agents only sell 50%

[FTJoshua]

Is it true that agents, even good ones, only sell about 50% of the material they are pitching?

Thanks, all!

[alleycat]

Gee, I guess I'm surprised it's as high as 50%.

[rugcat]

It all depends on the agent. Some do better than 50%, some worse.

[Jamesaritchie]

As rugcat says, some do better some do worse. Some do a LOT worse. There's the notion among new writer that getting an agent is the same thing as making a sale, and it's not. Worse, some agents who do sell are primarily selling books by established writers, and may sell no more than five percent of the books by first time writers they take on.

[dantem42]

I had heard that among the top 200 or so agents, they sell something like 70 percent of the stuff they pick up to represent. It's skewed toward nonfiction. Also keep in mind that while an agent may not sell someone's first novel, he or she may sell the second.

[Will Lavender]

I had heard that among the top 200 or so agents, they sell something like 70 percent of the stuff they pick up to represent. It's skewed toward nonfiction. Also keep in mind that while an agent may not sell someone's first novel, he or she may sell the second.

I believe this. I'd say even at the very top, the Donald Maasses and William Morrises, it's nearing 70 percent for just fiction.

But when you get down to the middle of the bunch, I'd say the success rate is 25% at best.

[Jamesaritchie]

I had heard that among the top 200 or so agents, they sell something like 70 percent of the stuff they pick up to represent. It's skewed toward nonfiction. Also keep in mind that while an agent may not sell someone's first novel, he or she may sell the second.

This is true for top agents, but an awful lot of what agents pick up to represent are not first novels by new writers.

And you have to remember than darned few agents can take on more than three to four new writers per year, if that, and this really skews the percentages.

And if you're a fiction writer, you have to take the nonfiction numbers out of the mix to get anything like an accurate picture.

[Sakamonda]

The figure I hear most often is 50% overall (fiction and nonfiction) sales of the new projects agents take on per year. I believe the sales success rates are higher for nonfiction (70-80%), lower for fiction (25-40%), and that balances out to 50% overall.

Sometimes agents don't sell the first book by new writers they take on, but then they might sell the second, or the third----and then, once that client has made other sales, the agent then can often "backfill" additional sales from that writer's backlist once publishers are comfortable with that writer's track record of sales. What makes taking a new writer on such a risk for an agent versus a writer with a prior publication track record is, (at least this is the understanding I've gained from my own agent), is that so many publishers make their acquisitions decisions based mostly on "marketability", and that includes how many books an author is likely to sell. "Marketability" is far easier to calculate for an author who already has books being tracked by Nielsen Bookscan than a completely unknown, untested author. So pubs could very well change their minds and decide a couple years down the road to acquire a book they originally rejected on the basis of the project being "unmarketable" when an author is unknown, once an author becomes "hot" with another book.

Sometimes, of course, good, talented authors never become "hot" and their books just don't sell regardless of the agent's efforts. These clients are usually "fired" by the agent at some point (or sometimes, the client fires the agent and finds a new agent and starts over from square one).

The moral of the story is, any time an agent takes on a new client, he/she takes a risk that all the time and effort spent marketing that client to publishers could all add up to nil. Good agents are usually better at predicting which clients will result in sales BEFORE they sign them, but no agent (not even Binky Urban) can be right on that score all the time.