Do you need an agent?
Do you really need an agent? That’s a big question and goes straight to the heart of what you want to get out of the writing process. Is it a hobby or is it something more serious? I’m pretty sure that all of us would like to be signed-up by a decent publisher and see our novels in our local Waterstones – in which case, the answer is that an agent can definitely help you with that. An agent would probably go further and say that it’s pretty much impossible to land a book deal with a publisher without an agent’s help. This is probably true, although social media and the whole ‘BookTok’ thing has shaken that up a bit. But more of that later.
I’ve had a few agents (some not so special) in my time but that was in television. I will name no names. At the time, I definitely needed them — even the not-so-good ones. There’s pretty much no way on God’s glorious earth that you’ll get a TV drama commission without an agent pulling some strings. And then, when you do, you need an agent to negotiate the deal and make sure the contract is okay. They also chase-up payments, so all-in-all pretty essential and the best ones more than earn their ten percent.
Books are different. For a start, they take a whole lot longer to write than a TV script, even allowing for the months of rewrites demanded by TV producers. And if it’s your first novel, it hasn’t been commissioned – so as soon as you’ve finished it, the equally long process of pitching it to potential publishers starts. That can be tough on your own.
Here’s the thing. As soon as you’ve got an agent, you’ve got someone who will have an opinion (usually a strong one) on what you’ve written and how to improve it. For example, an agent may want you to change the focus of your story in order to squeeze it more clearly into a particular genre. This will help them to pitch it to a publisher — as I talked about in the ‘Choose Your Genre’ entry. Conversely, without an agent, you’re totally free to write whatever you please. You can also approach a publisher yourself but an agent will have contacts and will know how to get your manuscript read by the right person. An unsolicited submission (and not all publishers accept them these days) will join a very big pile to be read, eventually, by the most junior member of the editorial staff (publishers may deny this last bit but really?)
After you’ve got a publisher interested, they will want their own changes, of course, just like your agent did. We could be talking years from your agent seeing your ‘final’ draft for the first time and the book eventually appearing in bookshops. If you have the time and energy for all this, then great. If you don’t, then you’re probably not going to enjoy the writer-agent relationship.
Fear not, there is an alternative: do it yourself. Amazon and Apple both offer very easy (and free) ways to publish your book as an e-book, paperback and even hardback. The upside is that you’re in control of everything and you’ll get a much larger share of the sale price than you would from any publisher. The downside is that you’ll have to do all the marketing yourself. This is where you need to be strong, active and imaginative on social media. If you like doing all that stuff and you’ve already got a lot of followers, you could be onto a winner. If neither is true, you’ll need a lot of good fortune to sell many copies. It can and does happen but you only have to look at the vast number of books published on Amazon every single day to know that you’re up against a lot of competition.
So what do you do? My concluding advice is this: try pitching to around ten agents to see what feedback you get and take it from there. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. If no-one bites, it’s not the end of the world, as we’ll find out next time.
Happy writing!