Could someone move this thread to the Bewares topic?
You already know about American Literary Agents of Washington Inc. (In addition to charging fees and having no sales, they also run a vanity publisher, which solicits clients of the agency without acknowledging the connection.)
You also asked about:
Diane Raintree out of New York: She sells her own editing services at $99 per hour. It's a conflict of interest for a literary agent to double as a paid editor: if the agent can make money from recommending editing, how can the writer trust that the recommendation is in his best interest?
Charlotte Gusay out of Los Angeles: This Agency has a respectable track record of commercial sales. It also charges a $35 fee with submissions. Small submission fees like this are a gray area; a handful of reasonably well-established agents do charge them. But they can also be abused--i.e., the agency will request submissions in which it isn't interested in order to get the fee--and Writer Beware has received several reports that seem to indicate this is the case with Gusay, at least some of the time. In situations like this, you can't really know for certain whether a request for a submission indicates real interest in your work.
Debbie Fine from Southeast Literary agency out of Sharpes Florida: She charges $200 upfront for a 6-month agreement, and has no commercial book sales as far as I'm aware.
Barbara Harris out of San Diego (seems legit): Harris's contract offers writers a choice of paying $250 upfront for expenses or providing submission materials at their own cost. This is a bait-and-switch: it would cost so much to make all the copies that the upfront fee looks cheap by comparison. Reputable agents don't ask for expense money up-front as a condition of representation, or require authors to supply large amounts of submission material on the author's dime.
I'm not aware that the Harris Agency has ever sold a book to a major US publisher. It claims a very small track record of about 15-20 sales over its nearly 10 years in business (compare this to a successful midsize agency, which will sell that many books every year). Five of the sales are to a Chinese publishing house which I and others have tried to research, so far without success; another is to a niche publisher that appears to sell only online. The remainder are to smaller publishers that don't require authors to be agented: i.e., an agent was not necessary to make the sale.
Harris "blitz" submits (sends out queries to 20 or 30 publishers at once, with a form the publisher can check off and send back to indicate interest); it also "bundles" queries, sending several in a single envelope. These are unprofessional methods, and editors hate them. Writers report that when the initial round of queries doesn't result in any sales, Harris has no follow-up plan even though the agency contract has some months to run. Based on documentation I've received, submissions aren't always well-targeted (Writer Beware has been told by several editors that they tend to ignore Harris because it so often sends inappropriate or unprofessional submissions).
- Victoria
