Do Writers Need Literary Agents?
New Leaf Literary Controversy and the Meta Challenge of Moby-Dick
“Biggest” News in Books: New Leaf Literary
The social media sphere of writing was alight last Friday with an uproar over writers being unceremoniously dumped—some in the middle of contract negotiations for their book deals— from New Leaf Literary due to their agent leaving the agency. Being canned on Friday with seemingly no or little succession planning on the agency’s part created, understandably, a lot of irate writers and people in the writing community irate on their behalf. This seems to happen about once every six weeks or so on book Twitter—an agent/agency or publisher does something that’s not great and everyone gets very vocal and upset about it.
As an editor, I don’t have much experience with New Leaf; as far as I understand, the bulk of their business is in representing children’s and young adult authors. As I’ve said many times on Dear Head of Mine, being an author is hard, and making a living as an author is even harder. But at first blush, my reaction is that this sucks, but it sucks in the way that getting fired from any job would suck—there’s never a good time to lose your livelihood and, while there are certainly better ways to be let go than others, it pretty much is always unpleasant. Is getting fired on a Friday without any heads up wrong? Is it appalling? Kind of. But it also exposes how strange our setup is in publishing, how careful writers have to be, and how, more so than any other industry I know of, the business is mostly conducted in an extremely informal manner that almost guarantees that people will behave badly sometimes.
A Handshake and a Prayer
Probably the strangest thing about publishing from an outsider’s perspective (or even an insider’s one) is that a good portion of what we do is based on the old-school notion of a handshake deal. When a writer and literary agent decide to work together no money exchanged for services upfront, and the majority of the time no binding contract is signed, they simply make a genteel agreement that both parties will do right by each other and that the money and the rest of it will work out in the end. If that sounds strange, it is, but it is also the standard—a word to the wise for aspiring writers: you should be very careful about signing any paperwork before your book contract and you should never pay someone upfront to represent and sell your book.
Agent and writer often work together to develop a book idea and materials to sell it for months or years before selling the book to a publisher. But there’s usually nothing that says the author or the agent can’t walk away at any point in the process (Disclaimer: As a running theme in this conversation, there is no standard, so this isn’t strictly true in all cases). Much of the time, until a book is sold and a contract is signed, there’s no economic arrangement or commitment from either party. Equally as odd is that once a book contract is signed, there is an economic agreement made forever between writer and agent—even if they part ways, the agent still gets paid based on that book’s success.
You can see where this is going with regards to New Leaf—it’s an instance where if the agent decides to walk away they can, and there’s nothing the author can do about it except say, “Hey, that’s not right!” Of course, an author has the same power and could easily use a literary agent’s free labor to give them advice, edit their manuscript, etc. before saying “thanks a lot” and taking their manuscript to another agent to sell. In reality, neither of these scenarios happens very often; although there’s often nothing economically binding, there’s a social cost to breaking a handshake deal that can in turn effect economics by being a bad look and potentially damaging a reputation and future prospects. But any system that is based largely on a social contract is by definition vulnerable to individual bad actors and weird situations.
Why You Need a Literary Agent
Full disclosure: I am married to a literary agent, a very very good one at one of— if not the most— reputable literary agency. The value of literary agents cannot be overstated. Agents cost money—the real ones, the good ones, charge 15% commission on their sales in the US and don’t charge any fees besides that—but like an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor they provide invaluable professional services. If you surpass a certain level of seriousness as a writer, you’d be foolish not to hire one.
If you don’t have a lot of money—say, for instance, you work in publishing—you don’t necessarily need to worry about hiring an accountant to do your taxes. It’s a reasonable risk worth taking forgoing one—you might not maximize your return, but also you probably would spend more money on an accountant than you’d gain by using one. On the other hand, if you’re a multi-millionaire, you would do well to hire an accountant. Foremost, you have a lot to gain by hiring one if you have a lot of money, but almost as important is that you have a lot to lose by applying your amateur knowledge to a complex system of rules and trying to do the accounting yourself—it’s not just losing money, but even worse consequences like audit, fraud, etc. that become real as the stakes of getting it right are raised. As the stakes are raised, the risk of not consulting a professional with specialized knowledge about the issue you’re facing, whether it be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant, get exponentially higher. Therefore, if you want a serious career in writing, you should find the right literary agent.
The first thing a good literary agent can do is, obviously, negotiate for more money—many times it’s simply better as an author to pay an agent 15% commission and get 85% of a larger book deal than 100% of a smaller book deal. Some writers are averse to someone taking a 15% cut for “doing nothing” and often pay the price as a result (although, I’m sure many who go it alone convince themselves that they got the same amount of money that an agent could have gotten them). However, literary agents—the good ones—provide a lot of other services for that 15% commission, and a lot of the time they provide these services “on spec” for no direct compensation before a project is sold, like editing, offering creative input, and advocating for the writer’s monetary and non-monetary interests with the publisher. Again, many do this with no monetary benefit attached or guaranteed. Writers pay nothing for this if their book doesn’t sell; if it does, they often end up paying a fraction what they would have to on the open market for these kinds of services (a good freelance editor, for instance, can costs tens of thousands of dollars).
Stretching the lawyer part of this metaphor, technically you can represent yourself, and you might be good at it, but it can get really, really annoying for the judge who is used to dealing with people who understand the procedures and social cues of a courtroom. The judges for writers are your business partners: editors/publishers/marketers/art directors/publicists/etc. I’ve worked with a grand total of one author that didn’t have a literary agent (a book I inherited from a different editor). It went fine from a communication standpoint—not all self-represented writers are a nightmare by rule—but looking back on it I can see from start to finish they didn’t have the necessary knowledge or skill to advocate for themselves effectively and get the maximum out of the publication process. By-and-large a writer is better off when they can put their energy into writing the books—and promoting them—and the agent can put all of their energy into handling their business affairs.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Here’s the massive caveat to what I said above: there’s basically no qualification process for the profession or title of “literary agent.” The only thing you have to do to in order to call yourself a literary agent is to sell a book. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what book to what publisher or for what amount of money, you just have to sell a book to a publisher and you are a literary agent. Unlike the aforementioned professions—doctors, lawyers, accountants—there is no certification, schooling, accreditation, or test involved. This barrier to entry is hardly foolproof in those industries: a lawyer can give you bad advice, a doctor can give you ill-conceived treatment, an accountant can steal all of your money while you’re not looking. However, they do at least offer some standard and at the very least this significant headache in achieving the qualification serves to ward off some bad actors—many times it’s easier to just make a decent living while doing the right thing.
There’s no regulatory body that tells literary agents what the qualifications are, what their job is or how they have to do it—if you can sell a book you’re in. If a literary agent just wants to sell the book and doesn’t want to edit their client’s work, advocate on their behalf, or offer them creative input, nothing says they have to. To add insult to injury, there’s no medical textbook or tax law equivalent that a writer can look to themselves if they want to check the advice a literary agent has given them. But as with any professional service, you have to use your common sense and stay alert—Is this lawyer pressuring me into a plea deal because they’re overworked? Is my doctor distracted? Does my accountant shoot the breeze too much about the point spread for the Los Angeles Lakers game?
It’s important to trust your instincts if something doesn’t seem right. For instance, look into the agency the literary agent works at. What is their reputation? An agency lets you know what kind of company the person you’re thinking of working with keeps. This is not foolproof either—a Harvard medical degree (any Harvard degree really) could simply be the best of cover for a bad apple. But at least some organization provides a semblance of a barrier to entry—the other literary agents at the agency have chosen to work with this person. Purportedly, this New Leaf literary agency has had weird issues before. That said, there are plenty of very good and reputable agents who basically belong to an agency of one (their own business). The whole industry of literary agents is incredibly scattered, with no barriers to entry, and that means the rule of thumb is: results may vary, be careful.
Advice to Writers
All this caution, and yet, you often shouldn’t take this sense of risk one step further and make the mistake of thinking you can replicate what a true professional does—and that goes for literary agents, too. With professional services of all stripes, you have to find someone you trust and trust them to do their jobs. As the old saying goes: there is no worse patient than a doctor. Constantly second guessing someone and trying to go it yourself in something that isn’t your expertise is the second biggest mistake one can make. But it’s a Catch-22: choosing the right expert when you have no expertise is hard. Listen, evaluate as you go, pay attention to your interactions not necessarily what other publishing people say (I know many a writer that has been burned by blindly trusting a literary agent or editor because a friend vouched for them, or conversely burned themselves by listening to the first bad thing they hear about an agent or editor and acting on it without evaluating the situation themselves), and, finally, know that you’re not the expert so trust your gut rather than your knowledge.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 111, Pages 539
After one-hundred-and-eleven days there’s not much new to add to the conversation about Moby-Dick. Many of the same themes—whale encyclopedia, gams, problematic characters, very blunt chapter titles, man vs. nature, etc.—keep coming up again and again. Moby-Dick isn’t necessarily a difficult read, the language is certainly meaty but not so intellectual or arcane as the other books that might sit alongside it as “daunting classics.” Yet, as you read on you realize why this classic has a reputation of being challenging and deserves it—there’s an unrelenting, circular quality to Melville’s storytelling that is grueling. One of the biggest surprises as a reader, is how little Ahab and his quest for the white whale is part of the book—it’s picking up in these last few chapters, but in total Ahab features in about 30 or 40 of the 540 pages we’ve read so far. My theory is that the reputation of Ahab’s quest, as an arduous and epic one, lives on because Melville takes the reader on a digression of epic proportion to finally reach anything substantive about Ahab or the white whale. The reader is Ahab, trying to figure out where the heck Ahab is. The classic hero’s journey would have shown Ahab facing numerous obstacles in his pursuit, but we haven’t seen anything resembling bumps in the ocean—they’ve traveled, they’ve hunted whales, they’ve talked to other ships about the white whale, and Ahab has made a harpoon out of the “nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.” Therefore, the real obstacle is a meta one, the hero’s journey is the reader’s journey—can you make it through the endless asides, double-backs, and philosophical entreaties to find out what happens to the one-legged man and his ivory nemesis?