One of the questions I am most frequently asked by unpublished writers who have a manuscript or a few chapters under their wing, is if I can recommend a literary agent.
The cannier or more worldly wise sometimes ask not for a name, but whether there is any point in having an agent in the first place. These, the sceptical, have obviously been talking to writer friends, or have overheard the literary fraternity's ceaseless whining about agents - the easy life thereof, and the lack of benefit (and attention) the author gets from them.
No doubt to the first-time writer, or those whose income from their work is relatively small, the idea of an agent taking 15% of their earnings hurts. If ever they ask advice from a publisher, they will almost certainly be told to body swerve the profession as if they were bubonic, most publishers agreeing with the cynic who described the relationship between their trade and the agent as "the same as that of the knife to the throat". Publishers would think that, though, because once an agent is involved they are obliged to pay higher advances and improve the terms of their contracts so as not to take advantage of a writer's naivety or ignorance of how the business works.
Money is thus usually at the bottom of all gripes about agents. Lately, though, a new line of grievance has emerged. Several publishers have announced the equivalent of a literary open-season, during which writers can submit manuscripts directly to them, without involving a middleman. Of course, that has always been the case. The problem is, books that arrive via a well-known and respected agent are far more likely to be read than unsolicited work. However, in a very public challenge to the hegemony of agents, HarperCollins, Jonathan Cape, Little, Brown and Tinder Press have said they are keen to see fiction unfiltered by these literary gatekeepers (or griffins, as some think of them), and are offering a window, varying between days and weeks, in which the unagented can submit their work. You can see their point. Much sifting and assessing, discarding or rewriting has gone on before a manuscript even has a chance of reaching an editor's inbox. It is entirely possible - indeed probable - that an original voice is being thwarted because of an agent's prejudice, short sightedness or lack of imagination.
Everybody has heard stories of tatty manuscripts that have languished unnoticed for months before being unearthed from the slush pile and turned into bestsellers. What you don't hear is that, having made their fortune, these writers generally appoint an agent to manage their career. Only those with an embarrassment of time and a hard head for money are capable of properly negotiating the tedious and complicated business of the working writer's life - contracts, royalties, foreign and translation rights, tv, film, radio and serial rights, and suchlike - which in many cases would eat into the writer's hours far more expensively than the cut the agent takes.
Now that the era of eye-wateringly large advances are past, agents' claws have been clipped. They still wield a good deal of power, but they are no longer regarded by authors as magicians who can pull hundreds of thousands of pounds for a first novel out of the hat, or land them a lucrative newspaper serial. Like so many others, they are simply another hard-working cog in the literary clock.
I suspect that the dream these enterprising editors have of finding a rough diamond amid the unfettered flood is, if not misguided, then unrealistic. After a single tweet inviting submissions, Alex Bowler, editorial director at Jonathan Cape, was buried beneath 5000 manuscripts. When search and rescue finally dug him out, he reported that there were three promising books in there. For those lucky writers, the exercise will have been worth it. But for the exhausted editor (or more likely his assistant) is that also the case? If nothing else, an agent is a timesaver. What could be more valuable than that?
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