expenses?

This was recently discussed here http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105159

I've had three agents and not one of them charged expenses.

Expenses charged by agents (and most agents do charge expenses) usually are for things over and above the normal cost of doing business--costs they wouldn't incur except for representing you. These might include photocopying (some agents avoid photocopying charges by asking you to provide all full manuscript copies), postage, Fed Ex or the equivalent, long distance phone calls, and galleys or finished books bought at the author's discount to send to co-agents overseas. Ideally, the agent will let the expenses accrue and deduct them from your advance. Less ideally, the agent will bill you after the expense has been incurred.

What expenses you'll be responsible for should be laid out in your author-agent contract. There should also be a cost threshold for any single expense (say, $25 or $50) beyond which your permission should be sought. Especially in these days of email, you shouldn't be paying more than a couple of hundred dollars a year. Most likely the costs will be even less.

An agent should NOT charge you for the normal cost of doing business--travel, legal expense, office supplies such as paper and envelopes, rent, or any kind of per-hour fee. An agent also should not charge for editing. Many agents work with clients to edit and polish manuscripts before submitting--but this should be part of what's covered by their eventual 15% commission.

When you should be suspicious:

- If the agent asks for an upfront fee of any sort (a handful of established agents ask for upfront money, but the overwhelming majority of upfront fee-chargers are either fraudulent or incompetent)

- If the agent wants to charge you a flat fee at regular intervals (say, $50 per month or $150 per quarter)

- If the agent charges a flat per-submission fee (for instance, $30 per submission)

- If the agent wants you to provide an excessively large amount of material on your own dime (i.e., 10 or 20 full manuscripts, or 15 submission packets)

- If the agent bills you for every paperclip, envelope, and business card, and/or pads his or her bills with unnecessary (and unwelcome, to publishers, who just want a clean manuscript) extras like author photos, fancy binders, cover mockups, and the like. Unfortunately, you often don't discover this kind of abuse until after you've signed up.

You can avoid most problems by confining your queries to agents who have verifiable track records of commercial sales. The abuses identified above happen almost exclusively in the realm of the fraudulent and/or amateur agent--of which there are, unfortunately, a very large number.

- Victoria