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The sad truth about agents. Don’t read this if you have hopes and dreams you still cling to. In fact, don’t read virtually anything we post here these days. Just run screaming and lock yourself in a closet with a typewriter and your inheritance money and click away until your work is done.
Chances are that if you are a writer a little further down the food chain, but lucky enough to have an agent, they won’t be doing much for you. Restless writers, like I used to be, may change agencies frequently, only to find out that after a brief honeymoon all is back to normal – for most writers changing agencies is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as they watch the promises of their career go down the drain.
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The problem is that there are many more writers than the market can bear, and to most publishers writers are about as important as farmers are to Tesco – they know that there is an endless supply of produce. Of course most of the unsolicited writing that lands on agents’ desks is rubbish, but how can we be sure that the occasional gem will be discovered? The short answer is that we can’t and, sadly, neither agents nor publishers lose any sleep over it. The undiscovered writer is the acceptable victim of a system which, ironically, works for everyone concerned except for the very people who are its lifeblood.
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September 25th, 2007 at 7:45 am
I’ve published 15 books and countless articles, essays, and poems without an agent — and don’t recommend that route either. If it weren’t for my alternate identity as a college professor, my family and I would’ve been out on the street starving long ago. But it isn’t only agents who treat writers as expendable (consider that a euphemism). There’s also, as you suggest, grubby, market-conscious publishers. And don’t forget reviewers, whose only interest in your work is often limited to scoring points off you to further their own pet theories or perverse agendas. So why write? Not to make money or secure fame, that’s for sure, but to breathe.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
One must write to breathe. That’s beautiful, howie good.
September 25th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
While, as a hopeful author, I’m certainly depressed about the state of publishing and sympathize with the writers… I am a bit annoyed at the the last statement in the quote, which is similar to ones I see all the time.
It seems to be an obviously fallicious conflation of all writers. Writers, in some sense, are the lifeblood of literature. But more to the point it is GOOD authors who are the lifeblood of literature. The thousands of horrible hack writers and wannabes, though they may also be “writers” are hardly the “lifeblood” of literature or publishing.