Do literary agents know what they are doing?

Do literary agents know what they are doing? OK I appreciate that thinking about this is a reaction to getting rejection letters. I also do know that there are plenty of stories about authors being turned down and then eventually being successful. Keep trying they all say.

Put all that on one side and ask the question, do any of them keep score. So far, on all of the agent’s web sites I have looked at, I have never found an agent that says how good they are at spotting winners.

The sort of thing I am looking for is something that says we have looked at X number of submissions and approved Y new authors and of all the people we have turned down only Z have gone on to be published by someone else. If Z as a proportion of the rejections, is smaller than Y as a proportion of the submissions, then it would suggest that the agent knows what they are doing. If the numbers were the other way around then you would have to conclude that the average of all the other agents was better than the agent in question.

As I have never found any agent who publishes any stats, other than telling me how many submissions they get, I am leaning towards the conclusion that none of them keep score, or if they do then they don’t want to tell anyone about it.

So what does this tell me? I guess the obvious answer is that one might conclude that none of them are particularly good at spotting talent. Does that matter? Probably not. The key thing is whether the agent is any good at representing talent – getting you a good deal if they do take you on. Some data to help answer that question would be helpful, but I don’t see much sign of that either.

There is another problem, if most agents turn down most submissions then any author who gets accepted is likely to just say yes whether the agent is any good or not, so they are in a sellers market.

On balance then, I guess the right strategy is to get an agent, any agent, and get published. After that it must be a lot easier to get a good agent, because all of them are interested in making money and they would rather take on a published author than an unpublished one.

It actually feels like a rubbish system that is ripe for a new business model – I just wish I could figure out what such a model might look like.

Authonomy

I put my book on Authonomy in the hope of constructive criticism. The basic deal there is simple enough, there is a complex and invisible algorithm driven by which books other site members like, by which books rise up the charts. If you get into the top five at the right time then Harper Collins will look at your book. With about 5000 books on the site I’m not sure I regard the odds as particularly good. Other people have blogged about how it has become a sort of swap fest, you read mine and I’ll read yours. To get into the top five you obviously have to put in a lot of hours reading and commenting. Not made any easier or quicker when the site prevents you reading offline and its refresh time in clunky by modern standards.

If only five triumph, what is in it for the other 4995 books and their authors? Precious little I would suggest.

I’ve had getting on for 40 comments and almost all of them tell me what a great book I’ve written. I tried sending a letter to random people who seemed to be online a lot in which I asked specific questions. Do you think chapter one is too dark? Did the issues raised put you off? Does it start too slow? The response I got was pretty much the same. It’s not too dark, too slow, or too detailed.

What do agents say? Those who have rejected it so far say things like:- ditch chapter one - there is too much exposition and it’s too dark, so no one would pick it up in a shop if they read the beginning. Get into it much quicker and get to the real crime. Um it’s a medical thriller and there is no actual crime, but never mind – you get the picture.

Nothing said in any of the comments from writers on Authonomy was aimed in the same direction as the agents who have rejected the book so far.

So is there any point to Authonomy? The vast majority of books will not be improved by the comments they get and the chances of being picked up by Harper Collins become more and more remote as the site goes on. Of course all that reading other people’s book and pitching to get you own read chews up time when you could be writing. Slowing up the rate at which writers crank out books that would never be published may be what Harper Collins was really aiming at.

That might seem bad, but in some ways it gives us a hint of a more optimistic picture, not for publishing but for life in general. Given the chance, even perfect strangers will not say bad things, or things they think might hurt. To get any criticism that might push you towards change, you have to pay. In the case of agents, mostly you pay with your time, plus printing off the double-paged versions of three chapters and the stamped addressed envelopes. The other alternative is to pay for critiques from folk like Stephanie Hale or Cornerstones. The latter are more expensive, but they don’t take 15% of whatever you earn eventually. To be fair any word beyond ‘No’ that an agent says is on their own time and costing them money.

One could argue that agents should have an interest, in a general sort of way, in promoting better writing, and hence should share their views. On the other hand book publishing is a competitive business; if all the writers got better there is no evidence that customers would suddenly buy more books. As Fred Hirsh once said. ‘If everyone stands on tip toe, no one sees any better.[i]’ From there you could argue that the less agents say, the easier it is for them to pick possible winners.

So there you have it, we live in a society where you have to pay for insults or unpalatable truths and if you talk to perfect strangers the chances are they will be nice to you. Of course that means Eastenders has got it all wrong, but surely we knew that anyway.

---

[i] Social Limits to Growth Fred Hirsh, 1976 Harvard Press