The Most Important Person in the Room

Something I like to do when I’ve got some extra time is go back through the YA Highway Field Trip Friday posts. I love them. They’re always chock full of interesting information and entertainment. They keep me posted on things I may have missed in the industry otherwise.

 

So, I was going back through these posts tonight and, on the December 20th post, I found a link to a Pub Crawl post by Joanna Volpe about Query Dos and Don’ts. Joanna is an incredibly successful agent (and the founder of New Leaf Literary Media, my agency) so I clicked on the link to her post. It was brilliant, as expected and had a lot of valuable information.

 

And then I decided to read the comments. I don’t know why I do this.

 

There were people asking really intelligent questions, and then there were people who, for lack of a better term, had an extremely inaccurate opinion of what agents do. They also had an incredibly inaccurate vision of what self-publishing will guarantee them.

 

There were many comments that started getting my back up, but this one pushed me over the edge:

 

“At that point, an agent would have to bring a lot to the table in order to be worth their 15%–Hollywood connections, for example, or foreign sales experience in fifty different countries. And of course, they’d have to be able to negotiate a print-only deal, because if I was making upwards of $1,000,000 per year in ebook royalties (on one title alone!), no way would I bend over and let a traditional publisher take that away.”

 

Okay.

 

Hold on for one hot minute.

 

First of all, as I say to my son, tone is everything. Starting out condescending and combative isn’t a recommended tact to take. But, more than that — where in the world are you getting that $1 M figure? Is this an Amanda Hocking commentary? Because, if that’s the case, you are missing the whole point. THE WHOLE POINT. Of traditional publishing. Of self-publishing. All of it.

 

The point of getting an agent isn’t about sales or rights or connections. It’s about support.

 

Yes, those sales and rights and connections are factors in how they support you. But the reason you get an agent is to have someone in your corner. Someone to help you navigate a business that, frankly, you know nothing about if you are counting on getting $1 M self-publishing one book.

 

Anomalies aren’t what built publishing. The midlist is. All of those authors who are writing while having day jobs or who are pumping out books that sell moderately well are the reality. The huge success stories are phenomenal and great to hear about because it means books are still selling and we haven’t lost an art form to technology. But those success stories aren’t the rule. They’re the exception.

 

So many comments on this blog post used the exception to give reasons not to sign with an agent. And every single one had to do with money.

 

Two examples -

 

“What is the standard royalty rate for a writer who signs with them? If a writer self-pubs on Amazon she gets 70 %, so selling 50k a month can net a middle class salary in that one month even if she sells at the lowest price that royalty is offered. Any agent who wants to work for a writer should be able to show the *average* contracts where they top that.”

 

“What, precisely, will the agent do to earn that 15% of your income? For example, having a writer with a ready-platform (50k in sales) seems to require too much heavy lifting, so I guess marketing and promoting is right out. But for 15% of your income, forever, it’s not too much to ask for expertise in contract negotiation, right?”

 

I don’t know where in the world people got the idea that the agent is an either/or concept, but let me say this —  practically every self-published author who has been massively successful in my genre (YA) has gotten an agent and signed a book deal with a big publisher.

 

Why would they sign with an agent when their commodity was at it’s hottest? Because an agent can make you feel like the most important person in the room.

 

I never, EVER feel less important than any other author on my agent’s docket. She makes it her business to return emails quickly. She reads my work in a timely manner. She helps me with edits. She can sense my need to work fairly fast and supports that.

 

And my agent has clients who make her, like, MONEY money. Serious money. I am not one of those clients by a long shot.

 

When you choose to self-publish, you are taking on a job beyond just that of “author” — you need to market and advertise, you need to edit, you need to design, you need to upkeep websites and web presence (as much as a traditionally published author would, if not more) and you need to do give aways, buy book swag, have contests, etc. More than that, though, you have to convince people that your book is worthy of reading. You have to sell yourself.

 

I don’t.

 

My agent sells me.

 

I write books.

 

That is the difference. That’s it. If you want to self-publish, understand what you’re taking on. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT but it is not the same thing as a traditional route.

 

But all I want to do is write. Sure, I have a website I keep up and I tweet and use Facebook. I do giveaways and buy book swag for said giveaways. I do all of that stuff because I want to. When you self-publish, you really have to do that kind of promotion.

 

All things being relative, this doesn’t apply to every single self-published author ever. But it applies to most of them. That, and the self-published authors I know had amazing platforms that contributed greatly to their success.

 

So, for those who ask that “what do agents do to deserve their 15%” question, I say this to you — look at the time you have for writing. Now divide it in half. At least that much time will need to be devoted to the business of writing, not the writing itself. Are you willing to give that up? If so, you might not be in the right business. You might be less of a writer and more of an agent yourself.