Monday, 18th January 2010

The fall and rise of the literary agent?

Literary agents, do not read Robert McCrum's offering at Guardian online today. He predicts your future and as the doctor said to the 80 a day a man: the prognosis is grave. Literary agents are victims of the recession and the renewed vigour of publishers, desperate to survive in a changing industry. Following the egregious example of sticken airlines, agencies see salvation in mergers. McCrum writes:

‘What's new about the current takeover conversations is the desperation of the protagonists. They will be negotiating from positions of weakness not strength. Leaving aside the dreadful market conditions, the ongoing transformation of the book world's economics by the combination of Amazon and Google (to use a newspaper short-hand for a far more complex and subtle process) is rendering the literary agents' role economically, even creatively, pointless.’

Steady on Bob. These may look the worst of times; in fact they are possibly the best. The internet has opened new territory for intrepid agents. More often than not the Net is a colony of insanity, but it is the ideal forum to create an instant literary brand, which is all publishing and representation reduces to commercially. Talented online writers require representation and there is money to be made; the phenomenal success of the unreadable Belle du Jour is a case in point.

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Anne Wotana Kaye 1

January 18th, 2010 6:54pm Report this comment

I find it hard to have any sympathy for literary agents. For more years than I care to remember, I had been trying to find one when I was dreaming of publishing a novel. Sending the manuscript direct to publishers was useless since first-time writers have to come through an agent. Catch 22 is that agents will only consider a work if the prospective writer has already been published or has an agent already. So now, in my seventies, it is a situation of dream on.

Magisterial Beachcave

January 19th, 2010 2:12am Report this comment

The agent is a middleman by definition. The point of an agent is how close s/he is to the supply and demand of manuscripts. If s/he knows lots of writers and publishers, there is a point in being an agent. If not, it can be a dead-end street of starvation. It is not really, I believe, even a profession but a POSITION really. One can either have it or not have it. Why am I listening to that stupid Nickelback in the background?

KG Barrett

January 19th, 2010 6:00am Report this comment

I fail to see how many literary agents make a living. I am in the process of looking for an agent for my first novel. A trawl through the internet and a search of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook brings up what looks like a promising selection of agencies. It is only when you start to examine their websites more closely that you begin to wonder why and how they are in business.

"We will try and get back to you within two months." "Failure to follow our submission guidelines will result in your email being deleted unread." "We are not currently searching for new authors." "We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts" (eh?). "We are not interested in the following categories of fiction: crime, mystery, fantasy, romance, erotica, history." (I did not make the last one up).

When you do find an agency that will lower itself to receive your proposal, you will either get the standard bum's rush or you may get no reply at all.

So I don't think we should feel too much sympathy for the current plight of the literary agent. There are some good ones out there, I know, but there is also a great deal of dross. The good ones will survive, the others will go back to pushing a barrow.

David Short

January 19th, 2010 5:05pm Report this comment

Didn't someone not far from the Spectator's chief executive's desk put in a lot of money, possibly OPM, into a literary agency not so long ago? It must be one of the least stable business to invest in, particularly if authors run a mile from an agency under new, grim ownership!

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January 26th, 2010 8:28am Report this comment

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