The Author's Handbook

3. When, Why, and How to Look for an Agent

3 When, Why, and How to Look for an Agent THROUGHOUT MOST OF THE LAST CENTURY, A PERSIStent author didn’t need a literary agent to get a book published by a publishing house with a track record. That’s no longer true. Generally, having an agent may help you pass the publishers’ monopoly on “Go” and collect two hundred dollars many times over. But once you do get an agent, you’ll wonder how he can live in a New York mansion and send his kids to private school on his 15 percent of everything you earn while you’re struggling to pay off an old tract split-level in Piscataway, New Jersey. Years ago, submitting without an agent, directly to editors at publishing houses, beginner Nancy Hanson of Bismarck, North Dakota, successfully sold her first book, How You Can Make Twenty Thousand Dollars a Year Writing: No Matter Where You Live, to tiny special-interest F&W Publications. After readers bought thirty thousand copies early in the first year in print, she thought an agent might help her find a bigger publisher who could sell even more copies. She methodically went through Literary Market Place and singled out twenty literary agents, then wrote each of them a letter describing the book’s success, her credentials, and some other good book ideas. Some agencies replied that they were not taking on any new clients. Others said they would read and evaluate her future manuscripts in return for hefty reading fees. Those who expressed interest in representing her wanted 15 percent of any sales she made. Shocked, she told us about it. We could only reply that we’d heard some agents were asking for 20 percent. Naturally , Nancy wanted to know what agents could be expected to do to merit that big a hunk of her income. She asked a lot of other questions that you’re probably asking, too. What does a literary agent do? The ideal literary agent is a cross between Oprah Winfrey and Hugh Grant— tough enough to talk wily publishers out of high advance payments and long deadlines, yet supportive enough to nurse dejected writers back to literary 25 health and happiness. Unfortunately, there are no ideal agents. The best you can hope for is Robert Redford in A River Runs Through It—honest, hard-working and kind. Basically, a good literary agent helps his authors sell books to publishers by rigorously pursuing the eight steps in selling that we’ll outline in chapter 4, thus leaving you free to think up more salesworthy ideas and write more dynamite books. In return he peels off 15 percent of all the income from those books before he sends the rest on to you. But there’s much more to being a good agent than that. He can help sell book club rights, paperback rights to hardcover books, and hardcover rights to paperback books, again in return for a 15 percent cut of the take. He can help sell magazine and newspaper condensations and serializations based on his authors’ books, taking 15 percent of that income too. For novels and true-life adventures, he may get involved in dramatic rights, though those deals are often complicated by the fact that most literary agents who specialize in books are clustered about the East Coast and most agents who specialize in movie and television sales are in California. Most East Coast agents use the services of West Coast agents when they want to sell dramatic rights, and since half of 15 percent looks unattractive to them both, they usually insist that authors part with 20 to 25 percent. Likewise, when American agents sell foreign rights and have to split their commissions with agents abroad, a 20 or even 25 percent commission is common. Up to 25 percent of your 5 percent royalty looks like a lot for spending a few hours (spread over several months) peddling a work that may take you several years, full-time, to create. That’s why writers are rarely satisfied with agents who seem to do no more than mail out their manuscripts and proofread contracts. What can an agent do that you can’t do yourself? Although Nancy asked it first, this is usually the last question writers ask because , as a rule, writers have little business sense. The primary value of an agent is to be your business manager. Most writers handle the research and writing of their books and talk to the...