Reader Question Day #18 – should I get an agent?

CW writes:

Jonathan! So, as an acquaintance who has been published, I hope to pick your brain just a bit. I have a writer friend who is looking for an agent. Do you have any suggestions?

Frankly, I am not the person to ask. I spent much of 2004 to 2011 trying to find an agent, and was utterly unsuccessful – I never got anything more than a form response.

So take what I am about to say with a grain of salt. This is also dependent on on what your friend writes and how much he has written – for instance, if he’s written two chapters of a novel and wants to get an agent, he’s probably not getting anywhere until he actually finishes the book.

Those caveats aside, I think it would be a much better use of your friend’s time to look into self-publishing ebooks than to hunt around for an agent.

Why? To put it bluntly, we are in the middle of a major societal paradigm shift that is only just starting to go mainstream – the transition from print books to the domination of ebooks. Print books aren’t going away, just like radio didn’t go away when television came along, but ebooks are going to dominate.

The primary function of publishers is distribution – they turn your manuscript into a book, and distribute it to various stores. With ebooks, your friend can post his book file on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and the various other sites himself. It’s even free, and anyone with even a modicum of technical skill can figure out how to do it. The purpose of a publisher is to distribute your book to an audience, but with ebooks, you don’t actually need a publisher to reach an audience. (Of course, attracting an audience is a different matter entirely.)

Your friend could waste years trying to find an agent, waiting for the agent to sell the book, and more years for the publisher to get around to printing the book. There’s also an excellent possibility the book would fail to sell through its first print run and go out of print, in which case your friend will probably never get the rights to his book back, and the only money he will ever see is whatever part of the advance he gets to keep. Whereas if your friend self-publishes his book, he can start making money off it immediately. (Probably not a lot of money, at least not at first.) There’s a good article on the topic here:

http://kriswrites.com/2011/06/01/the-business-rusch-agents-surviving-the-transition-part-3/

So why go with an agent and a publisher? There’s the prestige element, which I understand completely. Writers want to be able to say “I got published”, “I’ve got an agent”, and “I’ve seen my book in a bookstore”. It makes us feel special and validated.  However, I will be blunt again – feeling special and validated is not nearly as nice as getting paid actual money.

And I am not blowing smoke this topic. I started self-publishing in April of 2011, and since then I have sold just under 20,000 copies of my ebooks. (That doesn’t include the free promotional books – I gave away something like 60,000 of those.) I have made a nontrivial amount of money doing so – enough, in fact, that my taxes for 2011 are massively beyond my ability to do, and as soon as I finish typing this post, I’m going to drive across town to write a check to the CPA I hired to do them (and also to write a check to the IRS). You can see the sales progression here:

https://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?p=1948

That is my opinion on the matter – I think your friend would be better served self-publishing and starting the slow process of building an audience for his work than hunting around for an agent. Again, what worked for me might not worked for your friend. But in the unlikely scenario I received an offer from a publisher, I think I would be better served by an intellectual property attorney and a CPA than an agent.

If your friend decides to look into self-publishing ebooks, I suggest this $3.99 book, LET’S GET DIGITAL, by David Gaughran as a starting point. It is very thorough, and helped me considerably:

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Get-Digital-Self-Publish-ebook/dp/B005DC68NI

Another good book is THE SECRETS TO EBOOK PUBLISHING SUCCESS , by Mark Coker, the guy who founded Smashwords, a major ebook distributor. It’s free:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431

Hope this is helps your friend!

angel91119 asks:

if there’s a new caina book coming out does this one have any romance?

GHOST IN THE STORM does have a romantic subplot – I’m not going to say which characters are involved, though.

And if I get to continue the series long enough, Caina does (briefly) meet the man who will become her father-in-law a few books. Though telling any more would be an egregious spoiler.

-JM