Um, guys, read the rest of Smith's blog postings there. Pay especially close attention to his Killing The Sacred Cows Of Publishing blog as well as the other one. Nowhere does Smith say that agents are not worthwhile.
In his latest post or therabouts, he also gives a formula/challenge for getting your stories to make money.
Unfortunately, I'm nowhere close right now - but then again, it's a 5-year plan so I don't need to be (so what if I started back in 2007 - I didn't have a plan or a clue then).
I read his entire post on agents specifically as well to see if I was misunderstanding, and a lot of what he says contradicts the majority of what I've learned. Maybe I'm just a newbie who doesn't get it because I'm not in the industry, but I also don't plan to take one person's word over everyone other bit of advice/information I've seen.
I was especially unimpressed when he said that if it's an agent who blogs he/she should be avoided because the person has too much time and it means they aren't successful. I can think, off the top of my head, of six or seven blogs by agents with amazing sales. Hell, go look at Kristin Nelson's stats for the year. I'd be proud to have her as my agent.
So yeah, I agree with some of what he says, but I'm taking the bit about agents with a grain of salt. I'm not saying that he's a hundred percent wrong, and clearly I have no standing to know one way or the other, but yeah. I'd need some really good evidence to back it up other than "my experience has been..."
And while he says agents are handy for dealing with business stuff the author doesn't want to do and negotiating contracts, he's essentially saying that the reason most people
think they need an agent is incorrect.