[Agent] Mathew Ferguson

Mathew, in every example you've provided there's an inbuilt hook. Either a television show, a project for schoolchildren (now there's a captive audience), or an established author's fanbase and presence. In other words - visibility. You bet that matters.
I just wish you wouldn't bet your clients' work on it.

eqb said:

Your post seemed to imply a different approach--releasing the book in increments online, *then* approaching a commercial publisher.

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There was a vanity publisher that had this approach on here for a while (the Zooty and Flapper guy, Dominic or Dimitri... something like that) Basically his brainstorm was that he'd post people's stuff for free on his site and once it garnered several thousand reads, he'd put together a submission to send to publishers telling them he had proof the book was good, popular, etc. He never took into account that by that point, the book's core audience had been burned through for no profit to anyone except him (it cost to post to his site).

Posting like that counts as publication to certain houses, and if the story caches in Google or another engine, then it's available for free for an extended period of time even if the author pulls it from the internet.

mscelina said:

There's a difference between using excerpts as hooks for your published work and tossing the whole thing out onto the internet for free and unmonitored consumption.

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Cory did release his entire book for free. And Baen's Free Library does the same thing for selected titles. And what they found is that many readers will read the e-version then buy the printed version. Or they might read one free book in a series, then buy the rest if they like it.

But first those books are professionally edited and produced. And they are *marketed* by the publisher. Sure the author does promotion, too, but they aren't working alone, in advance of even selling the book.

Mat, is this you?

Eirin said:

How will you get people (editors and/or the reading public) to notice another page of text on the internet? It's not as if there's a paucity as it is. How will you create visibility?
How will you even entice editors to go looking in the first place?

I'm an avid reader and I'm perfectly willing to spend quite a bit of money on books. I'm far from alone in this, nor do I think my book-buying pattern is unique. I shop online if I'm acquainted with the author or have heard good things about a specific book, in B&M if I want to browse. The keyword here is selection.
I do find and enjoy free stuff on the net, but I don't have the time to scour cyberspace for good reading material, and I certainly can't be bothered to monitor torrent sites for random uploads from hopeful new authors. Bookstores function as my gatekeepers.

Editors in general don't appear to be inclined to spend their days online looking for new writers either. They, too, have gatekeepers.

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Hi Eirin -- I don't think this is the only route to publication by the way. It's just one of the routes and not the most important one.

Editors are not the first target audience. While there are editors out searching for the cool new thing, there are plenty who don't search at all and rely on the agent filtering mechanism.

The point of the website is to find and build the audience. Say you are writing a non-fiction book on US car manufacturing. As the book develops, it would be a great idea to start posting online sections of the book. This posting will tell you potentially how many people there are around who are interested in this topic. If you're only getting 100 visitors a day you can conclude it is a low number.

If you are writing fiction then the point of the website is to build and attract an audience also. There are many well-established strategies to do this such as posting links to your site on forums, releasing the book on a torrent, posting chapters on critique sites, running a twitter account and writing an interesting blog. The sum result of this is so you or an agent can say "This website received 10,000 hits per day, has had four thousands comments such as x, y, z, and the eBook has been downloaded 2000 times.", for example.

If an editor has two books of equal quality and one comes with "This has 5000 readers who receive a page every three days" and the other comes with "I wrote this, I'm pretty sure there is a market for it", which will be published?

I use bookshops as gatekeepers too. I do read some stuff online but as the Kindle has only just been released here in Australia I haven't moved over to reading entire books online. I do however search out around the world for the cool new thing. I used to do it when I was an in-house editor to and I would write to people asking if they had anything to submit to us.

Online activity can't make an average book publishable but it can give a publishable book an edge over another publishable book.

Mathew, I'm confused about what you intend.

Do you want to release excerpts of your clients' work online in order to catch the interest of editors at commercial houses, or do you propose to publish books online in pay-to-view increments?

Someone could easily do either without your assistance. What would your part be?

Eirin said:

Mathew, in every example you've provided there's an inbuilt hook. Either a television show, a project for schoolchildren (now there's a captive audience), or an established author's fanbase and presence. In other words - visibility. You bet that matters.
I just wish you wouldn't bet your clients' work on it.

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Hi Eirin -- I don't agree that there was an inbuilt hook for each of those examples. Sex in the City could have stayed a newspaper column and went nowhere. Max Tucker's website could have stayed as a website and not been made into a book.

The quality of the material is paramount. Good quality can start from anything and go to anything. A sticker that becomes a t-shirt that becomes a gift book that becomes a graphic novel doesn't get there because there was an inbuilt hook. It gets there because the quality is there from the start.

I'm certainly not betting my clients' work on the web and I'm not so foolish to think that a website is all one needs. For example, I represent two illustrators and I love their work. They are damn good illustrators and I fully believe in their styles, their ethos, everything about them. I've encouraged both of them to build websites and engage in activities that will raise their profile.

One illustrator has amazing character designs. My strategy with her is to see if I can license some of those designs to a local person who will make the products and start selling them. I fully expect the initial money to be low but the product samples and a sales record are the desired outcome. Now I don't really care if that character starts on a t-shirt, a sticker, a badge, a notebook, a sock or a bar of soap. So long as it starts somewhere decent, establishes a beginning and can then grow out to something else.

mscelina said:

It all boils down to this: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? That's why e-published authors have to be so vigilant with their work. Sites that are selling pirated copies of published works are cutting into their sales. Why would incrementally e-publishing sections of a book be any different?

There's a difference between using excerpts as hooks for your published work and tossing the whole thing out onto the internet for free and unmonitored consumption.

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This is the standard debate around eBooks. Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of those "eBooks are the way to go!" agents. The market isn't there yet, it isn't commercialised successfully and the money still is mostly in paper publishing.

However, putting out an eBook isn't an unmonitored event. Websites show downloads, hits, where people are coming from and where they go.

I'm on the side of "Theft of your work online isn't the problem. Anonymity is."

Cyia said:

There was a vanity publisher that had this approach on here for a while (the Zooty and Flapper guy, Dominic or Dimitri... something like that) Basically his brainstorm was that he'd post people's stuff for free on his site and once it garnered several thousand reads, he'd put together a submission to send to publishers telling them he had proof the book was good, popular, etc. He never took into account that by that point, the book's core audience had been burned through for no profit to anyone except him (it cost to post to his site).

Posting like that counts as publication to certain houses, and if the story caches in Google or another engine, then it's available for free for an extended period of time even if the author pulls it from the internet.

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I've heard that idea also. If a book only has an audience of three thousand people then you might have already found them and satisfied their need for what you are selling. This is particularly true with non-fiction topics.

Eirin said:

Mathew, I'm confused about what you intend.

Do you want to release excerpts of your clients' work online in order to catch the interest of editors at commercial houses, or do you propose to publish books online in pay-to-view increments?

Someone could easily do either without your assistance. What would your part be?

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Hi Eirin - this isn't what I intend for my agency. It is simply one of the small side-tracks that started because I said any agent who doesn't know what SEO is should hang up their spurs.

I'll give you an example of something I might do.
About two months ago I rejected a very well-written story. That writer got the longest rejection letter I've ever written. It was almost there in many many ways. I invited him to submit his next work and just recently he has. I haven't read it yet but if it lands in the same area as the first submission then I'm very likely to make an offer of representation for this writer.

Have you ever read the unedited version of Eragon? You can see there is great stuff there but it does need a serious edit. This writer is like that. I can see the structure.

If this writer was happy for me to represent him then the first thing that would happen is they would get a fully marked-up serious red ink copy of their manuscript sent back. I would work with this writer to bring the book up to publishable standard.

Once the manuscript is at publishable standard then starts the multi-prong approach. Is it good enough to get immediate attention? Do his competition have websites?
For his genre there exists a thriving online community. They would be one of my first targets. I would be encouraging him to join these communities and trickling out pages, all with links back to a website. I would probably also release a sample via torrents for download.
In this process, I would also start slowly submitting it to publishers and seeing what they have to say. If I received "It's awesome but we're not sure how big the market for it would be" then I would put a lot of effort into growing the online presence of the work. If the website was flooding with traffic then I might suggest a pay gateway to get the rest of the book (this would require very high traffic numbers though).

The point of this is to build an audience and give me something to say other than talking about the content of the book. I want to be able to tell an editor that the first three chapters have been downloaded 5000 times and here are a page of comments from readers. Pre-selection and pre-approval works on editors and sales and marketing quite well.

A savvy writer who knows a little about Wordpress and can research SEO can do the web side of it by themselves. They don't need an agent for that at all. And if they started to make a bit of money from the site or had big traffic numbers then they would find agents and publishers approaching them. If they were making enough money from their website and online releases then they may turn down paper publishing entirely.

So that's just one example of something that may happen. An agent who scoffs at a website is living in the past I think.

priceless1 said:

Mat, is this you?

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Yes, that is me at Channel Frederator. Thanks for reminding me of this - I've recently taken www.mannamanna.com.au offline for reworking and so this profile website links nowhere.

Oh...my. You're frightfully young. Now this all makes a lot more sense.

What you are describing - ways to establish internet presence and visibility - is more or less what newly published authors all over are already doing, with varying success. Those authors at least have a pre-selected product to base it on.

That's not the point, though.

What I'm seeing is that you are trying to substitute internet handwaving for industry connections, and I strongly suspect that your claim that those connections don't matter springs from the fact that you don't have them. I believe that, at best, you're wasting your clients' time; at worst you're fucking up their manuscripts' submission history, reducing the pool of potential publishers.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

priceless1 said:

Oh...my. You're frightfully young. Now this all makes a lot more sense.

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I'm 30. My birthday is April 11.

Thanks for the compliment though.

So it's not my country and it's not my age. Anything else you would like to pull up?

I've been working in publishing since 2003. Is SIX years enough?

I didn't come hastily to my opinions. They were built up over years and through many projects and experiences. They are evidence-based. This is why I can say that agents don't work "24/7" or anything near it.

Eirin said:

What you are describing - ways to establish internet presence and visibility - is more or less what newly published authors all over are already doing, with varying success. Those authors at least have a pre-selected product to base it on.

That's not the point, though.

What I'm seeing is that you are trying to substitute internet handwaving for industry connections, and I strongly suspect that your claim that those connections don't matter springs from the fact that you don't have them. I believe that, at best, you're wasting your clients' time; at worst you're fucking up their manuscripts' submission history, reducing the pool of potential publishers.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

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Wow, what a negative response.

No, I am not trying to substitute internet handwaving for industry connections. I was simply talking through a tiny segment of what an agent should know about, care about and be willing to dive into. An agent who doesn't know the difference between Joomla and Wordpress ... is no agent.

As for the claim that "connections don't matter" - I'm sure you'll find this is a misrepresentation of my position. Perhaps you should read through the posts.

What I claim is that the publishing industry as described (agents and editors are buddies and having these close connections is what makes one a good agent and having these close connections gets a manuscript to the top of the pile, agents work superhuman hours) does not match reality (editors churn, publishers churn, having long-term relationships isn't as advantageous as agents claim, agents don't work as hard as the myth goes, there are more ways to publication than direct to book publishers, etc).

I don't really think "stop worshipping agents" is an extreme position to take.

I do actually have relationships with editors in publishing houses around Australia and in other countries but I don't count too much on them. As a freelancer I've seen the churn at work. My contact at Penguin ... churn. Well, there goes some freelance work. Call up the new editor - hey, I worked for your predecessor, want to hire me? Then it either heads to yes, business as usual or no, new broom sweeps clean.

Contact at another publisher in Melbourne - emails, great relationship ... churn. Now they work at a newspaper and that connection is worthless.

The point I'm making, and the one that seems to get some people very upset, is that it isn't very hard to make a phone call and it isn't that hard to get people to talk to you. I look at all editors with a two year time limit on their heads. If they've been in a job for a year then I expect them to be gone a year later.

This is simply the reality of the publishing industry. Look at any industry newsletter - people are transferring around the place or dropping out, new people are coming in.

mathewferguson said:

The special pleading usage was correct. Being in Australia was used as the special case to refute what I claimed.

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No, Mat. Your usage is incorrect.


Or, a bit more modern:


You would have us believe that both Mephistopheles and Blackadder are using special pleading. They aren't.

Special pleading, among other things, requires that the claimed circumstances be irrelevant. Further, for your claim to be true, someone has to have claimed that being in Australia is the special case to refute what you claim.

The actual claim is that maybe things work like that in Australia but they sure as fudge don't work like that here. The people who are telling you those things are doing so out of a spirit of helpfulness. Don't turn down the gift.

I do look forward to seeing how you fare over the next year. Most agents who make sales start doing so in their first six months.

mathewferguson said:

So it's not my country and it's not my age.

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Actually, it is.

I didn't come hastily to my opinions. They were built up over years and through many projects and experiences. They are evidence-based. This is why I can say that agents don't work "24/7" or anything near it.

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"Evidence-based" my rusty red pen. You are woefully under-schooled as to how the industry works outside your tiny sphere. Until you have worked in other countries and rubbed elbows with real agents who make real sales, your opinions are akin to howling at the moon. Credibility? No, I don't think so.

James D. Macdonald said:

No, Mat. Your usage is incorrect.

FAUST: Come, I think hell's a fable.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.
​

Or, a bit more modern:

BLACKADDER: No need to panic, somebody in the crew will know how to steer us to France.

CAPTAIN REDBEARD RUM: The crew, my lord?

BLACKADDER: Yes, the crew.

RUM: What crew?

BLACKADDER: I was under the impression that it is common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.

RUM: Opinion is divided on the subject.

BLACKADDER: Really?

RUM: Yes. All the other sea captains say it is, I say it isn't.

BLACKADDER: Oh, God. Mad as a brush.
​

You would have us believe that both Mephistopheles and Blackadder are using special pleading. They aren't.

Special pleading, among other things, requires that the claimed circumstances be irrelevant. Further, for your claim to be true, someone has to have claimed that being in Australia is the special case to refute what you claim.

The actual claim is that maybe things work like that in Australia but they sure as fudge don't work like that here. The people who are telling you those things are doing so out of a spirit of helpfulness. Don't turn down the gift.

I do look forward to seeing how you fare over the next year. Most agents who make sales start doing so in their first six months.

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Bonus points for Blackadder! A brilliant program.

I'm looking forward to seeing how I go over the next six months too. I got a freelance gig for one of my illustrators last week but it was a small job so I'm not counting it yet.

Regarding special pleading - someone did claim that me being from Australia was the reason for my claims regarding publishing and agent work. Australia was the special case, the irrelevant circumstance.

priceless1 said:

Actually, it is.

"Evidence-based" my rusty red pen. You are woefully under-schooled as to how the industry works outside your tiny sphere. Until you have worked in other countries and rubbed elbows with real agents who make real sales, your opinions are akin to howling at the moon. Credibility? No, I don't think so.

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Have you ever taken the time to look into logical fallacies? You pulled out one a moment ago - Ad Hominem, regarding my perceived age. You've made some ridiculous statements, particularly about agents working "almost 24/7" and when I refute that you decide to attack my perceived age rather than my argument.

Why not consider the possibility that agents don't actually work all the hours they claim to? Is there not the possibility that people who work on commission derive benefit from the claim they work incredibly hard?

Is there not the slightest sliver of a chance that agents use PR about their own job to help justify its existence? Can you even admit that?

I am not "woefully under-schooled" and nor have I worked in a tiny sphere. You appear so committed to a mythology regarding publishing and agent work that you are now lashing out with insults at me because I disagree with you.

I do not accept the terms you set down for qualification to be a real agent. Have you published work in Australia? Would it be fair to say you are not a real publisher if you haven't? And if you have, then pick another country. Oh, you haven't published in Norway? Then you can't possibly be a real publisher. Such a position is stupid.

Your laundry list of qualifications to be an agent is ridiculous. I don't accept that one needs to work as an intern for an established agent. I contend that experience in the publishing industry, depending on its depth, is enough.

I did not step into agent work as a lark or just for the hell of it. I have years of experience in publishing but apparently it's not quite enough for you. I got an illustrator a job last week - is that enough or do you want to start setting dollar amounts on the qualification too?

I don't mind a bit of online fire from time to time. You might notice that I always use my own name when I'm online - that's because I stand by what I say. Don't worship agents. No, they don't work 24/7. No, your query letter isn't really important. Yes, having a website is a great idea.

I'm very well aware that this position brings out those who are dedicated to defending the mythology. After all, what agent would admit that there are easy sales? It was a call, a contract and a chunk of cash and all for hardly any effort. We know those deals exist ... but no one will talk about them.

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Mat, I think this could have been an interesting discussion, but the aggression in your answers disheartens me. I don't "worship" my agent, any more than I worship any other professional. But I respect them. You are taking any attitude above disdain as "worship," and that ticks me off. Yes, the "24/7" thing is hyperbole (and it's not something I personally said, so please don't throw it back at me). But most American agents do work many evenings and weekends to get their query/partial/full reading done, which is all that's meant by it.

My sale wasn't "easy", and the negotiations over my contract weren't "easy." I'm grateful for the part my agent played in them, and that isn't worship. Oh, and my query letter was important to getting her as my agent. That is a fact of my experience. I'm not "defending a mythology," I'm just respecting a professional with skills, experience and talent.

You may not mind "online fire" but I feel like I'm being yelled at. It is really unpleasant. And your insults ("agent worship", "defending the mythology") are distracting from what could be an interesting discussion, about methods of getting noticed.

I got my sale the old-fashioned way, and I'm skeptical of web success for unknown, unpublished novelists, but I would have liked to talk about it. Except you keep yelling at anyone who respects and appreciates their agent.

"Stop worshipping agents" is not an extreme position. What's extreme is the accusation that worshiping agents is what we're doing.

priceless1 said:

Oh...my. You're frightfully young. Now this all makes a lot more sense.

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Now just a doggone minute. Now you're saying that as well as Mat being ruled out as an agent because he's Australian, and hasn't been an assistant in an agency that he's too young??? What a bigoted midset we're uncovering here.

Are you aware how young some agents are these days? Take a look at some of the most established agencies and you will find agents a lot younger than Mat, I promise you. While I prefer my agent to be able to dress him/herself and not need pushed round the park on weekends I'm not too fussed about age, and you shouldn't be either.

As Mat has eloquently said, it's the writing that matters. All the rest is BS.

mathewferguson said:

I'm certainly not betting my clients' work on the web and I'm not so foolish to think that a website is all one needs. For example, I represent two illustrators and I love their work. They are damn good illustrators and I fully believe in their styles, their ethos, everything about them. I've encouraged both of them to build websites and engage in activities that will raise their profile.

One illustrator has amazing character designs. My strategy with her is to see if I can license some of those designs to a local person who will make the products and start selling them. I fully expect the initial money to be low but the product samples and a sales record are the desired outcome. Now I don't really care if that character starts on a t-shirt, a sticker, a badge, a notebook, a sock or a bar of soap. So long as it starts somewhere decent, establishes a beginning and can then grow out to something else.

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So you're representing illustrators as well as authors, and focusing on licensing with them? And according to the link that Lynn posted, your publishing experience is pretty much all on the licensing side, and you don't seem to have worked in standalone books at all. This doesn't sound like a good background for a literary agent from where I'm standing.

I'm not suggesting that licensing is an entirely useless way forward--for some writers it's a very useful route to consider--but it's not appropriate for a lot of writers because their work just isn't suitable. For (a very bad) example, literary novels aren't going to do well if they're made into cartoons. Licensing is a big deal, and very lucrative: but it's a completely different business to literary agenting.

I'll use an example from Australia: New MacDonald's Farm. It's a children's television show on here and it has an accompanying licensing programme. It started as a pretty terrible looking website. The creator hired some writers to write 1000 -1500 word stories based around the characters Henry the Horse, Percy the Pig, etc. Not the most innovative thing I've ever seen.

They used their website to start drawing traffic. Children were coming to the site and downloading colouring sheets and the like. They took their traffic figures and detailed proof of market to Beyond Entertainment who then transformed it into a television show. Once on television along came the publishing program and out came the books.

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While I don't know anything about this TV show, I'm sure you're right about how it became successful, just as I'm sure you're right about the other examples you provided (which I'll not quote here, for brevity). The thing is they're not typical of how most books come to a publisher's attention: they're exceptions, and so shouldn't be used to prove the rule. And if it's how you're planning on getting your clients' books published, I do hope you're taking care to only accept books which would suit these methods of promotion: otherwise you'll be fouling the pitch for the writers concerned, which would be a horrible thing for you to do to them.

Mat, I think your intentions are good; I think that you are positive, and have an innovative approach which is worthy of some attention. I just don't think you have enough experience to really know what you're doing; I think your attitude towards the publishing business in general, and towards agents in particular, is worrying; and like Emily and others here, I'm concerned by your aggression and easy dismissal of some of the advice you've been given here, and the questions you've been asked.

I suspect that you'll come back with a dismissal of all I've written here: fair enough. You evidently believe in yourself, and your ability to do the job that you've set out to do. So I'll direct you to the research paper I linked to in this blog post of mine, Unskilled and Unaware, which discusses how it's difficult for people to realise how bad they are at something until they've developed a reasonable degree of expertise in the area. Please: read the research paper and take some time to consider it. I'm worried for the clients you're taking on, and for the future of their work.

Emily Winslow said:

Mat, I think this could have been an interesting discussion, but the aggression in your answers disheartens me. I don't "worship" my agent, any more than I worship any other professional. But I respect them. You are taking any attitude above disdain as "worship," and that ticks me off. Yes, the "24/7" thing is hyperbole (and it's not something I personally said, so please don't throw it back at me). But most American agents do work many evenings and weekends to get their query/partial/full reading done, which is all that's meant by it.

My sale wasn't "easy", and the negotiations over my contract weren't "easy." I'm grateful for the part my agent played in them, and that isn't worship. Oh, and my query letter was important to getting her as my agent. That is a fact of my experience. I'm not "defending a mythology," I'm just respecting a professional with skills, experience and talent.

You may not mind "online fire" but I feel like I'm being yelled at. It is really unpleasant. And your insults ("agent worship", "defending the mythology") are distracting from what could be an interesting discussion, about methods of getting noticed.

I got my sale the old-fashioned way, and I'm skeptical of web success for unknown, unpublished novelists, but I would have liked to talk about it. Except you keep yelling at anyone who respects and appreciates their agent.

"Stop worshipping agents" is not an extreme position. What's extreme is the accusation that worshiping agents is what we're doing.

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Hi Emily.

It's great that you have a good agent and you respect them. That is a good position to be in and a good attitude to have.

My response wasn't directed at you. I despise agent worship on principle. It doesn't mean I think anyone who says something positive about agents is automatically engaging in it. I do sincerely believe that agent worship is a real condition though and I've seen plenty of examples of it.

There are people (priceless1 for example) who will say things like agents work "almost 24/7" and it isn't hyperbole. They really believe it and they spread it around. I don't agree that priceless1 meant to say that agents work evenings and weekends to get their reading done. Wouldn't she have said so by now? If her position needs clarification, she should do so.

It's 7:20pm in Australia right now and I'll be reading and replying to submissions until about 10pm. But I don't work more than about eight to ten hours a day and I would never pretend otherwise.

The mythology I am referring to is the collection of statements people make and continue to make about publishing and agents. Why these myths are so persistent is because they have bits of truth woven through them. Of course there are difficult negotiations. Of course there are calls and emails and meetings and talking budgets and all kinds of difficult work. Of course there are times when an agent is working massive hours to get things done. But it isn't the way people like priceless1 tell it.

There is a PR element to agent work. Talking up sales online and in trade newsletters. Pretending there is a deep and secret connection to editors and publishers. Telling a client how difficult the job is in case they ever start to think that 15% isn't justified. To acknowledge and talk about this PR element is forbidden, apparently.

Mine is quite a simple position: agent work is not nearly as difficult and time-consuming as some people (agents included) make it out to be.

Old Hack said:

So you're representing illustrators as well as authors, and focusing on licensing with them? And according to the link that Lynn posted, your publishing experience is pretty much all on the licensing side, and you don't seem to have worked in standalone books at all. This doesn't sound like a good background for a literary agent from where I'm standing.

I'm not suggesting that licensing is an entirely useless way forward--for some writers it's a very useful route to consider--but it's not appropriate for a lot of writers because their work just isn't suitable. For (a very bad) example, literary novels aren't going to do well if they're made into cartoons. Licensing is a big deal, and very lucrative: but it's a completely different business to literary agenting.



While I don't know anything about this TV show, I'm sure you're right about how it became successful, just as I'm sure you're right about the other examples you provided (which I'll not quote here, for brevity). The thing is they're not typical of how most books come to a publisher's attention: they're exceptions, and so shouldn't be used to prove the rule. And if it's how you're planning on getting your clients' books published, I do hope you're taking care to only accept books which would suit these methods of promotion: otherwise you'll be fouling the pitch for the writers concerned, which would be a horrible thing for you to do to them.

Mat, I think your intentions are good; I think that you are positive, and have an innovative approach which is worthy of some attention. I just don't think you have enough experience to really know what you're doing; I think your attitude towards the publishing business in general, and towards agents in particular, is worrying; and like Emily and others here, I'm concerned by your aggression and easy dismissal of some of the advice you've been given here, and the questions you've been asked.

I suspect that you'll come back with a dismissal of all I've written here: fair enough. You evidently believe in yourself, and your ability to do the job that you've set out to do. So I'll direct you to the research paper I linked to in this blog post of mine, Unskilled and Unaware, which discusses how it's difficult for people to realise how bad they are at something until they've developed a reasonable degree of expertise in the area. Please: read the research paper and take some time to consider it. I'm worried for the clients you're taking on, and for the future of their work.

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Hi Jane, well done with attempting to predict a response from me. If I dismiss your claims then you are correct. If I don't, then you are correct. You win the internet!

Please be assured I have worked on adult fiction, children's licensed fiction, children's non-fiction, adult non-fiction, romance (ugh), young adult fiction and a whole range of other exciting projects (like the Pearson Junior Atlas, where I was project editor).

When I asked earlier what experience I would need to show I didn't get much of an answer. Apparently you can either be an established agent or some faker liar poseur and there is no other option. It is impossible to be a new agent with six years of publishing experience as an editor, writer, copywriter, copyeditor, project editor, proof-reader, SEO writer ... you get the idea.

I have a footprint online. You can find books I've written and edited in libraries. You can find books that I pitched, negotiated and took from idea to delivery. This isn't enough though. I must also have some deep respect for agents and never dare suggest that agents work less than horrendous hours.

Perhaps if I kept to the script I would be allowed in the club.

mathewferguson said:

Mine is quite a simple position: agent work is not nearly as difficult and time-consuming as some people (agents included) make it out to be.

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How, exactly, do you know this? You aren't a successful agent yet. You haven't sold anything yet. You have an opinion, which you've shared repetitively here, but you don't actually have evidence to back it up.

Several people have suggested that you come back in six months and let us know how your novel approach (pun intended) is working out. I think that would be a good approach.