Do you need a literary agent?

In which I gently question my (professional) existence

The literary agent writes about literary agents

I started this newsletter with a dirty secret: publishing is populated entirely by fellow, fallible, fulfillment-chasing humans. (Well, maybe not entirely—I bet there’s an enterprising editor or two out there who is using ChatGPT to write some sales copy right now.)

And guess what? This is even true for incredibly talented literary agents, believe it or not. 😉 This means that there is no single magical human who is going to make or break your book—even if they are the most amazing agent ever, equal parts supportive hug-dispenser, creative-genius brainstormer, tactical deal-hacker, and bloodthirsty-shark negotiator.

So rather than begin our foray into the world of literary agents by asking “why” you need one, I want to start with “whether” you need one. To do that, let’s first cover the capabilities of agents.

What a literary agent should do for you

When you think of agents in general, I bet a certain image comes to mind: someone (probably a man—though you might be surprised to learn that as of 2019 84% of literary agents were women) yelling into their bluetooth headset about money. Aside from my personal aversion to folks who intentionally use emotion as a substitute for real leverage, there’s a lot more your agent can do for you. Put simply, your literary agent should be adding value to your book project throughout its entire life cycle.

Develop

Most agents play an active role in developing an author’s book idea and book proposal. Even when an author reaches out to me with a completed book proposal, we will usually have a fair amount of back-and-forth and further revising and developing of the idea. In general, agents can be valuable sounding boards during the development of a book idea—they can channel the mindset not only of your end readers, but of the editors at publishing houses that will be considering your project. For my clients, I spend anywhere from six weeks to six months, sometimes longer, developing a book idea into a polished, tempting book proposal.

Sell

A competent literary agent will also “make the market” for your book proposal once it is ready to send out into the world. In a traditional “wide submission” of a book proposal, your agent is ideally reaching out to hand-picked editors within their US and UK networks simultaneously, with the ultimate goal of bringing together interested publishers into a competitive bottleneck—essentially creating a (virtual) marketplace for your book project. There are so many elements that go into this process—editor-author meetings, auction dates and rules, rights and territories made available (or not), fielding of preempt offers, and countless other factors—that I could probably spin this out into a five-part series all by itself. But I’m lazy, and each project has so many specific factors that go into the making of the market that there likely wouldn’t be any useful takeaway information for you all anyway.

The overall aim at this stage is to gather as much interest in the project as possible, in as tight a time container as possible, so that you can make a decision with the most information possible. This market-making ability is perhaps one of the most valuable benefits of having an agent—it’s difficult to pull this off without a large, regularly maintained publishing network and an up-to-date sense of the book market across multiple subjects.

(N.B. I’m not the first to apply this “making the market” phrasing to the literary agenting world—I have the dimmest of memories of either hearing it from another agent, or reading it somewhere, but I can’t recall the specifics and I’m not finding it in a web search right now. If you know the source, or are the source, let me know and I’ll update this with a citation!)

Negotiate

Depending on the interest gathered during the selling stage above, you will have some amount of leverage to negotiate an offer from a publisher. As above, I’ll drastically summarize what is a complicated, sometimes chaotic, often intuitive process with an anodyne platitude: a good agent will extract as much as they can from the leverage they have. Even more important, if you do reach a tentative deal with a publisher, your agent will also negotiate the contract terms to be as favorable to you as possible. In fact, the sheer existence of your agent should result in a more favorable contract presented from the outset of the negotiation process—some publishers have different contract boilerplate for unagented authors than they do for agented authors.

Exercise

In the “sell” stage above, I only mentioned the US and UK—you may rightly be asking, “What about all the other countries in the world?” This is where subsidiary rights (just called “subrights” by publishing folks) come into play. A good agent will “exercise” (a.k.a “license” or simply “sell”) your book’s subrights in a way that you might not be able to do personally. There a host of subrights that are usually retained by an agented author—such as multimedia rights, film/TV rights, and merchandising rights—but here let’s focus on my favorite: translation rights.

Clare Mackintosh @claremackint0sh

And this, on the other side of my desk, is my ego wall. One copy of each translation of each book, from I Let You Go at the top, to After the End at the bottom, plus some special editions and awards.

In my opinion, one of the highlights of the whole book experience is receiving a hard copy of a translated edition of your book. It’s a concrete symbol—one you can pet, hug, and put on a bookshelf—of your ideas traveling around the world. In the same way that your agent will likely have an active network of US and UK editors, they should also maintain a network of international editors and publishing houses, either through their own efforts or through strategic partnerships with internationally focused agencies around the world. (At Curious Minds, our international partners are the amazing Louisa Pritchard Associates, Duran Kim Agency, and English Agency Japan.)

This is why I visit the London Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair every year: 90% of my time at those fairs are spent meeting with international publishers and pitching our clients’ books for translation deals.

Advocate

Everything I’ve just outlined is connected to the selling stage of your book project, but good agents do not disappear after they’ve sold your book and its subrights. Your agent also serves as a constant advocate for your interests. If you are concerned your publisher isn’t capturing the book with its cover design options; if you’re wondering why your publisher is requiring (or skipping) a legal read; if you’re confused about the permissions process for third-party material in your book—in all of these instances and more, your agent is available to sit on your side of the table and amplify your views and concerns. (Although a good agent will also not blindly agree with you on every point, especially if they think something is not benefitting the book.)

Your agent will also constructively nudge your publisher at certain times: namely, when you are owed money, when it’s time for your publisher to kickstart the book launch discussion, and when your royalty statements are due.

And last but not least, your agent should always be available for “big-picture” advocacy—I love talking with authors about their next project ideas, and the overall strategy for the arc of their author career.

All of the above adds up to a lot of advantages, so what I’m about to say might seem odd: there are times when you might not need an agent.

When you might not need a literary agent

There’s a chance my boss will not be thrilled to get to this part of this post—in fact, there’s a chance many agents will wonder whether this framing is even productive for most authors. Why not simply cover the benefits agents can provide, and move on with the “assumed close”?

The reason I’m making this post messier (and longer) than it has to be is that I’m a firm believer in full transparency with authors when it comes to book publishing, even when it doesn’t directly serve me, or it makes a decision more difficult than it might otherwise be.

So in the service of transparency let me clearly state up front that what follows is not specific advice for you specifically to forgo an agent. There are several factors that will come into play in your specific situation, including which publishers you’re speaking with, what your specific project is about, and what you specifically might need from the publishing process.

At the risk of getting spicy, let me also say that the publishing industry is not uniformly populated with people who have your best interests at heart. There are publishers out there that insist you pay for some aspect or another of publication, that register the copyright for your book in their name rather than yours, that don’t reliably issue royalty statements and income. Even well-meaning editors and publishers might push you for an accelerated manuscript delivery date to fit the book into one of their sparser publication seasons; as mentioned above, they might use contract boilerplate that is less favorable than the version agented authors have; and they might simply not be as attentive to your project, and its subrights, as they should be. This is why I think literary agents overall are extremely useful, and are worth having on board most of the time.

All that said, let’s talk about situations where you might be able to get by without one.

Academic projects

If you are an academic early in your career, you may well need to publish your first book (or two) with a university press to build the best case possible for tenure. Since university presses readily accept direct submissions from authors, and since “tenure” books often skew more academic in tone than books that you might want to write down the road, there’s not as much value an agent can provide when it comes to each of the stages mentioned above—EXCEPT for contract negotiation and overall advocacy, I should point out. Even for academic-oriented projects, you’ll want to pay close attention to the contract terms from university presses, to be sure you have the copyright to the book and that you’re not tightly locked into publishing your next book with them as well.

Offer in hand

Perhaps you’ve already been approached by an editor you like at a reputable publisher, and you’re ready to review an offer and contract terms on your own. In a situation like this, you may well be able to land a deal that works for you. I say this, however, with three BIG caveats:

First, as I mentioned above, some publishers have separate contract boilerplate for unagented authors, so you might be starting contract negotiation from a less favorable position than you would with an agent. Second (and directly related to the first point), you’ll want to make sure you have access to a reliable knowledge base about book publishing contracts. (I’ll get into this in more detail in the coming weeks.) And third, if an editor has approached you about a book, it’s almost a certainty that other editors would ALSO be interested in you writing a book. Without an agent, it may be difficult to judge the hypothetical demand out there and negotiate accordingly.

DIY buff

Maybe you’re one of those admirable, naturally curious DIYers who want to handle the deal process yourself, to fully grok the publishing world and to save that 15% agent commission. This is totally valid—after all, you are the fount from which everything else flows, so it makes sense that you might want to own the full process. In a situation like this, however, I’d simply suggest that you not make this decision casually. Most (but not all!) stories I’ve heard from authors who went this route are tinged with regret rather than triumph. Take some time to deliberate, and make sure you have some sort of game plan for each of the stages mentioned above under “What a literary agent should do for you”.

And last, I should of course mention the elephant in the room: the “backup plan” DIYer. Perhaps you simply haven’t come across an agent who is interested in representing you. As I mentioned way back at the start of this newsletter, conscientious agents represent surprisingly few authors, and that can certainly give rise to worthwhile unagented book projects. Over the following handful of weeks, I’ll be doing a walkthrough of the deal process, not only to give you a general sense for the book publishing world, but hopefully to also give you a bit of insight into how you might navigate this process yourself if need be.

Before we get into all that, however, I’ll be more fully delving into the world of literary agents in two weeks! It’s just about time to put that book proposal to full use. . . .