Big Ed sent me a wonderful link to a post from a site called Lessons of Failure. The title of this post is “Why You Can’t Trust Recruiters.”
It is short and to the point.
In the center of the post there is a great discussion about the value added of a real estate agent to a sale price of a home that is spot on the money for understanding how book agents work. Spot on.
And I think the two most important paragraphs in the entire article are the following. All book references in ( ) are mine.
“A recruiter’s (book agent) main job is to put you in front of any employer (publisher) who will hire you (buy your book). Not necessarily the best employer (publisher). Or the best company. Or even the right job (sale). Any job (sale) will do, as long as the recruiter (agent) gets paid.
Your salary (contract) negotiation with a recruiter (agent) follows the same path as the house pricing scenario–the recruiter (agent) wants to make the deal happen at a reasonable price, but without upsetting the potential employer (publisher)…”
Worth the read. Especially for the real estate scenario he talks about. http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/trust-recuiters/
Thanks, Big Ed, for the link.
I find it funny that this still needs to be discussed. I can’t think of a reason to get an agent in the current climate of this industry.
Ramon, because 95% of all writers think they need one to sell anything. Just go into any writer’s workshop and ask any one of them where they are mailing their books, if they are mailing their books that is, and not lost in rewriting them.
Great post Big Ed!
For those who are unconvinced about the incentive structure that Big Ed describes, check out the book “Freakanomics,” which has a chapter that goes into some depth about how the incentives are structured for agents of all sorts (using real estate agents as the example), using numbers and pointing out longstanding trends, with footnotes (well, endnotes). It’s a good, accessible, in-depth look at the whole subject of middlemen. The better you understand ANY middle-man’s incentive structure, the better you’re equipped to judge when and how to use them in a way that will be effective, rather than a gyp.
Thanks for the link, Dean. Glad to hear you’re bearing up okay under the week from hell. Raising a glass to you here!
-Dan
Don’t be so shy, Dean. Tell people what you REALLY think of literary agents. (grin)
Anne, actually I like agents, most of the ones I have met anyway, with a few exceptions. They are very nice people, charming. And in the old days of publishing, before all these changes, a couple agents helped me a great deal.
But things have changed. Drastically. And that is the problem. I don’t dislike agents. I just hate what they are doing to writers, and the fact as a group, they settled almost without a fight for 25% of net for electronics rights for their clients. Writers are ultimately responsible for that because we sign, but the agents were our representatives that kept saying over and over to writers it was the best they could do. And thus, at that point, I started stepping back and really questioning agents and who they really worked for and that’s when the real nastiness of agents as a profession became clear. In fact, if you read my Killing the Sacred Cow posts on agents from the start, you can watch my attitude toward agents shift over a couple of years.
I’m lost in rewriting! Are you the one who blogged about NOT rewriting? I can’t find that post again anywhere. Rewriting and having my work critiqued is doing my head in!
Suzanne, up at the top of the page there is a tag called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. There is a post on both rewriting and workshops there. Both are deadly to fiction writers when done wrong or take to excess. Those might help. Good luck. It’s a ton more fun to just write and mail new stuff and a lot less painful when you don’t let idiots in a workshop tear it apart. (grin)
I hope people listen to you.
One of my favorite quotations is from Much Ado About Nothing when Claudio says, “Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.”
So true, Dean.
And Suzanne; I actually just finished a partial rewrite of my first book. It was written six years ago and the first book I’d truly written start to finish. It was well received then, but when I looked at it now, I realized it needed to be “polished”. It was slow-going and painful, and I couldn’t wait to get it done. I had to be very careful not to damage the story and water it down with “technical improvements”. Did it need the work done to it? Yes. But ultimately, like Dean said, you better be very careful not to kill you story. And I stopped going to writers groups and workshops over a year ago. Everyone there is usually about fifty pages into their book, still steeped in the myths, or rewriting their work to DEATH.
The only workshops I ever plan to attend from this point are Dean and Kris’s, or one such that they recommend.
I have enjoyed reading the blogs at writerunboxed.com over the years, but yesterday they had a post by a woman who has written a book about how to get published traditionally. I’m sure the author has the best intentions, but my thought was–really? you can even write a book about that in 2011?–but thousands of unpublished authors will read that and attempt a journey they shouldn’t even be taking. At least not right now.
http://writerunboxed.com/2011/10/15/four-ways-not-to-get-an-agent/
J. Daniel Sawyer: Thanks, but I’m not the author of the post. I just found it and said, “Dean would love this!” I sent him the link and you see the result.
Heh, I’ve been dealing with recruiters for the last couple of weeks. (My former employer lost the re-bid on the contract I was working.)
One thing, though — you can have multiple recruiters representing you, just not to the same employers. It’d be like having multiple different agents presenting your book to different publishers. You can’t quite get an auction going, but you can leverage one offer against another.
Boy, wouldn’t that shake agents up: “you only get an exclusive to editors A and B, someone else is representing me to X, Y and Z”.
According to this article both publishers and agents are now worrying that Amazon is trying to make them obsolete by dealing direct with authors:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?hp=&pagewanted=print ]
Interesting times indeed.
Melvyn, Publisher’s Marketplace this morning pretty well shot that article all to hell, including the court aspects of it. This kind of thing, especially from some place like the New York Times, is a reflection of nothing more than a bunch of myths.
The closing of Borders due to years of bad management has had much, much more of an impact than Amazon publishing a few hundred books. However, the indie publishing aspects of author freedom is actually starting to both bother and excite those I have talked to inside of traditional publishing. Most find it exciting because most are book people working in those places and know that they can’t publish everything, especially the strange and off-center books. So as readers they get excited. And as a corporation, they are also starting to see the value of indie publishing in finding and test-running books before they spend money on them. Before this new world, traditional publishers just had to take a flyer at how well a book would or would not sell. Now authors can do the upfront testing for publishers.
So the myth of traditional publishers being afraid of Amazon is just that: A myth. Even Publisher’s Marketplace said that as well today. However, traditional publishers are very, very worried about the transition that is happening from majority paper to majority electronic sales. They all have vast systems and money and contracts tied up on the paper side that are hard to cut back. That’s where their real worry is. Not some online bookstore publishing a few authors on a new list.
This post reminded me also of travel agents. Not that the parallel is strong at all: travel agents are (generally) just commissioned independent sales staff for the travel providers, so the whole financial arrangement is completely reversed for the traveler. It doesn’t cost the traveler anything.
But what it reminds me of is the fact that I cannot imagine any reason at all that I would use a travel agent for regular travel (special deals are a different matter) when I have Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, et al., all as close to me as this blog. I have never seen a price advantage, and I can book pretty much any regular flight or car or hotel faster and easier on my own. And yet there are still plenty of people who not only book through travel agents, but also insist that it’s the BEST way to book.
Some people just have a very narrow comfort zone, I guess.
Big Ed put it brilliantly. Maybe that kind of analogy and plain talk will put the subject in a light new writers can understand.
I used recruiters a number of times for IT jobs in the UK, where pretty much all jobs go through recruiters and most people prefer to send their resume to one place and filter the interview offers. As mentioned above, one big difference between agents and recruiters is that people often use multiple recruiters, another is that it’s generally a one-off relationship where you get the job and then say goodbye, rather than paying them 15% of your salary for life.
I certainly agree that recruiters and agents have similar motivations, but IT workers tended to be smart enough to understand that the recruiter might not be working in their best interest. I believe the recruiters my employer used didn’t get paid unless the new recruit stayed past the probationary period, so that also reduced their incentive to try to push people into jobs they wouldn’t like.
I’m not sure the example works as well as it might have. First of all, in a real estate market, the agent acts more like Amazon than an individual hawking it on a street corner.
Second, my real estate agent knows my house will eventually sell at some price — so if we list at $115K now and it doesn’t sell, and we later have to lower our price and sell at $100K after three months, not a lot of difference to them in commission (consider it the equivalent of “sunk revenue”). So the difference in commission price isn’t really a motivator. So, unlike Freakonomics’ assumptions about motivators being only downward, agent motivations also go the other way just as easily. (Caveat below)
I think the real focus on the trade off should be not on price, which is minimally different, but rather on the amount of work required to get a deal done with the right other parameters in place.
For the real estate agent, the amount of work to sell at $115K is huge compared to $100K — more networking, more staging, more dressing it up, more hard-selling, more advertising, etc. And selling in in two days with five showings is a big difference in workload from selling it in three months after 300 showings.
Or, it’s a lot like pricing your book yourself — you could list it at $30 and do a whack of work to sell a few copies, or you could drop it to $2.99 and do a lot less hard selling to sell copies. You know SOMEONE will buy it for $30, but unless you’re willing to go door-to-door, how much work will it be to find them?
Interesting though that Dean you find their pricing incentives distasteful — it seems like the same logic, in part, that you use for not rewriting or risking bad critiquing groups. If you divide your motivation in doing so in two (early pecuniary vs. reduced quality later), the pecuniary logic logic seems like you would be wasting time when the shortstory is already “market ready”, hence your examples of successfully mailing off and selling stories before they were critiqued. To me, the pecuniary aspects seem almost identical to the agent’s — sell now even though it isn’t “perfect” because a sold manuscript is better than working to dress up a prospective one to MAYBE get a higher price. (Ignoring your argument that in your case and many (but perhaps not all), rewriting and bad critiques actually could / would / should / might reduce the viability of your manuscript).
Separate from workload though, I think the bigger thing to understand from agents though is the type of thing you, KKR, Michael S. and PG talk about — what does the agent actually do for you? What is contained in the workload that they undertake on your behalf?
And, to steal from the other article, the caveat is more about what their finances look like. I know my real estate agent’s situation well enough to know he’s not in a rush to sell my stuff at the wrong price — but if it does sell early, he actually takes a lower commission (reflecting both his reduced workload AND probably a price that was set too low for the market). So for the example in Freakeconomics, and in the referenced article, the bigger motivator for BAD agents is not price but cashflow — if they’re broke, and they need the $$ coming in, yep, a quick sale is better than risking no sale.
But that is a slam against BAD agents, not all agents.
I think your other articles, and particularly KKR’s and PG, do a much better job of questioning the need for any agent in this marketplace…on what they actually do for you than on their possible short-term financial incentives.
Just a thought (way too long, but a thought nonetheless).
PolyWogg
Also note that that NYT article about Amazon ran in the Tech not the Business (or Arts) section.
Dean,
Thanks for putting the story in perspective. There seems to be a tendency in some quarters to see Amazon as taking over the world and as an outsider its difficult to know what is going on.
Melvyn
Oh wow! What brilliant advice about not rewriting. Thank you. I’m having a lot more fun, and my writing is much better too.
Inide now approaching mainstream?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44926222
Hey, a blogging-agent who is ALSO agent-as-epublisher commented in her blog this week: “It’s a totally weird phenomenon, but I’ve had more authors hire lawyers to read the Author/Agent Agreement they sign with me than I have authors who have hired lawyers to read the publishing contract.”
Although the agent seems to Not Get why someone might want a lawyer to advise them before they sign a binding legal business agreement with literary agency, the Good News implied by her commentary is:
There are writers out there who are having lawyers review agency agreements for them!
This is pretty new. And really good to hear.
Oops. The link:
http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2011/10/reading-your-contract.html
Actually, Dean, an executive recruiter is far more motivated to ensure a good match than this article suggests. Because he has an ongoing relationship with the employer, and an employee who’s stuffed into a job he’s not satisfied with will make his dissatisfaction known! The employer will be made unhappy with the recruitment, and his relationship with the recruiter will suffer.
This is quite unlike publishing, where agents have no fear at all that a writer will cause any significant fuss over a bad deal. The agent gets what he wants. The publisher gets what he wants. And everybody remains good friends.
Oh…not the writer? That’s okay…he probably doesn’t even know the difference.
It never happen in business. Not at an executive level. Not in my experience.
Wendy: I suspect a key there is “executive level.” I’ve seen bad mismatches happen in recruiting for engineers and specialty technical folks. I suspect it’s because it’s difficult to claim that a “dissatisfied employees” is the result of a bad match at hiring. Recruiters and HR departments have a tendency to focus on the technical skills rather than the interpersonal ones, which would never be overlooked at an executive level.
Nonetheless, we’re in violent agreement that writers are unlikely to even know they’ve gotten a bad match.
It should be pointed out that the gist of her article complaining about authors signing contracts without reading and understanding them:
“but what I find most disconcerting of all is the recent realization that so many authors are signing these contracts without reading one word of either of them. Isn’t that mom lesson number two? Right after saying please and thank you, aren’t you taught to never sign anything without reading it first?”
Someone… There is a vast difference from “reading a contract” and “understanding a contract.” Most agents don’t have a clue what some of these contracts really mean for an author. If they did, they would never, ever allow an author to sign a bad reversion clause, a bad option clause, or a bad escalator clause.
IP Lawyers understand what all that means in contracts and can explain each clause and the long-term aspects of each clause.
Dean — the impression I got from the comment pointing me to the blog entry was that the agent was complaining about authors using an IP lawyer on agency contracts.
But when I got there, it seemed that her main complaint was authors not reading either the agency nor the publisher contract — that she was complaining about people signing things without understanding what they are signing.
I didn’t get the idea that she was against an author using an IP lawyer at all.
Didn’t say she did. I have no read the post you guys are talking about, just saying that in general agents don’t know what their clients are signing unless that agent is also an attorney. You have an untrained English major telling writers what contracts mean. Yeah, that way always works. (grin)