Had an interesting exchange in another thread. A friend just finished a new book and is preparing to send it off to an agent. I asked what the agent will do for him. A word of background is needed here: this is a good writer who turns out interesting, well-written books with believable characters. The plots make sense and underlying the stories are usually serious ideas about personal relationships, honor, family, and all those things books are supposed to have in them. But he is not a bestseller. At least not yet. Hes a plugger who probably hasnt sold a total of ten thousand books if all the stuff he has written was lumped together on a single spreadsheet. Several people -- who also writers but havent yet broken into the bestseller ranks -- chimed in on the thread, but none of them actually gave me a specific answer. The closest anybody came was to say that agents hold the keys to the kingdom. I took that to mean the only service the agent provides is to allow the writer to be taken seriously. To put it bluntly, if you have an agent, you are genuine; if you dont, youre a poseur, a phony and probably self-published. I suppose somebody who writes bestsellers -- a Lee Child or James Patterson, for example -- derives some sort of benefit from having an agent. Of course, the agent doesnt have to do as much for them because they already write bestsellers, dont they? Bestseller writers -- no matter how bad their books -- dont have to scramble for publicity because they are in demand for talk shows, they get asked to write opinion pieces and their books are avidly scouted by Hollywood for movie and TV production. Agents and even publishers go out of their way to publicize big names like Turow, Grisham, etc. The little names? Not so much. Everybody else -- what they call mid-list writers -- basically does this stuff on their own because if they dont work to sell their books, nobody else will. Not their agent. And certainly not their publisher. Which brings me back to my original question: what exactly do agents do for small time writers who arent going to sell hundreds of thousands of books? Can somebody out there give me an answer? Anybody? *crickets*
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 22:58:09 +0000
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