Colleen Lindsay linked to this post recently. I read it. I found it...interesting, but uninformed.

I'll give you a second to read it. *sips coffee*

The writer seems to think agents are nothing but money-hungry fiends with no taste in Real Literature, while editors are princesses or princes the agents keep locked away in glass towers "for their own protection." She implies an editor would have bought her book that so many agents have rejected. I guess no one told her editors are trying to find the next bestseller, too.

Publishing is a business. Everyone's trying to make money.

I think one of the reasons it's so easy for writers to forget it's a business is because we are the ones bleeding over the same paragraph for a week, struggling with one plotline for a month, and spending a year drowning in the same story. The manuscript is not a product at that point, it's a part of you!

No, writers, it's still a product. It's still got to sell, make big money (or some money, but big would be nice), and at least do well enough so the editor who loved your first book can afford to buy another one from you.

It feels personal. It's not. It's not just about sales and marketing for agents, though. It's also about finding that manuscript in the slush that makes you sit up and slobber.

Here are some things that struck me:

I can tell you why your desk is piling up with flimsy bits of vampire literature, fantasy, romance, detective stories and the kind of first-draft bubble gum that used to be called chick-lit but is now shuffled in with other women’s writing in order to give it heft—although as far as you can see, neither the quality nor the subject matter has improved—which you are required to somehow turn into publishable books. It is because the vast majority of literary agents do not, in fact, have any interest in literature. They are only interested in jackpots.

In my experience, agents are people who have likes and dislikes in literature, just like writers. This writer apparently doesn't like fantasy, romance, detective stories (or the serial comma). If an agent doesn't like literary fiction, should they represent that?

Because when an agent takes on a manuscript, they become its champion. They love it. They fight for it. They show it to their friends (editors) and try to convince everyone to love it just as much. The manuscript is very likely rejected at least once or twice, sometimes more, and still the agent must have faith in the manuscript -- believe it will sell and be out there for everyone to see.

No one can love a manuscript quite like the writer can love it, but agent booklove has to come awfully close. Should an agent have to do that for a book in a genre they don't love? That's why there are lots of agents with a wide range of tastes. In fact, I think there are more agents interested in literary fiction than fantasy, so this writer actually has more agents to try than most of the people I know. And she stopped at 60 (more than, she said, but apparently fewer than 70)? A quick search on AgentQuery brings up 527 results for literary fiction, while fantasy results are a meager 139.

So, no. Agents aren't only interested in jackpots. They are interested in finding books they can champion through multiple revisions, submissions, rejections, and beyond the sale. They're interested in finding talented authors who can work with them and continue producing books.

The agent’s cut is generally 10 percent of the writer’s portion, which is in turn about 10 percent of the book’s cover price.

15%, actually.

Having set out what they do and do not want from writers, the agents then demand that we, their would-be clients, condense our novels into 300-word “pitches” that will convince them of the marketability of our books. (One might think that this would be the agent’s job—to develop pitches for the manuscripts by the writers they represent which they will then present to publishers. But no. That is not the way this system works.)

It's been my experience from working with Jenny, first as her client, then friend, now assistant, that upon offering representation and offering revision notes, that agents then set out to write a new pitch letter for editors. Agents work with editors all the time. They go out for lunches, chat on Twitter, get feedback from them on other manuscripts they've submitted. Agents should know what will make an editor sit up and slobber (while writers probably don't), so they can select the perfect editors for the manuscript and personalize each pitch by highlighting the points of the manuscript they know will catch that editor's attention.

We submit our pitches in good faith by email or snail mail (depending on the dictates of the individual agent-god. They tell us how they want us to submit right on their websites!) where they are read by interns with little experience of literature or life, and are rejected.

It's by reading slush that interns get experience in literature and life. They don't start out reading on their own, either; the agent trains them, shows them what to look for, and says things like, "Reject all the obviously bad ones, and if you have questions about any of the decent ones, bring it to me and we'll discuss it."

Some of us have had our query letters rejected more than 50 times.

That's nothin'. Remember what I mentioned about 500+ agents interested in literary fiction?

What, you may well wonder, do these agents do with all of the spare time they have carved out of their lives by creating query-letter formulae and “hiring” unpaid minions to reject the pitches that don’t meet their gutter-level standards?

They work for their clients. They call editors, submit manuscripts, work on revision letters, negotiate contracts, scrutinize every detail of contracts to make sure it's in the writer's best interest, take phone calls from clients and editors and foreign agents, and take phone calls from writers who can't follow guidelines and don't know how to send a query letter. In their real spare time, they read submissions, work with interns/assistants, and wonder how they're going to fit in another client whose book they love if they offer representation.

I've also heard they sleep, walk dogs, and have children, just like regular humans, but I think that's a myth.

(For further reading on this subject, check out this interview with “four young literary agents”, where you can learn among other things that submitting letters on pink paper is a clear indication of lack of literary talent.)

No, it's a lack of professionalism. This is a business where we behave like adults. Pink paper, however pretty, is not professional.

You, Dear Editor, are unknowingly complicit in this debacle. By refusing to accept direct submissions (just check your website! It says you will never accept a manuscript that is not submitted through an agent. It warns us that you will return our manuscripts unread if we try to foist them off on you! It even offers us helpful suggestions on how to find an agent—as though Google weren’t able to throw a hundred of them at us at a time!) you have become an unwitting accomplice to the devastation of the literary arts.

This is a filter system. It's not perfect, but it chugs along.

Writers write books. Good books, bad books, books with potential, and books that should probably never have been written. They submit to agents, who can reject most of that as bad, boring, and been done a hundred times. Making Light's "Slushkiller" actually has a really good breakdown in point three. Just replace "publish" with "represent", and "editor" with "agent."

They're not kidding here. Remember the nearly 40% of queries last week that didn't follow guidelines? (Not just our guidelines, but submitting-to-agent-in-general guidelines. I wasn't even being picky!)

So the agents pull out the books they think are great, can sell well, and will make editors sit up and slobber. They separate the manuscripts that deserve attention from the things that are truly awful. (Again, not a perfect system since tastes vary, subjectivity, all that.) Then they submit those worthy manuscripts to editors on your behalf. Because, again, they know editors' tastes.

Not having to read the large percentage of submissions that aren't good at all frees the editors to work with their authors, champion those manuscripts within the publishing house, and read more good submissions from agents.

And publishers' websites saying how to find an agent, as if Google couldn't do that for anyone? Usually notes like that are added to websites because they're tired of all the unagented manuscripts that get submitted.

For many, many reasons, writers need literary agents. If absolutely nothing else (meaning the writer can submit, negotiate, and vet contracts all on his/her own), having an agent frees the writer from the submission process so the writer can do what they do best: write more books.

Eliminating agents will not help. Eliminating agents will only take away authors' champions and deluge editors with the large percentage of submissions that are -- politely -- not very good at all.