My thoughts and frustrations in Publishing

My comments:

Why do you say in your article "If you have funds readily available (anything from $99 – $200 a year), seek an agent."? Good agents, that is to say non-scam agents, do not charge their clients a penny. So it's quite concerning to me that you are telling new authors that they should have money in order to search for an agent and further must pay an annual sum. Yes I suppose once upon a time when agents only wanted snail mail submissions you did need to spend a bit on postage and envelopes, but those agents are few and far between. Also you follow up saying that agents offer editing services. That sounds to me like you're saying agents charge for editing. Yes many agents these days do edit, mine certainly have, but again, it is not for a fee. Ever. The edits you do with your agent are to make your book as amazing as possible in preparation for submission, not because they want to earn a profit off of you. Agents make money selling your work. That's why they do what they do, that's why they work so hard to sell it. If you find other agents who are charging a fee etc, then they are not making money off of selling your work and are a scam.

This of course leads to your first line about self publishing in that you describe it as "The quickest, cheapest and easiest way to get your manuscript published". Certainly it can be the first and last. But cheapest? No. Trade/traditional publishing is by far the cheapest as you are spending no money on the production, marketing etc of your book. Certainly we authors do on occasion shill out to make our own swag, and might go to some cons here and there, but you'd be doing that for self-publishing ON TOP of paying for editing, design etc.

Considering how little space you offer on trade and how much you push the self publishing angle, it seems to me you have a bit of an agenda to push self publishing over trade and that would be fine if you weren't telling falsehoods about it as well. I am a huge fan of self publishing and have helped many authors with just that. But to say that it costs money to get an agent and that self publishing is cheaper are two seriously red flags.

Now. All that being said, I note you're from South Africa, so maybe you do pay for agents there, but I do find that hard to believe honestly.

So those are my comments, I hope they are useful.


ETA: Found this article for writers in South Africa that reiterates my point that agents will not charge a fee, so I don't think it's that South African agents charge and all the others don't. Though it does seem to imply South African agents don't do as much editing as North American/UK agents: http://writerswrite.co.za/the-literary-agents-role

aileen, please don't use AW to promote your blog like this. Either post your thoughts there or here. Thanks.

You are obviously frustrated with the publishing business, and I can understand that. But that doesn't excuse the many inaccuracies in your piece. For example, the claim you made that writers need a few hundred dollars a year to pay agents: good agents only get paid when you get paid, as they take their commission out of the payments publishers send you. And your comment that publishers aren't going to risk investing in new authors.

Before you write any more advisory pieces on publishing, please make sure you're providing good information and not just repeating the myths touted by vanity publishers and people with axes to grind.