I thought I'd take the holidays off from this, but there are several very thoughtful posts here. What I notice, though, is that there's a lot of conversation about what is right or wrong about a reading fee when it comes to agents, but nothing so far about what it might do for authors. Would it alleviate the long waits that writers complain about constantly? Would it get them the feedback they crave? One wonders.
Requesting and evaluating manuscripts and shopping them around is part of an agent's job. There's a word for the expense of doing one's job: overhead. Every business has it. Ideally, the agency will be generating a steady stream of income that will cover overhead and generate a profit. The agent may not be directly compensated by the particular writer whose manuscript he's currently reading, but he is compensated.
For me, overhead is the lights and my internet connection. It's photocopying and mailing statements to clients. My attorney gets paid by the hour and charges me to
receive a fax. My accountant gets paid by the hour and charges me when his secretary mails me the very return he's getting paid by the hour to mail me. While I may very well have successful authors from whom I earn a good living, why should those authors be "paying" me to find other authors? Shouldn't my time be spent trying to sell the film rights or the movie rights or the foreign rights to
their books? And, indeed, therein is why turnaround times are often so long. Because I spend
most of my time on my current clients, their projects and their needs. Until there's a mechanism that allows agents to--yes, I'll say the dirty word--profit from reading all of the unsolicited material that comes our way, those turnaround times will remain long, the feedback will remain little to none, and authors will continue to feel like spinsters in Atlantic City, going from slot machine to slot machine, hoping that this one will be "the one."
When I just went and read that quote above again, I suddenly started to think of drug companies. After all, they have extensive R&D efforts to find new drugs. But how do they pay for that? With higher drug prices on the new drug. But agents can't control the price of the works they sell. Publishers do that. Imagine if I said to the publisher, "I need a $10,000 commission on this, because I only found one salable book this month, after sorting through several dozen." Would that fly?
So, the only way that an agent can fund the R&D effort is to take profit from existing works and put it into new ones. But if 90% of books do not earn out, where is that profit? There's a post above that makes the excellent point that most agents do not see additional commissions after the initial advance is fully paid out. So, yes, you can easily be earning just a few hundred dollars for dozens of hours of work.
Maybe the solution is for
publishers to charge a reading fee or application fee to authors, then only publish the good books, and use the application fees to pay for the editors? Or perhaps agents should auction books not based on advances and royalties, but based on which publisher will pay the agent the largest finder's fee? Or maybe agents should just get paid by the hour by all authors? Certainly there are many books I've sold where my hourly wage is less than minimum when one factors in the time spent versus the advance and royalties. If authors are so confident that their book will sell for a lot of money, perhaps they should offer to pay by the hour or, say, by the month. Agents would still have the right to say no to a work, but if they said yes, they'd know what they were making and authors would know what they were paying. How about that?
Like I said, lots of thoughtful posts here, but so far, no solutions that I see (or have!).
Best,
Andy