We’re going to wade into a recent e-brouhaha, but it’s not going to be the Amazon vs Macmillan one. No, this is the one where Dean Wesley Smith argued that authors do not need agents. But you don’t need to read that to appreciate this ‘cast.

So… do you need an agent? This depends on the operating definition of “you” and “agent.” What kind of contractual experience do you have? What kinds of things will your agent do for you? And if you decide you do need an agent, how do you go about identifying the agent who is right for you? We’ll cover all of this and more!

Unrelated to agents (but definitely in the “and more” category): Howard reveals deeply personal information in this podcast!

Audiobook Plug: The Maze Runner, by James Dashner

Writing Prompt: Write a story in which a bestselling recluse author dies, and his agent scrambles to keep the career alive without telling anybody. Skin in the game, baby!

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*.

*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

Audible® Free Trial Details
Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Why get an agent? Expertise in negotiations, contracts, foreign rights, etc. that you don’t have. Wider view and experience. Career builder and consultant? A key question: do they have skin in the game? (I.e., are they invested in you or not?) Beware: there is no quality control for agents. Bottom line: everybody doesn’t need an agent, but you might.

[Brandon] This podcast comes from two areas. First off, I’ve had a request directly from a listener to talk more about agents. Their experience is we haven’t talked enough about it. Mixed with that, there has kind of been a minor fervor going on in the Internet about Dean Wesley Smith’s blog posts about agents. There are about four of them. He’s under the opinion that…
[Howard] Oh, those.
[Brandon] Yes. Oh. Those.
[Dan] Those inflammatory blog posts.
[Brandon] I wanted to kind of pitch some of the questions at the panelists or at the podcasters, and we’ll talk about what we think about agents.
[Howard] I shall be both a panelist and a podcaster today.
[Brandon] Oh, will you? All right.
[Dan] Are you trying to make us look bad, Howard?
[Howard] [pause] No.
[Dan] Well. Excellent. Yes, Brandon. What can I do for you?
[Brandon] You sold a book without an agent.
[Dan] I did.
[Brandon] I sold a book without an agent. Howard has managed to make a full-time living as a cartoonist without an agent.
[Howard] Selling books without agents.

[Brandon] So why did you go and get one, when you already had an offer on the table?
[Dan] Because I knew that there were things an agent could do that I could not do.
[Brandon] And what are those things?
[Dan] For example, negotiating the contract. I was not confident in my own ability to get myself a good contract in terms of rights and in terms of money. I wanted someone who knew what they were doing. I found someone and handed it off and said, “Here. You make sure that I don’t get screwed on this.” essentially. Foreign rights. I knew that I wanted foreign rights. Every author I’ve talked to said has said that that’s where a lot of the money comes from. In my case, that’s where my living wage comes from, is in foreign rights.
[Howard] Yeah, it sounds like that was the right decision for you, Dan.
[Dan] I had no idea. I spent 10 years trying to figure out how to sell a book in America. I didn’t want to start from scratch in every other country in the world. So I said let’s find an agent with international experience. So there we go. That was great. She was able, because she’s in a fairly large agency, she was able to just walk down the hall and say here, you are the European seller. Sell this in Europe. And so on and so on.
[Howard] You know what’s so nice about that? You think as a guy who’s smart enough to write a book that you’re smart enough to read a contract. And you are. You can read the contract, and if you’re clever, you will know exactly what you are getting and what you are not getting out of the contract. But what you are not able to do while you are reading that contract is read every other contract that publisher has sent out. Whereas an agent has seen hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of contracts, and can do, like your agent did, and walk something down the hall to somebody who has a little bit more experience with foreign rights, and just make it happen. That’s something that no amount of Dr. Google is going to help you with. Because authors don’t publish their contracts on the web.

[Dan] My experience with the contract… the first one that I got from Tor… is that I freaked out over really common stupid stuff, and I totally missed the really big stuff.
[Brandon] Right. I did a lot of that too.
[Dan] All the questions I would send my agent were like what about this line, it says that I have to sell my child? She’d say, “No, it actually doesn’t, you’re reading that wrong.”
[Howard] That doesn’t say child, that says children.
[Dan] Then she’d say, what did you think about that other line? Some other line that says I have to sell my kidney or whatever, I totally missed and she was able to point that out and get it changed.
[Howard] Well, I have two of those. And for the record… Internet… I only have one. Kidney.
[Brandon] Oh, really?
[Howard] This is true. Congenital defect.
[Dan] We always knew there was something wrong.
[Howard] It’s my congenitals. [Laughter] Moving right along.
[Dan] Goodbye [garbled] writing. I want you to know that I did not walk through that door. You opened it up, and I thought there’s a joke, I’m not going to make it. There you go.

[Howard] If I have to deliver my own punchlines, I will. Brandon, I want to tell you a story about an agent that’s similar to Dan’s story. My buddy Rodney wrote a book. It was a book on a Microsoft product. Wrote a book, sold the book. Somebody told him, you’re pretty good at this, you should go get an agent. He contacted an agency does a lot of agenting work in the science fiction and fantasy market. I won’t drop any names because that wouldn’t be right. But his agent told him, “Oh, I’m very glad that you sold a book. Can I see the contract?” He said, well, sure, and he showed her the contract. She said, “Let me renegotiate this for you.” He says, “You can’t do that. I’ve signed it. They’ve signed it.” She says, “Let me renegotiate this for you.” She renegotiated it, got her fee in there, and got him a 15% raise above that. I don’t know how that happens. But when the publisher sees an agent who knows what they’re talking about, the rules seem to change.
[Brandon] Right. They do.
[Howard] So, yeah, if you’ve already made a sale, great. Go get an agent and show them the contract you signed.
[Dan] A lot of people will freak out to hear that the agent takes a cut, but they pay for it. They easily pay for it.
[Howard] That’s exactly what this agent did.
[Dan] They will… if they’re taking 10%, though make sure that at least 10% more is added on there, thereby paying for their own…
[Brandon] What we’ve been saying here… by the way, I agree with all of it… what we’ve been saying here is the conventional wisdom.
[Dan] All of it?

[Brandon] Oh, yes. Well, not the stuff about his congenitals. But everything else, I agree with it. But the purpose of this podcast partially is to start throwing up the devil’s advocate stuff. Because honestly Dean has some really good points. It’s inflammatory, but there’s a lot of really good stuff in there. One of the things he points out, and I think that our listeners should know this, is that there is an alternative if you don’t want to handle the contract yourself. That’s someone called an intellectual property lawyer. The difference between an intellectual property lawyer and an agent is, an intellectual property lawyer you pay a fee to handle your negotiations on a given contract. After that, they walk away. You have paid them their money. You now have this contract, there is nothing coming off the top getting sent to them.
[Howard] That’s actually a really good solution if you’re worried about not having enough experience to understand what the contract really says.
[Brandon] And if you don’t like the idea of an agent taking 15%, it’s a way to go. What you lose out on that is the whole foreign thing. I have… Lee Modesitt we should maybe sometime get on the podcast to talk about these things. He doesn’t use an agent for American rights, he handles it all himself. Granted, he lived in DC for a while, he has got some legal background, he knows what he’s doing to negotiate. But he still uses an agent for all foreign sales. So you can actually do that, you can go half-and-half but one of the things that you miss out on that we haven’t really talked about is… a really good relationship with a really good agent is more than just a contract negotiated here or things like this. A really good agent… and this is something that Dean doesn’t like. I’ll just state that straight out.
[Dan] He hates it.

[Brandon] A really good agent is partially a career builder for you. They give you advice. They tell you, “OK, I think that this book would be a better thing to pitch at this time. Even though you’ve got two offers from these different houses, I think that you should pick this house. Even if they’re the same, because of things that I know about the business…” They will be a mentor. They will guide you through a lot of these things.
[Howard] The fundamental cause for that attitude for an agent is that a good agent has skin in the game and knows it. They know that if they build your career, they are also building their’s.
[Brandon] That 15% makes them vested.
[Howard] Some people look at that and say, “Oh, gosh. What a parasite!” That’s not being a parasite, that’s being…
[Dan] A symbiotic organism.
[Howard] Exactly. That’s a symbiosis.
[Brandon] But the devil’s advocate side says maybe you don’t want career building. That’s what Dean says. Maybe you don’t want someone telling you you should do this, you should do that. He doesn’t. He doesn’t want anyone stepping in and saying, “I think that you should do this with your career” or that you should rewrite this book and this given any or anything like that…
[Howard] I moved out of my mom’s house 25 years ago, and darn it…
[Dan] One of the points he makes, and that is valid here, is that the value of an agent as a career builder depends entirely on the quality of the agents you get.
[Brandon] Yeah. This is really big. Let’s talk about that after the break. Let’s pause for an advertisement.

[Brandon] This week we want to preview a book by James Dashner. James Dashner is actually a friend of mine. He just went big nationally with his book The Maze Runner. It’s a young adult dystopian thriller, I would say. We’re going to have him on the podcast probably in about two weeks. We wanted to promo his book this week in case you wanted to give it a read to know what kind of book he writes. I think it’s fantastic. I blurbed it.
[Dan] You did.
[Brandon] They used my blurb. But it’s a really great book.
[Dan] You weren’t big enough for him. It’s very good. It’s huge right now. It’s a very hot book right now, too.
[Howard] The Maze Runner by James Dashner.
[Brandon] Go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse to get your free trial.

[Brandon] Before we broke… break… before we stopped…
[Howard] Paused?
[Brandon] Paused, Dan had brought up a very important and salient point which is a lot of the things we’re talking about here really is depending on which agent you have experience with. Reading through Dean Wesley Smith’s posts, and Laura Resnick post a lot on there… they seem to have had incredibly like opposite experiences as me with agents. One of the things that Dean brings up that we should mention is that there is no quality control for agents.
[Dan] There’s no school, there’s no certificate you have to hold, you just… any schlub with a business card can walk up to you in a convention and tell you he is an agent.
[Brandon] Someone is making fun of this online with a blog run by their cat who… their cat has decided that they are an agent. Which is an amusing concept. Their cat can be an agent. There is nothing that says that they can’t. Because of that, what agents do, what their personalities are like, what they… how they see their job, all vary very widely. My agent, Joshua Billness, is fantastic. He never does any of the things that Dean Wesley Smith brings up that are really egregious. There are some egregious things he brings up. Sometimes he had experience with agents who are making decisions for him and not telling him. Contractual decisions.
[Dan] Which is awful. Never get an agent that does that.
[Brandon] He’s mentioned that sometimes you will get ignored by your agent because you’re just not important enough for them. Even when I was small, I never felt ignored.
[Howard] That breaks the skin in the game model. If your agent doesn’t feel like you’re big enough, your agent doesn’t have skin in the game, and isn’t going to help you with your career.

[Brandon] In that case, every agent is going to have bigger clients and smaller clients. It’s really going to come down to… does the agent consider… it comes down to integrity. The agent says, “I have taken this person on as a client. I will give them their due consideration and contact.” But at the same time, I don’t want to say that an agent who doesn’t do that is a bad agent. Because in a lot of ways, what your agent does should be matched to what you want as a writer. For instance, there are some writers who don’t want to hear from their agent at all. They want someone who handles the negotiations and is done and stays out of it.
[Howard] Please, just make my contracts work and make sure that I get paid so that I can sit here and write.
[Brandon] Other people want agents who are calling them on a regular basis and talking to them about their career and helping them with their books and consoling them and crying on their shoulder and things like that. You were going to say something, Dan?

[Dan] I was going to say… Well, one of the things that Dean was just railing about that he hated was editents… agents who act like editors and will make content suggestions on your book. He hated that. Whereas, on the other hand, Joshua does that all the time.
[Brandon] Joshua does that quite extensively, and has proven himself to be…
[Howard] Was it you and Joshua who were talking about the humor in… was it Warbreaker?
[Brandon] No, it was Moshe who was talking about that. It was my editor.
[Howard] It was Moshe. So it was your editor.
[Brandon] But, no… Joshua has proven himself to know a whole lot about writing and about books and things like this. There’s the argument that if they knew that much about writing, why didn’t they become an author? Well, that same argument goes for editors.
[Dan] They’re different.
[Brandon] It’s different. It’s different skills… writing… there are people who are really skilled at noticing when something is wrong and helping you fix it and there are people who are poor at it. Joshua is very good at it. Now, if you are a writer who doesn’t want an agent that does that, then Joshua would be a bad agent for you, despite the fact that I think he is fantastic and perhaps the best agent in the business.
[Howard] What do we got here on Dean’s list that we can…

[Brandon] The thing that kind of started all of this with Dean’s posts, and that I think is actually a very legitimate thing to bring up, is the question that sort of started this. Do you need an agent? He pointed out, it’s a big myth, he thinks, in the industry that authors need agents to sell. He calls it an incredible myth. The fact that all three of us here didn’t have agents and are able to make a living at writing… were able to get contracts. Dan and I both went and got agents. Howard, you actually tried once.
[Howard] I had an agent. She shopped the Schlock Mercenary books around to a number of science fiction and fantasy publishers. What was funny is that half of them had already heard of it and loved it, but didn’t see how they could make it fit with their business. The other half of them weren’t familiar with it and thought, “Oh, a comic? I don’t know that we’re ready to do that.” But that’s something that I think an agent is perfect for. I was trying to take something new into the market, and my agent said, “You know what? That sounds exciting. I’ll try that.” I never could have made that work on my own. Turns out I couldn’t have made it work with help.

[Brandon] I think the thing to take away from this podcast is the idea that there are a lot of great benefits to agents. But at the same time, we should bring out the simple fact that no, you do not need one. They don’t match every person. A lot of new writers get it in their mind that, “Oh, I must have an agent before I can sell…”
[Howard] I think a safer take away is everybody doesn’t need an agent, but you, fair listener, might.
[Dan] Here’s a quick story from David Hartwell to finish this up, because I thought this was wonderful. We’re talking about first-time authors specifically. He said as a first-time author, really, 50 to 100% of what you’re selling to an editor is yourself rather than your book. An agent can’t sell that for you.
[Brandon] You’re selling your potential. You’re selling who you are to become a bigger name later on. Let’s do a writing prompt. Howard?

[Howard] Write yourself a story about a famous recluse author and his or her agent. The author dies. The agent is now scrambling to keep that career alive without telling anybody.
[Brandon] That’s awesome.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Howard] That’s skin in the game.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.