[Display site/query service] WEbook / AgentInbox

[firedrake]

Colleen Lindsay said that she will do a report after she's tried the service. Should be interesting to see what she has to say about it because she's not one for beating about the bush.

I don't like it at all. To me it's another barrier between writers and agents and, while I can understand that agents would like someone to screen out unsuitable submissions, I'm buggered if I'd pay for a service like that, as a writer, it doesn't feel right at all. It's wrong because it's taking advantage of agents' frustrations with people who don't read submission guidelines.

 

[Deleted member 42]

I don't know what their "Premium" services will involve, but seeing as one agent has just announced she's currently accepting queries only through the service, I don't like it at all.

Well, they have to make a profit; that's the point really.

Where will the money come from? Not from Agents; it's going to come from users.

Users=writers.

Writers don't get any benefit from the site, really. You want a display site that badly, Blogger, Google Sites, and WordPress all have free options.

You want access to an agent? Ah . . . well. That's tricky. If you have agents who are only accepting subs from AgentInBox (Must Not Call it Agent In A Box) then you're sort of stuck.

 

[Deleted member 42]

I'm also troubled that anyone can sign up as an agent. There's a survey; it asks for contact information, years of experience, and provides a genre checklist.

I suspect genuine, legit agents are going to be lumped together with those who are there to troll for naive writers.

"I love your book. We ask all our authors for a 250.00 reading fee."

But you know, the agent was on AgentInABox, right? So that must be ok . . .

Again, I don't see a lot of publishing experience behind the site, or in terms of the site copy.

 

[Regan Leigh]

Didn't Colleen say that she would stop using the site if it charged? And that other agents would probably do the same? (Via Twitter)

 

[Giant Baby]

... You want access to an agent? Ah . . . well. That's tricky. If you have agents who are only accepting subs from AgentInBox (Must Not Call it Agent In A Box) then you're sort of stuck.

My point exactly.

Some sites offer "Premium" packages for a price alongside their free basic services (Query Tracker comes to mind). Others, like PM, are subscription only. But those services are a convenience to writers. The basic, necessary information you need to research agents and send out those queries is available for free on-line, or at your local library.

They don't actually control your ability to hit send, or drop a paper query in the mail, which would happen if more agents choose to use the service exclusively (and I recognize Ms. Lindsay is just testing). Add a fee to that, and you've driven out all the writers who come here, to AW, because they can't afford a subscription to PM.

 

[MacAllister]

Regan, yes - I asked about that directly. Colleen said that, indeed, if they start charging, she won't use the service any more.

There are a number of things about the idea of AgentIn(a)Box that I find a bit troubling - but most of all I was concerned about a pay-wall writers might have to go through to submit to reputable agents planning to accept submissions exclusively from Agent Inbox.

My concerns boil down to this:
The language on their site says:

AgentInbox sets up a virtual wall between writers and agents. Writers submit queries to your inbox, you view only what you’re interested in, and contact writers directly.

Now, with other display sites, that won't work in the long run, because writers are still submitting directly to agents as well -- and who on earth needs another place to go read slush?

But if you make Agent InBox the ONLY way to submit to some agents -- then ultimately, my question would be "who foots the bill?" There's a weirdness, too, with committing to a specific and exclusive relationship with an intermediary company and with a single website for your submissions. Agents signing on are essentially endorsing them, whether or not that's the intent -- but WeBook is also a publisher, after a fashion.

I'm just . . . troubled.

Again, who is going to foot the bill to pay the salaries of the intermediaries?

 

[MacAllister]

I did find a list of participating agents - a number of these folks are very legitimate indeed (as is Colleen Lindsay, of course) and represent books and writers we've heard of and read.

 

[HapiSofi]

It seems to me that AgentInBox gets more problematical as it exercises more judgement.

Any operation that solicits slush will get submissions and queries from addled/clueless/inconsiderate writers who haven't matched their submissions to the recipient -- for example, sending poetry collections to nonfiction specialists. They're irritating, but they're not really a problem. You can tell immediately that they're not for you and bounce them with a form rejection.

If you get so much slush that rejecting the obvious misfits takes up too much of your time, you can take on interns, or post notice that you don't do rejections, or find some other filter. This is where I imagine AgentInbox being useful: basic triage.

My problem with the idea is that I can't imagine agents paying very much per pound for that kind of low-grade ore processing. It doesn't take much work to teach a fast, literate reader how to sort out the obvious rejects, and at that level you'll be paying as much to remail the non-rejects as you're paying to have the sorting and rejecting done. Why not just take on an intern or two, or hire a part-time slushkiller?

Having AuthorInbox make finer and more precise determinations would put them in a position to charge higher rates, but the only way that's feasible is if the work they're doing yields more income -- that is, if it helps the agent find more commercially successful clients. I don't see how that can be any cheaper or more helpful than hiring an assistant.

Besides, you know who your assistants are. You've trained them, and you know their quirks and foibles. You won't have that fallback with AuthorInbox employees. What you will have are the additional costs and delays of having a separate operation interposed between authors and agents.

In short, I don't see any problems to which this is a unique solution, and in cases where it's a possible solution, I don't see any way in which it's a superior one.

 

[CaoPaux]

Near as I can tell, there's no charge to the agents. It's the writers who'll be paying for "Premium Services" somewhere down the line.

 

[HapiSofi]

Near as I can tell, there's no charge to the agents. It's the writers who'll be paying for "Premium Services" somewhere down the line.

Then they've got a built-in conflict of interest. Their service can only work if agents use it, and agents are in theory its primary beneficiaries; but the authors are the ones who'll be paying for it. It's like charging a reading fee, except that AgentInbox wants to set things up so that they, not the agent, collect that fee. It seems creepy.

Remember a while back when an agent who shall remain nameless came up with a system whereby you could pay him a relatively modest bribe to move your manuscript to the top of his reading stack? I thought that was a trifle dubious at the time, but in retrospect it seems vastly preferable to what AgentInbox proposes to do.

 

[WEbook]

[FONT=&quot]Hi from WEbook. We’re glad to see people discussing our site, and AgentInbox. We noticed a few misunderstandings that we’d like to clear up:[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]First, WEbook does not accept every literary agent who signs up to join AgentInbox. Before approving an agent, we do a careful background check to make sure that the agent is legitimate, and has established relationships with major publishers. We also make sure he/she is currently accepting submissions.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Second, while one of WEbook’s goals is to make it easier for agents to manage their submissions, the other side of this coin is our commitment to writers, and the strong effort we make to helping them succeed with agents. By putting every submission through a careful “flight-check,” and sending it back to the author if certain criteria are not met, we ensure that AgentInbox users will make the best possible first impression with potential agents. Many of the authors who have used AgentInbox have told us that they have really benefitted from this guidance. And of course, by rapidly matching submissions with the relevant agents, we hope to save time for authors and allow them to focus their attention on the appropriate agents.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]We’re very proud that we’ve already had one successful discovery on our site that has changed the life of an aspiring writer—Corey Whale is a young writer who had tried unsuccessfully to find an agent for his novel, but decided to give AgentInbox a shot. Soon after submitting, he was scooped up by Ken Wright, a prominent agent at Writers House. And we have several other writers who have used the service and received requests for a full or partial manuscript.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Thank you for the helpful discussion. We hope this information helps. If you have any more questions, or would just like to learn more, check us out at: [/FONT][FONT=&quot]http://www.webook.com/literary-agents/writers.aspx,[/FONT][FONT=&quot] or join the discussion in our forum: http://www.webook.com/forums/topicIndex.aspx?forum=f467ca81d3294afc[/FONT]

 

[Richard White]

Several? Out of how many?

What makes us believe the percentage of authors picked up through your service is any better/worse than simply submitting directly to agents?

 

[Eirin]

What strikes me is the uselessness of this service. A writer can just as easily submit directly to an agent*, and I don't think writers really need another layer to traverse en route to publication.

As long as it doesn't cost writers anything, though, I suppose it's harmless enough.


*And I'll never understand the scattershot approach to agent hunting. Agents to query should be carefully chosen and researched. The "throw stuff at wall and see what stick" method is very bad business practice.

 

[SJWangsness]

What strikes me is the uselessness of this service. A writer can just as easily submit directly to an agent*, and I don't think writers really need another layer to traverse en route to publication.

I agree one hundred percent. The only point of this whole service as far as I can tell is to lure writers into paying for their "premium services."

 

[victoriastrauss]

As I see it, there are two issues for agents:

- If they use Agent Inbox is an add-on, rather than a replacement for their regular submisions, won't it be more work to have two separate submission streams, even if one of the submission streams is at least somewhat pre-vetted?

- If they use Agent Inbox exclusively, will there be enough submissions through the service to make it worth their while?

Even if Agent Inbox screens out the obvious bad matches, and makes sure that agents only receive submissions that fit their stated interests, I don't see that this will really be a significant benefit if the submission are still crappy. Agent Inbox's screening doesn't seem to really be related to quality, just to appropriateness and proper format.

I agree with HapiSofi that if authors have to pay for the service, it's the equivalent of a reading fee.

- Victoria

 

[Colleen Lindsay]

A few things about Agent Inbox -

First, they DID do a background check on me when I signed up. A pretty thorough one, actually. They even wrote to me and asked me if I would be opening back up to submissions, because they didn't want to put me on their website if I wasn't going to read the submissions.

Second, I'm using Agent Inbox exclusively for one month as an experiment to see how it goes. The primary purpose is to see if it really does weed out irrelevant (or insane) queries, if it makes it easier to respond and if - at some point - our agency may want to use a similar online form (like some agents already do).

I'm getting about 20 queries a day through the service right now.

My very early thoughts: the overall quality of the queries I'm seeing is much better, ie, they seem to screen to make sure that you are getting only those genres you request and that the letters are addressed to the agent and that you are getting the pages as well. I haven't seen any of the long rambling and incoherent queries that I sometimes get in my email inbox. They also screen for...how to put this? Whether it makes sense in English. Because I get an awful lot of queries that don't.

For me, this kind of screening is a huge help, because it basically cuts out anyone who clearly doesn't want to or is incapable of following submission guidelines.

However, there are some things that I think are more complicated in Agent Inbox.

1.) There's no forwarding, so if I want to pass a query along to a colleague, I must cut and paste. We agents do that an awful lot, so I have addressed this issue with the,
2.) You still have to cut and paste a form rejection for each query. It would easier if you could just upload a standard rejection, click a box next to each query you don't want and reject all at once. As it stands, using the Gmail Canned Responses is actually faster for me.
3.) I think they ask the authors for too much information, and kind of make them jump through hoops to send a query. Not sure I like the idea of making the writers' jobs harder than it already is. For instance, I personally don't care what the writer's education is unless the book is non-fiction. But I seem to get elaborate schooling info that serves no purpose for me.

That being said, I have seen at least three queries I thought were amazing and and I've requested one manuscript already!

I have another three queries in there that I haven't made a decision on, because they're pretty spectacular but I only have so much reading time.

Anyway, I'll be making frequent updates about how my month-long experiment is going.

Cheers,

Colleen

 

[James D. Macdonald]

Soon after submitting, he was scooped up by Ken Wright, a prominent agent at Writers House.

Was that scoop-up a result of AgentInbox, or was it a coincidental thing? (That is, he sent his work to AgentInbox and he also sent his work to Ken Wright, and it was the direct submission that succeeded?) I've seen display sites use exactly that kind of weaseling for their claimed successes, and I want to make sure that it isn't true of y'all.

 

[Maxinquaye]

A few things about Agent Inbox -

First, they DID do a background check on me when I signed up. A pretty thorough one, actually. They even wrote to me and asked me if I would be opening back up to submissions, because they didn't want to put me on their website if I wasn't going to read the submissions.

Second, I'm using Agent Inbox exclusively for one month as an experiment to see how it goes. The primary purpose is to see if it really does weed out irrelevant (or insane) queries, if it makes it easier to respond and if - at some point - our agency may want to use a similar online form (like some agents already do).

I'm getting about 20 queries a day through the service right now.

My very early thoughts: the overall quality of the queries I'm seeing is much better, ie, they seem to screen to make sure that you are getting only those genres you request and that the letters are addressed to the agent and that you are getting the pages as well. I haven't seen any of the long rambling and incoherent queries that I sometimes get in my email inbox. They also screen for...how to put this? Whether it makes sense in English. Because I get an awful lot of queries that don't.

For me, this kind of screening is a huge help, because it basically cuts out anyone who clearly doesn't want to or is incapable of following submission guidelines.

However, there are some things that I think are more complicated in Agent Inbox.

1.) There's no forwarding, so if I want to pass a query along to a colleague, I must cut and paste. We agents do that an awful lot, so I have addressed this issue with the,
2.) You still have to cut and paste a form rejection for each query. It would easier if you could just upload a standard rejection, click a box next to each query you don't want and reject all at once. As it stands, using the Gmail Canned Responses is actually faster for me.
3.) I think they ask the authors for too much information, and kind of make them jump through hoops to send a query. Not sure I like the idea of making the writers' jobs harder than it already is. For instance, I personally don't care what the writer's education is unless the book is non-fiction. But I seem to get elaborate schooling info that serves no purpose for me.

That being said, I have seen at least three queries I thought were amazing and and I've requested one manuscript already!

I have another three queries in there that I haven't made a decision on, because they're pretty spectacular but I only have so much reading time.

Anyway, I'll be making frequent updates about how my month-long experiment is going.

Cheers,

Colleen

Thank you very much for this info, Ms Lindsay. It was very welcome indeed. I'm not a spokesman for anyone here, but I think the initial reaction to this was a worry that WEBook is introducing a reading fee through the back door.

It is still unclear what or who will be charged for this agent service, and I suspect that it will be claimed from writers that wish to submit. If so, then it may become another variant of a reading fee, except it's paid to a third party.

 

[Phaeal]

Thanks for the input, Colleen! I've been watching the FinePrint website for months, hoping you'd reopen your submissions.

I tried to submit through the Agent Inbox form, but it would neither let me submit both query and sample at step 3 (Query), nor progress to step 4 (Sample.) So I've sent a message to the site to see what the problem is.

UPDATE: The WEbook tech support got back with me very quickly and solved the problem re the form. So that was a point in their favor.

 

[Giant Baby]

... My very early thoughts: the overall quality of the queries I'm seeing is much better, ie, they seem to screen to make sure that you are getting only those genres you request and that the letters are addressed to the agent and that you are getting the pages as well. I haven't seen any of the long rambling and incoherent queries that I sometimes get in my email inbox. They also screen for...how to put this? Whether it makes sense in English. Because I get an awful lot of queries that don't.

For me, this kind of screening is a huge help, because it basically cuts out anyone who clearly doesn't want to or is incapable of following submission guidelines...

Is there a mechanism in place that lets you see the queries they've weeded out for you, if you so choose (to screen whether or not they've weeding appropriately to your tastes)? Also, are the weeded-out queriers notified that you've never seen their queries? Are they told why not?

You receive a lot of queries, so a few gems cast aside won't add up to much in the end. But for those writers, it'd mean a hell of a lot if this takes hold. Either way, that's a lot of trust for both sides to place in a third party. So, if I may ask, what access do you have to the dregs, should you choose to monitor what you're not seeing?

 

[SJWangsness]

I can understand Colleen and other agents wishing to have someone weed out the clueless, the misdirected and the semi-literate; they've only got so much time and none to waste. Still, if AgentInBox is doing all this vetting, they are presumably paying someone to vet. And unless they plan to continue doing so indefinitely as charity, the only way this makes economical sense for them in the long run is if writers start paying for access to agents. Even if agents keep their other inbox open but start giving preference to queries coming through AIB -- or even if it's only writers thinking they are giving that preference -- it becomes pay-to-play. And that would not be a good thing.

 

[Colleen Lindsay]

Is there a mechanism in place that lets you see the queries they've weeded out for you, if you so choose (to screen whether or not they've weeding appropriately to your tastes)? Also, are the weeded-out queriers notified that you've never seen their queries? Are they told why not?

You receive a lot of queries, so a few gems cast aside won't add up to much in the end. But for those writers, it'd mean a hell of a lot if this takes hold. Either way, that's a lot of trust for both sides to place in a third party. So, if I may ask, what access do you have to the dregs, should you choose to monitor what you're not seeing?

Well, the point is that I don't want to see what they've filtered out. What would be the point? And how would that save me time?

 

[Colleen Lindsay]

I can understand Colleen and other agents wishing to have someone weed out the clueless, the misdirected and the semi-literate; they've only got so much time and none to waste. Still, if AgentInBox is doing all this vetting, they are presumably paying someone to vet. And unless they plan to continue doing so indefinitely as charity, the only way this makes economical sense for them in the long run is if writers start paying for access to agents. Even if agents keep their other inbox open but start giving preference to queries coming through AIB -- or even if it's only writers thinking they are giving that preference -- it becomes pay-to-play. And that would not be a good thing.

Possibly. Or possibly WeBook will use the tried and true free method of screening that agents have used for years: interns. Most agencies already have interns screening the queries and reading manuscripts.

 

[Giant Baby]

Well, the point is that I don't want to see what they've filtered out. What would be the point? And how would that save me time?

Well, if I was letting a third party decide what to weed out for me, I'd want to see what they considered unfit initally, to make sure we're on the same page. Then, once I'd seen that we were, I'd feel more comfortable trusting it to do the work for me.

That's why I wonder if you (or other agents using the service) are able to screen their ability to screen for you.

 

[SJWangsness]

Yes, they could use interns to screen the queries. But then what does WEBooks get out of this site? I suppose they could put up a few ads or something...but that hardly seems worthwhile. I'm just assuming that somewhere in the dust is the profit motive. Somehow they have to pay for the site. And if they're not charging agents, and won't charge writers...well, how is it all paid for?

Just call me Mr. Skeptical.