Writers and Artists: Do You Really Need an Agent to Represent You?
Once I researched the matter, I learned that a literary agent had at least three important responsibilities that could be of use to me. For one, an agent should be well versed in the art of negotiating book and other contracts, an art I had not mastered. Second, an agent should help keep the money rolling in, both by making certain publishers paid as agreed and third, help his or her client generate more work. Since I had zero talent for getting always-late companies to pay on a timely basis, this aspect of an agent truly interested me.
There is this really odd dynamic to writing you see almost nowhere else. Few other professions would allow this nonsense, but consider that in writing, your product is called submission and you’re lucky if you’re able to get something called a kill fee when some editor decides not to use the article you’ve labored over. Twisted? Without a doubt.
In writing, there is some unspoken belief that publishers do the writers a huge favor by accepting their work and that editors should never have to degrade their lofty pursuits by worrying about something as tasteless and tacky as author payments. Only in writing is a payment made six months to a year after you broke your back to meet a deadline not considered late. Unfortunately, a writer’s or artist’s creditors usually think of any payment not made in 30 days as so late they have the right to shoot you for it.
An agent who could collect my money when it’s due? Sign me up, I thought, and promptly contracted with my first agent. But if I knew then what I know now, I’m not at all sure I would have made the same decision. The same may be true for you.
After speaking with dozens and dozens of other writers, as well as talking to many agents, I’ve discovered there can be some universal misassumptions by clients that are not always clearly corrected by the agents.
For example, on the issue of an agent being able to collect timely payment, an agent is usually only going to go just so far to exact the requisite pound of flesh from a publisher for a particular client. Why? Because the agent can’t threaten – not broken kneecaps nor legal action – a publisher and expect to work with that publisher for another client next week or next month. The agent has to protect his standings with the publisher so the agent can pitch other clients there.
” John” is an agent in New York, under contract for an old and established literary agency. He says his writers often fail to understand that he has to maintain a good relationship with a publisher and its staff regardless of problems one writer may have.
“Writers like to think that an agent really just represents one person, that writer. But there are very, very few authors who earn so much money that an agent or manager can restrict their representation to a single person. That means I have to be make decisions that benefit the majority of the 20 or so people I handle in any given year. If one publisher screws the pooch on one of my writers, I still have to play ball with the publisher for my other 19. So I can’t make big waves.”
Yet, when asked if he makes that clear to his clients, John never answers the question directly, even when this is pointed out to him.
Sarah Quinn, a contract copywriter in New York who works through an agency, says that in her experience, agents promise more than they can offer. “They tell you they’ll be there to go to bat for you if any editor or publisher starts playing games. But I’ve worked with three agents now and I’ve never seen an agent stand up for me or another writer when a problem arose.”
Lee Friedrich, a former ghostwriter and magazine freelancer, echoes Sarah’s experience. He says he went through four different agents before he finally realized that he was paying a 15% commission for work he felt he could do better himself.
“After you do good work, editors come back to you automatically for repeat business. Every writer should look long and hard at whether their agent actually gets them new work or whether that writer’s solid reputation gets that work. But that’s not the biggest complaint I have. These same writers should ask their agents, too, whether the agent is being paid a fee by the publisher. Two of mine not only made 15% on the contracts I signed, but also took another 10-15% from the publisher to make sure I was getting my work done on time. Then I discovered my last agent cut a deal with a publisher where my agent was paid $3,000 for every article I wrote and for which I was paid $1,000 each. Then she collected 15% from me, too. I don’t need an agent who acts like my pimp! If the agent is serving the publisher rather than the writer, this isn’t ethical,” writes Friedrich.
Mary Kohane Kimpujab is a one-time writer and agent who now works with a creative services group in the Los Angeles area. She agrees with John that very few agents can afford to jeopardize relationships with publishers or media companies because a single writer is unhappy. Yet she also confirms the conventional wisdom that agents are not needed by every writer or artist.
“If you aren’t making enough as a writer to justify a full-time, just-for-you agent or manager, then you’re going to have to share one with a group of other writers and realize you’re in a pool of talent. But if you don’t want to share among others who may compete directly with you for assignments or where an agent can’t make certain your specific needs get met, then you have to consider whether you need the agent at all,” says Kohane Kimpujab.
She has a slightly different set of rules to determine whether a writer needs professional representation. First, a new writer or one new to a particular genre can be aided enormously by the introductions and “foot in the door” work an agent usually provides. Second, a writer who does good work but isn’t usually getting the best contract dollars, she adds, will see a distinct improvement if he or she has an agent to fight those battles. Third, Kohane Kimpujab believes an agent is only justified when the writer earns at least 30% more than he made without the agent.
This last point should indicate that the agent is performing and more than pays for the standard fifteen percent he gets. But if you aren’t making substantially more with an agent than without one, she continues, “It’s time to think either about a different agent or trying your own approach, perhaps without outside representation.”
