Habits & Traits 4: Agent Myths Busted

Hi Everyone!

For those who don't know me, my name is Brian and I work for a literary agent. I posted an AMA a while back and then started this series to try to help authors around r/writing out. I'm calling it habits & traits because, well, in my humble opinion these are things that will help you become a more successful writer. If you missed previous posts, here are the links:

 

[Volume 1 - How To Make Your Full-Request Stand Out] (https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/4x9c25/habits_traits_volume_1/?)

[Volume 2 - Stay Positive, Don't Disparage Yourself] (https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/4xt9pa/habits_traits_2_amateur_writers/?)

Volume 3 - How to Query Well

 

As a disclaimer - these are only my opinions based on my experiences. Feel free to disagree, debate, and tell me I'm wrong. Here we go!

 

Habits & Traits #4: Agent Myths Busted

 

In my last post, I spent a lot of time trying to help people understand what goes into a good query. I talked a little bit about bad queries too, and the things that you should avoid. After thinking more about publishing as an industry, and about what I thought of agents and publishers before working on this side of the fence, I started to realize that a lot of bad queries are really just born of misconceptions about what an agent is... and what an agent isn't.

Unless I'm blind and potentially living in a cardboard box, an agent isn't a realtor. They don't have to sell my house for me, especially when I really cannot truly comprehend the value of the house I'm living in. My book (house) could be amazing. It could be the next Harry Potter. Or it could be the equivalent of a cardboard box under a bridge. Shopping for agents like they are realtors is a bad idea, made worse when you realize you don't truly know what you have.

Now that doesn't mean they know what you have either. At times, they're as blind as we are. But what they do know is what they've sold recently. They have more sales than you or me, so they at least have a better view of what the market looks like.

And also, an agent isn't a contractor. I can hire a contractor. I'm not hiring an agent. A contractor normally doesn't say no to new business because there is a market shortage of it. They need business to pay their mortgage -- in this way an agent is on the same boat sailing different waters. But unlike contractors, agents are inundated with writers. Being an asshole by treating agents like general laborers for hire is sort of like telling a recruiter to bring more jobs to you or you'll set their house on fire. The relationship is intended to be symbiotic. Making demands isn't very symbiotic, and just ends up netting you nothing.

 

Let's put on our empathy caps and take a look at an average agents life. We writers like to think they're living like Scrooge McDuck, rolling around in piles of money in NYC high-rises with private pools and parties. This couldn't be further from the truth.

 

Thinking of agents in this way is sort of like confusing your neighborhood friendly mechanic with Jeff Gordon.

Why?

Because of the food chain.

Here are the industry changes. Tell me if you see a trend.

• Reading is on the rise, but the market is more flooded than ever with books. Perhaps this is in part due to self-publishing, especially now that more and more quality books are being self-published and the aesthetic production of print-on-demand books is nearly on par with the printing quality from the major publishers.

• The flood of books has made editors at publishing companies more hesitant to take risks. This means less books are being traditionally published.

• Advances (money given contractually in advance of a book being published) are at an all-time-low for authors because of risk-aversion (see above).

• Agents are making less than ever before due to advances being low and less books being acquisitioned and greater risk in publishing etc.

• There are more agents than ever. Becoming an agent requires no degree, nor passing any test. You simply state you're an agent and start building the years of connections with editors necessary to be successful at it. And hopefully you live in NYC. But more agents means more competition, even if some of them are new and not quite sure of what they are doing yet.

• New York real estate is still steadily increasing... etc...

The point here is this - the burden of the economic force falls on the consumer, and currently every single notable consumer trend and force is moving in the direction of making it impossible for "Literary Agent" to be a job at all. Unless you are in the top one percent. Unless you get lucky enough to be struck by lightning twice in 3 minutes.

 

So, what's it actually like being an agent?

For starters, you don't begin full time. You begin while working another job. Sounds an awful lot like writing, right?

After a number of years and a number of clients and sales, you might begin to consider going full time.

Your day to day is a lot more about managing authors than you might think while waiting to hear back from editors. Because every author wants to know why their book hasn't sold yet. And because just like when you queried, it takes time to read a whole book. So patience is a virtue that none of us like.

When you're not sending emails, reviewing contracts from editors, following up with editors or keeping your authors in the loop, you're probably looking at the pile of reading you have to do. Let's see, 100+ queries a day on average, all of which need a response. Oh, and 20-60 full novels at any one point in time that you've requested from the last 2-7 months of queries.

But you can only really focus on queries/fulls if your authors are happy, so that entails reading their new works first and hoping you like the new stuff as much as the old stuff. If not, you've got an awkward conversation coming up that might end in losing a client. And you could be wrong. Perhaps you're passing on the next JK Rowling.

And also there's foreign rights, film rights, and auditing what the publisher is paying your authors to make sure they're meeting the contractual obligations. So that's a few hundred more emails and more waiting around.

Then there are the writers conferences you need to attend, because getting new clients is an important part of the job and the best way to do that is to be visible to authors so that they query you. But conferences may not want to pay for your flight from NYC to LAX and your agency would just as soon let you stay in New York and do work instead of lounging on the beaches in LA (with all that extra time and money you'll have). So you pay for your own flight. And your own hotel. And your own drinks. In hopes of finding the next big author.

Oh, and then there's all the crazy. Authors following you into the bathroom to pitch you. People talking about you while you're trying to take a moment to relax in the hotel pool. People pitching you in elevators without saying hello, and then respond rudely when you don't immediately produce a contract and a briefcase with 6 million dollars on the spot. And those are just the distractions at the conference. It doesn't stop when you get home. You'll still get phone calls from numbers you've never seen demanding to be heard. People will try to stop in at the office. On and on.

Right, and you should probably keep up on recently published books so you can also make sure you know what is currently trending. So add those books to your reading list because of all that spare time you have.

Oh, and for your average agent who's been working for 7 years, you could probably earn more than them by being a retail store manager at a Starbucks. So I hope you love reading more than coffee... or you might as well start working retail instead.

 

In light of these things, when you as an author are concerned that an agent is going to steal your work and decide it's better if they sign a legally binding agreement before they take a look at even one word of your query, or that the agent should send YOU a resume because you're the writer, or that you'd like to add a line in your query stating an agent must respond within 24 hours to your request, or anything in this avenue of crazy... you'd probably have as much luck walking into a burger joint and saying "No, you'll be paying me instead, AND giving me my hamburgers today... that's how this works. You don't get how this should work. I should be paid to enjoy your burgers."

If you're thinking to yourself "there is no way writers do this often" you'd be wrong. I see at least one in every twenty queries make some statement like the above. That's a lot of misinformed authors.

And hey, maybe in an ideal world, we would get paid to enjoy hamburgers. But that's not how commerce works. And it isn't how publishing works either. And maybe it is broken. Maybe free burgers for all would be a better system. But demanding a system to work a certain way because it would be better for you as an individual if it did is an unlikely way to inspire change.

 

So hopefully you take this information to heart. Hopefully you can put on your empathy hat and think through what that type of job would be like, and that should give you some perspective on who to be angry at if you think publishing is broken.

 

TL;DR: Don't be an asshole. Be nice to agents/people and good things happen. Be willing to learn. Be empathetic.