Agents are brokers. They are the middlepersons who sit between writers and publishers and make the connections between the needs of each group. Trouble is, agents are in short supply.
What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.
I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I’m looking for an agent. I’ve just finished my latest novel, TimeSplash! and I’d like to see it published.* Trawling through agents’ websites, one by one, trying to understand what genres they like to work in, whether they’re accepting new clients, how they like to be queried, and so on, is only part of the work involved. I’m also working my way through authors of similar material, trying to find out who their agents are. None of this is easy. All of it is time-consuming and tedious. The yearbooks for writers that list agents and their preferences are helpful and take a lot of the pain out of the initial stages of the work, but you need one per territory (so, for me, at least Australia, America and the UK) and the printed ones are at least a year out of date already.
Secondly, I just read a blog posting by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, telling the world that she wants people to send her queries right now so she can read them over Christmas. Wow! If only I wrote crime fiction! This is the kind of service agents should be providing – both to writers and to publishers. It got me thinking just how much easier and more efficient finding an agent could be if they were all willing to let the world know when they were open to new queries.
Of course, even if they were all as proactive as Janet, one would still have to subscribe to the blogs of every agent in your genre. But it would be a start.
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if I could just tell someone what kind of agent I needed and they would then line them up for me? Or if there was a ‘clearing house’ online where I could tick a few checkboxes to describe my book and up would come a list of a dozen agents around the world, actively seeking for manuscripts of that type? Surely there would be money to be made by someone in starting up an electronic marketplace like this?
On the other hand, even Janet Reid isn’t perfect. Consider this post about ‘surrogate writers’ which basically says she’ll dump any query that doesn’t come directly from the writer. Makes it kind of hard for the new middlepeople to get into the market if agents don’t like hearing from them. But then Janet wasn’t talking about my new breed of broker (meta-agents? super-agents?). She was talking about writers who get their mums to send in a query for them! I just hope that, when manuscript brokers start to appear, her email filters won’t search for phrases like ‘I’m writing on behalf of…’ and file their correspondence under ‘Junk’.
Meanwhile…
*For any agents reading this, TimeSplash! is a sci-fi thriller, set about forty years in the future and deals with the struggles of two young people trying to prevent a very singular terrorist attack on London. He’s doing it because he’s a nice guy who just got dragged into it. She’s doing it because she has a personal vendetta agianst the terrorist.
“What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.”
I almost agree with you here: but the problem is, how would those brokers earn their living?
Agents and publishers earn by producing good, marketable books which will sell in high-enough numbers to ensure a return on investment for everyone involved. But for writers, the return isn’t high: when the Society of Authors surveyed writers’ incomes, the numbers were so low they were scary (I’ve blogged about this, if you’re interested).
If the writers then have to pay a portion of that income to someone else–the broker–then they’re going to be even less well-off.
And if writers pay the brokers up-front for their help then, while some brokers are going to do their best to be ethical and fair, there’s nothing to stop the scammers from creaming a good living off writers who are just not good enough to ever see their work published by a decent press.
How can I be so sure? Because of the number of disreputable editorial consultants I’ve seen operating over the years, who profess to do just what you’re suggesting. When compare their incomes with their results, measured by the number (or lack of) good commercial sales that they’ve made, you can see the problem.
Sorry it to me so long to get to this, Jane! It seems to me that the broker’s cut should come out of the agent’s cut. Since the broker would be making life so much easier for the agent, it should be worth an agent’s while to use broker services even if they have to forego 15% of their 15%.
The last person who should have to pay the broker is the writer. God knows we’re exploited enough by this system. A 10%-to-the-author deal is miserable considering it is their work that is being sold. Publishers don’t do much better. Agents get a little more at 15%. It is the booksellers who are really making the money but it’s hard to see how to make them cut down on their huge margins when they have such a strategic role in the industry.
Graham, the publisher makes the most money out of each book sold, and I’m afraid that you’re wrong on this point:
“It is the booksellers who are really making the money but it’s hard to see how to make them cut down on their huge margins when they have such a strategic role in the industry.”
You’re forgetting the huge overheads that booksellers have, which eats up most of their income. In October last year I blogged about where the money in publishing goes (I’ll link to that at the bottom of this comment), and at that time I wrote,
“It’s estimated that once the bookshop has covered all of these various costs, their profit per book sold drops to below 5% of the cover price.”
If agents fund the brokering by paying 15% of their 15%, then the manuscript brokers aren’t going to earn an awful lot: most books bring in advances of less than £5,000: the agent’s 15% of that comes to £750, and 15% of that would be £112.50 (I think–mental maths at seven in the morning isn’t one of my strongest points). That’s not a very good return for finding the one good manuscript out of thousands read, and I doubt you’d find anyone good to do the job at that rate.
You can read my blog post about money in publishing here:
http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/2008/10/who-makes-money-when-book-is-sold.html
Thanks for the correction Jane – always happy to have my figures fixed.
My original post was a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course, so I don’t actually expect a set of agent brokers to emerge (nice as it would be) and the problem of financing them wasn’t one I seriously considered. Perhaps this issue and this alone is why they don’t exist.
The good thing is (not my maths, as it turns out, but) that I got to see your blogs. I’ve subscribed to How Publishing Really Works (hopefully I’ll be better informed in my next rant) and I’m seriously considering having a go at Greyling Bay. What a great idea! I had a ‘chapter’ in a collaborative story that The Times ran a *very* long time ago. Unfortunately it petered out and was never completed. Compiling self-contained pieces on a theme is a much less fragile notion. However many people contribute, there is still a worthwhile body of work.
The whole thing brings ‘Under Milk Wood’ to mind, by the way.