In answer to the question "What's the point of literary agents?", Cressida Downing says:
To an aspiring writer,
literary agents can seem like a parasitic race – they take their percentage,
but what do they give back? And is it worth having one?
The
short answers are ‘lots’ and ‘yes’. Read on!
An
agent sends your manuscript out to see who would like to bid on it for publication.
They’re effective because they have more knowledge of the editors and
publishers than most. An agent knows who is on the lookout for the next big
historical novel, whose lists are full, who is looking for a new crime writer,
and can target their submissions accordingly.
It’s
a two-way street, as publishers will know what genres the agents are likely to
be submitting, which ones specialise in crime, which ones are more literary
etc.
Once
an agent has matched your work to the right publisher (which doesn’t always
mean going for the biggest advance, sometimes a publicity commitment is worth
more than upfront cash), they are the professional whose job it is to negotiate
the best contract for you. Unless you’re confident about tackling aspects such
as high volume discounts, territorial rights, and the tricky area of electronic
rights, these are all best left to someone who fully understands them.
A
good literary agent will be the buffer between the publisher and yourself,
negotiating, say, an extended deadline, better dates for a book tour, or
fighting for improved deals as needed.
A
strong agent/author relationship can be incredibly beneficial for a writer as
it means having someone who’s always ‘on your side’, who is enthusiastic about
your writing, and whose desire for the best deal is for both your benefits.
That all sounds wonderful, and it makes agents sound like very valuable people, but I can't help feeling that Cressida is living in cloud cuckoo land, since the experience of the vast majority of aspiring (and experienced) writers is that they can never get to communicate with agents, let alone get signed up by one. There are too few agents, and too many writers -- and agents know this. That puts them in a very powerful position, and maybe it goes to their heads. They can pick and choose from the thousands of budding authors who contact them every year, and most if them insist on the submission of literary material according to a very strict template -- which does vary from one to another. Then they have the brass to say to a budding famous author "We will probably take six to eight weeks to look at your material, and if you don't hear from us after that you can take it that we are not interested....."
I don't have an agent, and part of me feels rather sad about that since I have tried hard enough, goodness knows. Before I published the first "Angel Mountain" novel I wrote to about 50 agents and of those, about 40 never even bothered to reply. The other ten were, to their credit, polite and helpful, while saying "no thanks". That did not inspire confidence, and maybe goes some way to explaining why agents are not held in universally high esteem. After that, I tried to get about 50 publishers to read the manuscript, and almost all of them said "We don't deal with authors direct -- you have to submit through an agent." So catch-22. In the end, I got so fed up that I published "On Angel Mountain" myself, and have now racked up sales of about 32,000 copies. To me, that suggests that neither agents not mainstream publishers are particularly smart, and that makes me feel at least a bit better! One wonders how many other excellent authors are ignored or given the brush-off by the "mainstream" publishing establishment while it continues to search for the Holy Grail, or "the next big thing." The literary gossip sheets are full of stories of "the next big thing" which went on to sell in millions, having been totally missed by the smartest of agents and the most commercial of publishers. JK Rowling, take a bow.
Even when one is a successful writer with eight published novels to one's name, with 75,000 books sold, agents can still afford to ignore one completely, or to send out curt notes to the effect that "your manuscript is nicely written, but not quite right for our list......"
So back to the question "What's the point of literary agents?" I have spoken to several other authors lately who do have agents supposedly working for them, and they have all said "He / she does NOTHING for me, while taking at least 20% of my earnings. Quite frankly, I'd be better off on my own."
Partly, this might have something to do with the fact that neither agents nor publishers quite know how to respond to the E-publishing revolution. I spoke to another well-known and successful author the other day, who was heavily involved in the Hay Festival, and he said "They are like rabbits caught in the headlights of a speeding car -- rooted to the spot, aware that something unpleasant is about to happen but not quite sure how to cope with it."
So would I have done better with the Angel Mountain Saga if I had had an agent working for me? I doubt it very much. I might have picked up a contract with a London publishing house, and the first book might have got some reviews and a fortnight or so of active publicity. Then it would have simply slipped onto the backlist as hundreds of new titles came inexorably off the production line -- some of them written by BIG authors with BIG marketing budgets attached to them because the publishers had to recoup BIG advances. Such is the way of the world. Also, I would have been much less involved in publicity and marketing, and would probably have watched from the sidelines as small quantities of my book tricked out of some high-tech warehouse located somewhere in England. In all seriousness, I might have been so discouraged that I might never have written volume 2, let alone volumes 3 - 8.
So I went my own way, and published through my own imprint called Greencroft Books. Then I had to do all the publicity for each title, all the storage, and all the marketing. Hard work, but fun, and the books have provided a reasonable income.
And now we are into the Ebook revolution. Another world, since an author now needs neither an agent nor a publisher. Write the book, digitise it, and stick it out there either as a Kindle book or on one of the other Ebook sites. The publishing process can be done in a day, as distinct from a lead time of eighteen months or so if one works through an agent and a London publisher. And immediately, your 70% royalties start pouring in to your bank account. That's the theory, anyway........
