Agents: The Difference Between Novelists and Poets
Note: This essay originated as a piece of work that I did during my third year of university.
During this essay, I aim to answer the following:
It has been said that one of the differences between novelists and poets is that novelists have agents, while poets do not. Discuss and describe why you think that is the case.
I intend to answer this question by referring to texts that I studied and the interviews that I conducted during the course of the module, and by researching the methods that novelists and poets use to publish their work.
One of the key differences between the novel and the poem is that the novel is designed to be read by somebody else, while poetry is usually an intellectual exercise and is often designed for performance. Novels, particularly best-sellers, can bring in huge amounts of income for the author and the publishing house, while poetry is notoriously capitalism-free. It’s near-impossible to earn a living from poetry alone – most poets that live on the proceeds of their writing are forced to take up a second job as a travelling lecturer, a journalist or an editor. In an interview that I conducted, Roehampton lecturer and published poet Peter Jaeger said: ‘The only poets that I know who have agents are poets who are primarily novelists, such as someone like Margaret Atwood.’
Peter and his fellow lecturer Jeff Hilson, who was interviewed at the same time, are examples of poets that don’t have agents. For them, the publishing process is much more personal. ‘One sends stuff out occasionally to magazines,’ explains Jeff. ‘And one’s asked to submit stuff to magazines, and I guess if you’re lucky enough, a publisher will ask you for a manuscript at some point.’ This approach automatically forces the poet to become his own agent and leaves him with more creative control over his work, although there can still be restrictions from the publisher. As poetic movements are often small and intimate, poets are generally aware of the publications and presses that publish similar poetry to their own. It’s important for poets, as well as for novelists and journalists, to have an awareness of their contemporaries and to read widely to give their work context. Jeff explains, ‘The community that we’ve got involved in is so small, we know all the publishers anyway.’
Poetry isn’t a money-maker, so agents are obsolete. As Peter pointed out, ‘Agents are involved with money, that’s why they’re there, and they get a percentage.’ When dealing with a niche market (which poetry is), agents find it difficult to earn enough to make it worth their while. In the world of fiction, where bestsellers can shift a thousand times as many copies, the money is more lucrative and the agent finds it easier to thrive.
For many, the poetry world has an edge over fiction because of the widespread use of chapbooks, small collections of poetry that are usually cheap and often home-made. It makes sense, in a circle where the words are more important than the money. When Peter started publishing, ‘the first thing [he] did was a little D.I.Y. thing that [he] made [himself], a little chapbook.’ This is a common approach among unpublished poets that want to spread their work around – the simplicity of not needing an agent is attractive. If a poet publishes a series of well-received chapbooks, he’s likely to get targeted by a publisher anyway, regardless of whether he has an agent.
But, as Jeff pointed out, some ‘superstar’ poets do have an agent, even if it’s because of their public image instead of for their poetry. Jeff says, ‘I think Ted Hughes used to have an agent,’ but Peter claims that even the modern-day American superstars don’t have agents. ‘Robert Pinsky,’ he says. ‘Poet Laureate under Clinton, he doesn’t have an agent. Charles Bernstein doesn’t have an agent. Ron Silliman doesn’t have an agent.’ If such high profile writers can publish without the need for an agent to sap the little revenue that they earn, there’s nothing to stop young, aspiring poets from doing the same.
The veteran poets stress the importance of networking and getting to know more about the field that you’re working in. After the chapbooks, Peter ‘started getting things in magazines here and there and basically it was because [he] knew the magazine and [he] knew that they would be interested in [his] kind of work. There was a bit of research involved at first where [he’d] have to look and see what was going on.’ For fiction writers, much of the pressure is relieved by their agents, who effectively do this research for them and contact appropriate presses and publishers on their behalf.
Something else for poets to consider is the option of appearing in anthologies, which present a small amount of their work alongside the work of other authors. This enables the poet to share their work with the general public without expensive production costs on their part. As anthologies are usually genre-specific, the poet has the advantage of being exposed to readers that have an interest in the field that they work in, whether from the title of the anthology or from association with the other poets. But publishing in an anthology isn’t without its problems – Peter ‘…[tends] to compose [his] work for the book…’, which can lead to a feeling of fragmentation. He sees his last three books as ‘pieces that go together.’ In such a case, the work is supposed to be presented as a whole, rather than as individual poems excerpted in to an anthology.
For performance poets, work is often self-distributed in the form of video clips on YouTube or audio recordings on websites like SoundCloud and MySpace. For this type of poetry, the transcript of the performance is less important than the performance as a whole, so there’s no need for agents to negotiate book deals. The poet’s appearances are usually organised by the poet himself, whether he appears at a local open mike night or gets a booking off the fame of previous performances. It’s in situations like these where the poet and the agent are in a lose/lose situation if they work together – the poet gains nothing and loses a percentage of any profit that he makes, while the agent puts in time and effort and gets a low financial return.
In the last twenty years, the internet has had a huge effect on the availability of self-published poetry. Before, the cheapest and easiest option was the printed chapbook, which still needed to be distributed by hand to the poet’s audience. With the advent of the world-wide-web, poets have been able to share their work with their peers across forums and message boards. Years ago, web programming required an extensive knowledge of coding – nowadays, thanks to simple HTML editing software, poets can easily share their work without any knowledge of programming languages. Blogging platforms like WordPress allow the poet to concentrate entirely on the content of their site by providing a standardised and easy-to-use layout, simultaneously offering useful features for them to use to update their followers and embed their news feeds on other websites. This hands the publishing power back to the poet, who doesn’t need an agent as a go-between – just a computer and an internet connection.
In the rare case that a poet and agent can work together for high financial return and wider circulation, they’re often publishing a Manifesto or an anthology. It’s also possible, though difficult, for a poet to grow famous enough for his readership to increase to such a level that an agent can make a profit and help the poet at the same time. Such circumstances are rare, and most poets are motivated more by their work than by the small financial reward that it may provide.
Poetry is often considered less glamorous than other areas of writing, and most people think of a novelist when imagining a ‘writer’. Even a best-seller of poetry can shift fewer copies than a badly-performing novel, meaning that novels bring more money to the writer and inevitably, the agent. It’s possible for novelists to publish and distribute their work without an agent (and even without a publisher), but it’s far more common for a novelist to have an agent than a poet. This is due, in part, to the difficulties of releasing a novel – there’s no such thing as a chapbook novel, and it’s unrealistic to suppose that small publishing houses and self-distributing writers could release the chapbook’s prose equivalent.
I also interviewed industry gatekeeper Ken Edwards, poet and editor of the Reality Street press. He suggested that the most common mistake made by poets that are looking for publication is that ‘they have not bothered to find out anything about the press or what kind of poetry it publishes.’ This demonstrates the varying roles that he expects the unpublished poet to take on – not only are they responsible for creating the work, they must also scout out appropriate literary publications and send out their work accordingly. Even so, Ken gets ‘solicitations (mostly by email these days) almost daily’ and says that of these, ‘one or at most two proposals from writers previously unknown to me will interest me enough to want to publish them.’
Ken also agreed that in his experience, poets with agents are an uncommon sight. He said, ‘Where there’s money to be made, there will be agents. Where there isn’t (and in 99% of poetry there isn’t) there won’t be.’ This concise but accurate statement epitomises the central argument in this essay – without sufficient amounts of money, there’s nothing for the agent to feed on. It’s possible, in certain circumstances, for an agent to work for free – for example, when acting on behalf of a friend or a family member – but it’s standard practice in the industry for the poet to distribute their work themselves, whether selling chapbooks and manuscripts at readings or sending a submission to a poetry press.
In Ken’s opinion as the editor of a small press, his business gives poets the chance to ‘take on new concepts which would not interest those whose main motivation in publishing is to make a profit.’ This suggests that small presses, while dooming the poet to less distribution, offer him a chance to experiment with language and form and to innovate. For many poets, particularly those that are relatively un-established and pushing something new, the freedom of the independent press is worth the low circulation. This is also important for poetry to develop – Ken says that small presses ‘are therefore vital for the continuation and renewal of poetry, which would otherwise atrophy and die.’
The advent of the internet has also had a big impact on the options that are available for unpublished poets. Thanks to sites like WordPress and Blogger, poets can easily share their material with the world across the internet with no extensive knowledge of coding required. When the internet first began to assert itself as an important publishing space, the poet needed to pay a coder to make their content available online. Now, with the advent of simple WYSIWYG software like Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver, the poet can share his work with the world across the internet for free. As the owner of a small press, Ken agrees that the internet is important: ‘With the disenfranchisement of small presses from the retail book trade (now dominated by the big conglomerates), the internet has been a lifeline for us to promote and sell books and to get authors and their work known.’
The internet has also made it easier for performance poets to boost their reputation – many, like Joshua Idehen, publish videos of their work on YouTube. SoundCloud and MySpace allow poets to share footage of their readings, and many combine them with Twitter to keep fans up-to-date. The only problem, as Jeff points out, is that ‘there are just so many of them. It’s a huge distraction from doing what might be called ‘proper reading’ or ‘proper research’, having to spend increasing hours in the day finding out what people have been saying on their blogs.’
Even older poets, like Ron Silliman (currently in his sixties), are keen to advocate the importance of an online presence. According to Jeff, ‘He came over a couple of years ago and said that any poet that doesn’t have a web presence is committing writing suicide.’ He sees it as a portal and says that people will ‘just stick your name in to Google and see what it comes up with. If that’s the first way of coming across people’s work then that’s no bad thing. Even if it’s just a reference to the books you’ve published, you know. Because where else are you going to find out about that? You’re certainly not going to find out about it in the press, not in the popular press, not in The Guardian, not in The Independent.’
It’s clear from Ken that many small presses and their editors expect their poets to do so much more than hand over copy. His advice to young poets is: ‘Read as much as you can. Learn from other poets and writers, living and dead, and also from film-makers, artists, musicians. Attend readings. Make contacts. Submit your work to magazines that publish the kind of work you are interested in. Subscribe to magazines and buy small press books. Write and write.’ And as an afterthought, he adds: ‘There are no short cuts.’
For most poets, their writing alone generates nowhere near enough income for them to survive on. Most write in their spare time and work, with many opting for jobs as lecturers, freelance non-fiction writers or journalists to pay the bills while keeping one eye on the art of writing. In our interview, Peter talked about the time he had dinner with Raymond Federman while at university. ‘He said, ‘You know, you and I are very lucky because we have these university places.’ We’re so lucky we can just maintain a bit of intelligent, critical thought by being in a university context.’
Even a book of poetry that sells well can be forgotten about completely in the space of a year. Peter says, ‘I had the dubious pleasure of seeing my book ‘Prop’ in the Waterstone’s best-seller list, and then within about a year in the half-price delete bin at Foyle’s so… fame is a fleeting thing.’ Peter was one of the lucky few – he received relatively good distribution, which doesn’t always happen. Jeff remembers ‘walking in to the Norwich branch of Borders and there were three or four copies of ‘Prop’ there.’ Peter’s lack of an agent clearly had no negative effects when it came to the release and distribution of his manuscript.
To conclude, agents are uncommon among poets because there’s barely any money in the business and agents need to make a living too. Unlike with novelists, where the writer and the agent need each other, there’s no advantage to the poet or the agent if they combine their efforts. It’s possible for an agent to work for free or for a poet to generate enough money to make it worth their time, but in general there’s no natural symbiosis between the two. Even when they do work together, there’s little-to-no advantage for the poet – at best, the agent does what the poet would have done anyway, saving him time and effort. The poet and the agent run in different literary circles – in the great food chain of literature, poets are meerkats and agents are armadillos.
See: www.youtube.com.
See: www.soundcloud.com.
See: www.myspace.com.
See: www.wordpress.com.
What-you-see-is-what-you-get: For more information, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG.
PiP – Joshua Idehen: My Love. [Online Video]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=280_dpqOQ9w. [Accessed: March 24th, 2011].
See: http://www.twitter.com.
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