Agents, queries, and submissions

Do I need an agent?

For most trade publishers, yes, because many of them do not read unagented submissions. For university presses, small presses, and a good many independent publishers, no, and their submission pages say so.

The agent's function is broader than getting a manuscript read. An agent negotiates the contract, knows which clauses are unusual, sells subsidiary rights, and chases money. An author without one is doing those things personally or paying a lawyer for the first two.

The decision follows the route rather than the ambition. A book aimed at large trade houses needs one. A scholarly book going to a university press generally does not, since those presses acquire on proposal and run their own peer review.¹ An author unsure which route the book is on has a prior question to answer first.

How do agents get paid, and what is normal?

Agents are paid by commission on what they sell, deducted from the author's earnings. The Association of American Literary Agents does not set a percentage in its Canon of Ethics, so any figure quoted as standard is convention rather than rule.²

What the Canon does regulate is the handling of the money. Members must maintain at least two separate bank accounts, one for money due to clients and one for operating expenses. They must pay clients within ten business days after clearance, and no later than twenty-one days unless otherwise agreed.²

Expenses are treated separately. A member may pass along charges incurred on the client's behalf with the client's approval, including copyright fees, postage, and manuscript preparation.² An accounting of services, fees, charges, and commissions has to be communicated fully, clearly, and honestly before work begins.²

Can an agent charge me a fee to read my book?

Not a member of the AALA. The Canon of Ethics states that members may not charge any reading fees for evaluating work for possible representation.² That is the clearest line in the document and it is the one worth remembering.

Paid editorial services are treated as a separate matter and are permitted under conditions. A member may offer them to people who are not clients only if it is disclosed in writing that representation is not implied, and the relevant section of the Canon is supplied up front.²

SFWA's Writer Beware puts the same risk in blunter terms, naming a recommendation from a publisher or agent of their own paid editing services as a clear conflict of interest.³ An agent who reads for free and represents on commission has interests aligned with the author. An arrangement where the reading is paid does not.

What goes in a query letter?

Whatever the agency's submission page asks for, in the form it asks for. Submission pages are the operative document, they differ from one another, and an author who follows the general advice instead of the specific page has failed the first test.

The common contents are a short description of the book, its category and word count, comparable published titles, and a brief note about the author. The description is the part that carries the weight, and it is the same compression problem as describing the book in two sentences.

Comparable titles are worth taking seriously because publishers do. Princeton University Press asks for title, author, publisher, and year with a statement of how the book differs, and tells authors to research properly before claiming there are none.⁴ The same standard reads well in a query.

What is a synopsis, and how long?

A synopsis tells the whole story, ending included, in continuous prose. It is not a blurb and it is not written to intrigue. Its purpose is to let a reader judge whether the plot works, which requires knowing how it ends.

Length is set by whoever asked for it. One page and two pages are both commonly requested and the requests differ, which is why the agency's own page governs.

The usual failure is withholding. A synopsis that hides the ending to preserve suspense has answered a question nobody asked and left the real one open.

The second usual failure is a cast list. A synopsis naming eleven characters in two pages reads as a summary of a book nobody could follow, even when the book itself is perfectly clear.

What is a book proposal, and does fiction need one?

A proposal sells a book that is not yet written, and it is standard for nonfiction. The published requirements are detailed. The University of California Press asks for eight things: a brief description, a chapter outline with paragraph-length descriptions, a statement of apparatus and illustrations, and an audience statement. It also asks for comparable and competing publications from the past three to five years, the status of the work, author information, and suggested peer reviewers.¹

Fiction generally does not use one. Novels are normally sold complete, and a debut novelist is expected to have finished the book.

The exception is an author with a publishing record, who may sell a novel on a partial and an outline. That is a function of the track record rather than of the proposal itself.

How many agents do I approach at once?

Simultaneous submission is normal and most agencies expect it, but the number is a judgment. Sending to every agent at once removes the chance to revise the query after learning it is not working.

A common approach is to send in batches, so that a pattern in the responses can be acted on before the list is exhausted. An author who sends five and receives five form rejections has learned something cheaply.

Agency pages sometimes restrict this, including rules against querying two agents at the same agency. Those rules are printed on the pages, and reading them is the whole of the compliance problem.

A record of what went where matters more than the batch size. Duplicate submissions to the same agent are the avoidable error, and they happen to authors working from memory.

How many rejections is normal before something is wrong with the submission?

Any number offered for this has been invented, since no published figure exists. What can be said is what the different kinds of rejection actually mean.

Form rejections carry no information about the book. A run of them tells an author only that the query did not persuade the people who read it, which could be the book, the query, the category, or the moment.

Personal rejections carry information, and consistency between them carries more. Three agents independently naming the same problem amounts to evidence. One agent's opinion is one reader's opinion, and Writer Beware is direct that no reputable editor will tell an author their book has huge commercial potential.³ Neither a rejection nor an acceptance is a measurement of the writing.

Is silence a rejection?

Increasingly, and agencies say so on their own pages. A no-response policy is stated in terms of a period, after which no answer means no, and that period is the one that governs.

Where a page states no such policy, silence means nothing definite, and a single polite follow-up after the stated response time is ordinary practice. Repeated follow-ups are not.

The practical consequence is administrative rather than emotional. An author needs a record of what was sent, to whom, on what date, and what the stated response time was. After twenty submissions, memory is not adequate to any of that.

The record also shows when a list has been exhausted. That is the point at which the query itself becomes the thing to revise, rather than the manuscript.

Does an unagented submission still reach an acquiring editor?

At publishers that accept them, yes, and their submission pages say which those are. University presses, small presses, and a number of independent publishers read unagented work as a matter of routine, and academic acquisition runs on proposals rather than on agents.¹

At large trade houses the answer is usually no, and the closed door is a policy rather than a prejudice. Open submission windows appear periodically at individual imprints and are announced on their own pages.

An editor cannot improve those odds and should not claim to. Writer Beware is explicit that saying a manuscript was professionally edited will not improve an author's chances and may harm them.³ Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, including submission material an author is still working on.