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Agents charging Fees

spike

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1.0;1464547 I suppose my final position would be this: you pay a plumber or a tradesman (tradesperson) to come out to to your home when you have a problem. Even if they find that yes said:
concisely[/I] next time.

Slan go foill,

1.0

I'm afraid you're comparing apples to aardvarks. A literary agent should be compared to a real estate agent. All money is made on commission.
 

Dave.C.Robinson

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(Snipped for brevity)

I suppose my final position would be this: you pay a plumber or a tradesman (tradesperson) to come out to to your home when you have a problem. Even if they find that yes, your cistern *is* perfectly functional, Mr 1.0, they'll still charge you a call-out fee. Like a plumber or a sparky, agents have to rent premises, too. They also have utility bills to pay, as well as heating and telephone bills. Of course there's a few thousand shysters out there willing to take coin for doing nothing. But there's always going to be those types of individuals. Always have and always will. So, if we take the tradesperson analogy, why should writing be any different (and if you're thinking that I'm equating writing with shovelling faeces, then...lol. Yeah. I'm not *really*)?

Again, apologies for the long diatribe. A fascinating subject and I look forward to defending my position a little more concisely next time.

Slan go foill,

1.0

I see your point, but think it's a false analogy. The rule of business is anyone who pays you is a customer, and anyone you pay is a supplier. When you bring a plumber out to your house to fix your cistern, you are their customer. But for an agent you're the supplier. Agents exist to sell books, publishers are their customers. Writers are agents' suppliers, providing the product for them to sell.
 

LloydBrown

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Yep, and plumbers don't turn jobs down. They take every one. If they could review your problem from their home before they sold it to another company...wait--this analogy isn't making any sense.
 

1.0

Yep, and plumbers don't turn jobs down. They take every one. If they could review your problem from their home before they sold it to another company...wait--this analogy isn't making any sense.

It's an entertaining analogy, Lloyd. It's not to be a comparison written in stone: "omigod, literary agents and tradesmen are identical" sort-of-thing. C'mon, take it as it was meant, rather than using it in extremis to score points. If everyone wrote literally, then t'would be a boring world, indeed.

And now onto fresher fields. Perhaps things are different in the States (not that they're brilliant in the UK), but a (professional) agent taking a reading fee *then* attempting to bag a writer's commission by working his or her buttocks off is fine by me. Is there such a compulsion for the agent to work as hard? No there certainly isn't if the agent is unethical. However, I'm figuring your spider sense can pick those rogues up. Are there benefits for giving money to an agent? Of course. It might make him or her give you a faster - and more comprehensive and detailed - response. Rather than waiting six months for a reply, you might be able to get an answer within a month. Faster if they're not busy.

My apologies, but I can't see any compelling arguments so far that have made me think that, in the right circumstances, agents should charge a fee. As usual with any commercial transaction, caveat emptor applies. You wouldn't hand your money over to a complete stranger without doing some background checks, so do the same with an agent. If they seem okay, then take a chance if it's right for you. If it feels dodgy or "not right", then hold onto your money.

I think that everyone's fingers appear to have been burnt on this one and understandably so. However, the situation for writers, as it is today, is almost purely based on commerce. There are very little emotive elements within a publishing deal. Therefore, if a publishing deal is an economic one, then surely it should be an option for writers to use economics for their *own* gain? Agents, if they charge, need to be able to justify their charge. If they can't, sayonara. If they *can* justify it, then perhaps they might have a compelling reason *why* they are charging. If this is the case (and tbh, I can think of a few good reasons why a reading fee might be beneficial to the writer), then I believe shutting out the option is a wee bit short-sighted.

Lastly, allow me to qualify this viewpoint: my thoughts are based on pure theory. If others have cautionary - real world - tales to tell, knock themselves out. I'd be fascinated to hear.

Best,

1.0.
 

DeadlyAccurate

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Lastly, allow me to qualify this viewpoint: my thoughts are based on pure theory. If others have cautionary - real world - tales to tell, knock themselves out. I'd be fascinated to hear.

This entire forum is based on real world cautionary tales. If you want specifics, just go to Preditors & Editors, find any agents listed as Not Recommended, and then cross-reference them with the threads found in the Index stickied at the top of this forum. Do that with a few dozen Not Recommended agents and see why the experts repeatedly say not to pay out of pocket.

If your writing is good enough to be published, you don't have to pay people to read it.
 

Tilly

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You want a real world example? How about from the UK - Christopher Hill and the Hill and Hill agency:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12420

Writer Beware covered this in 4 blog posts:

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006/09/victoria-strauss-hill-hill-literary.html

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006/09/victoria-strauss-hill-hill-literary_24.html

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006/09/victoria-strauss-hill-hill-literary_25.html

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2006/09/victoria-strauss-hill-hill-literary.html

Scary stuff.

I understand you'd be happy to pay if it meant helping your career. But paying upfront fees to agents won't help your career. It will send you careering down an expensive, and sometimes emotionally painful, dead end.

Article in the Times highlighting the problem:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article605481.ece

This is a book I'd highly, highly recommend:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0809325756/?tag=absolutewrite-21

You think that you'd be able to sense if an agent wasn't on the up and up. Well, the people I've seen post here who were caught in the web of scammers weren't stupid or ignorant people. In an area where they had more knowledge, I doubt they'd have been caught out. But they didn't know that successful agents don't charge fees. The scam and clueless agents can come up with all kinds of reasonable sounding reasons for charging fees. That's why they have victims.
 
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DaveKuzminski

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Keep in mind that prior to Writer Beware and P&E, there weren't any sites (not that I found back then) spelling out who to trust and who to be wary of. Sure, there were sites, books, and even magazine articles spelling out the general warning signs, but they didn't name names. It was that lack of specific warning that brought about P&E and then mere months later Writer Beware.
 

LloydBrown

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It's an entertaining analogy, Lloyd. It's not to be a comparison written in stone: "omigod, literary agents and tradesmen are identical" sort-of-thing.

I understand that. I use analogy all the time.

However, I write business plans. If the business models are different, then the revenue streams are necessarily different. It doesn't make sense to compare how the two industries charge or earn their pay. Pointing out that you always pay a service charge in another industry doesn't mean anything when it comes to a literary agent.

Let's put it this way: what if your agent got kickbacks from the market he sells to? He'd have a financial interest in selling your work (in whatever field we're talking about) to a lower offer, if his kickback made up for the lower fees he collected, right? You might find yourself with a worse publishing deal, but you don't mind, right? Whatever the agent needs to do to stay in business, right?

Somehow, I don't think so.

It's a clear conflict of interest--as is collecting fees from writers.

As I'm sure has been stated before, an agent who collects fees has no incentive to sell your work. It's much harder to sell a manuscript than it is to sit back and collect fees. There's at least one scam agency that has set up an auto-responder to accept manuscripts and collect fees--and it has done so for years without ever talking to a writer or selling a book. It's just free money for them that keeps coming in without any effort.
 

JulieB

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Agents who live on commissions are hungry folks. They're also picky about which writers they take on because if they can't make sales they don't make a living. This also gives them an incentive to be aggressive in getting the best deals for their writers. In the end it benefits them and YOU.
 

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It is fine to talk theory, but the danger comes in expounding theory as real world practical behaviour. There are rarely any absolutes of course, but 9 times out of 10 the agents you find out there charging fees are scammers. As such it is wise I think to advise a first timer to simply "never submit to fee charging agents". There are hundreds of excellent non-fee charging agents out there (far more than the ones who are legit and charge fees), possibly when the new author has exhausted all of those, then they can sit down and carefully analyse the fee charging ones. But it's a dangerous world out there, and it is not only the very stupid who are conned, these days cons are extremely sophisticated. The whole "money flows towards the author" is simply a very sound practice to live by.

In theory yes, an agent could be able to charge fees and still be legit. And in theory I could keep my door unlocked at night and not get robbed. I still like the added security of my deadbolt however.
 

James D. Macdonald

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Agents, if they charge, need to be able to justify their charge. If they can't, sayonara. If they *can* justify it, then perhaps they might have a compelling reason *why* they are charging.

The fee-charging agents are fully capable of justifying their charges. They're past-masters of supplying reasonable explanations. Utterly compelling stuff.

And all hogwash.

Theory's fine. Experience tells a different story. But go with the theory if you must.

Here's one thing I'd like you to do: Before you write that first check to a fee-charger, ask him or her for the titles/authors/publishers of all the books he or she has sold in the past twelve months.

If the agent, despite reading fees, hasn't been able to place any books (or has only placed them with vanity presses), ask yourself what makes you think that the agent will be able to place your book with a commercial press.

"Because my book is different!" is not the answer.



[SIZE=-1][/SIZE]
 

victoriastrauss

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And now onto fresher fields. Perhaps things are different in the States (not that they're brilliant in the UK), but a (professional) agent taking a reading fee *then* attempting to bag a writer's commission by working his or her buttocks off is fine by me. Is there such a compulsion for the agent to work as hard? No there certainly isn't if the agent is unethical. However, I'm figuring your spider sense can pick those rogues up. Are there benefits for giving money to an agent? Of course. It might make him or her give you a faster - and more comprehensive and detailed - response. Rather than waiting six months for a reply, you might be able to get an answer within a month. Faster if they're not busy.
Why would a reading fee make the agent respond faster? He's charging the same fee to everyone, so it's not as if you're paying for any special privileges. What you're paying for is what reputable agents currently provide for free.

It's worth noting that both the AAR, the American trade group for agents, and the Australian Literary Agents' Association, forbid their members to charge reading and evaluation fees. (The AAA, the UK agents' trade group, also prohibits reading fees, but provides a loophole.) From the AAR's Canon of Ethics: [FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, Serif]The AAR believes that the practice of literary agents charging clients or potential clients for reading and evaluating literary works (including outlines, proposals, and partial or complete manuscripts) is subject to serious abuse that reflects adversely on our profession. For that reason, members may not charge clients or potential clients for reading and evaluating literary works and may not benefit, directly or indirectly, from the charging for such services by any other person or entity.[/FONT]

What abuse, you may ask? Here are some examples from Writer Beware's files.

- One agent with a fairly sizeable track record charges a reading fee of $35 (the agency calls it a processing fee, but a duck is a duck). This may not seem like a lot of money. But there's substantial evidence to indicate that the agency invites everyone who queries to submit a partial, whether or not the agency is interested. Since successful agencies get hundreds of queries a week, that $35 probably adds up to a major source of supplemental income.

- One agent charges a reading fee of $150. This agent has been in business since before Writer Beware was founded (1998) and in that time has never sold a book to a commercial publisher. The agency is just a front for collecting reading fees. Given how desperate aspiriing writers can become, it's easy money--even though most writers now know that reading fees are not legit.

- One agent charges a $250 reading fee and rationalizes it by promising a written evaluation. The evaluations consist of a a couple of paragraphs mentioning the writer's work in very general terms, suggesting that the manuscript has been cursorily skimmed; and several pages of generic how-to advice (the kind of thing you might find in a how-to-write book), the same for everyone.

These are just three examples of the kinds of abuse invited by reading and evaluation fees. We've got many more in our files. Hopefully this will shed some light on why the AAR and the ALAA are concerned enough about abuse to prohibit reading and evaluation fees for their members.

- Victoria
 

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Here's one thing I'd like you to do: Before you write that first check to a fee-charger, ask him or her for the titles/authors/publishers of all the books he or she has sold in the past twelve months.

If the agent, despite reading fees, hasn't been able to place any books (or has only placed them with vanity presses), ask yourself what makes you think that the agent will be able to place your book with a commercial press.

"Because my book is different!" is not the answer.

1.0,

What Uncle Jim said.

If the fee-charger gives you a list, fine, then research the heck out of that list. Don't be surprised if most or all of those books the agent has placed are with vanity publishers. If so, cross them off your list, because I'm sure you know at this point that vanities will take anything you give them.

But don't be surprised if said fee-charger doesn't give you a list; they'll come up with pathetic stuff like, "Oh, that's privileged information," or "I don't give that out because I don't want others to know." Baloney. Legit agents practically scream from the rooftops to let people know when they've placed their authors. Why not? They went through a lot in order to make that sale, so why shouldn't they let the public at large know?

Look, I can't give you a real-world example, as I'm not pubbed yet (I had one short published, but that was years ago), but I came into the publishing cold; I didn't know jack. Because of this board, P&E, Writer Beware, and the Rumor Mill, I've educated myself as to how the wacky world of publishing really works. People who've been legitimately published give of their time and knowledge so the rest of us don't get taken by the out-and-out scam agents and the clueless wannabe agents. Before jumping into anything, esp. something as weird as publishing, educate yourself, so you'll be less likely to have a lighter wallet.

Will it take longer for you to get published by doing all this friggin' research? Hell yeah. But at least you'll be confident that someone isn't just taking you to the bank.

Good luck.

~Nancy
 

Donna Pudick

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Not so fast, Shawn

The cost of running a small agency isn't all that much. It's less than a membership in a mid-sized golf club. As for postage, it can add up, but also not that much. Most large publishers accept email transmissions. That's free. Most manuscript boxes can be reused, and rejections often come back with the return postage still in the box. Many publishers prefer padded envelopes and will send back a manuscript in your box, in a padded envelope, or sometimes leave out the box. So using a box isn't necessary.

Copies are much cheaper on a work-horse lazer printer, so a smart agent will use one instead of going to a commercial copier.

A good telephone service allows for unlimited calls and emails take care of most communications between editors and agents. Same thing between agents and authors.

A membership in a unishipper's service saves a bundle on the few hard copies an agent must mail out, and the bills are never much over $40 per month.

To Newsflash

Ditto what Victoria said. And Dave. And James
 

Carolina

anyone have any experience with an agent wanting the project under the condition you bring in another writer to come in and clean things up - provide an outside prospective? someone mentioned it earlier but no one replied.
 

JCT

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anyone have any experience with an agent wanting the project under the condition you bring in another writer to come in and clean things up - provide an outside prospective? someone mentioned it earlier but no one replied.

A book doctor? Not unheard of but is the agent pointing you toward a specific one from whom they may get kickbacks from or referral fees? Or does the agent think your book needs more work in general to be saleable?
 

Carolina

more saleable, he says. no money. they know each other and it seems very transparent. no money between them, he says.
 

JCT

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more saleable, he says. no money. they know each other and it seems very transparent. no money between them, he says.

I'd tread very carefully. For instance, I recently got hired by an agent to book doctor/edit a book by a well known author who is old and slowing down but wants to go out with a bang. He hasn't published anything in a decade or so.

My aunt and the agent were talking and my aunt referred me. This agent usually doesn't do this kind of stuff but this author has been his client for thirty years and he really wants to see the book done.

So in my case, it's all on the up and up. But like I said, tread carefully.
 

Carolina

would you mind expanding on the rights and reputation aspects? thanks!