should I become an agent?

let's talk about $$$$$$

When I look back now on how it all started, there were a few reasons I wanted to become a literary agent.

First, I was excited by a new challenge. Succeeding at the impossible turns me on. Oh, you don’t think I can raise $50,000 and organize a conference for 500 women in three months? Get out of my way!

I was starting to feel like I’d hit a ceiling with my book coaching business—there was nowhere else to go, if I didn’t want to scale. (I don’t want to scale. I’d rather work directly with writers than manage and supervise the people working directly with writers.)

Two of my clients sold books at auction this spring and I thought, Why can’t I do that?

Why couldn’t I be the agent who sold those books?

I knew that becoming an agent would come with greater risk than running my own business, but there was also the potential for greater reward.

In my small business, I work one on one with writers, and they pay me for my services. If I coached you while you wrote your book and it becomes a Reese pick and a New York Times bestseller and a movie starring Aubrey Plaza (wishing this for all of you!!!), then I send you a bouquet of flowers and pop the champagne and brag on social media that I played a small part in shepherding your book into the world.

If I’m the agent who sold your book, I’m more like an early investor in a startup that hits the jackpot. I’m earning commission on your book royalties but also on every foreign rights deal, every film and TV option. The musical adaptation for Broadway!

Imagine you’re Jennette McCurdy.

Okay, now imagine you’re Jennette McCurdy’s agent.

This appealed to me.

So I started telling select friends and colleagues that I was thinking of becoming an agent. And everyone said the same thing to me:

You would make a GREAT agent.

I’ve worked in the media and publishing industries since 2008, beginning at the New Yorker. I’ve published five books in three genres. I’ve worked on projects that have sold to imprints of Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster, as well as Audible and Bloomsbury. I have a huge network.¹

Over the next three months, I had informational interviews with four different literary agents at three different agencies. I also started building my list of potential clients, and spoke to a dozen writers about their projects.²

Most of you already know how literary agents earn income: when they sell a book to a publisher, they earn a 15% commission. If your agent sells your book for $100,000, they get $15,000; if they sell your book for $1,000,000, they get $150,000.

But how is that commission paid out, over time? And how much does your agent actually get to keep for herself?

I think this is the part that the majority of writers don’t understand, or think about. And I hope breaking down the financial reality of agents a little bit in this newsletter will help writers have more empathy for the position that agents—especially junior agents—are in, when they’re trying to build a portfolio of clients who can reliably generate revenue.

I’m going to be honest here and say that I currently operate a six-figure business that I’ve built over the past six years. My work isn’t a freelance “gig” or a “side hustle.” I have multiple revenue streams, I’m well compensated for my expertise, and I love what I do for a living.

If I was going to become a literary agent, I had to figure out how I could replace my income when I pivoted to earning on commission, instead of fee for service.

The advice I received? Set a goal of selling $1,000,000 in books a year.

I could sell 10 books for $100,000 advances. I could sell one book for $500,000, one book for $100,000, and eight books for $50,000. You get the idea.

My commission (15% of $1,000,000) would be paid out in multiple installments, over years.

I would also be splitting my commission with the agency I worked for. As a beginning agent, my split might be 50/50. Maybe one day I’d land at an agency that let me keep as much as 70% of my commission. Every agency is different—some pay you a salary as a kind of advance against what you will earn in commission that year. Some offer health insurance benefits; others don’t.

Let’s say I’m the best agent the publishing industry has ever seen (ha ha ha) and I sell $1,000,000 my first year out of the gate (HA HA HA) and earn $150,000 in commission. I’m killing it! During the pandemic, many publishers started paying out book advances in quarters, instead of thirds. So one quarter on signing the contract, another on manuscript delivery, another on publication, and the final quarter on paperback publication.

One quarter of $150,000 is $37,500. My first year, I give half to my agency, and I keep $18,750.

But I don’t give up! I’m undeterred! I’m eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches! I really want to make this work! I keep hustling and I have another great year. I sell more projects and earn the same amount in commission (all the agents reading this newsletter are laughing at this hypothetical).

Year two, I would earn some second installments of the advances from year 1, plus I would earn first installments of the books I sold. So maybe year two, I do really well and double my take-home income to $37,500!

If I hang in until year 3, my morale gets a boost when I finally get to see some of the books I worked on come out. I get to touch them on bookshelves and post them on social media. (And I get those third installment payments!)

Doing this back-of-the-napkin kind of math made me realize it would take at least five years to build a list of clients who can reliably bring in income, in an unpredictable, unfair, and often frustrating industry. It made me better understand why agents have to reject so many projects by extremely talented writers. Any agent can tell you about the “sure thing” project that never sold. Not for one dollar. After they devoted hours, weeks, months of their life into developing it. After weathering months of crushing disappointment and rejections that they filtered for their clients.

In the most recent membership survey from the Association of American Literary Agents, 69% of survey respondents indicated that low salaries are “a critical issue for the industry to address.” Fifty-nine percent of respondents earn less than $100,000 a year, compared to 46% in 2021. Over the past two years, the percentage of agents making less than $50,000 a year has also grown.

If you’ve ever wondered why agents won’t represent your work to small presses, this is why. If you’re wondering why it takes agents so long to respond to query emails, it’s because they’re allocating their limited time and attention to the clients they already have. This summer, I myself struggled with prioritizing the unpaid development work I was doing for writers; it’s always easier to prioritize the client work I’m being compensated for. I’m sure that anyone who works for a living, and also volunteers for a cause they care about on the side, can understand this tug of war feeling.

Ultimately, I decided that I can satisfy the entrepreneurial risk-taking side of me by devoting time and energy to my own writing projects. Instead of hoping to represent a hit one day, I hope to write one.

I know literary agents read this newsletter! Please feel free to leave a comment here, or if you wish to contribute a comment (or a correction to anything I’ve written) anonymously, hit “reply” and I’m happy to keep your identity anonymous!

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Last chance to register for my memoir plus seminar

Thirty years ago, memoirs had a big moment: Tobias Wolff published This Boy's Life in 1989 and then came Girl, Interrupted (1993), The Liars' Club (1995) and Slow Motion (1998). But the market for memoir has evolved and social media has played a big role in its evolution. You no longer need to buy a hardcover to see inside the life of a stranger: all you have to do is open Instagram, where women are documenting their lives in real time for an audience. To stand out in a crowded marketplace, many successful memoirists today are writing "memoir plus" by combining personal narrative with research, original reporting, history, true crime, and/or cultural criticism.

I’m teaching an introduction to memoir plus that begins tomorrow, October 10. The Zoom will be recorded for those who can’t make it live. Full details here

1. This isn’t a sneaky advertisement for my services! I’m currently at capacity and not taking new projects at this time. When that changes, I’ll make an announcement.

2. It’s unethical for a literary agent to charge for representation. None of the writers I spoke to were my book coaching clients (in other words, they didn’t pay me anything for my advice on their project).