This is part 3/11 in our series about How to Land a Literary Agent:
- Your Fishing Guide: What I Know About These Waters
- The Prey: What Exactly Is An Agent?
- The Why: Who Actually Needs an Agent?
- Dawn or Dusk: When to Start Fishing
- The Fish Finder: Locating Agents
- The Bait: Writing a Pitch
- Casting Your Line: Query Letters
- The Nibble: When an Agent Expresses Interest
- The Bite: Getting an Offer
- The Play: Interviewing Agents
- The Keeper: Final Decisions and Next Steps
As we saw in “The Prey” the agent is a kind of super-hero. I don’t know if she can catch bullets with her teeth, but she definitely has a Spidey-sense. Maybe you have some agent-like superpowers, too—like drafting a contract at the speed of light, or negotiating as artfully as The Hulk. (Sorry—I’m guessing on that last image; I don’t really follow the Marvel franchise.) The point is, maybe you can actually handle many of the tasks typically performed by an agent. Then the question becomes: Do you still need one?
The answer: Maybe not. But probably.
Sorry—was that not clear? Let me unpack it a bit.
There are, in fact, some cases where you don’t need an agent. Here are a few of them:
- (Very) Small Presses. Publishing in the US is dominated by the scores of imprints headed by the so-called Big Four publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette Book Group. But there are scores of small and independent presses (Poets & Writers has a great list), and many of the smallest presses will accept “unsolicited” (= unagented) submissions—at least for select reading periods. For these smaller presses, you will sometimes have the option of doing an author submission.
- Contacts. Sometimes you know someone who knows the brother-in-law of the sister of the neighbor of an editor of [INSERT BIG FOUR IMPRINT HERE]. If you do, exploit the hell out of that contact! I once got a manuscript in front of an editor at a Big Four imprint thanks to an indirect contact, and if even I can do it, anyone can. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but you might at least get a read.
- Twiddle your thumbs and wait. You can also wait to be struck by lightning—that is, the moment when some editor notices the brilliant flash fiction piece you published in the Monroe County Quarterly, and she reaches out to sign you to a three-book deal. I suppose that could happen, but I don’t really recommend this approach.
Where does this leave us? Well, for most of us, it means you need an agent. In fact, even for the small presses, the presence of an agent is an influential sign: it means you have been vetted by a professional in the field, and that alone increases the chances that your manuscript will be read by an editor.
Here’s a useful statistic (provided by ChatGPT, so do with it what you will): Publishers generally accept less than 1% of unagented submissions (what they call the “slush pile”), whereas some 20% of agented submissions find a home.
I can’t vouch for the specific percentages, but the trend sounds right.
What this means is that having an agent is considered indirect evidence of quality. (God only know what is meant by “quality,” given the trash that sometimes makes it to the bestseller lists, but maybe having an agent at least suggests your potential marketability.)
So, what’s the bottom line? I think it’s better to have an agent than not. With a couple of my books, I made first contact through an author submission to a small press, but even then I was glad to have my agent handle the negotiations and the royalties. And when one of my books was optioned for a film (which is finally going into production…), I was triply glad.
So, overall, it’s best to have an agent. But how do you get one? And when should you start looking? Well, it just so happens that timing the next topic.
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