The nature of scammers

Have you Googled her? Checked her name on AgentQuery? Preditors & Editors? If she's worked in publishing, an internet search should bring up something about her background.

Although her elusiveness in answering your simple question is alarming.

Ten years of experience, but won't say how. No sales. No clients.

My opinion? Stay away from this person. It sounds all too fishy to me. Now, I'm fairly cynical, so maybe someone here a bit more in the know will say otherwise, but IMHO - run as far as you can, as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

I think we can discount the possibility of stealing your manuscript. If she did steal it, what is she going to do? Sell it to Harper Collins for $1million? If she could do that then she would be much better advised to become your agent and make her 15% without the risk of a lawsuit.
More likely is that she simply doesn't have the connections to get your manuscript on the desk of the right editor at the right time. This only damages you if you agree representation with her. At this point I don't think you lose anything by sending the full. If she offers representation then you ask her a lot of hard questions about her experience, connections and marketing plan for your work. If you don't get answers that completely satisfy you, then you walk.

You might want to PM Victoria and tell her the name of the agent. If they're a known scammer she'll probably know it. But if this agent claims she's been in business ten years and has no clients or sales anywhere, and no website, and isn't listed in the usual places, that's a big red flag.

Chances are she isn't trying to get your ms. But she could be trying to sucker you in and then ask for money to go further. Or she could just be a bad agent who keeps trying on the side and just hasn't sold anything. Anyone can claim to be an agent, and they can submit to editors, they'll just be treated like unsolicited queries more times than not. There's a lot more to being an agent than a sign out front.

If this is the agent I think it is, she claims to have 10 years experience in publishing and has just set up as an agent. If this is the case then no recorded sales is not a vast problem.
However, agent is not an entry level position. I would want evidence that she knows what she is doing wrt contracts, foreign rights, understanding royalty structures etc.

I'd say the only harm is what happened to me in almost the same situation. The agent offered representation and I was so happy that I accepted. Later on I ran into problems.

If I had never queried that agent, I would not have been in trouble later. As a result, I decided that this time around, I would only query agents with recent sales, preferably in my genre. It's easy to get emotional when The Call comes, so it's best for me to make sure beforehand, at a less emotional time, that The Call will only come from a successful agent.

As others have said, don't worry about theft. A bad agent isn't interested in your manuscript, only in your money. A good agent (or one who wants to be good) won't risk their reputation by stealing. As Waylander pointed out, it's a lot easier just to sell the ms. for you than to go to all the trouble of stealing it and pretending it was written by someone else.

Just because an agent is inexpert, or ignorant, or says peculiar things or has odd submission guidelines, doesn't mean s/he is a scammer. S/he may simply be an amateur. There are many scammers out there, but they are vastly outnumbered by the amateurs, who often have the very best intentions, but don't have the skills or the contacts to back them up. As Waylander also pointed out, "agent" is not an entry level position.

For the writer, though, the bottom line is the same: no sale. You may not lose as much money to an amateur as you would to a scammer, but you'll waste just as much time (or maybe even more, because your amateur agent may be very nice and responsive, leading you to give her second chances when you'd be better off giving her the boot) and experience just as much heartache.

The agent we're talking about claims publishing experience, but from the way she words the claim, and the lack of specifics, I'm guessing that the publishing she was involved in was not trade publishing. So it's quite possible that she may not have knowledge or the contacts to succeed. On the other hand, she at least has parallel experience--unlike people who become agents because they haven't been able to sell their own manuscripts, or because they're retired English teachers who love books, or because they think that agenting is something they can do from home in between taking the kids to school and cooking dinner. So I think you can't write her off entirely. It could go either way, though, so until she does prove herself with some genuine sales, I think it makes sense to hold off on querying her.

- Victoria