Nomad said:
What you can lose is the opportunity to be reviewed by editors at major houses. If your agent has no connections, is unprofessional, has never made a sale, and you finally get sick of her and land an agent who DOES have a professional history of making sales, you may have burned your bridges at any publishers to which the clueless agent already submitted on your behalf. A bad agent can often be worse than no agent at all. If you already know this woman isn't successful, do you really want to put yourself in the position of being the next test case for her success? Why not shoot higher and go for an agent with a track record? Or for that matter, just shop your work around yourself. You certainly can't do worse than this agent has apparently already done.
Sorry I don't buy this.
To me it doesn't matter who the agent is that represents a person. The agent is just someone who acts on the behalf of another. If any story is submitted and a publisher likes it then they will publish it regardless of whom the agent is.
They may have their favourites but thats not to say they are not open to fresh faces.
Or if someone else writes a similar story and has it published first, the other writer can prove that they wrote theirs beforehand from copyright dates. (one can also achieve this by posting a story to oneself and never opening the parcel and logging that parcel with their solicitor - I do this).
However, it would be sour grapes on the part of the unpublished writer (I think) if another writer with a similar story got there first. Good luck to them, I say.
Like my mother says, if you are meant to have something it will be there waiting for you, you just have to be patient.
True, there may be publishers that will trust the say so of any particular agent, but it doesn't mean to say that an (until now) unproductive agent won't find a writer with something wonderful to be published, (not saying its me either). And as I said before, every agent has to start somewhere.
I'm a great believer in helping others especially others who have been discredited simply because they have not delivered what they set out to do - YET.
I don't know for an absolute certainty that deborah arrowsmith cannot deliver, I only know from what I have been finding out on writers forums, that there is some doubt. However, I have managed to find and emailed one of her clients and have received a favourable reply from them. Okay, Deborah hasn't found them a publisher but the writer had nothing detrimental to say about her.
In fact they said to quote: 'My personal dealings with her told me she was very professional, and business like. I was impressed.'
I have to admit from my dealings with deborah arrowsmith I have to agree, and it is only the advice recieved from writers beware that put the cat among my particular pigeons. There is no other source that discredits deborah arrowsmith, AND I have to say that in actual fact the complaints recieved by writers beware related to a debbie armstrong and not deborah arrowsmith.
I would very much like to speak with those that made the complaints, to verify for an absolute certainty whether debbie armstrong is AKA deborah arrowsmith or not and that will be where my next stint of research is headed.
Over and above everything I would not wish to add to allegations about DA if her greatest crime is not yet having found a publisher for her clients.
Everyone has to make their way from the bottom to the top sometime, there's no other place to start.
