What Literary Agents Do

From the Writing the Novel Proposal Workshop

Essentially, a literary agent is the liaison between a writer and a publisher. He is a business representative, whose primary job is to sell a work to the publisher who will pay the most for it (and ideally will handle it most effectively) .

An agent should know the special areas of interest for each publishing house as well as individual editors' tastes and enthusiasms within a particular house. The best literary agents acquire and maintain a wealth of knowledge about publishing, keeping up with trends in an industry that has been undergoing seismic changes in recent years.

A submission from a knowledgeable and respected agent will be read by an editor way before an unsolicited submission from an unknown writer. Editors know each agented submission is backed by the agent's reputation, which goes a long, long way in this business.

Because most major publishing houses accept only agented submissions, those publishers who do accept unagented submissions get so many of them that their slush pile becomes—and remains—overstocked with manuscripts. Many manuscripts get lost in the slush, with nary an editor's eyes ever gazing upon them. Editors just don't have the time to sift through all those submissions. That's what's so great about having an agent submit your material: While almost every unagented submission sits in a slush pile for awhile—sometimes for perpetuity—nearly every agented submission gets a read, usually with editorial enthusiasm if it comes from an agent the editor has worked with before