I met author Laura Resnick (like so many other people in the literary industry) at a writers' conference.  If you're beginning to think maybe you should attend one, you're right.  Anyway, I sat down and asked her if she was related to Mike Resnick, who wrote one of my favorite books ever--Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future.  It turns out he is her father.  She had some very interesting tales to tell about her voyage through Africa and her relationship with literary agents.  I asked if she'd discuss the latter here for all you faithful (and largely silent) readers.

The Agent-Author Paradigm

Like many writers, I started my career without a literary agent, because I couldn't find a legitimate agent willing to represent me when I was an aspiring writer. Then, after I sold eight books on my own, I went agent-hunting again. There was a lot more interest from literary agents this time, now that I had demonstrated that I could sell books steadily.

In retrospect, that was my first real-world lesson about literary agents: They don't like heavy lifting.

The agent whom I wound up hiring, a very successful one who is still quoted often in publishing trade journals, sent my new book proposal to five publishers. They all rejected it. He immediately dumped me. I had been a client for all of four months.

My next agent, who was reputable and well-known in genre fiction, was very committed and enthusiastic. This agent was also, alas, extremely volatile. After about a year, I ended the association while gulping down antacids and listening to the screams of rage at the other end of the telephone line. I subsequently received hate mail from the agent and heard from many people for the next two years about the vicious gossip the agent was spreading about me.

My next agent was successful and very respected. There were ways in which this association was fruitful, and ways in which it was very stressful and frustrating. The quantity and depth of  our irreconcilable differences increased until I eventually decided to leave. I then sold five books on my own that the agent had not liked or wanted to handle (hence, some of my frustration as a client).

I hired my next agent, someone with an impressive client list, to negotiate three of those book sales. Here was another real-world lesson: An agent's initial enthusiasm for you is unreliable if you've queried that agent while you've got a good book offer already on the table. Collecting the commission on that deal wound up being the most work this agent seemed interested in doing; and when things started to go south in my career and I needed an engaged and involved literary agent, I could scarcely even find this person. So I left.

I queried a number of agents after that... but the publishing market was bythen (and still is) depressed and in turmoil, and I was a writer having career problems. So—surprise!—no one was interested in representing me. So I did what I had done many times before: I researched the market and sent out submissions to editors myself.

Within three weeks, I received (and subsequently accepted) a good three-book offer from a major house. That same year, another major house approached me out of the blue and offered me a contract. By the time yet another major house met with me at a conference to, it turned out, discuss how they could get me under contract, I had to say, sorry, I was very interested, but just too heavily-contracted to commit to anything else at that time.
Keep in mind, I was dealing with all the above business myself because I was a writer who couldn't get an agent!

All these various experiences, as you may imagine, convinced me that, for whatever reason, the agent-author paradigm is not a business model that works well for my career, and so I decided not to seek another agent. And that has so far (two years on) continued to be a good decision for me. Since I can't see into the future, I won't say that I will "never again" work with an agent; but I can't currently imagine the scenario in which I would choose to hire another literary agent.

I now have a literary lawyer who negotiates the clauses of my contracts for me, for an hourly fee (which, as it happens, costs me drastically less money than my agents' commissions did), and the result is that I'm now getting the best-negotiated contracts of my career. She is also available to assist with me any professional issues or problems that arise for which I feel I need legal advice.

I've also recently signed an innovative international deal for the e-rights to my backlist, at a time when I've yet to hear of a single literary agent doing anything at all with their clients' backlist e-rights. And although I've been too busy to give it any attention yet (getting serious about this is on my To Do list for 2010), I've already increased the foreign subrights business that was largely inactive when I was an agency client.

I don't preach a philosophy wherein no one should work with an agent. Indeed, many writers loathe business the way I loathe mechanics, and so they should have a literary agent, just the way I have a professional mechanic who deals with even the most basic maintenance tasks on my car.

Instead, my position is that—despite the conventional wisdom of our industry which says that a serious career writer must have a literary agent, and that any writer who doesn't have one is making a huge mistake—in fact, self-representation is sometimes the right choice for some writers. Moreover, since it's so hard to get an agent in the current market—for established career novelists, as well as for aspiring writers—I think it's really important to get this message out there to all the writers who may be feeling that they can't start or continue their careers because they don't have that one supposedly "essential" ingredient, a literary agent.

In any case, whether you're actively looking for an agent, or thinking about handling your own business (at least for now) because you can't get an agent yet, or (like me) have decided that the author-agent business model just doesn’t work well for you, I recommend that you visit The Writers Resources Page of my website at http://www.LauraResnick.com. It's full of personally recommended books, blogs, websites, workshops, and services that are useful to writers, whether they're mid-career professionals or newcomers.

Laura Resnick is the award-winning author of numerous fantasy novels, romance novels, short stories, articles, and columns, as well as two non-fiction books. Her upcoming release is Doppelgangster (DAW Books, January 2010). You can find her on the Web at: http://www.LauraResnick.com