Agents Care About Writers First?

[nathan]

Due to the comments section of the Agents posts in the Mythbusters Series (Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing) Dean Wesley Smith has added a new post. This one is titled Myth: All Agents Care About Writers First:

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/

I hope some people are following this series and also reading the comments part of the posts where some other working writers are coming to share and expand on things said by Dean.

I went to my monthly lunch Sunday and rode over with a YA author who's book is coming out from Simon & Schuster later this year. He's on a forum a bit like this one made up of young YA professionals (i.e. writers with <5-10 books out, not writers of tender years) and the acrimony some of Dean's positions have caused there is insane.

You don' have to agree (or want to which happens more often) but you should at least be aware that there is this other way of looking at the business side of writer. Knowledge is power.

[erazmus]

This was a good one. Though I'm starting to wonder if any writer anywhere ever finds an agent that actually does work for them and lasts. This week end I went to a small local convention and talked with several of my local writing friends. None of them have been able to acquire an agent they were happy with. One has nineteen novels out, in three genres with I think four publishers, and has gone through four agents. She's a graduate of many of DWS and KKR's classes.
Are there really so few good agents out there? Robert Heinlien had one agent for most of his career (Lurton Blassingame). Most of the writers I know either go through agents like a restaurant goes through busboys or do without one entirely. You can do that, if you can write for just one publisher. That only seems to work if you sell really, really well.

Mike

[nathan]

None of them have been able to acquire an agent they were happy with. One has nineteen novels out, in three genres with I think four publishers, and has gone through four agents. She's a graduate of many of DWS and KKR's classes.
Are there really so few good agents out there? Robert Heinlien had one agent for most of his career (Lurton Blassingame).
Mike

This was discussed a bit by Laura Resnik in this sense: It can actually be *harder* for an established writer to get an agent than a newer writer. An established best seller? No (or sometimes). But a working pro or constant mid-lister? Yes.

Why? Because new agents are looking for The Next Big Thing the author who's going to go from nowhere to money shot with a single manuscript. Established non-celebrity level writers--the thinking goes--have had their shot and if it was going to happen it would have.

This is erroneous for a number a of reasons--but there you go.

Blassingame was what Dean calls an "old school" agent, i.e. he had a lot more in common with a literary rights lawyer than the "slush reader" modern agent.

Getting a greedy contract negotiator is the agent dream it's just that most of the "new breed" as it's called by others smarter than myself, seem themselves as mini-editors. The lowest kind of editor--the entry level slush reader. Only the agent doesn't make any money on salary to read and demand rewrites thus business model of time = money is fundamentally flawed.

[crystalwizard]

>Why? Because new agents are looking for The Next Big Thing the author who's going to go from nowhere to money shot with a single manuscript. Established non-celebrity level writers--the thinking goes--have had their shot and if it was going to happen it would have.


That's the same sort of thinking that has the bean counters laying off the people who have the most experience because they make more money than the new kids who just hired in. Not smart.

[erazmus]

It falls back to a lack of work ethic instilled in our culture today. Everybody wants to "get rich" but nobody wants to work for it. They don't want to earn a good living, they want to hitch to a star and ride off into the sunset.

A smart fellow could earn a fortune by starting up as an agent and just do it old school. Work for their clients, know the market, meet every editor you can, work with as many as you can, be known in the industry instead of a few offices, work every angle of every book, get your clients every dollar from every possible source. Of course, you'd be pulling an eighty hour a week. But you'd be earning every dollar you made, writers would fight to be your client and eventually you'd be rich, because you deserved to be.

And what's the fun in that?

Mike

[nathan]

I plucked this from the comments section--which is often the most interesting and dynamic part of the posts.

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.

[erazmus]

I read the comments, but often forget to go back after a few days and read all the new ones.

Mike

[Jaqhama]

I'll give you a perfect example of an agent making choices on a writer's manuscript without bothering to forward said manuscript to an editor(s).

A couple of months ago I sent a story synopsis and the first 50 pages of an SF novel to an agent in New York, one who I know is a big hitter in the literary agent business.

He was good enough to accept my story and did read the first 50 pages.
He emailed me back a few days later and declined my SF novel saying: "I didn't like the character."

So here is an agent saying he didn't like my character.
And I'm thinking does it matter if an agent doesn't like the character?
Surely his job isn't to pass judgement on my character but to see if he can find an editor who is interested enough in my novel to publish the story?

He didn't say the story was badly written or contained typos or was just basically a load of crap.
He just said he didn't like the character...that was all.

Now is it an agents job to pass comments on the characters in your story?
And is it an agents job to decline a writers manuscript because the agent doesn't like your character?

Apparently so.

To be honest I was just happy to get the guy to accept my sub at all, because the guy is in the top ten of agents in the USA.

[erazmus]

Some agents make the claim they have difficulty selling books they do not believe in. If the agent plans to routinely launch an aggressive marketing campaign with the books he handles, like submitting it to many editors at many houses and following it up by actually pitching things like foreign language rights and such, it helps a lot if the agent lovesthe character, plot, setting, etc.

So if what this guy is saying is "The main character didn't grab me, so I'm not the best guy to spend the next fifteen months selling it." I can kind of go along with that. Of course he could mean anything by what he said, it is no more semantically valid than any other rejection letter.

Mike

[crystalwizard]

It boils down to:

Rejection letter = your customer didn't like it. Move on to the next prospect.

[Rob K]

I'm sort of flexible, so it wouldn't bother me too much if an agent asked for some re-writing. If it got to be to the point where I thought it was harming the novel, I would discuss my concerns with him. If he ignored those concerns, or we couldn't find a way to compromise, then there might be a problem. Sometimes rewriting requests become ridiculous, though, and that's where I bow out--especially when I know it's someone who doesn't know as much about writing as I do. Some agents do have a good grasp on what sells to editors, though, so it's worth considering what they have to say.

[Rob K]

Some agents make the claim they have difficulty selling books they do not believe in. If the agent plans to routinely launch an aggressive marketing campaign with the books he handles, like submitting it to many editors at many houses and following it up by actually pitching things like foreign language rights and such, it helps a lot if the agent lovesthe character, plot, setting, etc.

So if what this guy is saying is "The main character didn't grab me, so I'm not the best guy to spend the next fifteen months selling it." I can kind of go along with that. Of course he could mean anything by what he said, it is no more semantically valid than any other rejection letter.

Mike

I agree. I think you've got to believe in a project to really put forth effort into selling it. It would probably be better for an agent to reject a writer than to take on something he's not really into.

[The Griot]

This is an interesting discussion. The few times I talked to agents or went to agent seminars I got the impression that the agents worked for the editors. At my level I'm probably dealing with the "slush pile" agents Nathan described. This concept of the agent working for me is fascinating. I never got that feeling. Guess I don't know much about the process.

As far as an agent rejecting your work, the sad reality is that in this business the reader is not our customer. The agents and the editors are. We have to satisfy them before we can hope to get access to the reader. This is a classic distribution scenario.

[crystalwizard]

He's a customer. Agent or not, he is your customer. You're selling your book to him. He's going to turn around and resell it to someone else, and split the profits on the sale with you. The fact that the person he is selling it to is ALSO going to be selling it to other people has nothing to do with anything.

You're still selling, or attempting to, to the agent. If they don't want it, move on to the next.

And avoid agents totally if you can.

[erazmus]

And that's another thing. Some very successful writers go a long, long time without having an agent. Like fifty books and multiple NYT bestsellers long. If you write in one area, with one name for only one or two publishers, it doesn't mean you're a failure. Often just the opposite. It still is possible to place a book without an agent, get a fair contract on your own, be well handled and well marketed, find an audience, sell like hotcakes and end up buying that horse ranch in Kentucky with the money you make, without an agent.
My friend John Ringo did just this. I believe he has an agent now, handling Hollywood and foreign sub-rights, video game rights etc from his many books. But I know he didn't have one for the first book, I was on the forum when he sold it directly to Jim Baen during an argument (not the preferred method), and he did without for a long, long time and still doesn't use one for Baen books and his primary deals with them.
He didn't need one when he parlayed his status as a 'military Science Fiction writer' and US Army air-borne veteran into a job as a talking head on Fox News during the gulf war. (with less than four books to his credit, and he was a corporal). Other have done as well or better, as recently, as he. You can place Ms without an agent. You can get serious publisher backing, build a serious following, and be a huge success without giving 15% of your earnings to an agent.
Just hit a home run your first time at bat, grab the tiger by the tail and never look back. (hows that for a mixed metaphor?)

Mike

[BethS]

So here is an agent saying he didn't like my character.
And I'm thinking does it matter if an agent doesn't like the character?
Now is it an agents job to pass comments on the characters in your story?
And is it an agents job to decline a writers manuscript because the agent doesn't like your character?

Actually, it is. And here's why: in order for an agent to be effective at selling and representing your work, he needs to love it. Most agents will not take on a project they're lukewarm about, because they won't do a good job selling it and they know that.