It's the year 2000 and you have a great book that you want published and sold in bookstores everywhere. It's a lifelong dream and, besides, this book is great and important and everyone should read it.
So, what do you do? Best first move is to get an agent. Agents know editors. They have a track record of getting work bought and published by publishers. Publishers trust agents to bring them the good stuff. If an agent likes your manuscript, it's no guarantee it will get published but it's better than the alternative. The only drawback is that agents take a 15% cut of whatever you make, which is fine because, hey, you wouldn't make much if anything without one.
The alternative? If you can't get an agent, then you can send your manuscript into a publisher along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, which will likely be used to send it back to you with a pre-written rejection letter -- if you're lucky. Most likely you won't hear from the publisher at all. In very few cases, a summer intern will come across your masterpiece in the "slush pile" (made up of agent-less manuscripts like your own) and love it like you do and champion it to her boss, likely an assistant, and maybe, just maybe it will see the light of day.
And if that doesn't work, you can always publish it yourself with a "vanity" press. That's what self-publishing used to be known as -- vanity publishing.
Today, the options look very different. The ability to self-publish through Amazon, Barnes &
My question is, where does that leave agents?
For some agents, those who deal with only the biggest authors, the new publishing paradigm might not change much for now. Many of these authors still still want and need agents to help them manage their careers, negotiate big, complicated contracts, sell foreign rights, movie rights, audio rights, app rights, other licensing deals and such. Plus, many of these relationships have developed and grown over time. You wouldn't abandon a friend just so you don't have to share as much of your seven-figure advance, would you?
But many other agents are finding themselves in a position of having to legitimize what they do every day to their clients and potential clients.
In January, I spoke with Jane Dystel, president of New York-based President of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. Dystel, more than most agents, has done very well adapting to the changes in the industry and has had a lot of success picking up self-published authors as clients. When I asked her what her biggest challenge was when trying to acquire new authors, she said, "That we can help then do better than they’re doing themselves and that is a huge challenge because many of these self-published authors are doing phenomenally well."
Dystel is one of the agents who pioneered the approach of helping self-published authors with certain problems but not others, which is very different from the traditional author-agent relationship, where agents handled everything.
She said, "We took on a lot of our clients and just handled the foreign and the British and the audio and the movie rights. In some cases traditional publishers would approach us and would ask us if the authors were interested in a traditional deal. And if they were interested we would try to make it happen and if not we would just continue on with what we were doing before."
Read more of this interview here.
Dystel helped some of her clients sign six- and seven-figure "traditional" deals with publishers when it benefited the clients.
With this sea change in mind, we at Digital Book World asked over a hundred "hybrid" authors (those who have both published traditionally and self-published and generally are savvier than most other kinds of authors and know more about the publishing industry) about agents. We learned some fascinating stuff.
First off, about 9% of hybrid authors actually worked with an agent when they self-published in the past. And about a quarter said that "agents have adapted their skill sets and services" to meet the new needs of authors. And about a quarter said that having an agent provides their self-publishing efforts with "value."
It seems as if agents that are willing to be flexible with how they do business have a better chance at attracting these kinds of authors (and likely others) than agents who kowtow to the old way of thinking.
Read more about what hybrid authors think of agents, publishers, self-publishing services, ebook royalties and more here in our full report.
