In this insanely competitive publishing market, there are clearly a lot of benefits to signing with an agent and being backed by a publisher. Marketing budgets, the guidance of an editor, the expertise of an agent… invaluable resources that can help achieve success beyond what self-published authors typically can on our own. I’m the last person to insist that you don’t need the industry, because the industry is powerful for a reason. It makes successes.
However, there are a lot of stories we don’t hear, the flip side of success. Out of the thousands of authors signed to agents each year, not all of their books get sold. The larger publishers often assign unpaid, unqualified interns to screen manuscripts—I’ve heard this from numerous sources inside the industry. If those authors whose books are published don’t sell quite enough copies as measured by a formula for maximum profit, their contracts can…
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