The Agent Spectrum, 7-13

How to choose the right literary agent, cont.

Every time I write a draft of one of these posts, I pass it through a series of filters.

The first filter: Is anyone going to be mad at me? (To date, no one’s gotten very mad at me for anything I’ve written on here, but the fear is always there.)

The second filter: Is this actually useful to anyone?

And the third filter, which sometimes I forget to run: Is this motivating, or am I just going to depress people?

Last week, I wrote about literary agents using a series of spectrums:

• editorial ←→ not very editorial

• high standards ←→ throws things at the wall

• manages their inbox ←→ emails sink into the void & disappear

• never gives up on a submission ←→ gives up

• big deal ←→ unheard of

• at a good helpful agency ←→ at a cutthroat agency

For some reason, I failed to anticipate that any of this would be depressing. I thought I was giving a sort of neutral, clinical breakdown of the ways agents differ.

But a few comments on the post suggested that some readers found the whole taxonomy of agents rather discouraging. I can see that—I did spend a lot of the post talking about all the various ways that agents can be subpar.

So before I dig into another seven spectrums—yes, sorry, this post is going to be stupidly long, couldn’t help it, bit off more than could chew—I want to make the case that this breakdown of agent foibles is actually not that depressing.

First, let me acknowledge the reason it might seem depressing: Getting an agent is so fucking hard. When you’re in the middle of the querying process, you don’t really want to hear that things are going to continue to be hard after you get an agent. You certainly don’t want to hear that things might get harder. So my helpful little list of Ways Agents Sometimes Fall Short may have just given you an extra set of fears that you didn’t have before.

However. Most agents are basically good. They sell books, they work hard for their clients, they have a few big successes, they have a lot of minor successes. This is true of agents across all the spectrums I listed. They have different methods of getting the same thing done, and most of those methods work.

The reason I list all these possible qualities of hypothetical agents is so that, someday, if you’re deciding between two agents, you can go down the list of spectrums and say:

Okay, Agent A will probably answer my emails faster, but Agent B has a bigger reputation. Neither A nor B is especially editorial, though I liked B’s ideas more. B works alone, and A is at a large agency—not sure how collaborative it is. B is a big deal but still sells to a lot of small presses. A wants to send out the manuscript as-is, but B wants me to do a little more work on it.

And then you might conclude, based on which of these spectrums you consider most important, that you should go with Agent B over Agent A.

You’re not going to find an agent who checks every single box of your Ideal Literary Agent. It’s not even clear what all those boxes should be. And some of them are mutually exclusive.

The hope is that, by evaluating agents for all these qualities, rather than just going by panicked gut instinct, you can make a better choice for your career. And if you do end up making the wrong choice, you can still find ways to work around your agent’s foibles, and compensate for any areas in which they’re not as strong.

There. Is that any less depressing?

Well, it’s the best I could do. Let’s dive back in:

The Commitment Spectrum

Stay In Your Lane ←→ Ride Or Die

The Maximum

In the last installment, I talked about the Perseverance Spectrum—how determined an agent is to sell your current project. But the Commitment Spectrum is about an agent’s level of commitment over the long haul: are they down for all the twists and turns of your career, or is this partnership conditional?

At the far end of the spectrum, you’ll find agents who take a bird’s-eye view of your career. They want to set you up to sell many, many books, and they’re willing to follow your enthusiasms wherever they lead. So you want to break into screenwriting? Okay, here’s a film/tv agent you can talk to. Now you want to write a picture book? Okay, here’s an illustrator you can work with. Now you want to rebrand yourself as an author of erotic thrillers? Okay, here’s how to pivot your brand from cutesy kids’ stuff to x-rated adult stuff.

In short, this agent wants to be your lifelong representative, a behind-the-scenes mastermind of whatever career works best for you.

The Minimum

At the other end of this spectrum are agents who signed you for a specific project. They liked that specific project. Now you’re trying to write something totally unlike that specific project? Listen, why don’t you just write a same-but-different version of that specific project, and then you can discuss next steps. Oops—now you’ve published two books in that niche, and your readers expect more of the same. If you really want to write outside your lane, maybe you’d better find other representation.

An agent of minimal commitment signed the project you queried them with, not you. They’re not taking a holistic view of your career, unless your career is going to be very steady and predictable. They got excited about this one project, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to love everything else you come up with.

The Middle Ground

Most agents are committed—up to a point. They do take the long view of your career, and they want to work with you on as many projects as possible… but if those projects seem to be heading in a direction totally alien to their tastes and expertise, they might gently suggest that you part ways.

How can you spot a committed agent?

All agents will tell you that they look beyond an individual project to the whole of an author’s career. So you can’t tell much from their talk. Luckily, low-commitment agents out themselves pretty quickly through their actions.

One clear sign: the author agreement. When an agent offers representation and sends you the contract, read through it carefully. Is the contract time-limited in any way? (“The agent will represent the author for a term of twelve months, commencing on signature of the contract…”) Does the contract scruple to specify that this agreement concerns only the work you just sent them, or does it include any and all writing you generate while under representation?

The agent you’re corresponding with may not have written this contract—it may be official boilerplate at their agency—but still, the contract sends a message. Is this agency devoting a lot of legalese to making sure they can cut ties and run?¹ Does the contract very carefully and narrowly define “The Author’s Works” as actually just the one specific project you queried with?

If so, it’s possible that you’re dealing with a low-commitment agent—or at least, an agent who wants to reserve the right to be low-commitment.

Other signs will pop up during the first phone call. An agent who’s excited about the whole scope of your career will want to talk about it. They’ll want to know what other book ideas you have, where you want your career to be in five years, what genres you can see yourself working in.

A low-commitment agent will speak with enthusiasm about the project you sent them, but they won’t show that much curiosity about you or the other projects you might have in store.

Do you need a committed agent?

The answer will seem obvious here: of course you want a committed agent! You want someone who’s going to stick with you thick and thin, ride or die, for richer and for poorer!

Yes, mostly. If you find the ideal agent, then of course you want that agent to care about the whole of your career. But it’s also fine to sign with someone who is the right agent for right now.

Maybe you want to sell a single nonfiction book and then pivot to fiction. Maybe the project you queried is old news to you now, and you’re much more excited about some new obsession. Maybe you only want to publish one book. Maybe you don’t know what you want.

Plenty of authors work with multiple agents over the course of their careers, and plenty of authors manage to make those transitions amicably. I think the crucial thing here, as with all these spectrums, is to know what kind of agent you have on your hands.

If you have a low-commitment agent, you shouldn’t spend years sending them manuscript after manuscript, hoping they’ll spark to something. They liked the first thing you did, but it was kind of a one and done. That’s fine. Time to part ways and find someone who can commit to the work you’re writing now.

And if you have a high-commitment agent, that’s great—stay with that agent as long as it’s working for you.

The Friendship Spectrum

Your Business Partner ←→ Your Therapist

The Maximum

At the far end of this spectrum, you’ve got an agent who treats you like a best friend. You two text, exchange pictures of your dogs, vent about your personal lives, and greet the ups and downs of the writing business with champagne and fits of weeping, respectively. This agent will cheerlead you when you’re low, talk you off the ledges of your anxiety, and roundly abuse that one critic who gave you a negative review. If you write a 3am email to this agent saying “I think I’m a fraud and I’ll never write again,” the agent will come in swinging first thing in the morning with a battalion of affirmations and reassurances.

The Minimum

At the other end of the spectrum are agents who treat your business relationship like… a business relationship. When you start your email with a friendly “How are you? Hope all is well!”, they respond: “Thanks, all is well here. I’ll have notes to you by the end of the week.” You don’t know the first thing about this agent’s personal life, and when you share anything about yours, the agent is polite but uninterested. If you send them a panicky midnight email, and then a contrite contextualizing follow-up the next day, they’ll respond: “I’m checking on this and will get back to you.” You’re not going to get any warm fuzzy affirmations from this agent. They’ll treat you as a fellow professional.

The Middle Ground

Most agents have a limit to how personal they’re willing to get, how involved they want to be in your emotional journey. You’ll probably hit that limit at some point, make note of it, and adjust accordingly.

How can you spot a therapist agent?

You’ll get a sense of this one from the first phone call, though it may take a while to gauge the full range of this agent’s relationships with their clients. Over the course of many phone calls and emails, your communications will either trend toward the personal or plateau at the impersonal.

The thing to assess here is not how your agent feels about you, but what boundaries they’ve set around how they feel about you. You can’t force a close personal relationship with someone who wants to keep it strictly business—and it’ll feel awkward trying to maintain a business-only relationship with someone who wants to be your best friend and confidante.

Do you need a therapist agent?

This one is all personal preference. Me, I prefer for my transactional relationships to be openly transactional. I find it a little unsettling to perform the rites of friendship with someone I consider a professional colleague. Great, cute dog, now can we talk about that contract?

But plenty of writers get much-needed support and commiseration from their agents. I won’t knock it. The most important factor here is whether your preferences (business relationship versus friendship) are a match for your agent’s. A mismatch can be worked around, but might result in some early awkwardness as you both try to figure out how much or how little to share.

The Delegation Spectrum

Micromanager ←→ Ask My Assistant

The Maximum

Imagine a tangled strand of Christmas lights. Now imagine sixteen strands of Christmas lights, all tangled together. Now imagine that each of the colored bulbs in those strands of Christmas lights has a face, and each face is screaming: “I’m the most important! You’ve got to free me first!”

Now imagine that it’s your job to untangle all those Christmas lights, every morning, from now until the end of time.

That’s a little bit what it’s like to delve into an agent’s inbox.

Agents perform incredible feats of logistical juggling on the daily. Some agents handle this with a squadron of interns and assistants and co-agents and colleagues. Other agents handle it alone.

At the far end of this spectrum are the agents who delegate like pros. Any task that can possibly be performed by anyone besides themselves must be delegated. Of the many tasks that need the attention of that specific agent—well, some of those will have to get delegated too. Scheduling? Handled by an assistant. Reading the slush? Handled by an intern. Reading a client’s new manuscript? Handled by an assistant. Sending thoughtful editorial notes to that client? The assistant writes the notes, signs the agent’s name, and then fires off the notes from the agent’s email address.

The Minimum

At the other end of the spectrum, we have agents who are too obsessively Type A to delegate anything. They develop other coping strategies, such as being superhuman, responding to emails 24 hours a day, and not having personal lives. On weekends, they can be found devoting twelve-hour chunks to line-editing a client’s latest draft. If they do have assistants or interns, they don’t trust them, and end up double-checking and editing their work so much that they might as well have done the work themselves. These agents handle their own slush, their own schedule, their own submission lists, their own pitch letters, their own everything.

Are they on top of all that everything? That kind of depends on their Inbox Management System and other spectrums. Anyway, whether or not they can handle it, they’re going to do it alone.

The Middle Ground

Agents in between have strict rules about what they will and won’t delegate. Some of those rules would surprise you.

My bet is you could put twenty agents in a room and they’d all disagree about what should and shouldn’t be delegated. One agent would say that she always reads her own slush pile—how could she trust an intern to pick out the good stuff? Another agent would say that reading the slush pile is what interns were made for, and it’s a waste of his time and his clients’ time to wade into the slush pile himself. One agent would acknowledge that she always asks her assistant to put together an initial submission list when she goes out with a project. Another agent considers it his entire job to come up with the right editors to submit to—why would he let an assistant hazard random guesses when he’s in close touch with editors at all the relevant imprints?

You get the idea. The main thing you need to know as an author is whether and when you’ll be corresponding with your agent’s army of assistants, and when you’ll have access to your actual agent.

How can you spot an agent who delegates?

There should be signs of this one fairly early. You’ll be directed to an assistant to schedule the initial phone call; the assistant might even be the one to send along the agency contract.

In some cases, the assistant will be right there on the line during that first phone call. “My assistant read your manuscript too, and had some great editorial notes that I wanted her to share,” the agent will say, possibly revealing, through her continual deference to her assistant’s perspective on the book, that the agent herself has not actually read your book.

Do you need an agent who delegates?

If your agent isn’t really reading your work—if she’s passing it off to an assistant, who is typing up brilliant editorial insights that your agent will send to you as if they’re her own—well, does it matter?

I think in most cases, it actually doesn’t matter how the sausage gets made. If your agent’s system works for them, and you feel you have reliable access to someone who represents you—whether it’s the agent or their invisible assistant—then maybe you’re in okay shape.

However, there are situations when it becomes important to know how much of your work with an agent has been delegated or outsourced.

I have a writer friend who was co-represented by an agent and her assistant. The agent was a big deal, had a great reputation, and would put her name on the submission—but all of the editorial work and day-to-day correspondence happened with the assistant.

Then my writer friend learned that the assistant was leaving the agency to work somewhere else. So my friend had a choice: stick with the big-time agent, with whom he had barely corresponded; or go with the assistant, with whom he had been working closely this whole time, but who had a much smaller reputation with editors.

There’s no right choice here—or rather, there is a right choice here, but it depends on all those other spectrums. Could he trust that the big-time agent would remain invested in his project, or had it been the assistant’s enthusiasm driving things all along? Did he need a hyper-editorial agent, or was he confident that he could edit his own work as needed?

I don’t know what I would have done in his case. But I do know that I’d pick an agent who delegates over one who is hopelessly overwhelmed by all the Christmas light strands of their obligations.

The Proactive Spectrum

If Nudged, Will Act ←→ Ten Moves Ahead

The Maximum

An agent at the far end of the Proactive Spectrum will have ideas all the time. The submission isn’t going well—maybe they can try to drum up some enthusiasm with the scouts! The revision of your novel has stalled out—maybe they can shop around one of your short stories to film/tv co-agents! If your book sells to a publisher, this agent will keep close track of the publishing timeline, and will send helpful nudging emails to your editor like: “I was just wondering if we should start thinking about blurbs soon?” and “I noticed this prize deadline coming up—wondered if we’d already submitted!”

The Minimum

An agent at the other end of this spectrum will perform whatever functions are asked of them as an agent. But you have to ask. They will not follow up with editors until you say: “Have we followed up with editors using the good news about the contest win?” They will not submit to foreign rights co-agents until you say: “Do we have any plans to submit this on the foreign rights side?” They will not email you on a random weekday to say: “We haven’t been in touch in a few weeks—how are you feeling about your publisher?”

The Middle Ground

Agents in the middle tend to be extremely proactive about the submission process—from which they stand to make money—but less proactive about the lead-up to publication. They may fall out of the loop as you move to corresponding with your editor and publicist. If you don’t notify them of any problems, they’ll assume that everything is fine.

How can you spot a proactive agent?

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to spot a proactive agent from afar. I think this is one of those qualities that only emerges once you’ve worked with someone for a while. The best way to judge might be to speak with the agent’s other clients, and ask perceptive questions: “So you decided to submit on the film/tv side first… where did that idea come from?” “When did your agent get involved in the conversation about cover design?”

Do you need a proactive agent?

You want a proactive agent. If your agent isn’t very proactive, that’s fine—there are workarounds. But given the choice, and all other things being equal, you should always choose the proactive agent.

Having an agent who is reactive—who will act when nudged, and otherwise forgets your existence—places a huge burden on you, the author, to anticipate every step of the publishing process. When should your book go on a second round of submission? When should it go out to international publishers? To audiobook publishers? When should your publisher start contacting you about publicity and marketing? When is your publisher being delinquent?

You can’t know these things unless you 1) have worked in the publishing industry, 2) are friends with other published writers, or 3) spend a lot of time on substack. Your agent can and should know all these things. An agent who waits for you to prompt them to do their job is like a kid who needs to be asked to do his daily chores. “You didn’t tell me to make my bed yesterday, so why did you expect me to do it?”

If you end up with an agent who isn’t very proactive, you’re going to have to educate yourself about the industry. Try to get a sense of the standard timelines of submission and publication, and if it seems that you’re regularly missing milestones, prompt your agent with polite but firm questions: “Should we aim to submit on the foreign rights side next week?” “Is there anything else you need from me before we begin the second-round submission?”

The Transparency Spectrum

Ask Me No Questions, I’ll Tell You No Lies ←→ Here Is a Shared Google Doc

The Maximum

Agents at the far end of this spectrum are happy to share every step of their submission process with you. List of editors? Yes. Pitch letter? Yes. Rejection letters as they come in? Yes, if you want them, copy-and-pasted straight into a shared spreadsheet. They’ll tell you how they’re feeling about the submission, when it’s time to get a little less optimistic, when it’s time to start thinking about other options. If the book gets an offer, or multiple offers, they’ll share everything they know about the offering publisher(s), the advantages and drawbacks, what their other clients have experienced at the hands of that publisher… No question is off-limits; this is an equal partnership in which both parties have a right to all the information.

The Minimum

At the other end of the spectrum are the cagey agents. They don’t want to share their submission list with you. They’re certainly not going to let you look over their pitch letter. You have your job, and they have their job, and they would like you to back off and let them handle their end of things, please. They’ll tell you when anything important happens.

The Middle Ground

Most agents are fairly transparent about their process. They don’t mind sharing their submission list and pitch letter. They’ll agree to forward rejection letters to you, though they might gently recommend against that approach. (“How about I just send you the rejections with useful feedback?” or “How about every two weeks, I tell you who’s passed and who’s still reading?”) They’ll tell you whether they’ve followed up with the editors on the list, and when they’re thinking about a second round of submission.

However, these same agents tend to be cagey about their expectations. Agents present everything with a positive gloss, pretty much by default. It’s their job to keep the mood upbeat, the hopes high. They won’t tell you their reservations, they won’t tell you that the “mood” of the submission has soured, and they won’t tell you that they’re having serious doubts about the whole premise of your project.

How can you spot a transparent agent?

You’ll get some early hints of an agent’s transparency from the first phone call. As they walk you through the typical submission process, they’ll tell you whether they share pitch letters with their clients; whether they involve clients in the creation of the submission list; and whether they forward rejection letters directly.

As for an agent’s transparency about their expectations, this one’s a little harder to gauge. You’re trying to figure out, not how confident the agent is about your project, but how transparent they’re going to be about their level of confidence. So you might ask the agent something like: “What do you think is the main reservation editors will have about this project?” Or: “If the submission wasn’t going well, would you loop me in about that, or would you want me to just keep my head down and work on some other project?”

Do you need a transparent agent?

There are good agents all across this spectrum. It’s great to have an agent who is willing to make you an active partner in the submission—but it’s also great to have an agent who says, “I’m a professional, and I will handle this. You don’t need to worry until I tell you to worry.” (Of course, being an author, you’ll worry anyway. But it can be nice to know that the ball is totally out of your court.)

The only thing you need to watch out for here is agents who are at the really low end of the spectrum—the super-cagey agents. An agent who point-blank refuses to share their submission list with you, or refuses to send you a list of who has passed and who’s still reading, or who refuses to send you the editor rejections—that agent is bad news.

When you part ways with an agent, it’s their job to send you all that information, if they haven’t sent it sooner. An agent who withholds that information from you is actively harming your career, and violating standard practice. You deserve to know which editors have seen your book, and what they said about it. And your next agent will need that information in order to move forward with a new submission.

Agents who withhold information to that extent are rare, and I don’t know anyone who has been unable to wrangle a full submission list from their agent after a submission has closed. But I do know a few writers who have had to follow up a few times to get that full submission list. That’s a situation you want to avoid.

The Aggression Spectrum

Breaks Up Fights ←→ Starts Fights

The Maximum

All agents fight for their clients. But some agents fight tooth and nail. These agents are not only proactive but pugnacious in their determination to sign you, sell your book for a ridiculously high advance, and red-line every last clause of that contract.

So at the far end of this spectrum, we’ve got agents who are notorious among publishers for being “difficult.” An aggressive agent will gladly participate in a heated three-week back-and-forth with the contracts associate at your publishing house just to get you 25 author copies instead of 20. They will harangue an editor who makes you wait too long for edits. If you don’t like the cover design of your debut novel, this agent will raise hell with the design team.

Publishers are not always thrilled to work with these agents. But, hey, the literary agent is supposed to be a “champion” for their clients. What is this if not championing?

The Minimum

At the other end of this spectrum is the agent who takes the side of the publisher. Okay, technically, the agent works for you: their client. But in practice, this agent often takes on the role of mediator. When there’s some rift between you and your publisher, this agent will try to gently talk you round to the publisher’s side. When you’re upset that your publicist isn’t doing enough, this agent will reframe the situation and offer some proactive steps you can take—none of which involves sending an angry email to your publicist. This agent, generally, is trying to defuse fights rather than start them.

The Middle Ground

Most agents fall in the middle. They’ll take your side most of the time, but if you’re being unreasonable, or if they feel you’ve picked a few too many battles lately, they’ll try to talk you into some acceptable compromise. A middle-ground agent has a sense of how far they can push their publishing partners, and they won’t want to push beyond that limit. If it’s a choice between an extra $1,000 and a good working relationship, they’ll choose the good working relationship.

How can you spot an aggressive agent?

An aggressive agent will show their colors as early as your first correspondence with them. Are they pushy, insistent, expectant, demanding, even a bit bullying? If they’re treating you that way—a client that they hope to sign—they’re probably treating editors that way too, albeit with a greater dash of politeness. (Editors are harder to push around than querying authors.)

If you want to get a sense of whether you’re dealing with a gentle or aggressive agent, ask questions like: “What’s your approach to following up with editors?” and “How do you approach a contract negotiation?” A gentle agent’s response will sound reasonable, understanding, accommodating: they try not to follow up with editors until a few months have passed, they go into a contract negotiation deciding which battles to pick and which points to let slide… An aggressive agent’s response will sound dogged, obnoxious, insistent: they follow up with editors after one week, they fight every single line of contract boilerplate…

Do you need an aggressive agent?

Aggressive agents may not sound that pleasant to work with, but it can be great to have them on your side. I’ve seen aggressive agents get much bigger deals and many more concessions out of a publisher than agents who are kind and reasonable. Publishers are also careful not to neglect or short-change the client of an aggressive agent. If an editor knows that a scary Big Personality is going to get up in his face every time he misses a step, he’ll step a little more carefully.

If you have an aggressive agent, you’re in an interesting situation: publishers might be more reluctant to take on your project, because, woof, your agent is hard to work with. But if the publisher decides to go for it, you’re then in great shape, because your aggressive agent is going to do everything in their power (and some things not in their power) to get you the best possible deal.

You can’t control how editors feel about working with your agent. But whatever kind of agent you end up with, you can try to compensate a bit on your end. If you have an aggressive agent, you can make sure to seem extremely accommodating and reasonable in all your interactions with editors. (“What a nice author!” they’ll say. “It’s a shame they’re working with Notoriously Scary Agent.”) And if you have a super-gentle agent, you might need to be the one who pushes for a higher advance, a better contract, a more robust marketing effort—by entreating your agent to push for you.

The Pond Spectrum

Little Fish ←→ Big Fish

The Maximum

The other spectrums we’ve discussed are an attempt to pinpoint the innate nature of the hypothetical agent you’re thinking of signing with. How editorial is this agent? How proactive? How aggressive? How well-connected? But this last spectrum concerns the relationship between you and this hypothetical agent. Where do you rank on their list of priorities?

At the far end of the spectrum, we’ve got agents for whom you would be the absolute top priority. You’re the biggest fish in their pond. When your manuscript comes in, they bump someone else’s out of the way. They’re excited to go on submission with your work, excited to tell editors they represent you, excited when you send a vague email that you’re “working on something new.” If they have fifty unread emails, they read yours first.

The Minimum

At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got a big, crowded pond (your agent’s client list) and a tiny fish (you). This agent represents a lot of clients, and you are the least illustrious among them. When this agent pitches their upcoming submissions to an editor, they don’t mention your name. When this agent sees an email from you, they tack it to the bottom of a long to-do list.

The Middle Ground

In many cases, you’ll be somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy. You’re not the agent’s biggest client, whose royalty statements pay the agent’s bills. You’re also not the agent’s least significant client. You’re just in between, getting an average amount of care and attention.

How can you spot an agent who will prioritize you?

You should know this one from the moment you query an agent. Where do you rank compared to the other authors on their client list? If you have a bigger profile than their other clients, and/or more publishing credentials, and/or a better sales track, and/or a way cooler high-concept premise, you’re going to be the big fish. If not, you’re probably going to be one of the smaller fish.

Do you need an agent who will prioritize you?

As with all the spectrums, this one has trade-offs. Being the big fish in a small pond means you’ll get the best of your agent: they’ll email you fastest, read your projects soonest, and submit your work with the most gusto. But—there’s probably a reason that proverbial pond is so small. This agent might not have the connections or expertise that your qualifications deserve. They’ll prioritize you, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have what it takes to sell your work.

If you’re a small fish in a big pond, you’re not going to get first crack at your agent’s attention. They’ll deal with their more important clients before they deal with you. But they will deal with you in the end—they are still your agent—and they’ll bring a hefty reputation to whatever efforts they make for your book.

In other words, while it’s nice to have an agent who prioritizes you, you don’t actually need to be an agent’s top priority for them to sell your work. They’ll try to get the job done for all the fish in their pond, big and small.

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All right—those are the 13 spectrums of Literary Agent Quality. I’ll end this exorbitantly long post with a list of people to whom I hope it’s helpful:

• anyone who is querying and trying to find the “right agent”

• anyone deciding between two or more agents

• anyone who has parted ways with an agent and wants to name the reason it didn’t work out

• any current or former agents who enjoy analyzing the ways their colleagues slash rivals operate

• anyone who has puzzled over philosophical questions like “Should I go with a big-time agent who never emails me back or a small-time agent who always has time for me?”

Thanks for reading!

1. To be fair, almost all agency contracts stipulate that either party can cancel the agreement at any time for any reason. This is a good thing—both parties benefit from the ability to walk away freely. My point is that it takes about one sentence to get that across in a contract. A contract that spends multiple paragraphs emphasizing how little is owed to the author in the event of a dissolution of the agreement—that makes me a little suspicious.