http://sff.net/people/laresnick/About%20Writing/Writers%20Resource.htm

Your instincts are right, in the sense that self-education is crucial for anyone who wants to work in this field. I recommend you start by exploring my Writers Resources Page, which has links to dozens of good websites, blogs, etc. I think if you set a goal of thoroughly exploring one link per day on that site for the next few months, you’d feel a LOT more informed at the end of that project.

This is the second article I’ve read that tells me I don’t need an agent. I think I do since I know NOTHING about book publishing. I’m feeling a bit vulnerable, though, for the same reason. Not sure what to do.

I’ve never tried contacting editors directly and shall certainly look up that possibility now (shall do sofor my recently completed novels – not the one I published on Kindle which was in any case an adaptation in English of a book I published in Italian in 2007)

So many thanks for the advice!

Do the math.

There’s nothing better for an artist (of any persuasion) than hard-headed empiricism. What did I do? What was the result? Never mind conventional wisdom, look at what’s actually happening.

I second the recommendation of Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, because he gets into the dirty details: intellectual rights (your real source of money), royalties (and how they’ve traditionally been obfuscated), and the frantic pace of change just now.

I’d also suggest you check out my Writers Resources Page:
http://sff.net/people/laresnick/About%20Writing/Writers%20Resource.htm

Which still leaves my main question unanswered. How does a writer, with good books and decent sales, break through that ‘we don’t look at unagented authors’ wall? I’m not being belligerent or argumentative – I just want to know.

Thank you for being so open – I appreciate your insight.

As stated in the first paragraph, I sold 8 books on my own before I hired my first agent. I was a newcomer with no contacts, no name recognition, no experience, etc.

I also sold my 9th book on my own, because my first agent, who took me on when I supposedly had “power” you speak of, dumped me after 4 months.

Okay, fine I was a “category romance” writer back then, where havingg an agent was not “essential.” People back then nonetheless told me that you got better deals even at Harlequin if you had an agent. I got agent #2… and immediately discovered this wasn’t true. And my income went DOWN then, because my agent didn’t get me any more money (or any better terms) than I’d been getting on my own–but now I was paying her 15% of my income.

I fired her and subsequently moved on to agent #3, because EVERYONE said I HAD TO have an agent if I wanted to sell “single title” books (IOW, in the regular market, out of the Harlequin/Silhouette conglomerate). Well… actually, since #3 wasn’t interested, -I- sold my 13th book to a regular publisher . At a time when, according to everyone I knew in the biz, I certainly did NOT have a position of power. But I had persistence. (Then #3 agent insisted I pay a full 15% commission on that deal just for #3 to accept the opening offer and boilerplate terms after I’d done all the legwork.)

I’ll skip over the next few years, which were a mixture of agent sales and my own sales, and cut to the months I hired #4. I was most certainly not in a position of “power” then. My only new novel in the stands in the past 3-4 years had been badly-published and had dismal, career-killing sales figures; the publisher who had done this to my career promptly canceled my contract and dumped me; and then I lost my agent #4. (Technically, I fired her. But that’s a lot like sayin, “I filed for divorce after discovering my spouse had moved out.”) And in my hunt for agent #5, everyhone I queried turned me down. I was in a terrible career position, not in this position of “power” you’re assuming.

If I’ve got a “position of power” now, it’s preciserly because I turned my career around then. As I had on other occasions.

While it’s not the universal experience, my experience with agents is nonetheless depressingly common: I found time and time again that I couldn’t count on them–and I hear all the time from writers who are discovering the same thing and, like me, finally quitting the agent-author business model (or at least thinking seriously about it).

In fact, never mind COUNT on them–I usually couldn’t even get agents to submit my books to publishers. That’s a big part of the reason I made most of my book sales myself even BEFORE I finally quit the agent-author paradigm.

I may have sold a number of books (six this year alone) to e-, small and mid-list houses that accept unagented authors, but I’m not well known. Even now when I contact an ‘agent-only’ house I’m given the party line of ‘We don’t look at unagented authors. Period.’

I’ve queried over 100 agents and no one wants me. So – agents don’t want me, the big houses won’t even talk to me, but apparently the readers like me, because my sales are more than decent at the e-, small and mid-list houses that accept unagented authors. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t figure out how to make that last big step into the bigger, well-distributed houses.

I don’t want this to sound like a pity-party, or a bad case of the PLOMs, but it is a terrible frustration – Catch 22 at its worst. And, I suspect, there are a lot of other writers just like me – selling, but unable to make that last step.