thoughtfulThis morning, I was pointed to a post over on GalleyCat explaining why nobody needs an agent. Apparently, the electronic revolution means that the "middleman" between author and editorial is no longer necessary. Who knew? Or at least, that middleman is on the way to becoming fully outdated. Naturally, at least one literary agency feels differently, and has said as much. I suggest reading both links before continuing, because I, too, feel differently, and will now say as much.
These are the things I do: write books. Make changes according to the requests of my editors. Discuss possible changes with my editors. Review page proofs. Blog. Run blog giveaways of ARCs and published books. Attend conventions. Write outlines and proposals for books I want to write. Play Plants vs. Zombies. Watch TV.
These are the things my agent does: get my books to the editors who are most likely to not only appreciate them, but work with them in a way that is beneficial to both the publishing house and my career. Negotiate advances. Negotiate sub-rights. Protect my interests in areas like audio, comic book, and foreign rights. Make sure that I get paid on time. Follow up with my editors when things are unclear, or when I need more time to finish something. Check in with me to see what space I have on my plate. Understand the industry. Explain things like "co-op" and how marketing budget works. Tell me where my energy needs to be spent, rather than where I necessarily want to spend it.
Beyond the fairly standard notation that many major houses no longer consider submissions from unagented authors, the agent serves a thousand functions that, frankly, I don't have time to deal with. It's possible that I would have time for them, if I wasn't writing four books at once; on the flip side of that, I can also say that if I was dealing with all the functions served by my agent, I wouldn't have time to write four books at once. It all feeds back to a question of resource allocation, and I have chosen to externalize certain resource needs in the form of my agent.
Agents don't just negotiate the size of your advance; they negotiate contracts, which are huge, complex, complicated things. Without an agent to go through the contract and understand it, you need to not only speak the crazy language of literary rights, you need to have strong feelings on all those things. What do you think about comic rights, merchandising rights, foreign rights, audio rights, film rights, the right to construct an amusement park based on your work? What do you think of the time the contract says you'll have to review your page proofs, of the concept of seeing your copyedits, of the way the next work clause is worded? Do you understand half of what I just said? 'Cause honestly, without my agent, I wouldn't, and even now, I'm a little vague on some of the specifics, although I'm learning.
Agents deal with your editors, and can mediate when, say, you miss a deadline because your cat got sick and you just can't cope and what do these people want from you?! Well, they want you to hold to the terms of your contract, and they want you to make a lot of money, because everybody would like to have a lot of money, and if you make a lot of money, so does your publisher. But without that buffer between yourself and the publisher, it's very possible that you could flip out and take somebody's face off, thus ruining the working relationship. Instead, flip out on your agent, and they'll take care of making nice while you hyperventilate in a corner.
A good agent will help your career in a hundred ways...and more, they're very often an excellent gatekeeper, because as soon as you're salable, the agents will be happy to let you know. It's not their job to get you to that point, but once you get yourself there, their job begins, and that job is a hard one. Frankly, it's not a job I'd want to do.
Are literary agents outdated? No. Are literary agents like having the cheat codes to the publishing industry? Yes. You still need to understand what you're doing, but they can make things go a lot more smoothly, and they can keep you from dying too many times before you finish level one. That's more than worth the cost of their commission.
It's not that we don't WANT an agent, mind
November 12 2009, 15:43:26 UTC 7 years ago
Agents may not want to handle your work for many reasons, and not all of them have to do with literary quality or artistic merit. Above all, they want to be able to SELL it--they want a quick sale, if possible, just like any salesperson. If they see something in the query/partial and then in the full manuscript that they think will appeal to an editor they know, sure, they'll take that person on and send the work to that editor. But if no editor comes to mind, and the work is cross-genre, or it doesn't seem marketable in today's market, or one of the names of the bad guys turns out to be the agent's child's name, then your work is rejected. Multiply that by 100 agents and then multiply it by seven books/queries that have won manuscript contests, and you can get a bit discouraged. It doesn't mean your work is crap/dreck or that it would not be liked by readers. Heck, I can show you clunky prose and plot holes in current best-sellers, so the criterion is not literary quality no matter where you look.
The beauty of the new model is that you can upload your own work to the Kindle for free, which means you have a chance at developing a readership. If you can't get your work out there at all, you have NO chance. That's basically the chasm here. Those of us who are not the darlings of New York for whatever reason (we're blackballed because we're stalkers and smell like Lysol . . . we don't start the book with a nuclear war . . . we live in Flyover Country and must be backward rednecks) have no other choice. We'd LOVE to come in by the regular door! But so would everyone else. Everyone today has written a novel. It makes the slush piles taller than your favorite dinosaur when he was stretching his neck to bite the tail off a giant. Worthy works are overlooked and disdained as often as the crow caws. We have nothing against agents, if only we could get them.
On the other hand, why is it that traditional publishing cringes so when Amazon makes it possible for the unwashed unpubbed masses to upload their own works to the Kindle? Hmm, perhaps they are a little bit scared. Sure, the task before the reader is then fairly heinous, because there are stacks to choose from, and indeed MOST self-pubbed work deserves to be tarred with the "not ready for prime time" brush. But not ALL of it. If readers run across those few works that fit their interests and that are well written, then the work has found its audience. I'll take any audience who'll have me. I simply want to be read (for all the wrong reasons, I'm sure.)
So it's not that we disdain agents or don't want contracts to be negotiated or whatever. It's that we see the edifice crumbling, and we're ready to go to that new place . . . wherever publishing ends up. I'm sorry to have to report that it looks like the current model--which is, after all, stuck in the 19th century, not even the 20th, what with allowing returns and so forth--has finally run its last lap. Something's gotta give.
Re: It's not that we don't WANT an agent, mind
November 12 2009, 15:53:59 UTC 7 years ago
I have a heap of rejections of my own, both from agencies and from publishing houses, so I definitely sympathize. A lot of those rejections came because my work wasn't ready; others came because I was submitting in the wrong places. All the agents I know are narrowly focused but enthusiastic, and the Internet really is making it easier all the time to find the agents who want to work with the sort of things we're writing.
As to why traditional publishing cringes...just speaking from what I've seen out of certain self-publishing efforts with little to no editorial review, it's sort of like what happened to fanfic when we went from paper 'zines to a mainly online community. It became a lot easier to publish, and WOW did we get some quality stuff. But the ratio changed, dramatically, and it became a lot harder to find that quality stuff. Agents and publishing houses are gatekeepers, of a sort, and while I may not always approve of what they allow to pass through, it's often reassuring (when not infuriating) to know that someone was involved in the process.
Agents aren't essential, but they help. Self-publishing isn't evil, it just changes the ratios a great deal, and that can make it daunting. You're right, and things are changing. The question is whether that change is going to eliminate the role of the agent, and I don't think it is.
Re: It's not that we don't WANT an agent, mind
January 8 2010, 21:44:24 UTC 7 years ago