The Agent Spectrum, 1-6

How to evaluate whether a literary agent is right for you

Jul 30, 2026

I spent most of this week trying to write a post about how to choose the right agent. I kept getting stuck in the following loop:

Most people don’t really get to choose their agent—they get one offer of representation, and they say yes to it. So really, choosing the right agent is about choosing the right agents to query. But choosing the right agents to query is pretty simple: you just want to find agents who might plausibly like your book and be able to sell it. So ending up with the right agent (out of that pool of plausible agents) is basically a matter of luck. But that doesn’t seem like very meaningful advice to people who are trying to choose the right agent.

Finally, after several scrapped drafts, I realized that what I actually want to talk about is what agents are like to work with.

Agents are flawed. They are people, so they’re going to be flawed. And yet you’ll almost never hear about their flaws, because any author who is currently working with an agent is going to sing that agent’s praises in all public spaces. Of course they will—why would they poison a good relationship with their agent by voicing minor complaints?

After an author has parted ways with an agent, they might dish about their frustrations in private. But they’re unlikely to share those frustrations publicly, for fear of putting off the next agent. What literary agent wants to sign with a client who has a track record of airing dirty laundry?

This means that all our information about agents comes from:

authors who are afraid to piss off their very powerful representatives
agents

I think reading advice articles on substack will usefully prepare you for a lot of facets of the publishing industry. But I do not think it will prepare you for what it’s like to work with an agent.

Here’s the deal on agents: They’re great. The role of the literary agent is phenomenally well-designed. They are well worth their 15% commission. An agent earns that commission in all sorts of ways you’ll never even know about, from back-channeling with editors to head off their irritation with you (“I think what my client meant to say in that email…”) to fielding pushy blurb requests to hyping up your manuscript to scouts. If you want to land a traditional publisher, you definitely want an agent.

Also, agents are the beneficiaries of a severe power imbalance. There are so many writers who want agents, and so few agents relative to those writers, that the writers who do sign with agents are terrified of rocking the boat. Agents technically work for their clients, but you have to be practically a household-name writer before you’ll feel comfortable telling your agent what to do. Agents, even the really good and honorable ones, get away with all kinds of things because their clients are afraid to make a fuss.

I have an agent, and I’ve worked as an agent, and I’ve worked alongside agents. I feel that I have a pretty good sense of the range of agents out there. No agent is perfect in every category—even your “dream agent” will turn out to have a flaw or two—but fortunately, you don’t need an agent who’s perfect in every category. You need an agent whose strengths are well-suited to your situation, and whose flaws you can easily work around.

Rather than attempt to catalogue all the types of agents out there, what I’d like to do is frame the question of an agent’s strengths and weaknesses as a series of spectrums. Where does this agent fall on the spectrum from editorial to hands-off? Where do they fall on the spectrum from passive to proactive?

For each spectrum, I’ll talk about the agents you might find at the extreme ends of the spectrum, the agents you might find in the middle, and how to suss out where a particular agent falls on the spectrum. I’ll also talk about how to work with agents in all those categories, and what kind of agent might be best for you.

Sound complicated? Well, it is, a bit. I ended up having so much to say on the subject that I’m splitting this into two (long) posts.

What I hope you get out of this, if you wade through it, is the ability to evaluate agents with more nuance: not just young vs. established agents, not just responsive vs. unreliable agents, but agents who score all across the board in all kinds of categories. You might someday find yourself working with an agent who is:

a fantastic editor, but incredibly slow to respond to emails, and hard to pin down about when exactly you’re going on submission
extremely green and new to the game, with good editorial instincts but no contacts and not a lot of support from their colleagues
significantly well-established, and ready to submit your manuscript right this second, typos and all
absolutely fantastic in the genre of your current project, but unenthused about the genre of your next project

Should you work with these agents? Should you seek representation elsewhere?

That depends on you.

The Editorial Spectrum

Hands-Off ←→ Hands-On

The Maximum

Writers love to ask agents how editorial they are. And agents love to say: “I’m a very hands-on editor.”

At the far end of this spectrum—the absolute editorial maximum—you’ll get an agent who wants to work closely with you on your first draft, your fifth draft, your sixteenth draft… This agent will offer you broad, structural notes, and will also go in and line-edit and fix all your typos. They’re not going to run out of patience, no matter how long the edits are taking, and they will always have a solution to propose.

The Minimum

On the other end of the spectrum—the editorial minimum—you’ll get agents who simply don’t edit. They might offer a few general points of feedback (“Editors aren’t liking your characters”), but they’re not going to tell you how to address that feedback. Writing and editing is your job—selling is their job. I’ve even known agents who simply recommend a freelance editor when a revision gets too thorny. (“This needs a lot of work. Why don’t you pay someone else to do it?”)

The Middle Ground

In between the two extremes, you have agents who will gladly do a deep dive on a first draft, but who will run out of editing stamina on draft two or three. Their editorial notes will get brisker, and they’ll start invoking other people: “Why don’t you send this around to beta readers?” Or: “I’ve sent this to my intern, and she suggested the following…”

You’ll also find agents who only give structural edits, no line edits—and conversely, you’ll find agents who are great line editors, but who don’t know how to restructure a project that isn’t working.

Because really, there are two separate questions embedded in this spectrum: how willing an agent is to give edits and how good that agent’s edits are. Some agents have superb instincts, but will only pass their editorial insights to you in an offhand comment over the phone. Some agents will gladly work through umpteen drafts with you, but aren’t very smart readers or editors.

(I could have made “quality of editorial feedback” a whole spectrum of its own, but this post is already long enough!)

How can you spot an editorial agent?

Generally, younger and less experienced agents tend to be more editorial, and more established agents tend to do less editing. But this isn’t always true—there are some high-powered agents who still meticulously edit their clients’ work before sending it out.

Almost all agents, when asked, will overstate how editorial they are. It’s hard to admit to being a hands-off editor without sounding like a jerk: “Oh, I prefer not to get involved until you’ve already fixed everything.”

If you actually want to know how editorial an agent is, ask them to talk about the revision process for a few recent client projects. If all the projects seem to have come to the agent fully formed (“She sent it to me, and it was just perfect!”), you’re dealing with a less editorial agent.

Do you need an editorial agent?

You need someone to edit your work, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be your agent. Do you have a community of writers or readers who can help you fix up a project? Do you need a lot of support to take something from initial idea to final draft, or do you prefer to just hand over the goods once you’ve finished?

There are easy workarounds for a less editorial agent—you just need to find another trusted editor, whether that’s a friend or mentor or fellow writer or freelancer. But if your ideal agent is someone who can help you sort through and develop your ideas, you need someone who’s willing to get their hands dirty.

The Perfectionist Spectrum

Sure, Worth a Shot ←→ Nothing Short of Perfection Will Do

The Maximum

The perfectionist spectrum isn’t quite the same as the editorial spectrum, though they’re related. This one is about the agent’s standard for the projects they submit to editors.

At the far end of the spectrum, you have agents who are determined to curate their list with exquisite care. They are highly conscious of the reputation they have among editors, and they refuse to send out anything that might dent that reputation even slightly. They’ll drag you through as many edits as it takes to meet the standard that the rest of their list has set. If your project isn’t perfect, it’s not going out the door.

The Minimum

At the other end of the spectrum, you have agents who will send out just anything. They find a project lying on the side of the street—sure, why not, let’s submit it to editors, see what happens! They tend to sign a lot of clients and submit a lot of projects with the expectation that if even 10% of those projects find publishers, their bills will be paid.

The Middle Ground

Most agents are somewhere in between: they’ll put you through your paces editorially, but at a certain point, after a certain amount of time invested, they’re just going to send out the project and see what happens. These agents have often built up good relationships with editors throughout their career, and so they’re not unduly concerned that sending out a single dud will tank their reputation. Still—they don’t want to send out six duds in a row.

You can imagine how the poles of this spectrum have some overlap with the poles of the editorial spectrum. Agents with a high standard for their list are often obsessive editors. Agents with a low standard for their list (hey, who knows, it could work for someone!) rarely edit before they send.

But lest we conflate the two spectrums, let’s imagine a hypothetical agent with an exceptionally high standard for her list—who also refuses to edit. She simply waits and takes on only those projects that are already in perfect condition. (The more established an agent is, the easier this is for her to do.)

And, just to be thorough, let’s imagine another agent with a pretty hodgepodge client list who actually does put in editorial work on all his projects—but maybe he makes a rule that after two drafts, he’s sending the thing out, whether or not it’s actually gotten better. So despite all his editorial efforts, the quality of his submissions remains uneven.

How can you spot a perfectionist agent?

This one is difficult to gauge in an introductory phone call. You can ask the agent how far your project is from being “ready,” but they’re always going to respond optimistically: “I could see this being ready to go out in three months!” Yeah, three months, if in that time you entirely rewrite the second half and fix all the stylistic missteps you made in the first half.

Better, I think, to ask something like: “If you had reservations about a project, even after multiple drafts, would you still send it out?”

Do you need a perfectionist agent?

In most cases, you’re going to want an agent who errs on the side of perfectionism—someone who curates their list carefully. This is because agents who send out submissions like they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall tend to burn through their goodwill with editors pretty fast. You don’t want an editor to open your project thinking, “Well, the last eight submissions from this agent were garbage…”

The only downside to agents who carefully curate their lists: you might never make the cut. You might pour your heart and soul into Revision #6, only to hear that the project is still not ready to go on submission, according to the unilateral opinion of your perfectionist agent.

To be fair, if your agent is telling you that your project is not ready to go out, they’re probably right. But it can still be frustrating, especially if you begin to feel that the agent simply doesn’t like the project you’re working on. In that case, and if you’re beginning to feel that you and your agent are talking past each other, it might be time to part ways.

If you end up with an agent who’s more the spaghetti-at-the-wall type, you can work around that—you’re just going to have to be a perfectionist yourself. Find some straight-talking friends who will give you harsh edits. Fix all your own typos. If your project is of supremely high quality, it won’t matter (quite as much) that your agent’s other submissions are more haphazard.

The Inbox Management Spectrum

Inbox Vortex ←→ Inbox Zero

The Maximum

If you could see the inbox of any of the agents you’ve queried, you would shudder.

Agents handle the unbearable crush of their inboxes in different ways.

At the far end of the spectrum is the manic Inbox Zero agent. They see everything that comes into their inbox. They’ve fired off a confirmation of receipt or forwarded an email to the right party before the notification has even disappeared from their phone. Nothing ever slips through the cracks. If you sent them an untitled attachment eight months ago, they can call it up in two seconds. They don’t seem to sleep.

The Minimum

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Inbox Vortex. These agents have accepted that the situation in their inbox is irremediably fucked. They’ve given up on their inbox. They say things like, “Could you forward that to me again?” and “Are you sure I was CC’d on that?” and “Could you resend, and put the subject line in all caps?” The things that are getting buried in that inbox would boggle your mind.

The Middle Ground

In between are the agents who catch most of what comes through their inbox, but who have occasional odd lapses. Some emails vanish without a trace, some emails just take a good fifteen minutes of digging, and some get responded to right away.

How can you spot an agent with an inbox vortex?

An agent is never going to confess to you that their inbox is a fathomless vortex, but there will be early signs. The more you have to resend, re-forward, and follow up, the more little flags should go up in your brain.

Slow response time is a possible indicator of an inbox vortex, but it’s not the main one to pay attention to. An agent who always takes three weeks to respond to your emails, but always does respond to your emails, has a better inbox management system than an agent who gets back to you promptly exactly 33% of the time, and otherwise ghosts you.

You’ll probably get a sense of your agent’s relationship to their inbox from your interactions with them during the querying process. Did you send them your phone number when setting up a call for Tuesday at 12:00? On Tuesday at 12:06, did they send you a frantic email saying they can’t find your phone number and could you please resend?

Do you need an agent with good inbox management?

Obviously, given the choice, you’d rather sign with an agent who is on top of their inbox. Agents who have given into the vortex really do miss important things—offers, deadlines, manuscripts. It’s hard to depend on an agent when you know that a percentage of the emails you send them immediately sink to the bottom of a vast shipwrecked death zone.

Of course, an agent with a bad case of Inbox Vortex can still be perfectly successful and effective. They develop this magic ability to catch things just in time, they send harried apologies (“So sorry, just digging this out of my inbox—but YES we’re interested!”), and everything works out in the end.

If you’re on top of things yourself, and have a good sense of what needs to happen when in the publishing process, you can probably manage an agent with an Inbox Vortex. You’ll just want to be proactive about your own deadlines, and gracefully nudge your agent if you suspect that something has slipped through the cracks.

If, however, you are new to the publishing world and/or prone to missing deadlines and/or passive about following up, you should try to find an agent who can handle the churn of their inbox.

The Perseverance Spectrum

Well, We Tried ←→ Knocks On Every Door

The Maximum

You hear all the time about writers who went on submission with an agent, and it “didn’t work out.” The book didn’t sell.

The book didn’t sell—to how many editors? If editors ghosted the submission instead of outright rejecting it, does that count as the book not selling? If the book is still technically on submission to one tiny independent press who said they were “Excited to read soon!” eight months ago, does that mean the book didn’t sell?

It is most often the literary agent who answers these questions, not the client.

At the far end of the perseverance spectrum, you have agents who never give up. I knew an agent who submitted a client’s book to more than 100 publishers. Somewhere around submission #110, the book sold to a very small press. That agent was not going to consider the submission over and done with until every single press in the United States had officially sent a rejection. Even then, the agent was probably going to dig up some presses in the UK to try.

The Minimum

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those agents who read the room at top speed. These agents might decide that a submission is dead after sending a project to twelve editors. Those twelve editors were the perfect fit for the project, so if they didn’t like it, who will? “You might want to start thinking about the next book,” the agent will say, before the rejections have even gone cold in your inbox.

The Middle Ground

Deciding when to give up on a submission is hard and heartbreaking, and most agents are quite good at it. They’ve worked with editors for long enough that they can get an accurate forecast off the rejections that come in, the pace at which those rejections arrive, even the tone of an editor’s silence.

Agents in the middle of this spectrum persevere as long as it makes sense. They’re not going to knock on every single door if it’s obvious what answer they’re going to get. But they’re also not going to give up early, or pull out of a submission just because of some early rejections.

How can you spot a persevering agent?

Check out the agent’s deals on Publishers Marketplace.1 Have they sold to small independent presses and university presses? Or does it seem like 100% of their books sell at auction to the Big 5?

When I see that an agent has done a deal with a tiny press (and announced it on PM), I know that press probably wasn’t the agent’s top choice—so they must have knocked on a lot of other doors first. That means the agent was willing to do multiple rounds of submission, and that the submission didn’t stop until the book sold—even if it sold to a press that couldn’t have paid more than $1,000.2

It might seem like a good sign that an agent only sells to the Big 5. They’re getting good deals for their clients! But keep in mind that some of those agents are simply not bothering to submit anywhere smaller. If the project doesn’t land with any of their ten editor friends, oh well, guess it didn’t work out.

Do you need a persevering agent?

You don’t want an agent who’s going to drop you after submitting to just a small handful of editors. That agent took on your project because they thought it would be easy to sell, and now that it’s proven not-so-easy to sell, they’re out. You want an agent who can pivot, who can rethink the submission strategy, who can rally and say: “Okay, it’s not going as well as we hoped, but here’s one more thing we can try!”

…well, up to a point. Because there’s danger at the other end of the spectrum too. The forever-persevering agent can be just as damaging to an author’s career as the agent who gives up too early.

Do you really want an agent who’s going to submit to 100 publishers? Surely it would be a better use of time and energy to revise the project, or to embark on a new project that better fits the market? If the project ultimately sells to a tiny press that will pay $500, print 100 copies, and sell none of them, is that really a victory?

If you’re working with an agent who falls on either end of this spectrum, you may need to get more involved in the submission plans. “Instead of submitting to the next round of 30 editors, how about we hold off and work through another revision?” you might suggest. Or conversely: “I know the book didn’t sell to the ten editors we had in mind, but I did think we might try these other five presses, if you’re willing…”

The Reputation Spectrum

Utterly Green ←→ Household Name

The Maximum

This is the most intuitive of the spectrums. Is this agent a big fucking deal, or did they start agenting like yesterday?

Agents at the far end of the reputation spectrum are well-established, usually older, with an incredible roster of clients that includes some eye-popping names. Some of these agents are revered, others are feared, but all of them send shockwaves around an editorial meeting with the mere mention of their names. These agents don’t get ghosted. When an editor receives a submission from one of these agents, they hop to.

The Minimum

All agents start somewhere. That somewhere is here, at the other end of the reputation spectrum. These agents tend to be younger.3 Their bios out them as an “Assistant Agent.” They have one or two deals listed on Publishers Marketplace, max. They have five or six clients listed on their website. They are green, eager, effusive. Their relationships with editors include two people they interned with a few years back, and that’s it.

The Middle Ground

Between the newbies and the household names are all the other agents: established, well-respected, close with a few editors, unknown to others, and generally able to pay their bills. They don’t get ghosted too often, but they also can’t expect editors to drop everything and read a submission just because their name is attached. Many of these agents are doing good work. Some of them might become big-deal agents someday. Others will carry along on cruise control until the end of their careers.

There are also agents among this set who are not actually very successful, but who are independently wealthy and thereby able to continue agenting without ever selling many books. More power to them—but keep in mind that just because someone has been in the business twenty years doesn’t necessarily mean they have twenty years’ worth of connections and sales under their belt.

How can you spot a household-name agent?

Easy. How many deals have they done? Who are their clients? If you mention their name to an in-the-know writer friend, will that friend say, “Oh, I’ve heard of them”? Do they work at an especially renowned agency?

Agents that are a big deal simply exude big-deal-ness. They list their star-power clients prominently; you’re not going to have to dig far to find out that they represent [Insert Prizewinning Author Here].

Agents who are just getting started are likewise easy to spot. They have very few clients and even fewer deals. When you ask them about the projects they’ve sold in the past, they get cagey. “I’ve actually just signed this client I’m really excited about,” they’ll say.

If you’re dealing with an agent somewhere in the middle of the reputation spectrum, it can be hard to figure out exactly where they fall. But that’s okay. All you need to know is that they’re not totally green, and they’re not totally revered. They’re just a solid, respectable agent.

Do you need a household-name agent?

Look: if you can get a big-deal agent, you probably want one. Editors are going to give that agent’s submissions the benefit of the doubt. They’ll read the first few pages of your project, thinking, “Well, it doesn’t seem that special, but if so-and-so thinks it’s good…” And then they’ll make an offer, because it would be such a boost to their reputation to have a book with so-and-so.

That said, of course there can be disadvantages to working with a big-deal agent. You’ll be a small fish in a big pond. They might have less time for you than for their other, more important clients. They might shunt you off to their assistant. They might not have a lot of patience for your new book idea about a speculative hybrid memoir in verse.

But those are all concerns about other spectrums. Yes, big-deal agents are often less editorial, less committed, less responsive. But you can evaluate all those qualities in their own right. Here, we’re just trying to evaluate whether, all other things being equal, you want to sign with an agent of formidable and preeminent reputation.

The answer is yes. You do.

The Resource Spectrum

Cast to the Wolves ←→ Symbiotic Synergies

The Maximum

So far, we’ve focused exclusively on the qualities of an individual agent. But that agent works at an agency with anywhere from zero to thirty colleagues, and that agency brings its own qualities to bear.

At the far end of this spectrum, we’ve got an agency of maximum cooperation. These agents pool resources, gossip about editors, troubleshoot one another’s submissions, and hop on one another’s meetings. Sometimes they even pitch one another’s projects. If you query an agent at this agency and they think it’s a better fit for one of their colleagues, they’ll forward your query to that colleague without even telling you.

The assistants at this agency have the full-throated support of their mentors, and often get their start by selling projects with their mentors.

The Minimum

At the other end, you have hostile, adversarial, sink-or-swim agencies. The assistants at these agencies are not getting a leg up from anyone, least of all their supervisors. The established agents would never think to pass a potential client to a colleague—not if their colleague stands to gain from it. These agencies tend to have high turnover and even higher burnout. There are great and legendary agents at some of these agencies, but you’ll only get the benefits of that agent if you sign with that agent—none of their wisdom is going to spill over to their colleagues.

Also on the “cast-to-the-wolves” end of the spectrum are agents who work alone. There’s nothing adversarial about a solo agency (hopefully)—but like agents at an infamously competitive agency, agents who work alone won’t have colleagues whose knowledge and resources they can draw from.

The Middle Ground

Most agencies are somewhere in between: agents are generally self-sufficient, but will occasionally cooperate when it benefits both parties. Assistants get a ton of mentorship and support from their supervisors, but agents of equal standing rarely collaborate. The agency might have a robust sub rights department or a good relationship with co-agents (film/tv, foreign rights), but otherwise, agents just kind of do their own thing.

How can you spot an agent with agency support?

Agents who work at an unusually collaborative agency will find a way to bring it up in the first phone call. They know that part of the value they bring to a client is the benefit of their colleagues’ knowledge and support.

Agents who work at an average agency—or who work at a miserable, cutthroat agency—just won’t bring it up. It’s not a selling point that they hate their colleagues and vice versa, so why would they mention it?

There are a few cutthroat agencies whose reputations are so widespread that you can probably find mention of them online. Otherwise, you can get a sense of an agency’s culture by asking an agent, “How closely do you work with your colleagues?” or “Have you ever co-agented with any of your colleagues?”

Do you need an agent with agency support?

Most of the time, you’re evaluating an agent on their own merits. It would be nice if they came with the added bonus of a supportive agency, but it’s not really necessary—clearly this agent has been doing fine on their own steam.

However, if you are thinking of signing with a super-green, not-yet-established, inexperienced agent, then the question of agency support becomes incredibly important. An offer of representation from an agent with zero years of experience is a bad offer. An offer of representation from an agent with zero years of experience and an extremely well-respected and heavily involved mentor agent is worth considering.

This spectrum also becomes important if you’re planning to genre-hop. Maybe the agent you want to sign with has no interest in cookbooks, but one of their colleagues specializes in cookbooks. Would the two agents be open to co-agenting that project? It’s probably too soon to ask that directly, but you can get a vibe check by learning whether co-agenting is ever an option at the agency.

Can you believe I thought I could get this all done in one post? Next week I’ll write about the next six agent spectrums:

The Commitment Spectrum
The Friendship Spectrum
The Delegation Spectrum
The Proactive Spectrum
The Transparency Spectrum
The Aggression Spectrum

I haven’t seen anyone else taxonomize agents this way, so I would love to hear your thoughts on the whole spectrum approach.

Devon Halliday

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?