Literary Agents: The Good, The Bad, and the Inevitable

Literary agents are universally hated within the publishing world. Authors distrust them; publishers are hassled by them. The first experience of publishing most authors will have is of a literary agent rejecting them. Editors spend their entire lives fending off the agents who represent the authors they publish. Literary agents take money from the authors and from the publishers without seeming to do any real work themselves. Basically, authors and editors are united by a belief that they would all be better off without agents interfering in their work.

That having been said, you’re going to need a literary agent.

Here’s the bad news: agents take 15% of everything you earn. This might rise to 20% for foreign rights.

Then there’s the fact that they are a law unto themselves. There’s no arguing with an agent. They basically do what they want. You can’t make them do anything; they can make you rewrite endlessly and at the end of it refuse to represent you.

That isn’t even the worst part of it. The main problem with agents is that they are totally unregulated. Nobody knows if an agent is actually any good at their job. Nobody knows if they are doing their best possible to represent their client, the author — you.

Agents are operating in a seller’s market. They are receiving hundreds of queries a week from people who hate their lives and think a book deal will make them rich and happy. Most people are just glad to have someone in the industry talking to them. So glad, in fact, they don’t ask any questions at all. I know I didn’t — I just signed whatever I was handed.

The good news is pretty good, though.

Your relationship with your agent is probably going to be most enduring one of your publishing career. Editors come and go. Editors don’t even edit that much. Increasingly, the person who is dedicating the most time and effort to helping you improve your writing, structure your ideas, and develop into a professional writer will be your agent. Precisely because they are taking 15% of your earnings they are massively invested in your success. You’re both fighting the same fight and you have a common enemy, the publishers, who will reject you, underpay you, forget about you, and drop you when your sales don’t meet their expectations. Your agent doesn’t have that luxury. You’re in it together.

There’s another aspect of agenting that rarely gets discussed. Imagine if you didn’t have an agent but you did have a publisher who wanted to buy your book. You would have to negotiate a contract with your editor. That would involve hammering out advances, payment schedules, royalty rates, rights territories, possibly even morality clauses. You don’t want to do that. Even if you were capable of educating yourself to the point of effectively representing yourself in those negotiations, by the time you had reached a deal you would probably loathe your editor. This is what agents do for you. They deal with all the boring contractual details and argue over money so you don’t have to. That way you and your editor can focus on what matters: the text.