victoriastrauss said:
I've been getting questions about Deborah Carter for years (until recently, her agency was called Mysterious Content Literary Agency) but have been totally unable to find out anything about her other than the info at Publishers Marketplace. Of the two authors named as clients, only Wes DeMott has current publications (with Leisure Books, a mass market imprint that's known for its small advances). The other, Anne Shelby, hasn't published anything new since 1995.
If--as seems apparent--she isn't selling books, how does she stay in business without charging some sort of fee? But I've never gotten a fee complaint about her. I wonder if she has another job or source of income, and agents as a hobby.
The conference circuit is replete with marginal and/or questionable agents. Some make almost a second career of conference appearances.
Yup. And some of those conferences can be lucrative gigs. For instance, the conference under discussion -- a February beachfront gathering in a South Coast resort area, at the height of the snowbird season, which suggests to me a moneyed clientele -- offers attendees the opportunity to have their (not terribly lengthy) work critiqued, by person or persons unknown, for only $40. Since the conference website is stern about the impossibility of getting your work critiqued if you don't register for it well in advance, and follow all their submission guidelines, I have to think they aren't hurting for business. Also, the conference's guests who aren't Deborah Carter are two women who run a critique service. They charge $5.00 a page. (Wish I were getting that much to work on my authors' books.)
How can Ms. Carter be making money? Critiquing seems an obvious guess. Unlike scam agenting, you actually provide a service, so as long as you don't misrepresent anything to your clients, you're legally in the clear. There are a lot of people out there who desperately want to be published authors. One of the most notable ways they differ from professional authors is that some of them have real money. Low-end scammers go after some poor naive author's grocery money. Up at the high end, you can't even call it scamming. Massage, more like.
Victoria, it doesn't matter that you've never gotten a fee complaint. What we can observe is that this woman has supposedly been an agent for years, but she has almost no sales. Forget whatever else she's been doing in the privacy of her own home. If she's been in the business that long, but she hasn't made any perceptible sales, she's not going to sell some other young author's first novel, either.