Self-Submiting vs. Acquiring an Agent

Depends on what you want. If your niche contains mostly publishers who take unagented material, and you are comfortable negotiating your own deals, then go for it.

If you're worried that you don't know enough about contracts to negotiate skillfully on your own behalf, and/or want to approach publishers who only take agented material, stop shopping yourself and get an agent first. If you do think you want an agent down the line, yes, you're shutting doors by submitting things yourself, because if you get rejected that's one less place your agent can submit.

Another possibility is to submit until someone makes an offer, then find an agent to negotiate the deal for you.

Good agents have working relationships with editors. They can get things read because they take editors out to lunch. They eat, talk, laugh, and do business together.

Things in the slush take a long, long time. Go look at duotrope's figures or Submitting to the Black Hole.

Agents know the ins and outs of publishing contracts. They know what rights to retain, what rights will sell, and how much those rights are worth.

Although your father is an attorney, would he be able to discern the value of the rights included in the contract? He may be able to keep you from signing away your soul, but would he be able to retain all the correct rights for you? Could he negotiate this with your publisher?

Basically, agents handle the nitty gritty business side of writing. They'll try to get you the best deal possible because they make money when you make money. If you make more, they make more.

You can submit to smaller, independent publishers on your own, but if you want the big guys, I'd go for an agent.

I asked around about this one a lot last year, and got a decent split between folks suggesting I try to get an agent first, and others who said to go directly to the publishers, then use their offer to land a top agent who can negotiate the deal.

Either way, it's generally a long, frustrating, query-filled process. I eventually decided to go after an agent first, but there are successful pros who swear by either method.

I agree with what's been said about the positive aspects of having an agent.

A good agent with solid industry contacts will be able to figure out which editors at which publishing houses will be most likely to be interested in your kind of book and help you refine your manuscript to hit as close to that bullseye as possible, thereby increasing your chances of making a sale. Unless you know editors and publishers as well as a good agent does, there'll be a lot more pure luck involved in hitting that bullseye.

Also remember, your agent is your partner. They are on your side. At first glance, giving up %15 of your potential earnings might sting, but it's worth it if your agent is any good. Keep in mind the more you get, the more your agent gets.

I'd much rather give 15% of $10,000 to an agent than keep 100% of nothing for myself.

This may be a tad off the topic of "to agent or not to agent," but as a lawyer myself, I can tell you that very few lawyers have a clue about the publishing world or its quirks and pitfalls. Nothing against your father, who may be the most excellent attorney in the country IN HIS FIELD, if he's not a literary attorney, the most he can do, without undertaking huge amounts of research, is tell you what the contract says, but not whether it's even remotely comparable to the average equitable publishing contract.

Most lawyers have never even heard of such things as "joint accounting" in the publishing context; and they don't know that advances, when broken into increments, should be negotiated (if possible) to avoid the last payment "on publication;" or know the wording that would narrow a second book option, or .... too many quirks of the industry to mention here. Things that would have most contract attorneys shaking their heads in disbelief and trying to have stricken from the contract are common and non-negotiable for at least some major players in the publishing industry.

Anyway, don't discount the usefulness of an agent based on your access to an attorney, unless he's a literary attorney.

JD, not giving legal advice here, of course, just general information

Get an agent first. The agent knows who would love which kinds of books and can negotiate a deal for you.

Try to avoid using a lawyer who is not knowledgeable about publishing.

HConn said:

Get an agent first.

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They have 'em at Wal-Mart?

caw.

stephblake24 said:

Thanks Marlys. My father is an attorney...so I was going to have him look things over for me...but I am curious about everyone's take on this subject. Of course in the back of my mind I wonder if an agent can get mo' money and the motion picture deal! Not that I am greedy or anything.

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Bad idea, steph, for all the reasons JanDarby states. My former boss was also a contracts attorney, and I'm an IP (intellectual property) paralegal. But I was blown away by the different meanings the same terms have in publishing.

For example:

In regular contract law, delivery and acceptance would mean when the author turned in the manuscript and the editor acknowledged receipt, the publisher would be bound to publish. But nope--not in publishing law. "Acceptance" means after review, and editing, and sometimes after copy editing. Until the publisher formally "accepts" the manuscript, there is no true contractual obligation for them to publish . . . nor to pay the rest of the advance.

Mandated publication has a whole different meaning too, that's bound and gagged to multiple other clauses in the contract.

The options clause is particularly problematic, because it reads just fine as it stands. But there is BUNCHES of underlying meaning there that can affect your whole later career.

No, please either get an agent, or have your Dad refer you to an entertainment attorney. You'll be glad you did. Trust me.

(Oh, and YES--the agent will get you more money, and retain more rights, than an attorney can. That's what they do. They're specialists.)

jchines said:

and others who said to go directly to the publishers, then use their offer to land a top agent who can negotiate the deal.

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Here's the problem with that advice, as I see it.

If your goal is an imprint of one of the large publishing houses, you're going to be running into the "no unagented submissions" policy a lot, which is going to cut way down on your options. Even where imprints claim to be open to unagented submissions, they give them rock-bottom priority. What this means is that there will always be an author with an agent ahead of you. Plus, the person reading your submission probably won't be an editor, but an intern or assistant without the power to make a buying decision. And as someone else pointed out, the waiting times can be loooooong--I'm not talking months, but years. In my opinion, all that time is much better spent looking for an agent (contrary to popular myth, it's easier to get an agent than it is to get a publisher), who, once you find her, can get you real attention from editors, and cut the waiting to a minimum.

If you want to submit to independent publishers, it's more feasible to go unagented, since most indies are willing to work directly with authors. Problem is, many indies pay small advances. Even if you get that contract offer and go agent-hunting, a top agent may not be interested, since there's little money in it for him.

Suppose you're the exception, and you get a publication offer from a large publisher as a result of an unagented submission. You probably won't have much trouble finding a successful agent willing to represent you. In an ideal world, the agent wouldn't agree to take you on on without first evaluating your full manuscript and being sure that you're someone he'd want to represent even without a publisher's offer--but in real life, I expect that many agents would operate on the bird-in-the-hand theory. So you may get an agent who'll do a good job for this book--but what about your future books? If the agent took you on because you had a contract offer, rather than because he liked and felt he could market your work, you may find yourself in a less-than-ideal situation when you finish your next book.

- Victoria

I'm going to give the ordinary advice one should get from an attorney here:

It depends. And this isn't legal advice, but an attempt to throw in some context for consideration.

The one thing that I can say with absolute confidence about the publishing industry is that there is no true "industry standard" for anything that holds throughout the industry. For any item someone puts forth as a "standard," I can probably cite half a dozen or more exceptions.

Further, there is tremendous variability in even broad practices across segments of the industry. The original poster didn't define the kind of work at issue. Here are just a few possibilities to answer her question directly:

• If it's a mainstream commercial novel, it's possible to submit without an agent, but disadvantageous—too high a proportion of publishers are "agented-only"
• If it's a category fiction novel (what some people mistakenly call "genre fiction"), in some categories unagented seems fairly normal (e.g., romance), in some categories unagented is far from unheard of but is slowly disappearing (e.g., speculative fiction), and in some categories unagented is worse than suicidal (e.g., spy/intrigue/thriller)
• In general trade nonfiction, agented sales are about as likely as unagented sales, although a few niches within there are radically different (e.g., self-help books from major publishers are almost always agented, but almost never agented from specialty self-help publishers)
• In academic, professional, and other highly specialized nonfiction, many of the leading publishers—few of whom are part of a NY-based media conglomerate—have barely heard of agents
• If you're a celebrity, in a very broad sense of the term, you need both more and less than a literary agent in the first place

So, in the end, the answer is still "it depends."

agent

I think the bottom line is that having a good agent is always a huge advantage. If you can't find a good agent, then you have little choice but to do the job yourself, but I don't think there's ever a time or a circumstance where having a good agent isn't a huge advantage.

In most genres, you can't even approach a large publisher without an agent, so you're greatly limiting your market options. And many publishers that do look at manuscripts directly from writers almost never buy one.

And, in the end, if you can't make a good agent say yes to a manuscript, what makes you think a publisher will say yes?