Agents of all sorts keep the sales wheel of our economy spinning, and that’s true for real estate agents, travel agents, talent agents, and yes, literary agents.
Beyond their sales acumen, there’s one crucial quality a literary agent needs to uphold and that’s trustworthiness. After all, your agent handles the negotiations of your book, the advance and royalties, subsidiary rights and so much more. Your agent is the primary shepherd of your work.
The thing is, I can see that it’s getting harder and harder for writers to tell which agents are trustworthy. For years, membership in AAR provided a legitimacy test to tell that an agent was adhering to a code of ethics.
But recently, many high-profile literary agents have chosen to forgo AAR membership. According to AAR guidelines, an agent can’t charge clients any fee above and beyond the commission for a book’s sale (typically 15%). Many agents feel that they need to be able to charge for extra services their clients require, like publicity and editing. Scott Hoffman of Folio Literary Management wrote about this recently in Is Your Agent Legit?
And on top of all of that, respected publishers like Thomas Nelson are now offering a fee to agents who refer writers to their new self-publishing operation. This is a trend which threatens to further deride the essential trust in the writer/agent relationship.
Imagine you’re trying to sell your house and contact a real estate agent. The agent responds that while he’s not able to represent your house, he would like to refer you to purchase a nifty $10,000 sell-by-owner package. Is this ethical?
I really hope this isn’t where things are headed, but I see the potential is there. For more on this subject please read Why Referral Fees Present an Ethical Dilemma by Victoria Strauss and Major Publisher Opens Subsidy Publishing Division on agent Rachelle Gardner’s blog.
And for any writer who receives a referral letter from an agent, I encourage you to post a thread about it on the Publishing Pitstop forum.
So have you ever gotten a referral to a self pub company from an agent? Thoughts on this trend? Let’s hear it.
-Maria Schneider
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I think this is a coming nightmare for the industry, but also for agents. If making a living writing is tough, making a living off a percentage of a writer’s income — even if representing multiple writers — is no picnic. It’s understandable that agents both good and bad are going to be scrambling to find stable sources of income as the industry contracts, and it’s predictable that these market-driven forces are going to drive agents across the board to loosen their standards. Principles are great as long as you’re not starving.
Having said that, I don’t have respect for any agent who goes this route. My ability to sympathize is humanistic: as a businessperson myself I don’t want parasites preying on my peers, and we all know there are plenty of agents who already do this. Agenting is in for a terrible squeeze and that’s one of the reasons I haven’t even considered trying to find an agent. In this rapidly evolving environment I’m not interested in having to think about, manage, or protect myself against someone else’s problems. (And I say that as someone who was agented for years in Hollywood.)
I have never even looked for an agent, though I will some day. Finding a reputable agent has always been a task I’ve looked on with great trepidation. A close relative had an agent and I heard nothing but horror stories from him, way back in the 90’s. This trend will only make my agent angst worse.
~jon
You use a great analogy, Maria. Real estate agents, back when I had a license, were prohibited from that very practice for the reasons you point out here.
I think it would be smart to expect agents to give a list of referrals. I know – usually it’s the agent vetting you. But I think the mutual trust issue needs to be addressed somehow. You know agents – would they object to sharing some contacts to any clients they take on?