Jan 24 2010
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: All Agents Care About Writers First
I never intended to do so many of the agent myths in a row, but since we’re having such a great conversation, and Laura Resnick brought this one up in the comments on the last one, it makes sense to just go on.
New writers and many professional writers believe that when they hire an agent, the agent has their best interest only in mind. With many modern agents, this is so far wrong, a writer’s interest doesn’t even get in the top three places of focus for some agents.
So said clearly, the myth is: Agents always have their client’s best interests in mind.
But before I start, I want to be clear. Every agent is different. Every agency is different. What I tend to call “old-style” agents do care about their writers. “Old-style” agents know they are an employee of a writer, they work hard doing what the writer wants, and puts the writer first in any relationship.
But the newer “slush-reading agents” as I call them, the ones that most writers deal with early on, are what this myth is about.
And let me be clear on basic employee nature. Of course any employee is doing the job for his or her own reasons. Money, love, challenge, companionship, whatever. All are reasons people take jobs. And becoming an agent is no different. Agents are people and their focus is themselves first, of course, as it is with any employee.
But most places of work for employees have rules of behavior, where during the hours that the employee works, the employer’s needs come to the front and are the focus of the actions of an employee. Just good business.
A clerk in a store helps customers, takes their money, keeps merchandise straight, all for the betterment of employer, so that the employee can make money and keep the job. A waitress in a restaurant follows restaurant rules, serves food in a certain fashion, and works while on the clock for the employer so that she can get paid and help her life move forward.
But, alas, there are no rules for agents. None. The new wave of agents have sort of made up rules for themselves lately, using not their employer’s interest, but instead twisting the job to fit their own interests. Wow, imagine a waitress doing that or a clerk in a store? Yet that’s how agents in writing are functioning now. No rules, no guidelines, nothing to keep them thinking that their employer should come first.
So simple human self-interest and lack of basic rules explain why so much of these myths exist for agents.
For more information and a lot of great discussion, all the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing posts about agents are linked here:
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: You must have an agent to sell.
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Agents Know Markets
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Agent Agreements
Please, please, if you have any desire to really understand agents and help your writing career, read all the posts and all the comments. Thanks, Laura Resnick, and everyone who asked questions and made observations and helped in the discussion following those chapters in this crazy book.
In a comment after the last post, Laura Resnick said, “Many agents (perhaps most) see their credibility, their reputations in-house at publishers, and the productivity of their editorial contacts as being based on having a high hit-to-miss ratio with submissions–a high ratio of submissions that the editor likes and makes an offer on.”
I want to really aim an arrow at what Laura pointed out on agent perspectives in her fine comment.
“Slush-reading agents” (meaning the current batch) in sending manuscripts to editors have both a similar and a completely different goal in mind than a writer does.
Similar Goal: Both the writer and the agent want the editor to buy the novel for as much money as possible. Such a sale helps both not only make money, but helps both of their careers.
Different Goal: The writer wants the novel out and seen by as many editors as possible, to give the book the best shot to sell and maybe even get a small auction going. The agent, as Laura points out, wants to make sure to protect the agent’s reputation with an editor, thus wants to limit the number of rejections.
And this difference in goals is where most of the troubles are. Agents who mail things for clients worry more about their own careers and their own value to an editor then they worry about selling a book for a client. In fact, if a book isn’t perfect in this type of agent’s mind, they won’t mail it. Not for fear of hurting their client, but for fear of hurting THEIR (AGENT) reputation.
When an agent asks a writer to rewrite a manuscript, who are they really concerned about? Not the writer, that’s for sure. They are only looking out for their own self-interests. Nothing more.
When an agent asks a writer to rewrite a manuscript, they are actually hurting the writer. Forget for a moment the fact that an agent is not a writer and can’t really give good advice, but look at a rewrite from simple business terms.
1)The work of rewriting slows down any possible cash flow.
2) Rewriting takes writer time that could be used to create a new project.
3) Rewriting on demand of an agent hurts a writer’s personal belief system.
All fantastically negative things to a writer working alone in a room somewhere. So a simple rewrite request from a theoretical employee who is supposed to have the writer’s best interest in mind is fantastically damaging to any writer’s business
And agents do this only because they worry about their own reputation, worry about what editors will think of them. They have no care at all the damage they are doing to their client. “Slush-reading agents” worry more about their own reputation with publishers and editors than they worry about their reputations with the writers who hire them. To them, the attitude is, “If the writer doesn’t like it, they can find a new agent.” (And the writer should, of course.) But the agent’s self-interest are so far above that of thinking about the interest of their boss, the writer, that nothing but damage comes of it.
Why this has happened is a number of reasons. The most often stated is that agents work for more than one writer. So their thinking is that if they have a good reputation among a dozen editors at hitting with manuscripts, those editors will give them extra time and read manuscripts faster. And for the clients of this agent who can get a manuscript through the employee blockage, it sometimes helps. At least with speed of sales, a very minor thing in the overall picture.
But, and there is a huge BUT with the above, the fear and worry about what an editor thinks of the agent’s reputation is very, very bad for a lot of the agent’s clients. The faster acceptance vs. the huge damage to many clients doesn’t equal out.
Who really cares how fast an editor reads a manuscript? In fact, I personally know of a number of projects that editors said to me, “The agent is always in a hurry, setting deadlines for an answer, so I just bounced it since I hadn’t had time to get to it yet.”
Not my projects, thankfully, because I sell my own stuff, but friends. And when the editor said that to me, I just shuddered. A writer’s employee was causing the rejection because they were in a hurry. Yikes!
Anyone who has the slightest clue about what happens in editor’s offices when it comes to the process of buying a book know how long the process can take, and how many different battles an editor must fight. If the editor has some agent pushing at them, why should they drop everything and fight what that agent wants them to fight? They don’t. Mostly they just bounce the book.
So instead of pushing your agent to get an answer from some poor editor, why not push your agent to get the book project out on five more editor’s desks???? Give the editors time. And if you hire an agent to speed up the process of rejection, wow are you in the wrong business. Catch a clue. Your goal is to sell books. Give editors time to work. Put your manuscript on five to ten editor’s desks and then write the next project.
In fact, I have a term I use. It’s called “Irons in the Fire.” When a project gets sent out, or I get called on a possible future project by an editor, I think of it as just another Iron in the Fire and I forget it. I never think it will actually become real, and I never wait for anything. When they call with a real offer of money and terms, then it is real and not one moment before.
So my goal is to get as many Irons in the Fire as I can. I have had Irons in the Fire suddenly become a real paying project years down the road.
But agents, especially the modern “slush-reading” ones, have the idea that you should only focus in one place at a time, one book at a time, go slow, write only the same type of book book after book. After a first novel SALE, this might be good advice for a year or two, but for most of your career, it’s awful advice. So why do agents give it to you? Back to their focus on what editors think instead of their client writers.
That’s right. Your employee is telling you what to write so that they can please an editor. (Remember, editors work for publishers, the corporation you will depend on the agent to get a good contract from. See the problems forming?)
Editors have to treat a book in a sort of book-as-event manner, since it takes so much for them to buy a book. And they want that author giving that book their focus. But wow, if you write 500 words a day, one book a year publishing pace in many genres is way too slow for you by half. But your agent, because of their focus on what the editor wants instead of what you want, will tell you to slow down or just not write.
And if you slow down, write fewer books, you will make less money because you have less product. Worst advice an agent can give, has nothing to do with the well-being of a writer, and yet agent after agent after agent gives this stupid advice.
Slow down is the flat worst advice ever given to writers. Yet I will bet a large number of writers with agents reading this have gotten that advice.
It all comes from agents, at least the new breed of them, thinking more about their own career and what editors think then what their own clients think or need. The older breed of agents who like doing deals and negotiations and sales don’t care how many books you write. The more you write, the more they make, so they are happy.
Think this through, folks. Say you are a writer who can manage to average 1,000 words per day (about an hour worth of work), so you produce four novels per year. If you have hired an agent who only has about six main editors and a few other secondary editors they work with, and you are pouring four novels a year at that agent, it is in the best interest of the agent to tell you to slow down. Not your interest, because the more work you produce, the more money you make. But the more work you produce, the more your agent has to work, and thus basic human nature kicks in. (Cue the whining music here…This is TOO hard.)
(Again, read the earlier agent blogs about marketing and such.)
THE TRUTH. A modern agent (slush-reader/blogger) is looking for a one-book-per-year writer who hits it big.
In other words, like a lot of humans, modern slush-reader agents are lazy. They want money but don’t want to work. They want to find a writer to hit the home run for them, the next Stephanie Meyers. At the big thriller conference, a major bestseller got up to talk about agents. He said simply, “The worst thing that can happen to you is that your agent has a client that is a major bestseller. And it’s not you.”
I have seen this happen time-after-time, writers with a agent who has another client who suddenly hits it big, and suddenly that agent is not returning phone calls, having writers rewrite to slow them down, not mailing manuscripts, and on and on and on.
The agent you want is a person who works for you, who mails a book when and where you tell him to mail it, who listens and cares about your writing needs and your writing speeds and your need to cross genres. If the agent is focused on you, they will be fine. You’ll find a good working balance. But if they are more concerned about what a publisher’s employee (editor) will think of them, then run from them.
And run fast. The amount of extra help they think they can give you with editor-focused thinking will do nothing but harm you in so many ways.
One more way, never talked about but very real. An agent is hired to be your negotiator in contracts. But the focus for that agent is to keep a certain small group of editors happy. So you sell a book through an agent to one of those editors.
Agent doesn’t care about you at all. Agent only cares about coming across as a nice person to the editor, someone easy to work with, someone who “understands” and can give favors and find good writers when needed. Only issue is, the agent in the contract negotiation is “giving” your rights away. And your negotiating power.
And I have heard of a number of instances when agents worked across contracts with different writers, talking to the same editor. “You give me this in writer A’s contract and I’ll give you this in Writer B’s contract.”
Yup, it happens, and it should make every writer shout in anger, but alas, remember there are no rules for agents, no one looking over them, and thus publishers know this and can use this lack of rules for their advantage in all aspects of their business. And how would you, as a writer know that happened and you were writer B?
You wouldn’t. Not directly. Your agent would tell you, “Oh, we couldn’t get that detail fixed. And that’s assuming you, the writer, even know enough about contracts to ask. Most writers, thinking “I don’t need to know business” just trust these agents.
Agents who are thinking more about keeping editors happy and their own well being then your contract. Yup, that’s the person you want to trust.
So, for a moment, let’s talk about what every employer must decide about an employee.
REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS.
Understand that every writer will be a different sort of boss, and every agent is different, still, let me try to lay out some basics at least to jump from.
1) Don’t ever expect an agent to save you. Agents won’t and can’t save you.
2) Don’t expect them to know everything. Agents are not as knowledgeable about your writing and projects as you are. And after a time, they won’t even know as much about the business as you do.
3) Don’t expect them to be good in all areas and all genres. All agents have weak areas and strong areas. You need to understand them and balance their strong and weak areas against your needs.
4) Don’t expect an agent to do everything for you. Hire an agent (or any employee) for ONLY what you need. Nothing more.
5) Don’t expect them to tell you what to do. (Or worse yet, plan your career. Before you hire them, be clear with yourself and them what you expect from them and what you want them to do. If you start letting an employee guide the ship, your ship is doomed to crash on the rocks.
6) Just because you hired an agent, don’t expect the work to end. Expect to double and triple check everything they are doing all the time. It is your business, after all.
7) Never expect them to care or work as hard for you as you will work for yourself. This is just standard for any employer, and really, really is true for agents. You have only your own career, they work for dozens of writers, if not more.
If you have ever run a business or office with employees, you know I have just described what any good employer thinks about with hiring an employee.
Again, no agent is the same. Many are very, very honest. But understand they have no rules, other than the rules you give them as their employer. They are human, and often would rather not do the work, especially if they think the project is only small or has no hope. As the boss, you have to be aware of these human traits and understand them and push where a push is needed.
But never once believe that an agent, any agent, no matter how good they seem, has your best interests at heart. They do not. That is an ugly myth. They are an employee that only cares about their own business. And they are an employee without rules unless you put the rules on them.
And some of the agents these days might as well be working for (and just drawing checks from) the publishers. But if you understand that, you can work around that and keep your best interests in mind in who you hire.
Just like the owner of a restaurant or a clothing store, you have to control those who work for you and keep them working the way YOU want them to work. And if an understanding can’t be reached between you and your employee, fire them.
It really is that simple.
Copyright 2010 Dean Wesley Smith
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This is part of my inventory in my bakery now. (Confused on that, read the last Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post about making money with writing.) I’m giving you this small slice as a sample. I’m giving you a taste, but not selling any of the pie. If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery. 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 or so I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, research, rejections, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.
Thanks, Dean
Just picking up on a few of the things Dean discusses in this post:
**”He said simply, “The worst thing that can happen to you is that your agent has a client that is a major bestseller. And it’s not you.”**
I had one agent with whom this problem was not just apparent, but double-underlined, in bold, in neon red. One of the agent’s clients became a mega-star, and it increasingly seemed to me that the agent went from being a literary agent to being that one client’s manager. The agent was frequently unavailable to me, because the agent was in Europe with the client, meeting with the writer’s European publishers; or in Hollywood, meeting with the client’s film contacts; or had flown to the client’s home, to discuss the writer’s schedule; or was out of town for a few days, having joined the writer on a signing tour. (I had never before in my life heard of a literary agent accompanying an author on a signing tour; have also never heard of it since, either.)
Considered from the agent’s perspective, I could see how this focus on one client made sense. Not only was that client worth, oh, 100-times the income that I was worth to the agency at the time, and therefore merited much more attention than I on the business basis of income = importance, but it was also clearly a lot more FUN for the agent to meet with people in Europe and Hollywood eager for a share of that major writer, than it was to discuss my midlist career problems or figure out where to send my next MS.
But from –my- perspective as a working writer and a client, this was a problem, obviously. It was most certainly NOT my only problem with this agent, but it was indeed a problem. I had experienced versions of this problem with other agents, but this was certainly the most stark example of it that I ever experienced, and a good example of just how wrong things can go for the working career writer when another of the agent’s clients hits it really big.
**But if they are more concerned about what a publisher’s employee (editor) will think of them, then run from them.**
I’d already been having problems with my second agent, prone to tantrums, but the day I knew I had to fire her was when I said I had an option proposal I wanted sent, and she BLEW HER STACK because the timing would mean submitting it in summer, and that would make her look bad with the editor (because, she said, no one submitted in summer, it was vacation season). Apart from the inaccuracy of that (things do slow down in publishing in summer, but since it’s a THREE MONTH season, life does go on), this was an –option- book and I had –already discussed- the summer submission with my editor (who, like a lot of young editors, didn’t have the finances to go away in summer and worked all season). But the agent balked and just kept shrieking that she wouldn’t submit a book in summer, because it would make HER look bad. So I fired her and submitted it without her. No problem.
I also worked with an agent who repeatedly refused to request reassignment for me in-house, even though I had a HORRIBLE and dreadfuly counter-productive relationship with my editor. The editor was a buddy of the agent’s, they did a lot of deals together, and for all the excuses and exhortations made to me, the problem was really that the agent didn’t want to strain the close relationship with that editor by requesting I be assigned to someone else. I insisted and finally FORCED the point; and during that process, the agent presented it to the editor and to =me= as the two of them vs. me, the difficult and unreasonable author. Even though (I’ve kept all correspondence and a written record of my dealings with that editor, because I thought the editor’s constant screws ups and lies might eventually lead me very reluctantly into a lawsuit with the publisher), by any sane reckoning, the editor was a very destructive force, and any agent acting in –my- best interests would’ve been willing to request reassignment for me LONG before then.
**So instead of pushing your agent to get an answer from some poor editor, why not push your agent to get the book project out on five more editor’s desks????**
The counter-argument to this that one often hears is that sending the book out to more editors is just a case of “throwing many copies of the MS at a wall and waiting to see if any of them stick,” whereas an agent who only sends it to a few places is =targeting= the submission, and targeting a submission is more effective.
That works in theory, but only SOMETIMES in practice. Essentially, it works in practice if Slick Agent sends your MS to his good pal Lucky Editor in the belief that it’s a project Lucky will love, and Slick is correct, Lucky buys it. That’s when targeted submission works exactly as the theory says it does. And any writer who has benefitted (with sales) from targeted submissions is very likely to be a big believer in the agent system. NOT because the writer is stupid or naïve, but because we tend to learn from experience. If your experience is that this system works, then your belief tends to be that this system works.
HOWEVER…. there may be (and often are) any number of editors out there for whom a MS might be right… but if you’re a client of Slick Agent, THOSE editors will NOT be targeted. This is a BIG failing in the strategy of “targeted submissions.” Moreover, if your MS isn’t right for Slick’s handful of pals, there’s a very good chance he’ll refuse to send it out at all. Or if Slick thinks your MS may be right for his pals, but it’s not and they rejected it… Slick will now be out of ideas and, in many cases, reluctant to send out the proposal to anyone else. Not because there’s no other editor on the planet for whom the book might be right, but rather because Slick has run through his own personal supply of targets. Most agents (at least in my own experience) are amazingly reluctant to RESEARCH the market and find out who buys what. They develop a small quantity of targets, and that’s what they know and stick with.
So apart from the percentage of cases where an agent’s traditional “targeted submission” actually WORKS (and I don’t know what the percentage is, I just know that in =my= entire career, ONE agent has guessed right ONE time with ONE project… so it’s not a system in which I have faith), it’s a stragey which isn’t so much a =targeted= submission as a LIMITED one… because it’s a who-the-agents-knows-and-gets-along-with target system, rather than a who’s-buying-books-like-this system.
One of the problems with the agent-as-negotiator strategy is that most agents have an agency boilerplate–a contract they’ve hammered out for all the clients of their agency in all the deals that they make with this particularly publisher–and that satisfies them, so that they’re usually only keen to negotiate a =few= variables on any deal (such as the sum of the advance; the deadlines; which subrights, if any, will be licensed to the publisher; etc.).
Now, most writers consider the agency boilerplate a GOOD thing, believing it protects their interests better than they could. However, having worked with agents and having worked on my own with a literary lawyer, what I’ve found (more than once) is that agents are careless and heel-dragging about negotiating (or even flat-out REFUSE to negotiate) on clauses that matter to ME but which do not matter to the agent, such as the option clause and the reversion clause. I have consequently, over the years, been stuck with bad option and/or reversion clauses on several contracts.
With a literary lawyer doing my negotiations, I instead now have a =Resnick= boilerplate with two houses. That is my starting place with these houses in future negotiations, and in addition to all the usual things addressed by agents (with which I am certainly familiar by now), it addresses things that -I- consider important, and it ALSO addresses things that my LAWYER considers important (ex. on a recent contract, she wrote and inserted an indemnity clause that she felt protected me better than the publisher’s did, and they agreed to this change). I’ll go on a limb and guess that the majority of literary agents negotiating for clients don’t understand the details and potential legal ramifications of things like indemnity, warranty, and act-of-God clauses the way a contracts lawyer does.
During contract negotiations, I’ve also never ONCE heard my lawyer say something that I think I heard every one of my literary agents say at least once, which was, “But publishers don’t like that.” My lawyer never minds asking for something. In my experience, agents, by contrast, often balk.
**6) Just because you hired an agent, don’t expect the work to end. Expect to double and triple check everything they are doing all the time. It is your business, after all.**
This is a particularly important point from my perspective. One of the many reasons I wound up unhappy in all my agency relationships and eventually decided to go solo is that it always bothered me a LOT that my agents were getting 15% of the money without doing 15% of the work.
I always thought that, in fairness, that ratio should translate into me doing all the writing and the agent doing all the business–finding the buyer, negotiating the deal, following up on administrative problems with the publisher, etc.
In reality, though, my repeated experience was that agents wanted to do as little work as possible. They repeatedly refused to research markets, so if they didn’t ALREADY know how to sell a book (and they often didn’t), they refused to send it out; but if -I- did the research, and -I- sent it out, and -I- got an offer on the table… they still insisted on getting =15%= of the money. I typically had to send contracts back to my agents for additional negotiations because they had overlooked mistakes or had not even bothered to ask for things I told them I wanted (such as a narrow option clause, a reasonable reversion clause, etc.). And most agents, for the most part, wanted NOTHING to do with administrative problems with publishers, never mind following up and persisting until such a problem was resolved.
So in addition to doing all the writing, I always wound up doing a LARGE amount of the business stuff, too… and yet -they- were getting 15%, while their actual contribution to the -work- in my career was clearly far, FAR less than 15%.
This was only one of NUMEROUS reasons I had a problem with the agent-author business model (among other things, I also hated having to GET AROUND or PAST an agent to get a book into submission; and I loathed how contemptuous of me and rude to me me all four of my agents were–this isn’t behavior I tolerate in any other area of my life, and my own experience was that it’s a common problem with literary agents); but it was always a significant one. I always felt that, look, if you want 15% of my income, then you need to do 15% of the work around here–which means YOU need to handle all the business; and my own experience was that agents just didn’t want to do that.
Laura’s comments about ratios and yours here really turned on that light bulb in my head, Dean. Of course this is why my former agent quit trying to market my book after six tries. There is a myth out there (bolstered by agent comments on their blogs) that the market is tight and there’s only a few places to send to and when those avenues are used up, too bad. They use this warning to those who try to self market too.
I am so with you on the building up of inventory and getting those irons in the fire. With this in mind, don’t you think it’s a good idea while marketing long fiction to keep one’s hand in with short fiction as well? It does wonders to build up clout, build skill, give consistent writing practice at a tight level and generally speed up the success rate? Do you think that having some decent pro sales in short fiction will get you editorial interest quicker than using an agent?
Is there a relatively quick-and-easy way to distinguish “old-style” agents from “slush-reading” agents? What I mean is this: If I have a contract in hand and approach an agent and say, “Who are you going to put first? Me or the editors with whom you have a professional relationship?” knowledge of basic human nature tells me that the answer I’m going to receive is, “Oh, I’ll absolutely put you first,” even if that isn’t true.
It’s a situation almost like King Solomon dealing with the two women who claimed to be the mother of the same child. Knowing human nature, he decided to have the child cut in half, so that it would be divided between them. The real mother says, “No! Let her have the child,” because she doesn’t want to see her child killed. But the woman who was lying says, “No. Go ahead. Cut the child in two.” So he gives the child to the woman who wanted the child’s life preserved.
In the same way, there’s gotta be a question (or series of questions) to make it easier to discern one type of agent from the other, something that will circumvent the lies spoken just to get another client on board.
I realize it’s probably not quite that easy (nothing ever is), but there must be some way to navigate this mine-field without having a “slush-reading” agent blow up on you — both now and later, and literally and figuratively.
Brenda, writing and selling short fiction can’t hurt, that’s for sure. And yes, it might get you editorial interest inside a field. It sure did for me. Had an editor at Bantam read a couple of my short stories in the old Twilight Zone/Night Cry magazines and ask me if I had a novel. So yes, I’ve heard of this working. (grin) But that said, if you don’t read and love short fiction, don’t go that way. Just causes too much pain.
Laura, wow, thanks again for the great comments. And let me simply say, “Didn’t think of that!” A Resnick boilerplate already negotiated with a company. Of course. Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you. Makes complete sense. I will be putting together a “Smith” boilerplate from this moment forward, and use a couple of the back ones as well in future projects.
Well, that’s going to save some time and money. Thanks!
To figure out the difference between what I call an old-style agent and a slush-reading agent, just take that contract in the last post and turn it into a series of questions and then just ask an agent you are interviewing those questions.
I would also make statements like “I plan on marketing my own work at times and have you do the contract negotiations when I get an offer. Do you have a problem with that?” If they want to restrict you, RUN!!!
Things like that will make the difference very clear in a simple interview. Of course, no point in having the interview until you have an offer from a publisher. Keep that in mind and don’t get the cart ahead of any horse. You don’t need an agent to sell a book, remember? You can make agent decisions after you get an offer.
“In the same way, there’s gotta be a question (or series of questions) to make it easier to discern one type of agent from the other, something that will circumvent the lies spoken just to get another client on board.”
If anyone ever figures out the right questions, I’ll pay real money to find out what they are.
One of the frustrating things for me was that, with all four of the agents, I hired, I was incredibly thorough beforehand about my needs and expectations. And my yellow sheet of needs and expectations got longer with each successive bad experience. By the time I hired my fourth agent, I was rather surprised she even wanted to take me on, giving the grilling we went through in my determination NOT to have the same-old same-old problems yet AGAIN. And yet, within a couple of months of hiring her… I again began having EXACTLY the same-old same-old problems I’d always had, which we had discussed, which I had specifically said I wasn’t willing to deal with in yet another agent, which I had specifically said should prohibit us from commencing an agent-author relationship if she didn’t agree with me about these points, and which the agent had specifically said I would certainly NOT experience THIS time.
Uh-huh.
And that happened EVERY SINGLE TIME. (I just got more intensive, each time, about trying to make sure it would NOT happen.)
Partly, it’s salesmanship. No agent is going to SAY, “No, I can’t be bothered to read the material I represent,” or, “No, I only send projects to a small number of personal contacts, and then I quit,” or, “No, I’m really not that careful about negotiating contracts,” or, “Yes, I value my relationships with editors more than my relationships with my clients,” etc. Admitting any of that would just be poor salesmanship, from the agent’s position.
I also think it’s partly delusion. We’ve talked a little here about how different the agent’s perspective is from the writer’s on many of these topics. So I think most agents think they do a really terrific job–and when they don’t read a client’s material, or don’t send a MS out, or don’t pay close enough attention to a contract, etc., etc… their view is always that it’s an anomaly, and/or they have a really good reason for this which the naive, ignorant, and unbusinesslike writer simply doesn’t understand, and/or that it didn’t happen that way (I have been AMAZED, more than once, at the capacity of my former agents to rewrite history–this included, for example, agents believing that THEY had gotten deals that, in fact, -I- had gotten with proposals they’d either never seen or had refused to send out).
And partly, it’s simple self-protection. What professional in any field admits to strangers posing questions to him that he’s sloppy and careless about aspects of his job, and that he’s always working with a conflict of interest in which his clients often lose out? It just doesn’t happen.
So I became convinced, in the long run, that there was no way to get a straight answer from an agent about any of this.
The much more reliable course is to talk to clients and EX-clients of an agent. I think this is how one learns the most reliable, accurate info about them. But it’s not always possible, for obvious logistical reasons (as well as the fact that, out of self-preservation, many EX-clients will only be frank when talking to someone they know, not to a stranger).
I’ve had two experiences, btw, of getting an offer and THEN hiring an agent.
The second was my final agent, and my experience in that case led me to believe that most agents are delighted to collect nearly $12,000 in commission for doing no work at all… but they’re being WAY overpaid for that and, moreover, there’s no guarantee at all that they’ll EVER want to work. This certainly turned out to be the case there–depositing the commission checks on the deal I brought to the table turned out to be the most heavy lifting that agent ever wanted to do.
The first was puzzling at the time and amusing in retrospect. I was a brand new writer and had an offer on the table from Silhouette Books, a major romance publisher. Several professional writers said, well, if you’ve got an offer, then you MUST HAVE an agent, and one of them kindly gave me her agent’s contact info. So I contacted the agent. Although I think this person has since retired, this was someone who was an established agent at the time, with a respected agency. And this agent’s advice to me:
“Turn down the offer, retire the manuscript, and forget about the other manuscripts you’ve completed that Silhouette has said they want to see. Instead, start writing horror or glitz-and-glam, because those are two hot fields in which I could get you a deal if you wrote a good book.”
The fact that, er, I had ALREADY written a book good enough for a sale and ALREADY had a deal on the table… was irrelevant to this agent, since he wasn’t pals with anyone at Silhouette. He was (I gathered) pals with some horror and some glitz-and-glam editors, and so he (the mind still boggles) advised me to turn down a reasonable deal from a major house for a completed MS and -retire- it… in favor of writing, ON SPEC, things that I wasn’t interested in but that HE was interested in.
Looking back… I really wish THAT had been the moment I decided to give up on agents.
This is a fantastic series of posts Dean. Thank you! And thanks to Laura too for all her wonderful comments. Great stuff.
“I plan on marketing my own work at times and have you do the contract negotiations when I get an offer. Do you have a problem with that?”
That’s an excellent example, as I can envision a slush agent responding, “Well, you have to be careful with that. You see,” (people nearly always use “you see” when they are condescending you), “You have to be careful with editors, because they are a fickle bunch. If you submit to too many at one time, they might get a bit upset. Luckily, I know the market, who likes what, and so on. It’d be in your best interest to just trust me to market your work and focus on your writing. But not too fast.”
I love the series, mainly because it fits with my view on how the author/agent relationship *should* be.
And yet, as someone who lives in Spain without the budget to go to conferences to network with editors I don’t have the same opportunities to get to know with which editors I can ignore the “don’t send us unsolicited queries” and which ones would blacklist me for doing so…
So, that’s why (so far) I’m going through the agent route (as well as writing, writing, writing) but I would like to go straight to the editors – just no idea how. And of course, I can’t take any of your in-person workshops. Know any online workshops in approaching editors directly?
Here’s a question based on this part of the article:
**The agent you want is a person who works for you, who mails a book when and where you tell him to mail it, who listens and cares about your writing needs and your writing speeds and your need to cross genres.**
What’s the general practice regarding having more than one agent? Say Agent A has contacts only in one or two genres, but the writer wants to write in several and writes fast (3-4 novels a year).
If Agent A balks at sending out the writing, is it reasonable for the writer to ‘hire’ another agent to cover the genres Agent A doesn’t? Sort of like hiring another employee for your Magic Bakery?
I suppose as a new wanna be writer (only 2 ms finished) the concept of approaching editors directly seems daunting.
I’m doing the best I can to beat your notions into my head but it is hard. The myths are ensconced in my belief system and like bad religion, is tough to shake. Would you suggest that a neophyte, preparing to shop around their first MS go for an agent to “learn the ropes” or approach the editors themselves.
Part of my problem is that when I think of publishing, only one house comes to mind: Tor. Thankfully they accept un-solicited submissions, but I’m not even sure where to start looking for more houses I feel are right for my work.
Also, this blog is daily reading for me Dean. A thousand thanks to yourself and Laura for the unbelievably helpful posts.
I keep seeing the South Park episode, “Wing,” over and over in my head — as I read these Agent Myth posts.
I also keep seeing parallels to the sports world. Too many sports agents are what one might call “jock sniffer” agents: people out to get rich quick, using the credulity of their clients against them, giving horrible advice to young players, etc. Career-killing advice. And what does the agent care?
I personally know of several pro basketball agents who have literally destroyed the careers of players — with attrocious negotiating and horrid professional advice — and yet these agents are still making millions off the next generation of clients, in spite of the graveyard of careers left in their wake. And the absolute drag is that once a young player has had his career destroyed, it’s almost impossible to recover, and the age window closes so quickly…
Jock Sniffer can bury as many young players as he wants — there will always be a fresh crop of players each spring, and all of them will be like all young writers: chanting the mantra, “Gotta get an agent, gotta get an agent, gotta get an agent…” The next bunch of free money, therefore, is just around the corner for Jock Sniffer, who never has to think twice about whose career he destroys, because he doesn’t have to care.
The new breed of blogger/slushist literary agent seems like a carbon copy of the “jock sniffer” NBA agent. Players (writers) are only useful to him or her insomuch as the player (writer) can bring in quick, large checks. They’re all seeking the next LeBron James (Stephanie Meyer) and could care less about lunchbucket (midlist) type players (writers) because their #1 focus is blowing up their own reputation(s) and pocketbook(s) as quickly as possible, with as little work on their part as possible.
I don’t know about anyone else, but as a brand new “pro” I am not much for paying someone 15% to sit on their ass, give terrible advice, block me from getting the work into the hands of editors, or treat me badly because he/she is afraid I might hurt his/her career by trying to look out for my own interests. Such a creature appears to have zero practical utility, and I pray I don’t ever swallow the Zeke’s Floatin’ Bait, because chances seem good their will be a treble hook waiting for me!
In fact, I am loving Laura’s whole idea about IP or literary lawyers. That just screams out at me as a very practical, common sense alternative to the “jock sniffers” who are all wanting to use me to get money that they don’t earn. As she says, better to pay a true employee 2% to do valuable work, than a get-rich-quick sham agent 15% to screw with you, snow you, or otherwise deal the deck against you.
In other words, JOCK SNIFFER AGENTS MAKE HULK ANGRY! HULK SMASH!!!!
Laura, and again I agree. Kris and I and a couple of other pro writers talked about the topic of how an agent, with self-serving interest and logical responses will say one thing in an interview and end up doing another thing completely. And I agree that often it is without an ounce of bad intentions. But that’s what happens. Sadly.
Jeremy, that’s exactly the type of answer you want to run from. And run fast. You phrased it so that it would sound perfectly sane to a new writer, yet as you were meaning to do, the underlying meaning is just totally destructive to a writer, and will either kill a career or put years-long holes in it. Thank you for showing that kind of sane but dangerous response one gets from agent slush-readers. Just what Laura has been saying on the nose.
Alex, well you just tapped into another myth that I haven’t gotten to yet, and that’s that editors have blacklists. We do, actually, for those stupid and insane writers who threaten us. We call it the nutcase file, and there are some pretty well-known examples of writers in that file. I have letters in my old nutcase file threatening me with a gun, threatening to cut off body parts, and so on. Ugly stupid humans out there.
But beyond that, there is no blacklist. And never because you mailed them a manuscript and acted professionally. Worst they do is not read it, second worst they do is glance at it, know it’s not right, and reject it. But again, it only takes one editor to love it, to go to bat for it, and you’re in. And Alex, it takes as much postage to find an agent as it does an editor. Not sure what you mean by that. But trust me, the old cliche in this business is accurate and been around for fifty years. “The agent you can get as an unpublished writer is not the agent you will want once you start selling.” It is a very, very accurate cliche.
Benjamin, oh, you go the agent route to “learn the ropes” and trust me, you won’t like what you learn. Have you been reading Laura’s posts here???? And I thought I was clear about closed doors. Clearly you are one of those writers who when they saw the closed editor door, they took their manuscript and went home instead of tossing it over the door. Believing a guideline is believing there is no way around a closed door. It’s up to you to find your way around or over that door, not believe it.
Good point, Brad about sports agents. Interestingly enough, most of the literary agents I have met and are friends with and worked with from both sides, are really good people and would be insulted by your analogy to sports agents. But being a good person with good intentions doesn’t make them a good employee. So while I agree there are some really nasty, scummy agents out there, and those names can be found in the warning sites, most agents actually believe what they are telling you is correct.
And that’s where the problem is. THEY ARE NOT WRITERS and don’t even begin to understand your side of the desk, even though they think they do and are giving you good advice. Their good advice, combined with lack of any rules (employer oversight) combined with an honest lack of understanding, is what causes most problems. So if it helps you to think of them as all bad, that’s fine. But honestly, 90% of them are great people, who really love the publishing business. But that just doesn’t make them a good employee for you 90% of the time. There’s much more to it, as we’ve been talking about.
I know I sound like a complete hater at this point, but really, given the horror stories — and I don’t mean just here on this blog, I mean the stories everyone seems to be telling under their breath out in the larger fiction world — make me extremely prejudiced.
Agents, as a whole, do seem like a “bad” bunch right now. And no, not because they’re bad people, but as you said Dean, even good people can be bad for business if they don’t know what they’re doing or operate contra to the objectives of the business.
So I am approaching them with a huge amount of suspicion. Am I going to pitch my novel series to them this year? Some of them, probably, yes, just as I will pitch to the house editors, and see who nibbles. But forewarned is forearmed, and at the first sign that an agent — assuming I get any nibbles — wants to begin dominating the relationship or insisting on certain things that are contra to the writer-as-boss model, I will dump them immediately and not look back.
If I don’t have to be telling war stories in ten years, about how my agent(s) effed me over, I don’t want to. Absolutely. That’s why I am reading these posts — and listening to other writers too, not just here — and I am construction a gargantuan CAUTION sign with flashing yellow lights over the cave entrance labeled, “…Agents be here!”
Assuming a publisher wants my novel series, I will strongly consider taking Laura’s advice, and consulting a literary or IP lawyer.
I am also going to be attending CONduit and LTUE this year — local cons where some fairly good Names are going to be — and I will be chewing their ears off about their experiences with agents. The good, the bad, who thinks what about which agents, horror stories, the good tales too, etc.
I am willing to have my suspicion and artificially jaundiced perception changed. But it will probably take the right agent with the right attitude and the right standards and practices. It seems these agents do exist, though in far fewer numbers than someone like me would prefer.
Anyway, not trying to go all the way down the, “AGENTS SUCK!” road, because I can’t — not without seeming like a total poseur. Just venting some frustration over the fact that the model is so convoluted, there are so many pitfalls and people who want to take advantage of people like me, and that the poofy aspirant dream of honeycomb clouds and blue skies — post publication — is dying for me, yet again. (wink)
Brad, actually, going at hiring an agent with suspicion is EXACTLY right. Exactly. Kris said she felt sorry for her most recent agent when she hired him because he had to carry all the bad baggage of the previous agents. But because of that, it’s working great.
Interestingly enough, the good agents do exist, but are impossible to find for anyone not already plugged in. You might see their name pop up, but they won’t have a web site that’s active, they won’t blog, and they only go to top writer’s conferences when they are asked to teach or when they have lost a client and need someone new. And suspicion is exactly right even when you do get an agent because as Laura said, and I said, THEY CHANGE. They get tired, they get a big client, they have family problems, and so on and so on. They are human, after all, just as any employee.
Here, in a nutshell is what I am talking about.
1) With a regular employee, you as the boss interview a bunch of them and are looking for any reason TO NOT HIRE that person. You go into the interview with a possible employee skeptical to the max and just wanting and hoping to find one that will work, but not expecting to.
2) New writers, when hiring an agent, just take anyone who says yes and cheer at the idea that they “Have an Agent!” like that’s something to be celebrated. Instead of acting like a regular boss in the hiring process, they just blindly hire the first person who walks through the door and then wonder why that employee doesn’t work out. Duh.
AND WORSE YET, they hire an employee far before they have any real chance of making any money. You know, when you have just finished your first novel. Maybe it might be an idea after the 5th novel written, when your writing and skills are up a little, but so many new writers finish a novel and then go to hire an agent. And heaven help them if they actually get one.
That’s like pointing at an empty lot and saying “I’m going to buy that lot and build a restaurant on it. Want to be my waitress?”
If that seems silly, then you are starting to see what I’m talking about.
I should say that I don’t think agents are bad people, not at all. It’s just that their incentives are not properly aligned with writers’, but rather, editors’.
In my day job, we have three groups, much like the publishing world. We have Marketing types, who have incentives to reach the annual budget figures. Sound business practices. It causes them to push sales with new programs designed to increase sales. All good so far.
The inside sales team has incentives based on profit. Additionally, they have guidelines not to do a product quote for less than 25% margin. Seemingly sound business practice, because you don’t want them damaging a product line by taking an order at 10%. However, in the past we had a head of this department that would quote at 25% or even more to maximize her bonus, placing us 20% above the price of competition. That meant we actually lost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. For the 20 years she was with us. (That’s analogous to a bad agent.)
Lastly, the outside sales team has an incentive to have their sales figure greater than the previous year. That means two things: first, that they don’t care one bit about the margin on a sale, so they are constantly creating friction in the company by trying to take orders below 10% margin; and second, that they don’t care one bit about making the budget, so they flatly ignore the marketing department and their initiatives.
If I take this to publishing, we have a similar case.
The author’s incentive is to produce as much product as he can and sell it for as much money as possible, not to mention produce material that will sell as many units as possible to maximize royalties. Very simple. Write great stories as fast as possible and get them sold.
The editor’s incentive is somewhat in line with the author’s, but is limited by bandwidth. She needs great, saleable stories, but can’t handle an infinite supply. So she can’t take every good or even great story that comes in, and she puts the brakes on. She also can’t afford to try and sell sub-par stories in her organization, because she has higher-ups to impress with her prowess. That said, she is basically on the same page as the author.
The slush agent is the rogue. As mentioned previously, the slush agent must keep a high acceptance ratio, which actually causes him to limit what he submits to very carefully selected pieces and markets. This is identical to sales logs, where in lists of account projects, salespeople will not include projects they feel have little chance of success so their hit ratio will remain high. The difference is editors seem either not to know that slush agents limit what they submit (exceptionally unlikely) or don’t care because it helps them in their own incentives. But ultimately, the slush agent must damage many authors because he must keep his job and achieve his own goals.
And that’s where the system breaks down, and we all need to remember that. A slush agent, by nature, cannot have goals that are aligned with ours. A seasoned agent, on the other hand, can and often does. But an author would do well to remember that it’s a slippery slope with an agent and he had best pay attention to his career and business, because no one else will.
Good stuff. All of this. My brain is fried from all the myths I’ve had to yank out of there that did not want to budge. I think some have left pieces behind, so I’m looking at constant clean up for the next several years. But today I got my subscription to Publishers Marketplace and I’m sniffing out editors buying the kinds of novels I have written. Now it’s a matter of actually SENDING stuff.
Yikes.
I’m treating it like an experiment. It will be interesting to see what happens.
As always, thanks for these posts, Dean.
“But honestly, 90% of them are great people, who really love the publishing business. But that just doesn’t make them a good employee for you 90% of the time.”
To reiterate this point of Dean’s, this is also my impression. Most agents are fine people who love publishing. Many of them profess to love writers, and I think a significant percentage of them are sincere about this.
But that’s a separate issue from whether or not an agent does the job well, or whether or not a given author-agent relationship works well as a business endeavor.
I knew and liked two of my agents socially before hiring them. That’s not WHY I hired them… but it was only as a result of our problems with each other in -business- that we wound up on acrimonious terms. Socially, I had found them pleasant and engaging people.
There are a number of agents whom I like very much socially. My four bad experiences with agents (including the two whom I had previously liked socially) is part of why I never have queried and never will query them; I’d like to KEEP liking them.
At a luncheon a while back, I wound up seated next to a well-established agent, someone whom I’d never met before. I had enjoyed a panel he had done a little while earlier (we were at a convention), and he was good company socially. Also someone who clearly loved books and loved publishing. So we were having a nice conversation. At some point, out of standard professional curiosity, he asked who my agent is. I said I don’t have one. This alarmed him. Because (here we go) a professional novelist MUST have a literary agent, and any writer who does NOT have one is making a HUGE and very FOOLISH mistake. I really didn’t want to lay ALL my thoughts about the matter on this guy, since we were having a nice time and I have no desire to cause unnecessary offense or argue pointlessly. So I just said that after four acrimonious “divorces” from agents, I’d realized that “marriage” just isn’t for me, and I instead work with a literary lawyer. And since my career is actually doing BETTER now and I’m HAPPIER with my circumstances now, then this is what works for me.
But he couldn’t let it go. He was SO WORRIED about me. He spoke to me in the way a gently concerned adult might speak to a young person who’d decided to drop out of school to go pursue that acting dream in Hollywood. He truly thought I was endangering my career with my choices.
He was a nice man. And he was expressing a VERY common attitude among agents. (shrug)
At another convention, I wound up touring the parties with an agent who was terrific company, someone whom I really liked and would enjoy hanging out with again. But this agent represented two writers whom I know, and I was appalled by the usual stuff–narrow submissions, not reading the work, sticking them with the agent’s pals even when this was clearly NOT what was best for the writer, losing interest after a book was rejected or a contract canceled, etc., etc. All the same-old, same-old stuff. So, again, an agent can be, from my perspective, quite pleasant socially, but no one I’d want anywhere NEAR my -business- or my -career-, thanks. And yet I know that think that in making such a decision I’m making a terrible mistake.
Whatever.
Thanks, Laura, for giving details on that aspect of agents. It is the hardest part for any of us to grasp, that these people, who really care about the business and seem, at least on the outside to have a writer’s best interests at heart, can hurt a career so badly if a writer doesn’t take control and give instructions.
Thanks, I have a hunch that comment will really help a few people.
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This was strike one against my first agent. I was Writer B, though it also would’ve bothered me had I been Writer A in the scenario. What neither Esteemed Agent and Esteemed Editor knew was that Writer A and I are good friends. We intentionally did not mention this to either the agent or the editor. But when both of us had contracts pending at the same time, we discovered that the agent was using one of us (okay, me) as a bargaining chip for the other. We knew another pair of writers with the same agency who had the same thing happen (Again, they were very good friends who wrote for the same house, and had the same agent, but didn’t tell either the agent or editor that they were close.)
The agent simply told me, “I tried hard, but couldn’t get that term changed in negotiations. Maybe next time.” It was the exact same thing she’d told the other Author B. Right. The agent told both Author As that she’d been able to “cut a deal” because the editors were anxious to keep a good relationship with the agency as they repped many of those editors’ authors.
Now…this is an agency (and an agent) with a STELLAR reputation. Clients often rave. When I’ve mentioned the above to a few authors, they look at me like I’m a conspiracy theorist, because NO WAY would that happen with that agent. Yep, it did. And not only to me.
Strike two was something else you mentioned–agency boilerplate. I was going to a new publisher with a project and wanted a clause about electronic rights amended to be more in line with what I’d had in my previous contracts. The agent was horrified, saying, “You can’t ask for that! Our agency has a boilerplate with that publisher, and what you’re asking is stricter than our boilerplate.” When I insisted, the agent told me I didn’t understand how publishing worked. I replied that -I- never agreed to the “agency boilerplate” and was not informed of it when I wanted to change houses. Given that the agent knew my strong feelings on that particular clause long before we submitted a project there, I was miffed.
Strike three was that I felt the agent lost interest in me as a direct result of the fact I spoke up–professionally and politely–about strike two. I didn’t want editors to pick up on that lack of enthusiasm, so I left.
Now, I will say that I have a FANTASTIC relationship with that agent socially. (I’m sure it’s because when I left, I sent a VERY basic termination letter that outlined the terms of our split, but did not contain a laundry list of gripes. It said nothing whatsoever about my reasons.) I’ve even blurbed books for some of that agent’s current clients at the agent’s request, no problem (they were great books!), and I’ve heard through the grapevine that the agent always says nice things about me. Furthermore, the agent did negotiate some great deals for me while we were working together.
But was that the right agent for me? NO.
Also must add…
I do think there are some fantastic, enthusiastic, honest and SMART agents out there. If you want an agent–a good one!–don’t give up. It can be frightening to leave an agent who’s not doing their best for you, especially if you think, “Well, they’re all like that, and at least I don’t have money issues/personal issues/reputation issues with this agent.” We hear the horror stories and think our mediocre (or even poor) agent experience is fine in comparison, and what an author should reasonably expect.
However, in my case, leaving that agent–even though I liked the agent personally, without knowing if I’d be able to land another one who met all my criteria, without knowing if such an agent even existed–worked out for the best. I eventually found an agent who’s a much better fit.
Thanks again to Dean and Laura for sharing your perspectives with us. I can’t say that enough.
I’m a bit confused by one of the terms being used here: “slush-reading” agents. Doesn’t that imply that any agent who accepts queries is a “slush reader?” Aren’t there many longtime agents and good agents who accept queries? Aren’t editors who accept queries also “slush readers?” And for someone without connections, don’t you usually have to submit to either a slush-reading agent or a slush-reading editor to get published?
I’m also not sure I agree with the notion that agents who blog should necessarily be considered less favorably for doing so. Writing blog posts doesn’t have to take up a lot of time, and it’s a good way to share your knowledge or experience while promoting your business. I can see that many longtime agents wouldn’t blog because older dogs have a harder time learning new tricks. But any good established agent started out as a new agent at some point in time, and in this age blogging is pretty common. I’m really thankful to some of the blogging agents who have taught me things about the publishing business, just as I am to Dean and Laura.
Those looking for publishers that fit their needs, Duotrope.com is a great site. You can apply filters and find only the publishers that match your novel. Much better than those Writer’s Market paper-bricks that make your eyes hurt after three hours of paging through them.
Moses,
First off, never confuse editors and agents. Editors work for publishers and their job is to find good manuscripts. An agent works for you. Two very, very different job descriptions that you seemed to lump into one thing. Never. Editors need to read some form of slush, agents NEVER. And that’s the difference.
So now every writer out there who still hasn’t gotten a clue about the myth is shouting “But if they don’t read queries, how do you find an agent?”
Well, first off, go back and read all these agent posts. Second, go sell your book and get an offer from a major publisher. Then, with your research done on what you think would be a good agent, you pick up the phone and tell them you have an offer and interview them.
As I have been saying over and over and over, you don’t want an agent who “#1…Promotes their own business. Yow, they work for you, remember? (What is blogging??????? Promotion of their own work. Unless they do just one blog a year for an educational post, avoid them.) #2…reads slush for publishers. Not their job, they work for you, remember? The top agents you won’t find, they find their clients by phone calls from writers with offers or another writer referring the new writer. Hit conferences, talk with other writers, meet editors (stay away from the agents) and then when you sell a book, call an agent, a top agent with a top agency.
You don’t need an agent until you sell a book.
Sigh…shouting into the dark here, but still shouting.
You mention agents that ask you or want you to slow down. I’m sure they’re out there, but I’ve never encountered one and I’m on my third agent.
I do have a question. You said that an ‘old style’ agent gives editors time to do their job without rushing them (ie time to read the manuscripts). I’m curious, what would you consider to be a reasonable amount of time to wait for an editor?
I’ve been reading your blog about agents and rethinking a lot of old ideas. I’d like to see you address a couple of questions.
I hear agents at conferences say “If you’ve been submitting your ms. to lots of different publishing houses and then you come to us–we have nowhere left to submit, as the publishers won’t look at it twice.”
Could you give us a list of questions to use to interview this top agent with a top agency? The question that I’ve alway thought would be most interesting was ‘where do you see my career going?’ no longer applies if it’s not useful to have an agent help direct my career. I’ve always envisioned it as part of a good agent’s job description. And I am talking about advice and helping, not controlling my career.
Thanks for all the great information.
Jordon, you are lucky. All three of my agents have told me, at one point or another, that maybe I should slow down. In one fashion or another. Of it comes from a statement like “Take your time and make it the best you can do.” An insulting statement at best, since it assumes first that I don’t do my best all the time, and just because I write fast, I’m not doing my best. But I just have always shrugged that off because it just shows their stupidity and the writing process and has nothing to do with me.
How long does it take an editor to get a book bought? As long as it takes, which I know means nothing to anyone wanting a set rule and a guideline. What tends to happen if you have a good project out, one editor moves faster on it than others and makes an offer. Once you have an offer, you (or your hired agent) tells the other editors about the offer and sets a four or five day time frame for them to either jump in or pass. That’s a valid time for an agent to push an editor, but the editor isn’t pushing because an agent wants it, they are pushing because another editor wants it and they better make sure they are not missing the next big thing.
But when an agent sets some artificial deadline that has nothing to do with another editor, that’s when the problems hit caused by the agent.
My way of doing things is this: I send to five editors and when one rejects, I fill that spot by sending to another editor so I always have a project out to five editors. (I can handle five.) Then, in six months, I send the project to five more editors. I don’t bother the first five if they haven’t responded unless someone makes an offer. I just let it sit in their offices or wherever it has ended up.
Of course, the key to this system and not being in a hurry is that my focus is always on the next book and writing the next book. If I was only a one-book author, this system wouldn’t work, but once I mail a book, I’m lucky to remember it unless an editor makes an offer. My focus is always on writing something new. Always forward, never backward. I don’t care what I wrote last month. I only care what I’m writing today and tomorrow.
Yeah, I know, I’m weird.
Linda, your first question has the assumption that you have submitted the manuscript, not sold it, then got an agent for that book to market it. Why do that? Just keep submitting it yourself and then hire the agent when you sell it. Never hire an agent to submit a manuscript. They won’t be able to do it very well or for very long. Read the Killing Sacred Cows chapter about agents submitting manuscripts.
Your second question also taps into another myth. And one I’m going to do an entire chapter about. The myth is simply that agents can give career advice to writers. You never hear the old-style agents saying anything about this, but the modern agents (slush-readers as I have been calling them) think that this career advice is part of their job. (And even more frightening, they think they know what they are talking about.)
I challenged one young agent at a conference over lunch one day, at a table of eight people, when she said she helped writers with their career decisions. I got disgusted and asked her flatly, “How long were you an freelance writer?”
She looked at me and said she had never been one, but that didn’t stop her from knowing what a writer needed to know.
“So,” I said, now really disgusted, “you know how we decide what to write and are passionate about, you know about our cash flow issues and how that works, you understand that we make most of our money far beyond advances of a novel, you understand that to make a living, you either have to strike it big or write under more than one name at a time, you understand that often great books are rejected fifty times before they are bought, and you think you can tell me what will be the next hot thing I should write when no one really knows what that will be? And, of course, you think I should slow down to write better, don’t you?”
She gaped at me like a fish and I went back to eating lunch. I have been an editor, a publisher, and a full-time writer for thirty years and some baby agent fresh out of college thought she could tell me how to make a living and give me career advice.
If you want career advice, go to people farther down the road THAT YOU WANT TO WALK. If you want to be an agent, talk to agents about how to do that. But if you want to make a living from your fiction, talk to fiction writers who have been doing that for decades and ignore what a twenty-three-year-old college graduate who is lucky to make $40,000 a year as an agent says about career advice. She won’t have a clue, and her advice will be based on nothing but myth and what her college professor told her.
Again, I will deal with this myth in depth in a chapter of Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. It is a very nasty myth. Writers should learn from other writers. Another reason why agent blogs telling writers what to do are so damaging and just flat silly.
DW,
You response made me think of another question. You said you submit, then don’t look back until you receive an offer or a rejection. If it’s the latter, you immediately send the manuscript off to someone else to fill that empty submission spot. During this whole time, you’re working on your next project. Do you send it out to the places the first project is sitting or do you wait until you’ve received a response from all the publishers?
“If you want to be an agent, talk to agents about how to do that. But if you want to make a living from your fiction, talk to fiction writers who have been doing that for decades…”
Hear, hear.
That is something I remind myself of all the time. We tend to reach the level of those with whom we associate. If you want to be a successful novelist, do whatever you must to associate with successful novelists.
This is true no matter what your dreams are. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, find and associate with others farther along that path.
When we don’t choose with whom we associate, the results are equally destructive. Most of us associate with at least one person who is a negative influence, whether by choice or by force (family). If we surround ourselves with enough negative influences, we tend to emulate their bad behavior just as effectively as we emulate the good behavior of good influences.
This is the reason that societal influences have such a significant effect on where we end up in our lives. We all have the power of choice, but it’s hard to choose success if failure is all you’re familiar with.
My father knew this lesson very well, and made sure to move my family to the countryside outside of Keizer, Oregon when I was four years old. He wanted to make sure we weren’t subject to the negative influences of city life that he knew too well. As a result, when I was eighteen, and my best friend started hanging out with the wrong crowd, I did whatever I had to do to get away from that friend, and only recently started speaking to him again, twenty years later, after he’s been in and out of prison at least twice. His downturn was one of the most significant reasons I joined the Navy, and that one decision has made all the difference in my life.
So you could say I learned that lesson early, and often.
Jordon, if they were in the same subgenre, I might wait some time between sending to the same editor, but again, no rules at all. It is the book that sells the book, and having a second book in the mix sure isn’t much of a problem. Editors buy books that fit their lines and that they think will sell. Just figure out ways to give them a chance to see it. No rules.
Dean, first I’d like to say thank you so much for this series. I’ve learned a heck of a lot already and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more. It’s actually motivating to me to think that I don’t have to send queries out endlessly to agents and then wait to see if an editor wants my book(s)–it makes much more sense to find out if anyone wants to buy it first, and then quickly find an agent!
Now, I have a question about something you’ve mentioned several times, but not gone into much detail on. What’s the necessity of writing under multiple names? Does it have to do with genres, or just being prolific without people necessarily noticing you’re doing so?
Thanks for your response, Dean. It’s all sinking in … more slowly for some than for others
What about the matter of getting multiple offers from different publishers in hopes of getting a higher advance. Is that difficult to do on your own, and is that something that an agent is likely to handle better? It sounds pretty basic to me (negotiating 101), but when it comes to an auction situation, I don’t know if it’s better to have an agent at that point.
After you have a publisher that offers to buy the book, is this one of the reasons you’d want to get an agent at that point: because the agent can help create an auction situation?
I know an author who recently signed with an agent, and she told me she wants an agent for only two main reasons: “#1, to have somebody to pitch a fit on my behalf if the marketing of my book isn’t going well (cover art, etc.), and #2, to arrange an auction when I sell it.”
Any comment on her two reasons? Thanks again very much.
Clare,
Multiple names are just business is all, and thinking of your readers. The funny fantasy romance novels my wife writes as Kristine Greyson have a large fan following. Yet if one of those readers picked up her dark, gritty Chicago mystery set in 1969 written under Kris Nelscott, they would be disappointed, or even worse yet, her violent, brutal fantasy Fey novels written under the Rusch name. So you do it to keep your readers knowing what they are getting.
Secondly, in many genres such as science fiction, mystery, and a few other minor areas, one or two books per year is the most you can have under made-up publisher rules that no one really understands. (Romance is very different.) Now to write two books a year, that’s 500 words per day, about a half hour a day for me. What else would I do all day? So I write all over publishing, having fun, and just mailing.
Moses, Oh, I’m sure that Laura and I could handle an auction without an issue on our books. But most writers would want an agent on the case if you get one offer. If you get an offer and hire an agent for that project, tell them where you have also sent the book and they will call those editors. So most of the time I would hire an agent to just clean up the loose ends on a project that I have out to five or ten other editors. And hope for an auction situation to develop in the clean-up. But I could do that as easily, and most writers could as well. It just feels scary is all. Not really.
But that said, the author who signed with an agent clearly doesn’t understand auctions much. They are hard to set up and it all depends on your work, how commercial a book you have written to get more than one editor going for it. And good luck getting an agent to yell and shout for you. Go back to the main post of these comments. Most of these agents are more worried about their own reps with the publishers and might call and say something like “I know this is a pain, but my author wanted me to say something about the…(blank).” Reread the basic chapter about agents don’t have your best interests in mind and then think about trying to get one to yell at an editor for you. Nope, not going to happen I’m afraid, except at a low level, and often then the agent will bad-mouth you, playing over on the editor’s side. You are much better off talking with the editor yourself. Much better off.
I have no experience with auctions, since I’ve never written anything that got more than one offer. The first premise of an auction is that there will be multiple offers, or that a project seems to be right for multiple editors. My constant experience, remember, is that literary agents always think my work isn’t right for ANYONE and shouldn’t even be SENT OUT, never mind sent to multiple editors in expectation of multiple offers.
Although it’s getting into semantics, and I suspect everyone means something different, I’d also definitely distinguish between multiple submissions and an auction.
Multiple submissions just means that you send a MS to a number of places at the same time, and look for an offer from among them. If you get one, you hope that someone ELSE will offer, too, and then you can choose from among the best bids and most enthusiastic houses putting the most tools on the table. This happens sometimes, though it has not happened to me. My own experience has been that, instead, someone offers enthusiastically, and then everyone else says, “Congratulations on your sale!” because the project wasn’t quite right for them, or they didn’t get around to reading it.
I would be DELIGHTED to handle multiple bids myself–and if it felt too complicated to me, then it’s something my lawyer could certainly handle (we’ve discussed the possibility) for her hourly fee.
An auction (at least, as I see it) is something more formal and complicated than multiple submissions. My understanding of an auction is that, for example, an agent will set a date by which the bids must be placed, and may set a “floor” for the bids, too. IOW, the agent may send the MS to four houses and say to each house, “This is an auction. The floor is $100,000 for a 2-book deal, North American rights only. I must receive your bid 2 weeks from today.”
Needless to say, to set up an auction like that and have the publishers take it seriously, the agent has to have tremendous credibility with the editors to whom he sends the MS; and the agent is only going to do this for a MS which he believes multiple houses are likely to be very interested in acquiring.
Personally, while an auction is certainly exciting, I think they’re primarily for agents (to build profile and reputation) and primarily about showmanship. The results you’re actually looking for–a 2-book deal of at least $100K for North American rights only, from one of those houses–can be achieved just as well on the basis of making a standard multiple submission and quietly negotiating the bids. But that doesn’t have the FLASH! and the PR value of an auction.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that sometimes agents hold an auction and NO ONE PLAYS. They just don’t think the book merits their getting involved in an auction; or maybe the like the book, but they think the floor is too high. So I think the writer or the project then winds up tarnished, when that really wasn’t necessary.
“she told me she wants an agent for only two main reasons: “#1, to have somebody to pitch a fit on my behalf if the marketing of my book isn’t going well (cover art, etc.), a”
Gotta say, my repeated experience on this is that agents DO NOT WANT TO GET INVOLVED in such conflicts that the writer has with the publisher.
Sometimes they flat out refused. Sometimes, they addressed such problems, but very reluctantly and only after I pushed, prodded, and really really insisted. And even after having raised a point, at my insistence, they wouldn’t follow up on it, even so. I’d have to follow up myself, or I’d have to do still more pushing, prodding, and insisting to get them to follow up. I frankly found trying to get an agent to handle a problem with a publisher to be more time-consuming, exhausting, and ineffectual than it was worth, about 95% of the time.
The ONE time I remember an agent acting with alacrity and being REALLY effective on my behalf, and without pushing, was when something went SO bad that I said, “That’s it. I want to pull all my books from this house, even the ones already published or in production, and I’m getting a lawyer, because I’m prepared to sue.” This was over a problem caused by the editor who was the agent’s good buddy. On that occasion–probably because the prospect of my withdrawing all books and getting a lawyer would be deeply embarrassing to the agent viz that house, and it was clear that I was serious (and that I had good cause for my decision), the agent intervened and solved the problem.
But for anything less serious, my own experience over and over is that agents don’t want to get involved. (And for something -that- serious, my literary lawyer could have done what that agent did. Indeed, probably could have done it more effectively, since the problem was a legal one.)
Laura
“Most of these agents are more worried about their own reps with the publishers and might call and say something like “I know this is a pain, but my author wanted me to say something about the…(blank).””"
Yup. What Dean said.
How do I know they do this? One, because I’ve worked with agents so aligned to editors, instead of to me, that they TELL ME SO, and that they FWD to me their correspondence with the editor in which I SEE them talking about me this way. Two, because the agents, in refusing even to speak to a publisher about a problem for me, speak to ME this way about me. Three, editors in their cups tell writers the things that agents say (though they may not name the specific agent). Four, an editor once specifically told me everything that former agent of mine used to say about me, after I had fired the agent. (The editor was telling me this to let me know that, despite popular opinion that I was a fool to leave that high-profile agent, I’d done the right thing.) And five… remember what we said in an earlier discussion about how careless some agents are with correspondence and gossip? I’ve seen how agents talk about other clients to editors.
Everything Laura said in those last three posts is spot on the money.
Although I’ve no experience with agents or auctions or the like, I’ve read that auctions really aren’t all that common, that they’re really more a fantasy than anything. I’m not saying that they’re impossible. But rather that it’s better to focus on writing your next book, selling the book(s) you currently have on the market than hoping for some pie-in-the-sky auction.
I’ve also read that auctions can be potentially harmful to a writer’s career, especially early on, if the contracted book(s) don’t sell well. Based on what I’ve learned here, however, it seems to me that that holds true only if you don’t write under other pen-names, and even then I’d guess that there’s also no guarantee that even that would hold true. I’d think — hope? — that the next book you put before any editor would be more important than who wrote it, barring anything truly and undeniably disastrous. I’m assuming a situation where a writer has yet to establish themselves.
And the subject of agents so often being so resistant to getting involved in the problems between writers and editors, or writers and publishers, is another reason, in addition to ones I’ve previously stated, that I think 15% simply makes agents too expensive. At least for me. If someone’s getting =15%= of my income, then I want them doing 15% of the work.
Which for me, has always meant that I should be able to just write, and an agent should deal with all the business–which includes saying to a publisher, for example: “This cover mechanical you’ve just approved is covered in typos, has white type against a white background, has jacket copy for THE WRONG BOOK, and misspells the author’s name, and has a huge blank space under the phrase ‘About the Author.’ This is unacceptable, and I will continue following up until each and every one of the errors is fixed.”
But in my experience, agents simply won’t do that. While collecting 15% of my income, the agent instead says the cover mechanical looks fine, what’s the problem? And when I point out the problem, the agent says something like, “Huh?” Or: “Oh.” Or: “Ha ha, how about that!”
Indeed, while collecting 15% of my income, agents mostly just express irritation and exasperation with me for objecting to such problems and mistakes. They’ve never once objected to my simply handling a problem and then telling them about it afterward; but they’re somewhere between catatonically uninterested or snappishly irritable if, instead, I try to get THEM to do something about a problem.
This is yet another example (among so many) of why I personally prefer working with a lawyer. She only expects me to pay her for work she actually DOES; and once she agrees to handle some work, she follows up and sees it through without constant prodding and poking from -me-, and without tantrums and snappishness.
Laura, I agree about lawyers, and not because I went to three years of law school and many of my closest friends are lawyers. The reason I agree is that lawyers have rules and pretty firm codes they follow. Now granted, there are bad people everywhere, and dumb lawyers and lazy lawyers, but if a lawyer of any ilk steps too far out of bounds, they lose their ability to practice. They can be tossed out of the bar and once that happens, they are not allowed to practice.
And they have years of training and schooling and tests and continuing education to keep up their job skills.
Agents? They have a business card.
Steve and Chris York have set up their cat as an agent, for heaven’s sake. She gives bad advice, wants treats for not working, won’t mail manuscripts, and insults writers. Sounds like some real agents I know, to be honest. Chris and Steve did that to make a point and yet so many writers will laugh at the comments from the cat and yet let their own agent get away with the same thing.
Let me say this one more time so maybe it will sink in to just one more writer reading this. Agents have no training, no rules, no organization that looks over what they do. Nothing.
Yet writers just willingly, without so much as a standard job interview or a check of background, hand over their career to this untrained people, follow their career advice, give them control of their money and livelihood, and then wonder and are shocked when things go wrong.
Let me simply say (from my three years of law school training) that all of us writers deserve what we get. Duh.
These agents are nothing more than employees and need to be treated in the same fashion. Before you hire an employee, you check their background. Any writer out there ever check an agent’s background? A few of the smarter ones, maybe. But we all should. And if your agent is slow getting money to you, or not responsive, spend the small amount of money to have a professional employment service check them out. You might be stunned at what you will find out. Stunned.
And interestingly enough, they ask for your SS number, but do writers get their agent’s SS#?? Why don’t we? We should, every darn time.
We have talked about just a few of the myths that make such silly decisions as giving our money to a complete stranger without checking them out seem perfectly logical. And I have beat on the fact that agents don’t know writing, yet writers turn over their careers to them without a second thought, and celebrate that they do. The myths are powerful, but once you step outside of the myths and really, really, really look at the agent/writer relationship, it makes no real sense at all. None.
They are employees. Check them out, hire them and fire them as you need them. Use an attorney if you want.
In other words, plain and simple: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN CAREER.
“Steve and Chris York have set up their cat as an agent, for heaven’s sake. She gives bad advice, wants treats for not working, won’t mail manuscripts, and insults writers.”
I think I was represented by this cat! Or else by this evil cat’s twin.
In a similar vein, a novelist I know who’s made a fair bit of money out of Hollywood, including selling some screenplays, in addition to selling option rights to books, has always said to me that you don’t need an agent in Hollywood–they cost too much and do too little. What you need is a lawyer (and you REALLY need a lawyer there, because the contracts are VERy complicated, very specialized, and movie producers and studios are Not Your Friend when it comes to setting terms and making money).
Laura
Let me tell you something that just happened to me today with an agency I fired years ago.
First a bit of context: Fired agents remain your employees so long as the contract that they negotiated remains in effect. So if your book is in print, that agent is still your agent of record for the book. Unless something goes seriously wrong where you split payments, etc, the agent remains the one to whom the checks go.
I have a standing order with all of my agents, current and former, that any check over $1000 gets sent by UPS or Fed Ex, so that I can track it. I need to be notified that *any* check (no matter how small) is on the way, and I need to know how much it is and how it was sent.
About Sept. 21, I heard from one of my former agent’s assistants. She wondered why I hadn’t cashed a $3000 check. The agency was asking because they were closing their books for the quarter and hadn’t gotten that check back. I looked; I had not received said check. I looked through my e-mail. I hadn’t received notice that said check was coming, either.
I said those things, told them to reissue the check, and to overnight the damn thing like they were supposed to do in the first place. They did. Matter closed.
I thought.
Today I got another check from the agency for another project–sent one week after they told me they’d put the damn thing in the mail–and in the “expenses” taken out of that check were these two items. $19 for the lost check–and $19.17 for the overnight fees to send the lost check.
A check that they lost–or never sent in the first place–because they never followed my instructions. Their mistake, 100%. And if I hadn’t gone over the statement they sent me, I wouldn’t have noticed the $38 that they had taken out of my current check.
Another note here. They’re not authorized to take out these charges in the first place. I signed on with this agency before they took these fees. So I never agreed to anything like this.
Nickel and dime. And they have one of the bestselling writers in the world as their client. They don’t need my nickels or my dimes. Am I peeved? Oh, you bet. Problems with agents, small problems and large. (Btw, the current agent, who does not have one of the world’s bestselling authors, does not charge anything except his commission. Bless him.)
This continues to be a great discussion.
I posted a link to Dean’s agent posts on a professional writers’ list and got some interesting reactions. A few of them were quite defensive. I kept thinking as I read them, “This person is afraid.”
Afraid of admitting that they’ve made a mistake. Afraid of being told that their agent is not going to take care of them. Afraid of having to take charge of their own career.
To those folks I said – “You like the arrangement you have – that’s fine.” And they still came back with more fearful arguments.
Keep fighting the good fight, Dean and Laura. You’re opening some people’s eyes, at least.
Pati, I also posted the links to these discussions to a pro writer group site and I’m surprised at 1) the level of hostility I’ve seen directed towards the posts and 2) the general lack of real discussion revolving around not just the posts themselves, but about agents themselves.
Dunno what to think, so I take it all with a grain of salt and add it to my growing knowledge base. These posts and comments are a treasure trove, and I thank Dean and Laura and everyone else for posting and contributing. I know more now than I did before, and that’ll only help once I have an offer in hand on my next project.
Pati and Jim, I’ve noticed this, too–and not just lately, but ever since I started saying to other writers that, after many bad agent experiences turned me off that business model, I now work without an agent and am very happy with this decision.
I reiterate and repeat until I’m blue in the face that I am NOT saying that NO ONE should work with agents, and I am NOT telling anyone to fire their agent, and I am NOT telling any who’s agent-hunting to cease their hunt if they really want an agent. Rather, I’m saying that I want to see working WITHOUT an agent become acknowledged as one of the viable business models in our profession, rather than continuing to be universally dismissed as a stupid mistake.
Most of the time, I not only feel unheard, but even ridiculed. (shrug) I also get the distinct impression that, apart from people who know me very well, most writers just figure I had those consistently bad experiences for years with agents because I must be an idiot who hired charlatans and/or that I must be difficult to work with. (shrug again)
I dearly wish there had been a steadily working, unagented writer talking about working without agents back when I needed to hear it, so that I wouldn’t have felt like I was stepping off a cliff when I decided not to work with agents anymore. With that in mind, I don’t care about ignorant, hostile, smug, or condescending reactions to what I say on this matter. I’m not saying it for people who fervently embrace conventional wisdom and willfully reject any other possibility as valid. Rather, I’m saying it for whoever is now as I was back then; I’m saying it for someone who will benefit from hearing it.
And, truthfully, the further away I get from working with the agent-author business model, the less I can see any valid reason for ever returning to it.
Laura, that’s the exact reasons I’m also trying to shine a light on the myths surrounding agents. So when a writer is faced with either not writing and staying in the myth, or looking for another way, there is another way and a few of us saying, “Hey, you might try it this way.”
I have said over and over and over again that there is no right way. Every writer is different, every agent is different. A writer who just laughs or scorns other opinions has a very closed mind and will need a vast amount of luck to make it very long through a career without getting bit by that closed mind. And not just agents, but all the other myths that fill this business.
What I am finding very interesting is how my attitude is also changing as we have these discussions and I type these chapters, thinking through how to explain some of these myths and problems. What this is making me do it go back to my business mode, my three years of law school mode of thinking. I’m looking at this with a very, very cold eye, and the more I look, the more I wonder why I dealt with agents much at all over the years.
And how much in lost work and mental issues on my side causing lost work did they cost me? For a very long time, I had an attitude of “I don’t want to go back to media books, but nothing I write will get through my agent.” Then I just kept selling books on my own, even though I had that attitude about agents, and slowly started to look at the issue. My issue.
Having an agent as a reader and mailer stopped me from writing. It felt like I lost control of my own career, and I can’t feel that way. I have to be in control of my own work. And it wasn’t until the idea of doing POD and Kindle editions and other editions that were in my control finally got me stepping back and thinking about all this. And that’s when I woke up completely from the agent myth. But like you, Laura, and others, it has taken me years to work through these myths because even though they stopped me at times and hurt me other times, I somehow just kept going.
My hope here is to help a few writers wake up a little sooner, a little quicker, save a few years of pain and trouble.
Now, that’s the writing side. What has me the most scared these days is the clear fact that writers just hand agents control over their money. And just as I did the first time, I never checked out the person who I just gave this money control to, I never once asked just logical business questions. And these agents have no rules, no organization, no training, nothing. An agent could be stealing a writer blind and the writer would have to be lucky to discover it. And even with the law school training, I didn’t wake up to this even though I knew of at least ten writers who had agents take money from them.
What in the world is wrong with us (writers) as a class that we allow this to happen? How in the world did we set up a system that celebrates such bad business practice, such flat stupid business practice. And why did I fall for it as well with all my business training and my years in law school?
If I had become a lawyer (I did not) and I was sitting in my little office behind my little desk and a client walked in and asked me the following question. “I want to give a person I don’t know, haven’t met, haven’t run a background check on, control over all my money and give them 15% for handling my money, what do you think?” I would have managed to stop laughing long enough to ask the next question, which would be, “What rules does this person follow? Is this an attorney or a CPA?” And the answer would be “No rules, no training required, just some stranger who liked something I wrote, but I really, really want them to tell me how to run my business and handle all my money.”
I would, more than likely, suggest the client get medical attention.
Dean wrote: “And how much in lost work and mental issues on my side causing lost work did they cost me? “”
I’ve said before here that although the money that I’m saving/pocketing by NOT paying 15% of my income to agents (so far, it’s close to $15,000) was very eye-opening to me and has since become another reason I seriously doubt I’ll ever go back to an agent-author business model, MONEY was =nowhere= on the long, LONG list of reasons I decided to quit working with that business model.
But the above issue that Dean mentions was VERY high on the list: mental issues, and lost work arising from mental issues. All four of my agents caused me too much mental and emotional stress.
VERY high on my long list of reasons for getting literary agents out of my working life, when I decided to do it, was that I wanted that counter-productive, distracting, and fatiguing STRESS =out= of my professional life.
And that has ever since proved to be an excellent decision for me. No matter what has happened since then (and, actually, mostly GOOD things have happened since then), I am always aware of the positive effect of having shed from my working life the =stress= that agents repeatedly inflicted on me, whether they inflicted it actively or passively. (Actively = belittling me, insulting me, refusing to send out my work, fighting with me, siding with an editor against me, etc. Passively = ignoring me, not following up, not responding, dismissing my concerns or complaints, being forgetful and careless, etc.)
I was appalled when I looked back and realized how much of my life and my energy I had LOST in fretting about my agents, trying to figure out how to talk to my agents about projects or problems without getting my head bitten off, fuming about how my agents behaved toward me, worrying about whether I could raise a subject without the agent blowing up (again), trying to understand an agent’s seemingly inexplicable position (not sending out a project, not following up on something, refusing to request I be reassigned to another editor, refusing to answer a question, etc.), trying to figure out how to convince an agent that a problem was actually a problem, trying to decide whether to fire an agent, and–above all–trying to figure out how to convince an agent to SEND OUT MY WORK. I was FLABBERGASTED, in particular, when I realized how MUCH of my life I had wasted developing arguments trying to convince my LITERARY AGENTS to SEND OUT my work!
Man, the RELIEF of not having that exhausting, time-consuming, energy-draining, and pointless STRESS in my working life anymore… It was so debilitating and damaging, it’s STILL higher on the list than money when I list all the reasons I don’t want to go BACK to the agent-author business model.
But, again, worth noting we base our decisions on our experiences. If a writer’s agent has been her stalwart support, greatest fan, wisest advisor, and most calming influence in the storm of publishing, her take will be the exact opposite of mine.
It just so happens that my experience, four (reputable, respected) agents in a row was that having an agent always made my career WAY too much like a season of the TV show “24″: “We’ve got a mole inside the unit who’s trying to bring us down!”
It further so happens that I queried a lot of agents over the years, too, some of whom took time to give me advice even though we didn’t wind up working together… and their advice was always on a par with, “Buy a house you can’t afford and get an interest-only mortgage for it.”
Hence, my views.
But I also think the =ideal= of the agent-author business model is terribly seductive. So seductive that writers believe ardently in it, even in cases where it really ISN’T working well for them. I was one of those writers! And, even now, knowing what I know and feeling as I feel, I can nonetheless fully appreciate the allure of the seductive =ideal= of the agent-author business model.
Its appeal is that, in this highly competitive, unforgiving business, and in this very lonely, insecure profession, there is someone who BELIEVES IN YOUR TALENT, YOUR WORK, YOUR CAREER POTENTIAL, AND YOU; who will partner you every step of the way; who will always go to bat for you; who will be there for you when the chips are down; and who will help you achieve the success and recognition that you deserve.
WOW, is that seductive! It’s very hard to give up on believing in that ideal, precisely because it is so very desirable.
Dean, this has been a fantastic discussion. Laura, thanks for your insights. I was fortunate enough to snag my contract directly with my publisher. I agonised over trying to find an agent before I signed, but after discussions with other writers and my soon-to-be editor, I decided that I’d already done the hard yards and an agent wasn’t going to add anything more.
I have since lined up an agent. After reading all the posts and comments I’ll be approaching that relationship very differently. A huge thank you for dispelling so many urban myths!
“I must be difficult to work with.”
I know that feeling. Most people think I am difficult to deal with. By contemporary standards, I am, and I am comfortable with that. (I suspect that by standards of 200 or 500 years ago, I’d be considered difficult to work with as well.)
People also consider me complex. But after many years, I’ve figured out that I am actually very simple. I expect people to do what they say they’re going to do, and I don’t except any unreasonable excuses for failing to do so, even from myself. As a result, I like expectations to be very clearly explained and understood by both parties so there is no confusion. Once that’s done, everybody should get along, right?
But most people don’t have that expectation, and furthermore they certainly don’t believe they should be held to it. And that creates friction with me. I hate it. Five or ten years ago, I’d fly off the handle. Now I just ask again. And again, and again.
I watch too many people enter into business arrangements, even simple ones with family, in which they expect the other party to do something but fail to tell them. That creates dissatisfaction with the relationship.
I think a disappointing agent is disappointing because he promises to do many things that shouldn’t be done by the agent, and then fails to follow through because it’s not really his job. Or worse (much worse), he tries to follow through and can’t because he’s not competent to perform those tasks because again, it’s not his job and he’s not trained or experienced enough to handle those tasks. Not to mention that many authors fail to declare their expectations with their agent, so they can’t possibly be satisfied with the performance.
Dean’s contract goes a long way toward establishing those expectations of an agent.
One thing I thought of while reading your last comment, Dean, is the requesting of financial records for the agency. I imagine some agencies are publicly traded (I haven’t checked), making that an easy disclosure, but I wonder about those that are private.
A few years back we were handling a big IT project at my company with our Canadian sister company, and we had narrowed the bid for the project to two companies. One was far less expensive, but we had reservations in our office. So we asked to see the financial records, so we could determine how fiscally solvent they were. Our sister company really freaked out about how we didn’t trust Canadians, the IT company refused, and it became a really big deal.
We ultimately decided to go with the less-expensive company, against our better judgment. In 2008, they sold their company to a conglomerate, resulting in greatly decreased customer service, when their service wasn’t very good to begin with.
One can always ask to see a company’s financials. They’ll either show them willingly or not. But I wonder how the established among us feel about asking that question?
Whoa, and further thereto, on the subject of how defensive people are about this… On the basis of this discussion, I have just seen myself mischaracterized on an agent’s blog as being someone who “cannot comprehend” that a writer can have a longterm and fruitful relationship with an agent.
Which is patently inaccurate. I have said over and OVER here that my view about agents is a minority position, that the conventional view is that a writer needs an agent, that most writers I know prefer to work with an agent, and that anyone for whom the agent-author business model has worked well will naturally have views about it that are quite opposite from mine–not because the other writer is an idiot, but because we each learn from our own experiences, and so mine have shaped me, just as another writer’s have shaped her.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pointed out here that there is no one Right Way or Universal Answer on this subject, and that there are writers for whom the agent-author business model has worked out well, even though it kept working out badly for -me-.
So where did the notion that I cannot comprehend this come from, for goodness sake?
Like Pati and Jim, I’m also getting pushback on the agent posts here by Laura and Dean. Which makes no sense to me, since all they’re doing is presenting an alternative business model (i.e. using a literary lawyer) for when the agent-author model doesn’t work for a particular writer.
Pati’s right, some people are afraid and find Laura’s positive experiences without an agent threatening.
Now that I think about it, Dean’s core message with the agent myths posts is “You are responsible for your own career.” Which could be upsetting to those who thought an agent would take care of them so they could ignore the business side of writing.
I’ve found Laura’s story about her journey from using an agent to using a literary lawyer enlightening. There are projects that I’d love to write that don’t pay enough as an advance to get a good agent, but the book contract is too complicated to go it alone. Knowing I could find a good literary lawyer to look over the contract (instead of signing with a bad agent) is so liberating to me.
Dean@”My hope here is to help a few writers wake up a little sooner, a little quicker, save a few years of pain and trouble.”
And you have, and I’m trying to get the word out to other writers so they can read these posts as well. I’m broke at the moment, but as soon as I’m not, I’m donating here and buying a couple of Laura’s books as a “Thank you.”
Last year I interviewed an agent I’d met at a conferance and published it on my tech blog. The point of my interview was about e-publishing and the Espresso book machine, but when I went back and reread it and found her spouting the myths at me in her responses.
http://thomaskcarpenter.com/2009/05/10/interview-with-krista-goering/
Not that there was any doubts about the prevalance of the myths, but it was interesting to find them in my own minor dealings with agents.
Caveat Emptor.
Easy to say. Harder to do.
It’s so nice to just assume it’s someone else’s job to take care of us.
Maybe that’s an emotional artifact from childhood, when our parents — well, most of our parents anyway — took care of everything. Certainly mine did, and I had a very happy-go-lucky and care-free childhood as a result. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally miss those days, especially when all the little and big chores of being a husband, father, bread-winner, et al, get me down.
The Agent Myth promises — in a sense — to return us to those days. Someone else — an Adult — will take care of us. Make all the Bad Things go away, tuck us in at night, sing us a song, and so forth. Then, all we have to do as writers is write! Care-free! Hallelujah. Just like when we were kids. Be creative, and let the Adult handle the nasty business part.
I know that’s the state of the Myth down in the aspirant pool: that agents will magically solve EVERYTHING and anyone good enough to get an agent is automatically on their way, no more worries, yadda yadda. It’s cake and pie and balloons for the rest of your freaking life.
Alas, it seems none of us get a free pass. Even people who profess to have wonderful agents and wonderful working relationships with same, would probably be doing themselves a big, big favor, to try and keep an eye on the store. Even if it means insisting — strongly — that Wonderful Awesome Agent step beyond his or her comfort zone. With editors. With negotiations. By adhering to an agreement that favors the author above all else. By running a transparent operation.
I imagine Dean’s existing reputation — as Maverick Dean — has been amplified in the circles of the pros who have heard about these Agent Myth posts. I am not shocked at all to hear that there is pushback, some of it hostile in nature.
Of course the agents will push back. Saying that there is Another Way around them threatens them at their core: because if enough writers ignore the agent model and enough publishers rediscover the benefits of getting their material straight from the source, the number of agents able to support themselves is going to go down. Perhaps way down? Less business for the whole, thus the whole has to shrink and suddenly lots of agents — especially slushists/bloggers — will have to find real work.
Also, I’ve noticed that most writers who have published — and even many who have not — are fond of declaring their road to be The One True Road and will hold forth at length about this One True Road in front of anyone who will listen; or read, as the case may be. So those that have agents — and consider it to be a matter of prestige and a sign of their advanced state in the biz — won’t like hearing someone come in and say, you know what, many agents suck, steal money from their clients, are dishonest, so watch them like a hawk or even eschew them altogether.
By saying this you’re basically robbing agented writers of their “speshul,” when you tell them that their agent — their vaunted agent — might not be all they’re cracked up to be.
I said it earlier. Forewarned is forearmed. I shall be approaching all agents with a tremendous degree of skepticism. I do not like the idea of an employee messing up my business for me, telling me I don’t know how to run my business, or worse yet, telling me I am not even competent to be in business at all.
“I imagine some agencies are publicly traded (I haven’t checked), making that an easy disclosure, but I wonder about those that are private.”
Oh, heavens no. I doubt highly that any agency except maybe one of the big ones out of Hollywood are publicly traded. Doing that would put strict rules on them and they wouldn’t like that.
Nope, these are privately held companies or LLC or just a person’s business. Again, one of the major problems.
75% of agents out there are working alone or with one other agent and an assistant. The rest work in different size agencies from William Morris on down to small agencies with five agents. For a while I looked at how agents operated trying to see a connection on some of these myths with the size of agency, but alas, there is no connection. You will find all types of agents across the board.
And, of course, there are what I call “super agents” out there, meaning the agents that only deal in the huge deals. They would snort at a book that would only bring a low six figures. Not worth their time. There are maybe, at most, a dozen of these and no one reading this list could name half of them, let alone one or two. I’d be lucky to hit eight or nine names and I have been studying this stuff for a long time now and know a few of these folks and hired one once.
We had a writer who attended one of our workshops stumble across one of these with the right book. He called me and asked me if a few things were normal that the agent was saying and I asked the agent name. I had to have him repeat the agent’s name three times before I believed him. Those folks play on another planet and you have to really have the commercial writing chops and a hell of a project to even think of attracting their attention. And you have to have a soul of stone and an ego the size of Canada to play in their world for long. Makes Hollywood look tame.
But that said, if you can write fantastically commercial projects, have an ego that can withstand truck hits, and the ability to promote yourself like crazy, those agents will make you money. A lot of money.
I hired one once, for three days, for one project, and ran screaming because this agent instantly started telling me what I could write and couldn’t write, and when, and for the project we were doing, he was correct. I just didn’t want to go that way and I had to hire him to learn that fact. He and I are still friends. He understood completely. I LIKE writing small books at times.
And no, I won’t tell you who these big guns are. If you have to ask, you don’t need one and couldn’t handle one anyway, and that’s the honest truth. But trust me, you won’t find them blogging, reading slush, or at a convention. And if you have to ask how you hire one then, you don’t need one and couldn’t handle one if you found one. Learn the business before you go into the deep end. Honest advice.
Laura, you’re absolutely right. You’ve said repeatedly that working without an agent is right, but for you, and possibly some other writers. But not for all. That is a grossly inaccurate characterization of your comments, which have been very tempered and helpful.
Interesting turn of discussion. While reading the last few comments about how writers want an agent to take care of them, it sounded familiar.
Many people want the same thing from their government, their employer, their spouse, and whoever else they can find, so they don’t have to make any of their own decisions, and can hold someone else responsible for their failures. We’re all surrounded by people like that, and I suspect everyone has been that way for at least a short time. I know I have.
So good news for those types of writers. Along came literary agents, campaigning like politicians. “Just sign with me! I can make all your dreams come true!” And BAM! You’re on board a runaway train to nowhere.
You’re right, L.M. The underlying theme here is “You are responsible for your own career.” Even better stated it is “You are responsible for your own life.”
My father used to tell me things like “Nothing’s free in this world, Boy,” or “If you want something, you gotta go and get it! Nobody’s gonna give you a damn thing.” (He really talks like that; he’s from Tennessee.)
He was right, and he still believes it. I never quite had figured it out, but although the publishing industry seemed to exist solidly on the basis of writers submitting to agents and agents submitting to publishers, I was never quite comfortable with that. I didn’t know why, but I now realize it’s because I’d be putting myself at the mercy of another, and I hate that. Makes my skin crawl.
I am a salesperson by trade. B.S. sales seminars tell you that everyone is a salesperson in their daily life, and it’s something that’s actually true. We all use negotiating skills, some far better than others, to get what we want. The best negotiators can structure an agreement so everybody gets most of what they want.
When we’re talking with our spouses, families, or friends, we negotiate to get what we want by providing what the other party wants. Sometimes we just compromise; that’s important in any relationship. But often we just have to convince the other person to do it our way, somehow. Imagine hiring an agent to sell your ideas to your spouse, especially one that didn’t really care about your ideas. That would usually end up in your or your spouse’s failure to reach the desired outcome, and the relationship would deteriorate.
When I sell products, I like to talk to the customers myself. It’s the only way I can know how the customer feels and therefore try to deliver what he wants, and simultaneously to communicate what I want. I see no reason to alter that method in publishing, especially given that there are other, better ways than going through an agent for submission and marketing.
Lots of good stuff in the discussion here. I wish I were stunned at the pushback that y’all are getting from your workshops and listserves, but I’ve taught professional writers stalled in their careers long enough to understand that the defensiveness comes first, and then some of them step beyond it.
I’ve been noodling about something Laura said–dunno if it was in response to this post or a previous one–about agents earning 15% and not doing 15% of the work. And that has bothered me from the start.
She and I come at the people we hire differently. I don’t look for someone else to do 15% of the work. I look for added value.
Let me take this out of the realm of agents at the moment, and put it in a different context. My mother was an extremely anal woman, probably obsessive/compulsive, and it was around cleanliness. Our house sparkled. She taught me how to have a house like that, without a speck of dust or dirt, everything in its place, and even the no-iron sheets ironed.
I know how to do it. I lived it. I don’t do it. However, I want a clean house. I don’t mind clutter, but I loathe dust. I could–and used to–clean everything. On a weekend. When the place got bad. But I could use my mother’s methods. I can delineate them to you even now, 30+ years after I moved out of her house. With minimal daily effort, my house could sparkle.
I don’t do it. I hire someone to clean and frankly, her standards are so far below my mother’s that I can hear my mother clucking disapprovingly as this woman cleans. But every week, my house gets clean. Dust-free (relatively), dirt-free (certainly), and a little sparkly. It’s an added value, one I’m loathe to go without.
I hire an agent for the same reason. To add value. My current agent adds value. He doesn’t do 15% of the work, nor would I want him to. I do the work. He does the things I know how to do but prefer not to do. So I hire him for added value.
Most of those things are as quirky as my house cleaning needs–the way he asks for things I would shrug off (but I now benefit from), the fact that his is a voice that I occasionally use to speak for me. Many of them aren’t something a literary lawyer can do. If I thought so, I’d hire a literary lawyer.
But those are my quirks. And my attitude–on anyone I hire–is do they add value? If so, then they’re worth what I pay them. If not, they’re so gone.
And yes, I’ve made horrible mistakes with agents and other employees as well. This is years of hiring and firing talking.
I had a “value added” view about agents in the past, but I can only think of one sole occasion when I actually =got= value added. Not one sole agent; rather, one sole occasion with one of my former agents. (Which is why, of my four agents, that’s the only one whom I don’t regret having hired; though I should have left that agent sooner than I did.)
To use Kris’ analogy, my experience was that I kept winding up paying people to come and clean my house, who instead came and made it messier, so that I flt like I always wound up =cleaning up after them=, IN ADDITION to doing all my own work. Hence my irritation about the division of money vs. the division of labor.
But I agree thinking about what “value added” qualities you want in an agent-author relationship is a very good way to look at this for many writers.
I would add one thing to what Kris says, my opinion on it. I have rarely, if ever, had an agent actually earn 15% worth of the money on a novel. So on that side, I have agreed with Laura completely, yet I also tend to look at agents and other employees not so much on the percentage of work, but also on value added, as Kris said. But how I approach it is “Is it WORTH the money TO ME for what the agent will do?” So in that respect I look at it the way Kris does.
But there is yet one more added side to this. If you look at it strictly from a “amount of work for money” or “added value” which are both right, but I add in a third factor. “Downside distraction.”
On agents, for me, the roadblock that just having an agent puts up IN MY MIND is enough to keep me from not writing. If I am thinking I’m going to have to run this through an agent, get their approval, fight to get them to mail it to more than their eight friends, and then watch them with all the money, I just say, “to hell with the project.”
Now, over the years I’ve had some pretty good experiences with agents, even though I have sold all my own books. Yet I can’t begin to tell you how many novels I didn’t write because IN MY HEAD I still believed some of these myths. I made career decisions at times to AVOID the problems with an employee. How bad is that?? How silly is that, yet I did it, more than once.
So for me, yes I look at the actual amount of work an agent would do for me compared to the money earned, and yes, I look at value added to my career as Kris says. But the third factor, the “distraction factor” of simply having an employee, has to be factored in for me right along with the other two. And for me, it’s a huge factor. The biggest, actually.
To describe the “distraction factor” using Kris’s housekeeper example, say you really wanted a housekeeper, but the housekeeper turned out to be so passively judgmental about how the house looked on arrival that over the months you started slowly cleaning things BEFORE the housekeeper got there, until it ended up you were using a large part of a day just to keep the employee happy.
Silly, right, but what writers do all the time with agents.
How do I often get around this third distraction factor? I play a mind game with myself. Any book I write, I promise myself no agent will be involved with it. Then I write it the way I want to write it, market it the way I want to market it, and if I need an agent to help with the negotiating part, I hire an agent only for that project. Or a lawyer only for that project. But to keep the distraction part out of my life, I have to play the game.
And what’s interesting is that the last five novel projects I have worked on in the last year I haven’t needed either an agent or a lawyer. And they have been the most fun writing I have had since I started writing. For me, the distraction factor is huge. Value added is important, actual amount of work done is important for costs, but the distraction factor is what kills me every damn time. I just can’t have the ghost of an agent standing in my office.
I definitely identify with what Dean is saying about the distraction factor. (And I’ve known many people who do indeed clean their houses before the housekeeper arrives! )
As I’ve said before, although I’ve been astonished to realize how much more money goes into my pocket since I turned to self-representation, money was =nowhere= on the list of reasons I quit the agent-author business model. What Dean calls the “distraction factor,” though, was VERY high on the list–and it’s high on the list of reasons I don’t want to go back to working with an agent, either.
I don’t think I ever DIDN’T WRITE something because of having an agent, but I certainly did used to spend MONTHS at a time fretting about how to convince my agents that it was a GOOD IDEA for me to write something and that book should be SENT OUT. And I did this fretting precisely because of the negative way (and, in some cases, the ANGRILY negative way) they tended to respond to my work and to my desire for it to be sent out. The fretting wasn’t me borrowing trouble (I am not a fretter, by nature), it was instead a learned response based on my experiences with the agents.
So to take the value-added analogy further, when I look back, I see that I was paying a housekeeper to come here, refuse to clean, AND belittle my house, my decor, and my own housekeeping abilities, and occasionally throw a tantrum at me for having a house. So I just clean my house myself now. And since I’m a good housekeeper, this works out well.
I’ve heard of agents hired to negotiate the deal after a book is sold (by a newbie) getting enough of an increase on the advance to more than cover their 15%, in which case they’ve clearly earned it. Perhaps a literary IP lawyer could have done as well, I don’t know.
It’s often helpful to have an intermediary in a negotiation. It lends a level of detachment where personal involvment might interfere with the process; most people who don’t do it for a living aren’t very good at it. (From buying and selling houses, for example, I know it’s much easier for me to be a tough negotiator if my responses and demands are filtered through the real estate agent than if I were discussing it with the buyer or seller in person.) In the literary world, I know an author and magazine editor whose agent got the rights reverted on several years’ worth of editorials (originally works for hire). He might have been able to do that himself, but the very request might put him in an awkward position with his employer, especially if refused.
I’ve been around — if not in — this business enough to know more about it than most newbies, but also enough to know how much I don’t know. This Killing the Sacred Cows series is great, Dean.
That’s an interesting distinction, Dean.
Are you saying that you essentially avoid keeping an agent “on retainer” and instead sell the book yourself, then when you need to hire an agent for the contract negotiation, but only for that book?
I suppose you made that clear before but that I missed it. But that would mean that you are hiring the agent with the explicit understanding that they are to handle that contract only?
But, to be clear, if you find a housekeeper who comes and cleans the house and behaves well, and that relieves you of the burden of cleaning, then that’s a working relationship worth having. Just because I had a series of pathological housekeepers who turned me off the whole idea, and just because I happen to like keeping house myself, that doesn’t mean EVERYONE should keep house for themselves. It just means -I- should keep house for myself–and I wouldn’t suggest otherwise to anyone who either has a really good housekeeper or who seriously WANTS a housekeeper.
Can I torture that metaphor any MORE? (Oh, if I really try, I think I can…)
Back to the there is no One Right Way or Universal Answer. Whether choosing to work without or without an agent, I think (as per Dean’s “your are responsible for your own career” motto) the point, really, is that a writer needs to think about what he wants, why he wants it, how to get it, and whether he IS getting it (and, if not, what to do about that problem).
If a writer wants an agent, he should think intelligent about WHY he wants an agent, WHAT his expectations are, and then regularly examine whether his expectations are (a) realistic, (b) changing, and (c) being met.
And ditto if a writer decides he does NOT want an agent.
Laura
Jeremy, that’s right. When I need a task done and think another person would add value or help in a way, I hire that person for that task. Never, ever again will I have a full-time agent. Just don’t need one. But I do have agents I like to work with and who I know and have checked out completely. Those are the ones I pick up the phone and call when I need help on something. And when I do that, I gladly pay the going rate.
Exactly, Laura. I agree completely. No right way, just the way that works better for each writer, from an informed position. And that “informed” word is what this is all about.
Dean, do you think a beginning writer would get a considerable amount of pushback from most agents if attempting to take that position?
I suppose that’s a guarantee with the wrong kind of agent, or the wrong agent for me, but that the right agent would be very agreeable to such a concept.
Jeremy, first off, why would a beginning writer need an agent???????? Go back and read my posts again and then firmly plant the standing knowledge that has been around a long time in your mind.
“Any agent you can get as an unsold writer isn’t an agent you will want when you sell a book.”
If you have an offer in hand from a major publisher, you are not a beginning writer and can hire who fits you. If you are trying as an unsold beginning writer to get an agent, you get what you deserve I’m afraid. Sorry to be so blunt, but alas, the hard truth.
Point taken. I didn’t write what I meant, unfortunately.
It would have been more accurate to ask about an author with his first offer in hand. But you’ve answered that. The writer with an offer in hand can hire who he wants.
What I was trying to ask was whether a writer with his first offer would find agents reluctant to deal only with the one contract. But that is just a slip into conventional thinking. Rather, the author with an offer in hand has every opportunity to acquire an agent that would agree to a proper author-agent agreement.
Make no mistake. I will never hire an agent without an offer in hand. I never liked the idea of doing that as it was, and you’ve helped me realize that my instincts in that area were correct.
Jeremy, yup got it. With an offer in hand, you can shop for the right employee that fits what you need an employee to do. Exactly on the money. You might have to interview two or three, but you will find one. And it will happen fast, on the phone.
A point that some agents do which is just silly. They ask to see the book first. If they do, ask them why? They will be thinking that you are hiring them for life. Just say you would like them to do just the one contract first, then the two of you can talk about the future. You want to see how they handle the important stuff, the negotiations and contracts first. If they insist on reading the book first, walk away. Their judgment on your work means nothing and will only get in the way.
Good tip. And a good red flag to look for.