Industry thoughts
Jun. 30th, 2010 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesIf you'll notice, I don't talk as much lately about publishing industry things. It isn't that I'm not keeping up, but it's that I'm at a point where I think most of what can be said has been said, as far as advice goes.
As far as news and other things? Well, there are better sources than I.
But I got intrigued by reading some discussions on Twitter and in the blogosphere about opinions on whether legitimate agents should charge reading fees for queries. What surprised me, however, were some of the defenses.
Anyone who's gotten into the query game knows that one of the first things most sources of advice tell you is that no legitimate agent charges a fee for reading your query. They don't get paid until you get paid. Money flows towards the writer.
I think this is good advice, and agents charging reading fees bothers me deeply, I'll admit this upfront. I've read the defenses, thought about them, and they don't sway me. I think they're bad news for both writers and agents - and mostly agents.
First and foremost, I think it creates exclusionary conditions in an industry (at least here in the U.S.) that already excludes a lot of voice. There's a dire underrepresentation of many groups - PoC, GLBT folks, women (in some genres), PWD, and so many others. And I think class is among those. I think the publishing industry skews very heavily towards the middle to upper classes in a lot of instances. Fees would skew that even further.
Most publishers will not look at unagented manuscripts, and that's probably a good thing. I think the lead time for books would go from two years to two decades if publishers had to take on the combined slushpiles of the agents they deal with. The wheels would grind to a halt.
So, yes, the slushpile reading process is something that makes agents very, very valuable and necessary to keeping the publishing industry from collapsing in on itself under the weight of an unbearable signal-to-noise ratio.
But you have to have that signal-to-noise ratio because if you close the gates, you exclude people. And not just people who are bad writers with bad queries - people who may not have the resources, connections, or ability to, say, attend cons or garner connections and contacts. Such folks do not deserved to be excluded from a bite at the apple just because of the situations they're in.
To charge fees is to say to any writer who can't afford to pay multiple fees, "Well, you better get lucky with the few agents you can afford to submit to or just don't bother."
I, for instance, sent out about 100 queries for the last novel (rest in peace, Tower!Guy novel). I got requests for fulls and partials, and the cost of MAILING those got pretty hefty. I was unemployed at the time and the cost of mailing a full manuscript from one borough of NYC to another was about the cost of one of my medications. Luckily, I could swing it - but that's because I didn't have to invest hundreds of dollars sending out the queries to get back the three full request and seven partial requests I ultimately garnered.
And, no, I'm still an unpublished nobody, so that money ultimately got lost in the wind. It was worth it to me, but that's money I got no return on and will not see back ever again.
But let's look at this from the agent's side of the equation. They do perform the valuable service of filtering out a lot of the junk so that the good stuff gets through and gets passed along to publishers. Without agents, I don't think the system could work the way it does.
And since they are providing this service, shouldn't they be compensated? Why should they read bad queries and terrible first chapters for free? Shouldn't their time and eyestrain get them some kind of profit? Agents gotta eat, too, you know.
I agree with this, but I don't think the answer is to seek redress from writers as though the act of sending a query, whether it's good or bad, is somehow such a terrible burden and punishment for an agent that they should be compensated regardless of whether the writer sees any benefit.
I think agents need to think of ways to change the system, because they're in a unique position to do so. As the bridge between writers and publishing companies, they have a lot of pull with both and get to see both sides. I'm not expert enough to suggest specific things, but I do know that of all three entities in this process - writer, agent, and publisher, the one who actually has money is that third one: the publisher.
But still, if the publisher won't give it up, why shouldn't an agent take it where they can get it if they're doing all this hard work for nothing?
Well, for one, it isn't for nothing. Those slushpiles garner clients, so it's not without benefit to the agent to do.
For two, it would create a lot more problems than it would solve.
Agents would come under a tremendous amount of pressure to prove they were earning those reading fees, to prove they'd read each and every word of a query carefully. Writers would have a strong case for demanding that the "no response equals no rejection" policy that saves agents time go away, and for demanding personalized rejections with feedback. After all, if they're paying hard earned money for it, don't they deserve that?
It would also put agents under a great deal of strain to prove they aren't scammers, or to differentiate themselves from scammers. I personally believe that 99.9% of agents really would be honest about it. But you know what? .1% wouldn't, and that would be enough.
You know what's great about U.S. capitalism? The minute money exchanges hands, lawyers get involved. Think of any service you pay for. Somewhere, whether it's on the back of a receipt or the TOS on a PayPal button or the fine print at the bottom of a TV screen on a commercial - when money starts flowing, lawyers start going to work.
Which would mean that any agent who wanted to charge fees would either have to get a lawyer and come up with an iron clad TOS - and make sure that each and every person who submitted had agreed to that TOS/contract/legalese or open themselves to hordes and hordes of lawsuits.
And worse yet? It wouldn't take hordes. It might only take two or three people suing one agent for a few thousand dollars to put that out of business and maybe out of house and home, even if they won each case. That's court costs and legal fees and time spent dealing with it. Never mind the headache of keeping records of all contract agreements until they expire and being able to find them easily.
I know because in my current position? I have to keep up with the legal agreements my company uses that allows them to use photos for their websites, and I have to carefully document each one. Because if I misplace an agreement? Or wrongly attribute one? Our entire site could go down, and my company could lose a lot of money - and that would cost people their jobs.
Agents, especially those who agent only part-time because they need another source of income, would be in a very precarious position.
It also means that agents might find themselves in a bind if they have assistants or interns go through slushpiles. Putting my "Not A Lawyer" hat on, I can ostensibly see the case for someone suing and winning against an agent if they found out that their assistant doled out the rejection and not the agent themselves.
Don't think writers wouldn't do it? Agents already get plenty of rude and outright hateful responses to perfectly polite rejections, demanding an explanation, arguing, saying all sorts of terrible things. It would be a matter of time before they started hiring lawyers, either individually or en masse.
Queries as they stand now are free. The agent owes the writer nothing (nor should they) until there's actually something to be owed, until there is a tangible benefit in sight for both parties.
It may not seem like it, but this is actually a safeguard for agents as much as it is for writers.
As far as news and other things? Well, there are better sources than I.
But I got intrigued by reading some discussions on Twitter and in the blogosphere about opinions on whether legitimate agents should charge reading fees for queries. What surprised me, however, were some of the defenses.
Anyone who's gotten into the query game knows that one of the first things most sources of advice tell you is that no legitimate agent charges a fee for reading your query. They don't get paid until you get paid. Money flows towards the writer.
I think this is good advice, and agents charging reading fees bothers me deeply, I'll admit this upfront. I've read the defenses, thought about them, and they don't sway me. I think they're bad news for both writers and agents - and mostly agents.
First and foremost, I think it creates exclusionary conditions in an industry (at least here in the U.S.) that already excludes a lot of voice. There's a dire underrepresentation of many groups - PoC, GLBT folks, women (in some genres), PWD, and so many others. And I think class is among those. I think the publishing industry skews very heavily towards the middle to upper classes in a lot of instances. Fees would skew that even further.
Most publishers will not look at unagented manuscripts, and that's probably a good thing. I think the lead time for books would go from two years to two decades if publishers had to take on the combined slushpiles of the agents they deal with. The wheels would grind to a halt.
So, yes, the slushpile reading process is something that makes agents very, very valuable and necessary to keeping the publishing industry from collapsing in on itself under the weight of an unbearable signal-to-noise ratio.
But you have to have that signal-to-noise ratio because if you close the gates, you exclude people. And not just people who are bad writers with bad queries - people who may not have the resources, connections, or ability to, say, attend cons or garner connections and contacts. Such folks do not deserved to be excluded from a bite at the apple just because of the situations they're in.
To charge fees is to say to any writer who can't afford to pay multiple fees, "Well, you better get lucky with the few agents you can afford to submit to or just don't bother."
I, for instance, sent out about 100 queries for the last novel (rest in peace, Tower!Guy novel). I got requests for fulls and partials, and the cost of MAILING those got pretty hefty. I was unemployed at the time and the cost of mailing a full manuscript from one borough of NYC to another was about the cost of one of my medications. Luckily, I could swing it - but that's because I didn't have to invest hundreds of dollars sending out the queries to get back the three full request and seven partial requests I ultimately garnered.
And, no, I'm still an unpublished nobody, so that money ultimately got lost in the wind. It was worth it to me, but that's money I got no return on and will not see back ever again.
But let's look at this from the agent's side of the equation. They do perform the valuable service of filtering out a lot of the junk so that the good stuff gets through and gets passed along to publishers. Without agents, I don't think the system could work the way it does.
And since they are providing this service, shouldn't they be compensated? Why should they read bad queries and terrible first chapters for free? Shouldn't their time and eyestrain get them some kind of profit? Agents gotta eat, too, you know.
I agree with this, but I don't think the answer is to seek redress from writers as though the act of sending a query, whether it's good or bad, is somehow such a terrible burden and punishment for an agent that they should be compensated regardless of whether the writer sees any benefit.
I think agents need to think of ways to change the system, because they're in a unique position to do so. As the bridge between writers and publishing companies, they have a lot of pull with both and get to see both sides. I'm not expert enough to suggest specific things, but I do know that of all three entities in this process - writer, agent, and publisher, the one who actually has money is that third one: the publisher.
But still, if the publisher won't give it up, why shouldn't an agent take it where they can get it if they're doing all this hard work for nothing?
Well, for one, it isn't for nothing. Those slushpiles garner clients, so it's not without benefit to the agent to do.
For two, it would create a lot more problems than it would solve.
Agents would come under a tremendous amount of pressure to prove they were earning those reading fees, to prove they'd read each and every word of a query carefully. Writers would have a strong case for demanding that the "no response equals no rejection" policy that saves agents time go away, and for demanding personalized rejections with feedback. After all, if they're paying hard earned money for it, don't they deserve that?
It would also put agents under a great deal of strain to prove they aren't scammers, or to differentiate themselves from scammers. I personally believe that 99.9% of agents really would be honest about it. But you know what? .1% wouldn't, and that would be enough.
You know what's great about U.S. capitalism? The minute money exchanges hands, lawyers get involved. Think of any service you pay for. Somewhere, whether it's on the back of a receipt or the TOS on a PayPal button or the fine print at the bottom of a TV screen on a commercial - when money starts flowing, lawyers start going to work.
Which would mean that any agent who wanted to charge fees would either have to get a lawyer and come up with an iron clad TOS - and make sure that each and every person who submitted had agreed to that TOS/contract/legalese or open themselves to hordes and hordes of lawsuits.
And worse yet? It wouldn't take hordes. It might only take two or three people suing one agent for a few thousand dollars to put that out of business and maybe out of house and home, even if they won each case. That's court costs and legal fees and time spent dealing with it. Never mind the headache of keeping records of all contract agreements until they expire and being able to find them easily.
I know because in my current position? I have to keep up with the legal agreements my company uses that allows them to use photos for their websites, and I have to carefully document each one. Because if I misplace an agreement? Or wrongly attribute one? Our entire site could go down, and my company could lose a lot of money - and that would cost people their jobs.
Agents, especially those who agent only part-time because they need another source of income, would be in a very precarious position.
It also means that agents might find themselves in a bind if they have assistants or interns go through slushpiles. Putting my "Not A Lawyer" hat on, I can ostensibly see the case for someone suing and winning against an agent if they found out that their assistant doled out the rejection and not the agent themselves.
Don't think writers wouldn't do it? Agents already get plenty of rude and outright hateful responses to perfectly polite rejections, demanding an explanation, arguing, saying all sorts of terrible things. It would be a matter of time before they started hiring lawyers, either individually or en masse.
Queries as they stand now are free. The agent owes the writer nothing (nor should they) until there's actually something to be owed, until there is a tangible benefit in sight for both parties.
It may not seem like it, but this is actually a safeguard for agents as much as it is for writers.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-01 12:35 pm (UTC)