Agents Failing Authors
Well, having slashed and burned my RSS feeds the other day to get some time back, I made the mistake today of looking at the #queryfail posting at BookEnds. There are some 250 comments there, mostly from writers, complaining about how utterly awful some agents are. To save you having to plough through all that vitriol, I’ve summarised what seem to be the main complaints.
- Agents constantly whining about how busy they are. Some people pointed out how being busy is quite common but only agents seem to think it is a good idea to complain about this to their customers and to use it as an excuse for impoliteness or shoddy work practices. Others are extremely riled by the way so many agents these days seem to blog and twitter all day long and yet don’t seem to have the time to respond to queries.
- Slow response times. Some of the tales of woe are quite shocking. Some agents seem to take the attitude that, if they say nothing, their pesky querier will go away.
- The arrogance of agents when dealing with queries. This clearly gets right up the noses of some writers who dislike the assumption these agents make that they know better. I quote from one especially entertaining commenter: “Don’t lecture us about how to write if you haven’t yourself written more than a self-indulgent blog. We understand that you might not be able to sell our latest book, but if that’s the case, that’s all you really need to tell us.”
- Lack of professionalism. This is a big heading when it comes to complaints about agents, so I’ll summarise it with a few bullet points:
- It upsets authors that they see agents being disrespectful to their potential – or actua! – customers. I’ve seen business people disrespecting their customers in many industries but never in public and never to their faces!
- Haphazard working practices. For example, posted deadlines should be met, people feel, or at least the author should be notified when the agent is not going to be able to meet them.
- Published information (notably on websites) is out of date or inaccurate. Particularly this refers to the genres agents represent, and to their stated response times.
- So many authors complain about agents “losing” their submissions. They feel this is either simple lying or that these agents have appallingly lax business practices.
- There is a major issue with the lack of feedback throughout the agent’s processing of a query. Most people feel that a well-run agency would be able to give simple feedback about where a query is in the process and when the process has terminated. Aparently, this is too much to ask for with many agencies.
- Agents insisting that authors send queries, partials and fulls on paper, rather than by email. One author complained about the time spent queueing in the post office with a fractious infant on her hip to send her 300-page manuscript (for which, in the end, no response was ever received, by the way.) Aside from causing that kind of inconvenience, what excuse could a business have these days for not using email?
There is more – lots, lots more – but that’s the gist of it.
It is obviously a far from perfect system. It will be interesting to see what becomes of agents as the world of publishing moves to more efficient, digital models. It looks as if there will be many authors who would welcome an alternative should one ever arise.
Yeah, I read some of those comments. A lot of it looked like angry writers just wanting to vent at somebody and blame someone else for their lack of success. Thing is, agents are an integral part of publishing and I think they will be for some time.
One of the problems is that people don’t research a lot before they send, often. They’ll find a list of agents and start sending, without actually researching whether those agents deal with their type of fiction, what their response times are like, what sales they’ve made, whether they’re trustworthy etc. There’s plenty of places online where people can find that information out. Absolute Write is one good place.
At the agents’ end of the scale, they make a living off selling books to publishers, so obviously they want the best they can find. I’m sure some of them could improve their communication skills, but I honestly think those are among the minority and easily weeded out by a little research on the writer’s part.
Yeah, you’re probably right.
I have had two distinct phases in my relationship with agents. The first phase was long ago when I didn’t really know what I was doing, didn’t understand the craft of query writing, and didn’t know the value of personalising any communication to an agent. (But I did know enough only to deal with agents who said they handled my kind of material and to follow their query instructions.) For one work, I sent 54 queries to agents and got back just six, pro forma replies. The rest just ignored me.
The second phase is recent, and comes after I made a study of how to write a query letter and a synopsis. Now I get a response from (almost) every agent I query and most of them are even polite and personal.
It’s nice that I’ve now learned the secret handshakes and can get agents to talk to me. But it wasn’t my writing that improved so much in that time, just my knowledge of the procedures. It is a terrible shame that it has to be that way. What’s more, it makes me suspect that I haven’t yet learned that very special secret handshake that will get me represented.
I can understand frustration on the part of writers when it comes to dealing with agents. Some writers get hundreds of rejections before achieving any success – Enid Blyton is one such example – yet end up being incredibly prolific and successful.
But I guess it’s like most jobs; one needs to understand how things work. A salesman, for example, needs to not only know his product well, but he also needs to understand the procedures around booking meetings with clients, how to cold-call, how pushy he can be, etc. Unfortunately I think a lot of writers think that writing a sellable book is the only part of the craft. But, really, it’s only half of it. Being able to market oneself to the people that matter is a whole other art, and I reckon a lot of terribly good writers never get the coverage they should because they don’t learn that side of things.
Of course, everything is still subjective – based on an agent’s opinion which may have been influenced by other factors the writer can’t control. But hey, almost every aspect of life is like that to some degree – perhaps it’s just the intensely personal nature of trying to sell a novel one loves that highlights that even more so.