The Complete Guide to Getting Published (Excerpt)

3.1 Why You Need an Agent

So now you’ve written and rewritten and rewritten and you finally have a draft that you think is ready. The feeling I always get at this stage is a conflicting mix of pride and I never want to read this book ever again for as long as I live. If you’re feeling like this, then it might be a good indication you’re ready to move on.

Any path to traditional publishing starts with one word: Agent.

So let’s talk about them.

If there’s one question I get from aspiring authors more than all other questions combined it’s this:

“Do I really need an agent?”

The short answer is: YES! You definitely need an agent!

Can a novel be sold without one? Yes, it’s possible. Do I recommend it? Absolutely not. I’ll get into why later in this section, but first let’s talk about what an agent is and what they do.

Literary agents represent authors. They are your liaison and connection with the publishing industry. They negotiate on your behalf, they pitch your ideas to publishers, they match you with the best editors for your book and writing style, they offer advice on writing, book covers, marketing, and your career in general. And they do it all for the bargain price of…

15% of whatever your book makes.

Why 15%? Because it’s the publishing industry standard. Not 20, not 25, but 15. Anyone who tries to charge you more might not be a legitimate agent. 15% is the norm. Now there are some exceptions for foreign rights sales and film and TV sales, (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 3.9) but for right now, if an agent sells your book to a publisher, they will take 15% of your advance and 15% of all your royalties. That’s the way it works. There’s no getting around it. But what I think I’ll prove to you here is what I’ve come to learn: if an agent is good at his/her job, the 15% is totally worth it.

An agent’s primary job is to sell your novel to a publisher. Many people think, why should I use an agent when they take 15% of what I make? If I just bypass the agent and go straight to a publisher, I get all of it.

Well, the biggest reason you want to use an agent to sell your work is because most major U.S. publishers will not even read your work if it isn’t submitted through an agent. This is called an “unsolicited manuscript” and most publishers don’t accept them. Why? Because editors simply don’t have the time to read them. Especially with all the cutbacks the publishing industry has done lately. They just don’t have the manpower.

If an editor or publisher accepted every unsolicited manuscript that was submitted to her, she would be spending all of her time reading submissions and none of her time editing the manuscripts she’s already acquired. And since most of the unsolicited submissions editors get are not of very good quality, they would essentially be spending all of their time reading bad books, thus creating the need for some kind of filtering device. A pre-screening process. So that editors can spend less time reading bad manuscripts and more time reading good ones.

And alas, the agent is born.

An agent is basically a pre-screener of manuscripts. They read thousands upon thousands of submissions every year and they choose the ones they think have the best chance of selling to a publisher. That way, when a manuscript submission comes to an editor from an agent, that editor knows the agent had to sort through thousands to get to this one. It comes with a stamp of approval. It’s been filtered. And if the agent has a good reputation around town, all the more reason for the editor to drop everything and read this submission right now. Because they know it’s probably worth their time!

Now, on the rare occasion an editor does accept an unsolicited manuscript, chances are she’s not going to read it right away. Mostly because it doesn’t have that agent “stamp of approval.” And it’s going to land in something called a “slush pile.” The slush pile used to be an actual pile, about waist-high, in the corner of an editor’s office. Now, it’s more of a digital slush pile, also known as the “I’ll read it when I get to it” pile. Because editors are so busy reading manuscripts from their existing authors and submissions from agents, they rarely have time to read something from the slush pile. So it could take months even years for your submission to get read. Yet another reason submitting your manuscript through an agent is the way to go.