside knowledge as to how to get your manuscript in front of editors, but then tell new writers things that are blatantly untrue and could very much harm their careers going forward. (Or at least give them a frustrating beginning.) That, to me, is the most frightening part of all of this.
(And I did read that you were counseling new writers before I responded, which is part of why I felt the need to respond at all.)
So, you can continue to condescend to those who don’t agree with your opinion (or who committed the amazing crime of being younger than you) and hold firmly to the LJ poll results as your proof. But I would hope a few aspiring authors who have read this blog and the attached comments would wander over and see how the rest of the industry is guiding them. They’ll fare far better over here.
CL, actually I believe in all writers doing what they want. Always say that. And I don’t believe in rules in this business, especially when I say something like it’s a rule. I just try to give another side to the current myths. I hope all writers will find their own way. No issue with that at all by me.
I know that the door of “unagented submissions only” is just a door, nothing more, and there are many, many ways around over or through that door. I just tell writers to let the editor decide, not some agent. That’s all I say. If an editor decides to say no because there is no agent name on the envelope, that’s fine. No problem by me, editor choice.
But I’m afraid that most editors take a look. Not all, but most. How else do authors make sales without agents?
And when I say “young” I don’t mean young in age, I mean young in experience. Often authors don’t start into this business until late in life. They are still young in this business. Agents who are young are, for the most part, still not seasoned enough. It takes a long time to really learn contract law, to really learn negotiations, and so on. Nothing at all wrong with being young. Just don’t pretend you know everything like a 16 year-old-kid does. I knew everything when I was 16, forgot most of it by the time I turned 30. That’s all I am saying about young agents who have been around for two years and pretend to know everything there is to know. Those agents I get snotty about, no question. My bad. Sorry.
So good luck on your path. I honestly hope you make it. I hope every writer makes it and every path is different. I never ONCE tell writers to do it the way I did it. My way was too stupid for words and only worked for me. I say find your own path, but to do that, you have to open your mind and look at the options. You have a book a bunch of agents said no to, then send it to editors. All they can do is send you a form rejection telling you to get an agent. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will look at it and buy it.
Good luck.
“But if I’m reading Jim’s post-2005 graph right, it’s actually more like 35 unagented people vs. 97 or 98 agented people, or about 27% vs. 73% of those who submitted directly to either publishers or agents. ”
I had a drink (I drank, he didn’t) with Jim a few days after the survey results were posted and complained to him (in true Monday-morning quarter-backing fashion) that a key question left out of the survey is a stat that would have shown us how many of the UNagented first-novel sales had, prior to selling, been rejected by agents?
I, for example, participated in the survey, and I sold my first novel (my first 10 novels, actually) without an agent. HOWEVER… the first two books I sold were rejected by 11 agents less than a year before I sold them on my own to a major market. I would be really curious to see how many other writers went out on their own after discovering that they weren’t going to get anywhere with agents, and broke in that way.
Another stat I’d like to see is how many of the agented first-timers had previously tried to sell the SAME book -without- an agent, and I’d be curious to know if they attitribute their sales to being agented.
However, Jim’s survey wasn’t intended to examine the role of agents, it was intended to examine (and it certainly challenged!) the common myth that publishing is a “closed shop” or that things are “different than they used to be.” Among other things, one of Jim’s charts breaks out -just- the past five years, compared to the 30-year spread overall, and finds essentially no difference in any of the patterns.
“My point was to say that the last few years have changed the industry in such a way that the process for getting your foot in the door has shifted. And a lot of writers who have been in the industry for a while haven’t researched the shift enough to give quality advice. ”
CL, “things are harder/different now for me than they were back when YOU broke in” is a common mantra among every new generation of aspiring writers. So common that I was already hearing it by the time I’d only been in print for about 6 months. And I’ve been hearing it ever since.
Many aspiring writers (primarily those who aren’t temperamentally well-suited to this profession) want to believe that their pile of rejection slips and the seemingly closed/slammed/barred doors are a new and unique problem, rather than =exactly= the same thing that every single one of us making a living at this now encountered, too–and overcame.
In fact, =far more= has changed in the past decade for published writers than for aspiring writers. Because ONLY ONE thing has changed =significantly= for aspiring writers since I broke in 22 years ago. ONE: Slushpiles now are bigger than they were then. (This is primarily due to key changes in technology since then, such as word-processing rather than typing, widespread home-computer ownership, and easy-info access on the internet.)
OTOH, although slushpiles are bigger now than they were when I broke in 22 years ago (when I was pulled out of slushpile of only 6,000 manuscripts for my first-book offer), there are also many more markets now than there were then. In 1988, when I got my first book offer, there was essentially no such thing as a small press or mid-size press book-length market in fiction; there were the big houses and nothing else. Now there is a big, busy, and thriving market of alternative, respected, legitimate small- and mmid-size publishers (ex. Pyr, Sourcebooks, Subterranean, Small Beer) that simply didn’t exist back then. (And most of these markets deal often with writers who don’t have agents.)
So although the one thing that is tougher for an aspiring writer these days is that slushpiles are bigger (though, as any perusal of any monthly first-sales column will show–or Hines’ or Rowe’s surveys–lots and lots of new writers are getting pulled out of those slushpiles every year now, just as we were back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), there -is- a balancing factor, which is that you’ve got more submission choices than I had back when the hill I had to climb to my first sale was a mere 6,000-MS-high slushpile.
By contrast, it is now MUCH harder for a professioal writer to sell a third or fourth book than it used to be (and many new writers are finding find that it’s harder to sell a third or fourth book than it was to sell a FIRST book). It is MUCh harder for an established writer to switch genres than it used to be. It is MUCh harder for an established writer to switch agents than it used to be. Last year, it was more typical for an established writer’s advances to be lowered rather than raised on a new deal. It is MUCh harder to be renewed for an option deal than it used to be. It is much harder to squeeze an overdue check out of a publisher than it used to be. (Waiting times for delivery checks from at least one major house are now MORE THAN A YEAR; when I started out, 3 months was considered a longish wait for a delivery check.)
Lou Aronica, a longtime publisher, has written about this extensively in NINK (and perhaps elsewhere). Apart from the occasional supernova, it takes multiple books for a writer to become profitable to a house; yet, increasingly, writers keep getting dropped after 1-2 books for NOT being profitable… even though the chances of a writer being profitable to a house in only 1-2 books are very slim. Brand new writers are affected by this problem, but so are all established, working writers, since we sign with new houses all the time (in many cases, these days, precisely because the old house just dumped us after a book or two). In the past few years, I’ve been a one-or-two book wonder at FIVE houses.
Fortunately, now I’m at a house that tends to keep writers for a long time and which says they intend to keep -me- for a long time, so I hope this recent nomad portion of my career is behind me now. But MANY working writers are in a nomad phase that’s now common, but which was not part of this profession a decade ago.
The other thing that’s changed for aspiring writers–and this is in your favor, not to your disadvantage–is that the publishing mentality has switched heavily into looking for The Next Big Thing. In general, established writers are not part of that ethos, because agents and editors figure that if -we- were the Next Big Thing, it would have become evident by now; so clearly we aren’t. The Next Big Thing is almost universally perceived as being buried in the slushpile of aspiring writers–and editors and agents therefore take slush seriously. Often much more seriously than they take a query from someone who’s an award-winning writer with 40 books published and two 1990s bestsellers on his resume.
However, the thing one hears editors and agents say constantly (though not usually in public) is that although the size of the slushpiles had doubled, tripled, or quadrupled… the number of publishable MSs they find in those slushpiles hasn’t changed. Only the non-publishable quantity seems to be increasing in volume; and it takes a long time to wade through it to find a MS to buy.
Elyse,
Why are you quoting ANONYMOUS blogs?
An anonymous blogger has no professional credibility. This could be someone who’s fabricating every word and has never edited. Or someone who’s been fired for incompetence. Or someone who hasn’t edited in years. Or someone who’s manufacturing incidents and passing off other colleagues’ professional experiences as his/her own. Or someone with a -terrible- reputation for being incompetent and unreliable, or with a reputation for giving bad advice. It could be someone whom many houses have fired and many writers have refused to work with. It could be a staff editor who doesn’t happen to know what s/he’s talking about.
None of that may be the case, but as long as these people hide behind anonymity, we can’t even verify that they ARE professional editors, let alone whether they’re editors with any professional respect or credibility whatsover.
Quite apart from all of the character issues of someone who chooses to opine in public on the basis of being a “professional” or expert while meanwhile actively avoiding all responsibility for and all consequences for this privilege by hiding behind anonymity.
I write columns and articles in various industry publications, as well as giving speeches and writing blogs, and I TAKE RESPOSIBILITY for what I say in public in my professional capacity and ACCEPT THE CONSEQUENCES for opining publicly.
There are plenty of editors (just off the top of my head: Lou Anders, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Theresa Nielsen Hayden, Stacy Boyd, Anna Genoese) who blog using their real identities, i.e. as credible professionals. I recommend you follow those, rather than following the suspect blogs by person-or-persons-unknown that you’re citing here.
Actually, Editorial Anonymous has credibility in much the same way Ms. Snark did: as a professional who’s been blogging long enough, and who’s advice has been found sound enough over the past few years, as to be trusted.
Different communities tend to be engaged in different conversations. As a children’s book editor, it’s possible EA isn’t read much by some parts of the adult SF/fantasy community, and so looks like someone coming out of nowhere to give advice–but within the children’s book community, at least, he/she is reasonably well-known (if not by name) and well-regarded.
But here’s the thing: what holds for the adult SF/fantasy genre quite often does not hold for every genre across the board. If I had an adult SF/fantasy novel, would I market it without an agent? Maybe. If I had a YA or middle grade novel? Possibly, if I’d tried searching for an agent first, but with more trepidation. If I had a mainstream adult novel? I’m not sure I’d even try without an agent. Different fields have had different degrees of open/closed doors through the year; publishing isn’t exactly the same across all fields and genres.
Children’s/YA and adult/SF fantasy are too fields that have traditionally been more open to unagented submissions than most. In children’s/YA, this truly has changed over the past 5 years especially, but maybe over the past 10, as more and more houses have literally closed the door to unagented submissions, and some have even begun to balk at accepting manuscripts from conference attendees an editor speaks at, whom traditionally exceptions were made for.
In adult SF/fantasy it may still be different–I’m no longer as up on what’s going on there. My impression is that while unagented writers still get read, the response times have stretched out to the point where one could argue that it isn’t practical.
What it comes down to is, know your field, know what the tradeoffs are there, and don’t assume what applies for your genre (or applied, when you were breaking in) is what applies for all genres right now.
Janni,
Ms. Snark had no credibility with me I’m afraid, anymore than EA has. And Snark was an agent. Too many top editors blogging right out in the open to do anything else, but alas, my opinion. When I’m attacked by someone too cowardly to show me their face, I kind of laugh at the attack. It means nothing.
Your advice about watching your own area is good. To a degree. But closed houses are a myth. Now, will any editor tell you otherwise? Of course not. In public they must, and I repeat MUST stick with official guidelines, and if that official guideline is No Unagented Submissions, that’s what they will flat tell you. No exceptions.
Another reason to not learn from editors how to do your writing job.
And if you believe that as gospel from them you will save them some time. All is fine. If they aren’t offered a book, they don’t have to deal with it. But you offer them a good book, trust me, the process of how it got to them won’t mean anything. If it’s well written, has a compelling opening, and fits their line and they think they can sell it, they won’t look away because there is no agent.
But please continue to spread the myth. Please feel free to be afraid to mail a book to an editor without an agent. That way there are fewer books on editor’s desks and my books stand out more. Fine by me.
And by the way, I don’t write adult science fiction or fantasy much in novels anymore. All of my latest books are mystery, thriller, Christian, or young adult under varied names. I see no difference at all between any of them when it comes to this topic.
But that said, imagine me trying to find just one agent who was good in all those areas? Yeah, that’s going to happen. Another reason why I mail my own stuff and sell my own stuff and then have an agent help me on the back end issues.
Read all my agent posts. You can find links to them at the top of the page under the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. I know you only came here to defend EA. Too bad EA needs defending, since she attacked me in the first place from her position of fear. I find that sort of strange, actually.
Elyse, you wrote, “I appreciate your take on things, but it’s hard to take seriously when it lacks any research or evidence besides ‘a few author friends of mine have had bad experiences with agents.’”
I’d be very interested in competing anecdotes. Do you have author friends with long-term, successful relationships with agents (or do you yourself have experiences to share)?
Clare, I can give you one. Me. I had a wonderful 17 year relationship with my first agent and the only reason we even parted at all is because she didn’t handle thrillers and I started writing them. She’s still a good friend and I have zero to say bad about her.
However, that said, I was in control from the start of my own career and I sold every book, so we had none of the tension that comes in from that kind of silliness. Together I sold almost 70 novels. So a wonderful career with an agent is possible, if you are in control and hire the right person.
Wow— writers are arguing with you and defending agents. Ms Snark is an ass. So is the Rejectionist. So is Wolffe or whatever her name is who twitters about queries from writers and makes fun of them.
Anyone who is anonymous is a coward in my book. I’m taking a firm line on this because every time I confront a ’snarky’ agent or editor they run away and then block me. If they knew snark, they could write it, as I did in several NY Times bestselling books.
Writers– you produce the product. Agents market the product. And they do work for the writers.
I love my current agent but as Mr. Smith says– if she can’t sell my next book because it isn’t the genre she’s comfortable with, then I find someone else I can hire. And she’s fine with that, which makes her a good agent.
An author MUST be in control of their career. No one else can do it for you.
I started my Warrior Writer program to educate writers how to be authors after learning it the hard way over the past 20 years. When I ask agents what their formal training program is for authors they work with, they look at me like I’m crazy. Then twitter, blog, etc about how ignorant authors are.
Hell, I’ve agented my own books and have more experience than many of these people. I’ve certainly seen more manuscripts over the years teaching than most of them.
Writers. Take charge or put your fate in someone else’s hands. And when your career tubes, I’m sure that agent will be there for you.
Bob, thanks for your comments. And, of course, from all my chapters in this Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing book posted here, you can tell I agree completely with you. Writers must be in control of their career. And someone at your level or my level, of course we have more experience than most agents. Not all, but most.
And I, of course, have the exact same opinion about Miss Snark and other agents or editors who hide. Just cowards.
Thanks for your comments. Hope you read and comment on some of the other chapters. We’re having fun trying to pound some common business sense into some writers.
I say here again what I said on your “Follow the Rules” post, Dean.
An anonymous editor could easily be a real-life agent, in addition to the possibilities you previously named. It’s a great solution. Create an anonymous editor persona, and then talk about how agents are necessary (and suitable) for all the things that EA and the other say they are. All so that people will flock to agents.
I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, so I’m inclined to believe that these two are actual editors who feel they must hide their identities, and either believe in or are merely enforcing the rules that are given. But it’s worthwhile to consider the source and realize that they could very well be someone else.
Remember the story a while back about the author who wrote about a man who flew on the Enola Gay to bomb Japan in 1945 as a replacement for a soldier who had fallen ill? Once it hit the stands, the family of the “ill” soldier brought forth all types of evidence, including living men who were on the flight, to confirm that the “ill” man did fly on the flight, and they had no idea who the other guy was. So it turned out the man had fabricated the story, and the author was duped. Unfortunate.
But it proves a point. There are liars everywhere, and you have to check your sources. And check them again. And again.
By the way, rules are in place in all forms of business. My company has tons of them, and they’re all designed to prevent tons of shit from arriving on our desks without permission. Sound familiar?
If you read all our policies, you’d never send us anything because you’d know we’d refuse the shipment and it would be returned to you at your expense. But there are many, many ways around that system and the people that find them end up with their stuff on our desks. It’s not in the publishing industry, but I wanted to illustrate that these same roadblocks and ways around them exist everywhere.
One of my favorite statements ever came from my first year in the U.S. Navy, from an instructor in my ‘A’ School in Orlando, Florida. I unfortunately can’t remember the man’s name, but this is a lesson worth taking forward.
Whenever I or one of my classmates would complain about having to do something military-related, he would challenge us. We’d say something like, “Man, I hate having to get up at 4:00 every morning!”
He’d say, “Then don’t. Sleep in.”
And we’d look at him, shocked. “What do you mean?”
“Just sleep in. You don’t have to get up. Don’t get up.”
“What do you mean, sleep in? I can’t do that!”
And then he would look, with a mock look of surprise on his face, into our eyes, and say, “You can do whatever you want. You just have to be willing to accept the consequences. Don’t ever forget that.”
And I never have. That statement applies in publishing the same as it does anywhere else.
Dean, I guess I should have been more precise–I already knew you had good experiences with agents from things you’ve said elsewhere. I am interested in hearing from people who have sold their books through agents, whose agents have managed their careers well, and whose agents have basically done everything for them as several commenters are suggesting they can and do. Everyone who disagrees with you seems to be saying “this is the rule, this is the way it works” without providing any concrete examples of the business actually working that way.
The whole argument is ridiculous. Some of these newbies need to bite the bullet and just TRY to listen to some of Dean’s advice. I swallowed many of the myths whole for a long time. Then I stumbled over here, read Dean’s thoughts on submitting directly to editors, and was nearly ready to dismiss that advice like some of these other folks. Then I decided, “What the hell?” I have this old detective novel I love very much, couldn’t find an agent for, and gave up on. So here was my opportunity to try Dean’s advice with nothing to lose. I sent out some electronic queries to editors I researched at major houses who had worked on similar projects. There were houses that expressly state they do not look at unagented material.
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM ASKED FOR MORE!
Not a single reject; no “Sorry we only accept material from authors with representation” in the bunch. Some asked for the whole thing. Others sample chapters. One wanted a synopsis. (Oy! That was fun to write.) They are all still looking at my stuff, so this story doesn’t have an end. But it doesn’t matter. The very fact that they wanted to see the book PROVES you can get an editor to consider unagented stuff.
What more do you need? Just try it. And if it isn’t working for you, maybe you need to rewrite your query letter instead of using a bunch of myths as an excuse.
Rob, great job. Welcome to the real world of publishing, the one that lives outside the myths.
Everyone’s experience is different but, harkening back to some comments above, I have to say that, yeah, my own experience is consistently that agents are fair-weather friends.
This is also the experience of a huge number of other writers (many of whom, for reasons of personal preference, don’t talk about this stuff in public). It is not universal, but it is, unfortunately, very, VERY common that when something goes wrong in a writer’s career, the agent is the first person to desert her, rather than the one standing beside her to salvage the situation and triump anew.
There is a very popular mythos about the agent as a steadfast professional companio through thick and thin. I hear it all the time. In public.
What I hear a =lot= of in private, and have heard a =lot= of in private, from dozens and dozens over working professional novelists over the course of 20 years, is some version of, “Then something went wrong in my career… and suddenly my agent didn’t know who I was or how I’d gotten his phone number.”
Laura, I can’t agree more about that myth of agents as steadfast friends. Nope, doesn’t work that way and I can’t remember a long term writer where it has worked for. Agents work on a sort of Hollywood model. That is that as long as you are the “in thing” you get your calls returned, but the moment you are down or not involved, you don’t exist. And if you do try to even bring it back to the old level, you become a “problem.” Yup, the myth of an agent as a best friend, a companion through the life of a career is just bogus at best and dangerous at worst.
I’ve got one thing to add here, anonymously.
I’m an unpublished writer, and first off, thank you Dean, for posting this! My manuscript isn’t ready to go yet, and I’m doing research on how to market it. BTW, “not ready to go yet” means I’m working on the cover letter and synopsis. As Lincoln noted, short writing takes more time than long writing, sometimes.
Anyway: anonymity. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to jump to being a freelance writer, although I hope so. Once I submit and wait for whatever responses I get, I will almost certainly take a 9 to 5 job to pay the bills.
Here’s the critical point: in my last three jobs, I’ve been a salaried employee, and all three firms asserted their ownership of everything I produced while working for them.
Additionally, at least two of them googled me under my real name to find out more about me. Because of this, I’m much more careful about what I say under my own name.
Yes, it’s stupid, probably illegal too, and I also live in a state where I could be fired at will, for any reason. Corporations have stupid rules, and sometimes, the only way to deal with them is to become anonymous.
Now, I agree wholeheartedly with those who say that we should own our words. Someday I intend to be in a position where I can write this under my own name. Until that day, I maintain my online persona.
I have no idea whether Editorial Ass or the others have similar restrictions where they work, but you know, they might. Whatever you think of them, it would suck if they got fired for blogging something under their own name that contradicted some policy of whatever multinational owns their publishing house. Just pointing this out.
Otherwise, I’m enjoying reading this, but I need to get some writing done too.
Thank you!
Hi Dean,
I actually met you a few years ago at SIWC, and I believe you were presenting on this topic then. I also think that I rejected your presentation immediately, because I’d bought into the myth that getting an agent was the only way for a new writer to get published.
Not so anymore. If I’d been willing to test your theories, I might be in a vastly different place.
I retained an agent a few years ago from a cold query. She was a former editor with impressive credentials, but a new agent. However, I thought this was a case of the “best of both worlds”, because she worked for an established agency. Her boss also had to agree to represent my work before my agent accepted me as a client, which gave me an extra boost of confidence.
My agent was convinced that my book would immediately sell to a top publisher. I was going to have a “very long career” that she would be a part of, and be a “millionaire”. She told me this quite a bit, and was very determined. Of course I got excited!
She sent my work out to five or six editors that I know of. They all came back to her with very different responses – one wanted it rewritten as YA, which was ridiculous, given the subject matter; another already had an established writer who published similar works; etc. Every response was vastly different from the other, and yet my agent lost her confidence and suggested I rewrite the book so it would fit into a different “niche”. Stumped, I had no idea how to do this, but I finally suggested bumping up the supernatural component, since I could think of nothing else. She agreed, and then I discovered it’s really hard to bump up the supernatural at the beginning of a book when the “ghost” is still alive until page 100.
To keep my agent busy, I sent her my second novel while I puzzled over how to rewrite the first. My second book has a unique storyline, and my first reader, who is quite critical, said it’s the best thing I’d written thus far. However, my agent didn’t agree. She didn’t like it, and ordered a massive rewrite, with really vague suggestions about what she needed changed and why.
By this point, I’d already noticed troubling signs. My agent was still working as an editor, both for a publishing house and as a freelancer. (Even when she finally gave up the publishing house job, she still took on freelance clients.) She became a mother, and lost even more interest in agenting, or so it seemed. She often missed our scheduled phone consultations because it had rained, causing the “phone lines to go out in NYC”. Hmm…She never received my initial emails, only the follow-up ones asking her if she received them. She told me that she’d had other, more experienced agents in her agency read my novel and that they felt the same way she did. However, when I referenced that, she’d forgotten that they’d read my book. Things reached a real low point when her assistant starting reading my book and giving me rewrite suggestions. She even repeatedly spelled my first name wrong, and it’s only five letters long, for Pete’s sake!
Unbelievably, I put up with this for years. I rewrote my second book again and again, even though I didn’t agree with her suggestions and thought they were hurting the story. I trusted in her expertise in the business – she knew what would sell and I didn’t. In the meantime, the agent did nothing for me except stall and make creative excuses. Her kid was sick. She was sick. Her sister was sick. She was on vacation. Finally she decided to leave the country and have another kid (who I’m sure would always be sick, too), so I let her go.
The years of rewriting without results have taken their toll. In my “agented years”, I didn’t create a shred of new material, since I have two day jobs that involve a lot of writing, and I was always bogged down in rewrites. I dreaded being a lowly writer without an agent again, so I agonized over letting her go. But she really could have destroyed my career if I’d kept her. (Amazingly enough, six or seven additional publishers appeared on her termination contract, even though she’d never once mentioned showing them my book. Hmm….)
My plan was to finish a new book and then cold query again, trying to find a new agent. I thought that I’d just messed up and picked a “bad” agent to represent me. Your posts here have given me a lot of food for thought, and this time I will listen. Thanks for writing, and sorry for the length of this post.
Wow, WriterGirl, your story and so many others like it are the reason I decided to do these Sacred Cows chapters and finally do the book. Do read all the rest of the posts with agent in the title and make sure you read all of Laura’s comments on all of them, on top of the other professional writers who have logged in to comment.
The agent model in this business, as Laura puts it, is broken. It still works for a writer now and then, but more and more stories are just like yours. Or even worse, the agent manages to sell the first book and then what you described happens to the writer. At least you are still at that “fresh” point and don’t need to worry about sales numbers and such on an agent-killed career.
My suggestions on your two books is TOSS AWAY all the rewrites and go back to your first drafts you showed the agent in the first place and TRUST your own voice. Trust your own writing. Then go back to your writing desk and enjoy the process again.
Rewriting is flat no fun and not writing. Give yourself permission to go have fun with your writing. Finish something and be done with it unless an editor gives you a contract and then asks for a rewrite. Otherwise, just write and enjoy the writing and trust your own writing.
Thanks for the post. Sure sorry this happened to you, but alas, it happens to all of us for one length of time or another. I was no exception, neither was my wife. Good luck and enjoy your writing.
“I have no idea whether Editorial Ass or the others have similar restrictions where they work, but you know, they might. Whatever you think of them, it would suck if they got fired for blogging something under their own name that contradicted some policy of whatever multinational owns their publishing house. Just pointing this out.”
Heteromeles: This is still no excuse for anonymity. If they’re employers prohibit blogging, then as employees who’ve accepted terms of employment with that company, their obligation is either NOT to blog, or else to negotiate terms under which the company will accept that they DO blog. Not to violate the terms of employment by blogging but hiding their names. ESPECIALLY not when the -point- of their blogs is that their supposed expertise based on their supposed professional positions!
In 2006, I was sent on a fellowship to work at a major news bureau in Jerusalem. I was posting essays about my experiences there on my website. After seeing the first or second one, the bureau chief called me in and set down guidelines for me. (Having worked freelance for years, it foolishly hadn’t occurred to me to discuss this with what was now, in effect, my employer. Fortunately, they raised the subject early and fairly with me, so nothing got out of hand.) They didn’t want me talking about anything that occurred within the news room, about them, or about my experiences when I was specifically on assignment (though I could, for example, recount my adventures of trying to get TO and FROM an assigninment on public transport in the desert, which I did).
Fair enough. I continued posting public essays about my experiences there (under my real name), but I abided by the ground rules we had discussed together as reasonable adults–in a volatile climate (Jerusalem) where they were in a public and precarious position (as a major news bureau writing daily about the situation there, including articles with my name on them), and where I was privvy to a lot of confidential information. Were there things I wish I could have talked about in my essays? You betcha. But I didn’t. Because we had negotiated and established ground rules about what was appropriate for me to write about independently on my own site with specific regard to my employment at/by the bureau.
By contrasting, posting =anonymously= for the express purpose of violating the terms of my position would have just been sleazy.
And if they had told me they didn’t want me writing publicly AT ALL on my own website about my experienes in Jerusalem? Well, we’d have had to negotiate further, since I was not willing to regard my personal life and down-time as coming under their provenance. However, that subject never arose between us. Their concern was that my work for them shouldn’t become fodder for my website. It was their right to stipulate that. And it was not my right to continue employment there while violating such a stipulation by sneakiness and anonymity.
WriterGirl,
All I can say by way of consolation is that your story is very very common. You shouldn’t feel alone with it, and you shouldn’t feel it’s “just you.” Unfortunately, the sort of experiences you’re describing are much, MUCH TOO common. It’s just that most people don’t talk publicly about them.
And it’s one minor but typical example of a question posed several times above about what prompts the claim that the agent business model is headed for collapse. In a market that has become so tight and so challenging, how long do you think someone with such counter-productive practices that don’t generate income can last? In the past year, we’ve already seen at least two agencies shut down (both were newer agencies) and a number of other agents (such as the agent of a pal of mine) leave the business. Things will get harder (because this is publishing, and things really only go in one direction in this industry: harder), and we will see more agents and agencies falling by the wayside.
The market itself is creating a form of Darwinism in which agents with bad business judgment and unproductive practices (and, as discussed often and at length throughough the Killing Cows series, a substantial percentage of agents aren’t partciularly good at business) that don’t generate income will continue disappearing from the profession, increasingly unable to make enough money to pay their bills. First their professinal bills (so writers should certainly keep a close eye on THEIR money which is flowing through those agencies); then their personal bills, which is when even the dimmest bulb is likely to realize it’s time to find another profession.
The big picture is that agenting is a practice inextricably linked to big publishing. The vast majority of agents have long declined (and still decline) to deal with small presses, declaring the income not worth their time. Yet small presses are where quite a few writers have been going in the past decade, due to changes in major publishing.
Agents have chosen to take no part in the electronic revolution. When Kindle came onto the market, it was writers, NOT agents, who trailblazed that territory. I kept watching, thinking that SURELY at least ONE agency in the industry would be smart enough to negotiate an agency boilerplate deal with Kindle, gather up the available e-rights of all its clients (which, at any major agency, would amount to hundreds–possibly thousands–of books; and even at small agency, probably about a hundred books); organize a system of e-conversion (at a break-even or modestly profitable fee) for clients who couldn’t do it themselves, get those dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of books into this brand new market, and earn the commission on all those sales. It seemed SUCH an obvious business decision, I remained flabbergasted for over a year as agents continued NOT doing it.
And now that ship has sailed. Writers have found this lucrative new market for their work WITHOUT agents, and we see frank discussions all over the place about how much money their electronic experiements are generating. (Check out Joe Konrath’s blog; an early trailblazer, now he’s just one more example of the many writers making money hand-over-fist with electronic formats they pursued ON THEIR OWN while their own agents stood by idly and did nothing. This is by now a common story in the industry.)
Predictions are increasingly that a substantial portion of writers earnings are going to switch over to this business model–a business model that their own agents have, through sheer inertia, OPTED OUT of participating in. At this point, just how much of a helpless doormat would a writer have to be if NOW his/her agent insists on elbowing into that source of income and demanding 15% of it? Who but the most timid, meek, or (to be blunt) idiotic writer would go long with that NOW? That ship has sailed. Literary agents will not be part of a portion of the new publishing economy where their -clients- (as well as writers whom they’ve declined to represent) are making real money.
MEANWHILE… New York publishing is changing. I don’t believe it’s going to disappear. But book sales are down, the revenue generated by major publishing is down, and book advances are going down. I and most of my friends are being pressured to write faster than we used to, because the market has become so much more competitive. It’s possible that, in NY publishing, none of us will ever make the advances that writers in our exact positions made 5+ (let alone 10-20-30) years ago. (For example, because of lowered print runs and sales, someone can now make the NYT paperback list on the basis of an advance that’s under $50K and a print run under 100K. When I got into the business, both the print run (and, in proportion to that, the advance) would have to be a lot higher for the writer to have a shot at The List.)
That’s not all doom and gloom, because we ALSO have access to alternate streams of income (which Dean has discussed often on this blog) that we (or people in our current positins) did not have 5-10-20-30 years ago. So as writers, we’ll manage.
But… since AGENTS have, primarily through inertia and absence of vision, opted out of those alternative income streams… will THEY manage in a market where the traditional way of making a living in publishing is going to be generated less income than it used, and generating it (probably) for fewer people?
SOME will manage. But some of them won’t. In all the discussion I see online accusing major houses of being dinosaurs who are doomed because of their slow adjustment to the new market… what I DON’T see is what strikes me as the far ore obvious dinosaur, and the one whose future strikes me as much more precarious: the literary agent.
Agents have mostly ignored and largely opted out of the two fastest growing sectors of the new publishing market (small press and electronic venues) while the market they focus on (major NY publishing) is becoming far more competitive and, for many people, less lucrative.
There will continue to be major houses and mega-authors IMO, as well as healthy sales for highly commercial authors whose work is well-published. But I believe there’s not going to be enough for all the agents who currently want a piece of that pie; so we’ll see more of them failing and leaving the industry. And I think the trend will start with those for whom NOT getting involved in small and electronic markets when they could have will prove to be the crucial fiscal mistake from which they can’t recover.
My food for thought, anyhow.
P.S. In fact, I believe the struggle to stay in business these days when an agent is hampered by bad judgment and counter-productive practices may well be amply demonstrated by a situation we were discussing elsewhere on this blog just the other day.
There’s a common scam practice (wraned about often on watchdog sites like Writer Beware, for example) where the “agent” tells a client, “This book needs editorial work before it can be sent out. Let me recommend a good freelance editor to you,” and then sends the client to someone whose “editing” will be fiscally profitable for the agent. The “editor” may be a spouse or family member, for example; or it may be a friend/associate who pays a fee to the agent for sending business there. This is a con, and it’s a fairly common way of preying on desperate aspiring writers who don’t know enough about the business to be aware that this is an unethical practice.
Well, there is a (formerly) legitimate and (previously) repitable New York literary agent who for years had a well-known reputation of having clients rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite… and then not sending the book out anyhow. (I am personally acquainted with at least half a dozen writers who’d sold books before hiring this agent; who couldn’t even get a book into submission the whole time they were clients of this agent; and who had to–and, indeed, DID–ressurect their careers after leaving the agent.) For years I wondered how the agent could be making a living, given how often I heard this exact same story from multiple clients and former clients. I also wondered how much income it cost the agent (since, in most cases, the writers I know who left then sold those books which the agent had been unwilling to send out).
Well… I recently learned (and have since heard it confirmed multiple times) that this agent is now engaging in the traditional scam practice of telling clients that the MS needs freelance editing… and then recommending “freelance editors” with whom the agent has either a marital relatioship or with whom the agent is in a separate business venture.
Apart from being the sign of unethical behavior in someone I had previously considered honest if prone to bad judgment, so I was very sad to hear about this… I think it’s also a sign of the times. Someone engaging in such all-too-common counter-productive practices (such as requesting constant rewrites… and then NOT EVEN SELLING the book)… IS feeling squeezed into finding other sources of revenue. Such as scamming clients now.
So 5 years ago I wanted to write.
I was alone and isolated. I knew some myths–but not really. I lived in a bubble where I could make up the rules as I wanted simply because I didn’t even know…what I didn’t know.
I then cold queried an editor. Didn’t know I couldn’t. They said give me a sample & synopsis. I did. They gave me a 1-book deal and I’d sink or swim on that book. I got 2-4 book contracts over and over for the next 5 or so years.
I then studied all the myths. I became very educated in the myths. So I sent one more cold query out and spent 5 years hunting an agent. Didn’t matter that I’d already sold a book (and eventually 16 or 17) by breaking the myths–it was tie-in work so it must be SO VASTLY different than real writing. I had the mind set of an ass clown.
No agents or lazy agents was all the reply I got. But 2 years after I sent the cold YA query I got an invitation to audition. Sent a Sample & Synopsis and I got a 1-book shot. Book comes out in Sept. so we’ll see if this gets good run.
HAD to have an agent, dontcha know. Much easier to get an agent with a contact. Agent did squat. I lost 15% of the advance and all future royalties for a net gain of = -15%.
I met Dean. In all occupations without formalized training the mentorship model is just about the only way to gain knowledge.
I threw out all my Myths. Then I pissed on ‘em. Then I worked on queries and pitches and samples, oh my.
In that time I’ve cold queried every single house out there either major or with imprints in my area( and to multiple editors in those imprints & houses). 20% didn’t answer. 1 told me they needed agented only subs–after he read my pitch & sample thoroughly .i.e. I didn’t need an agent I need a better or more targeted sample & synopsis.
I’ve sold a trilogy. I’ve sold a single. I’ve become a serial story author for a small but pro press doing anthos. All since January of this year. I am a working writer at mid-list money. Nothing to brag about in spectrum of things–unless your dream is to write as a living without a day job, in which case I’m here to tell you it’s nice.
I’ve learned an insane amount about numbers, contracts, royalty structures, print runs, foriegn rights–simply by reading. I’m now a better agent than the agent I had. It really isn’t brain surgery people.
Would I work with a great agent given a chance? Of course. Some agents have gravitas, some can sell Antabuse at a frat kegger, some are OCD super IP legal whizes or foriegn rights machines.
An *ungodly* number aren’t any of these things. And some of the most famous are shady as hell under that shinny exterior.
If you find a good agent life is good. If you find a typical agent you’re losing 15% you could keep. If you find a bad agent you are so screwed it’s a shame.
If you’re starting out on your career it’s an expedition. Hopefully it’ll be a long one. Here’s my advice: listen to people who’ve survived in the wilderness for a long, long time. Don’t dismiss the wisdom of experience because you think the wilderness is different for *you* or your generation.
Under the bells & whistles its really, really, really not.
And for god’s sake people if you disagree with Dean fine. Ignorant natives clinging to ju-ju beads help me out–but make sure you read what he’s writing. The Strawman arguments cropping up in this thread as insane.
He didn’t say agents NEVER work. He didn’t say you should NEVER use an agent. He said the current system is broken and doing harm. He also said you can sell without an agent. These are specific things.
You’d think writers would be better readers.
Thanks, Nathan, for sharing that. A great case-on-point of how this really works. Great stuff, thanks.
Got a letter last night from a writer excited that he had just been offered a four book deal. And he said, I quote, “I followed what you said exactly, no agent involved, and it works.” He was writing for my advice on finding someone to help him with the contract and negotiations.
Yup, it works over and over and over. Thanks, Nathan.
I agree completely, Laura, that 99% of all agents just sort of fell asleep with all the changes happening, and in fact, all the new agents coming in, the ones you would think would be the most astute and aware of the modern world, have chosen instead to go farther into the silliness of editing their clients, rewriting them, and not mailing them. Makes no sense at all.
Only one agency I am aware of even tried what you are suggesting and that’s Richard Curtis, one of the best salesmen in the business. (Not recommending him, just saying.) He’s been around a long time and made it a point to stay ahead of trends and when he saw this electronic wave coming, he contacted all of his clients and rounded up their rights for those who would let him do it, and started his own company with actual editors (John Douglas works for him, as well as others) and they do a model much like Fictionwise, where they take a novel and get it up on all the electronic outlets and then take a percentage. In other words, Richard Curtis, as an agent, started his own publishing company for his clients and it’s still going on.
Now, in my mind, just as with Fictionwise, there’s a problem with this model that I don’t much like. Smashwords is also going to the same model.
The model works like this. Say you gave Richard’s company your novel to put up. You get a percentage (not sure what it is, but a percentage) of everything that comes in. Richard’s company formats it and does the cover and gives it to Fictionwise, who takes a percentage of what comes in to them. Fictionwise puts it up on Kindle or some such thing and Kindle takes a percentage.
Let me back up and do some numbers. You (the author) do a few hours work and put up a novel for $3.00 on Kindle yourself. One copy sells, you get 70% (after July 1) of that $3.00. So your income is $2.10. (About the same as selling a $25.00 hardback through a New York publisher.)
But give that same novel to Fictionwise or Smashwords and Fictionwise/Smashwords gets $2.10 from Kindle and you still have to do some of the work. And then you get a percentage of the $2.10. Say something just over a buck. (not sure of exact number, haven’t looked lately)
Now give it to Richard’s company. You do none of the work, sure, but they put your novel onto Fictionwise, which then puts it on Kindle, and you get a percentage of a percentage of a percentage. You will be getting a very tiny amount by the time the money reaches you. Pennies, actually. So to make any real money, you have to sell a lot of copies in that model.
Writers like Konrath and many others, including me and Kris slowly over this year, are doing our own covers and putting stuff up on our own instead of going through one of these “agencies” like Smashwords or Fictionwise. Yes, I said it, they are agencies, sort of publishers, sort of a new animal. They take a percentage. They take less of a percentage if they sell it directly from their own site. And they do that. But a lot of their income is access to other platforms. And you pay for that access.
Not saying they are bad. Just saying that if you do start down this road, understand once again that by putting something up on Fictionwise or Smashwords, they are not only a platform for sales, but an agent and a form of publisher and they take their percentages. The key in business is always to try to keep most of the money yourself. But don’t be so worried about that to the point that you make no money at all. Balance. Understanding. Balance.
Wild new world we are in at the moment. And wait a week, it will change yet again.
So in my belief, that model will work, but only for writers who can’t be bothered to learn a few basics like how to put a book up on Kindle or Smashwords or Scribd themselves.
It’s been three months since I attended the novel workshop in Lincoln City.
Nathan, thanks so much for the update on your progress. Tremendously exciting stuff, and a testament to what effort and thinking outside the box can get you.
Dean, I wanted to add some data points, regarding agented submissions and the supposed “wall” that exists between editors and writers without agents.
Of the 9 markets who got my initial package distribution, 5 have gotten back to me as of today.
The first market responded via e-mail within 72 hours of the package having left my hands, in spite of the web site’s explicit statements that paper subs were verboten and that all unsolicited MS had to go through a certain generic slush e-mail, etc, etc. The personalized e-mail I got — from the chief editor — said send him the electronic version of the paper package, so he could send to the genre editor whom he wanted to see the book.
The second market sent me a standard form rejection wherein the text stated explicitly that the house did NOT accept or read unsolicited, unagented fiction. Penned in the margin at the bottom of the form rejection is a personal note from the editor, who stated, “Brad — I think you are a strong writer. Regrettably, this isn’t the kind of book we’re looking for our list at the moment. Best of luck finding the right home for this project!”
Note to the crowd: the editor seems to have read the package, enough to take time out of his work day to pen me a personal note which says nothing about me needing an agent or anything else beyond, the project isn’t right for the house at this time. Oh, and I am a, “strong writer.” The editor’s name is on the letter. Not the editor I originally mailed the MS to, but now I have a personal ‘line’ open to this editor — who read my package and seems to feel it was worth at least a note — and now I can send my next novel package to him with a cover letter stating, “Dear editor, thanks for your personal comments on my last package. Please have a look at this project and see if it better suits your needs.” So far as I am concerned, that un-agented package was a win.
The third market also has a web site explicitly stating that paper subs are verboten, yet I got a personalized paper rejection. No complaints about me not following the web site guidelines. No word about me having to have an agent either. Just regrets that the project doesn’t work for them at this time, best wishes, send us more, yadda yadda.
The fourth market has recently been absorbed into a still larger market. The web site makes no mention whatsoever of current guidelines, but I got a personalized paper rejection from an editor with a name. As with the second market, I now have a ‘line’ to that editor which I can trace back with my next package for the next project. No agent required.
The fifth market, which explicitly states that they do take un-agented, unsolicited paper subs, was the only one to send me a bona fide badly-photocopied form rejection without personalized comments, though there is an editor’s name, so I might be able to technically claim a ‘line’ on that editor now, too.
So, out of the 5 responses received so far, 4 of them were a) personalized comments from editors at houses which b) either explicitly stated no unagented, unsolicited MS or at least demanded electronic MS mailed to a generic slush e-mail box. Nobody YELLED AT ME IN ALL CAPS telling me I am a cretin for ignoring guidelines or the “rules” about unagented, unsolicited MS. In fact, the one editor who took the most time to pen a response did so on a piece of paper making it plain that nobody at his house would spend any time on anything unagented or unsolicited.
=^)
That update is awesome, Brad!
I, too, attended Dean’s novel workshop in Feb. and I can also add my own data point to this.
So far I have submitted 5 query packages, only one of which to an editor at a house that accepts unsolicited submissions.
I’ve heard nothing yet on four of those (including the publisher with the ‘open’ submissions policy).
The editor I have heard back from? Requested the full manuscript. This is a major house that states very clearly in their guidelines that they don’t take e-queries and they never read un-agented submissions. Yeah, I sent my un-agented query via email. *grin*
What an intriguing, insightful post. Thanks for shedding the light on all that agents do and don’t do. I found the history of the publishing business and how the different terms and what people were expected to do fascinating.
Do you think, then, that new writers especially would have better luck if they just mailed their query to an editor directly rather than go through an agent?
Lauren, keep reading all the agent posts for a clearer reasoning on this, but in short, yes, yes, yes. Worst thing an editor can say is no with a form rejection telling you to get an agent. The best….. well, the best is buying the novel and paying you lots of money. We do workshops here called Marketing that teach writers how to do those proposals and query letters. It takes some practice and work to do it right, but frees you from the agents until you decide you need one.