You spend years working toward the publication of your book. Take writing classes. Attend workshops. Mingle at literary conferences. Develop your craft. Work with a writing coach. Write the manuscript. Hire an editor. Revise and rewrite. Build a website and blog every week. Grow an audience platform. Write reviews of books by authors you admire. Polish a proposal. Query agents. Receive rejection after rejection. And you wonder if it will stop hurting so much if you simply give up now. When you get a “no” it hurts. You doubt yourself. You question whether the book you’ve written is any good. You wonder if you’ve been suffering from grandiose delusions about your own talents. When you reread the latest rejection letter a few days later, you might see a glimmer of hope. The agent complimented your writing but didn’t think it was right for them or didn’t think they were the right person to sell the project. So maybe, you think, it’s not you or your writing but simply this wasn’t the right agent. Or maybe the agent is right about an insufficient audience platform, the lack of character development, or the first 10 pages didn’t have a strong enough hook. And you go back to work. You struggle to improve the manuscript. Tighten the narrative arc. Deepen the characters. Figure out a way to repackage the project. Submit essays, poems, or short stories for publication in literary journals or popular magazines. Give readings of your work-in-progress. Expand your social network.…

So you think you need an agent? Most agents do not represent poetry, short stories, non-fiction or material suitable for academic or small presses. If you have written a novel or a memoir, you might consider finding a literary representative. The best reference guide is Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents published annually by Writer’s Digest Books and the 2014 issue has just been released. Before you seek representation, it’s important you do some initial research on potential agents before you send a query. Here’s a few questions you need to answer before you contact a specific agent. Is the agent a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR)? Self-identified ‘agents’ may not be members of AAR and are not bound by their code of professional ethics. Are book deals this agent has sold to publishers reported in Publisher’s Marketplace? What comes up when you Google your agent’s name, or the name of the literary agency? How many years has the agent worked as a literary representative? Does the agency have a website? What did they do before they became an agent? The agent’s website should have a bio. How many books has the agent sold to publishers? Many self-identified agents are ‘packagers’ or ‘book producers’ who work for imprints of self-publishing companies. Investigate the track record of the authors’ books. Look at publishing houses, sales rankings, reviews, and news coverage of the agents portfolio of published clients. How many authors does the agent currently represent? The more authors an agent…

The business of publishing continues to evolve and new finance models have emerged in recent years. There is a lot of new middle ground between self-publishing – Amazon, Smashwords, Lulu – and the traditional route of finding an agent who sells your work to one of the big commercial trade presses – Penguin Random House, Hatchette Book Group, Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. Small and independent presses can’t offer authors large advances or extravagant marketing campaigns, but they do offer many advantages over self-publishing including distribution. Most self-published authors recognize the difficulty of getting their books into retail stores and libraries because they lack access to the distribution systems used by publishers. Finding a good fit with a small publisher who champions your manuscript can be an ideal scenario for authors. Academic presses shouldn’t be overlooked. It might surprise you to discover which university presses today publish commercial nonfiction, memoir, even fiction. Some presses, if they endorse your manuscript editorially, may negotiate with an author for a subsidy to proceed with publication. When an author invests in the initial production costs, it is possible to negotiate a higher copyright royalty rate in lieu of an advance. Subsidy publication is an avenue to explore if the author has the financial resources or can find a benefactor to provide a subsidy for the production expenses of publication. Subsidy publication is a “dirty little secret” in the publishing business. Many traditional publishers don’t want it well known that such business arrangements can…