{"id":242,"date":"2020-11-16T16:13:46","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T16:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/?p=242"},"modified":"2024-04-23T11:51:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T10:51:12","slug":"do-literary-agents-want-self-published-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/do-literary-agents-want-self-published-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Literary Agents Want Self-Published Authors?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few years ago, most literary agents <\/a>were snobby about self-published work. And rightly so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years back, it was genuinely the case that a large majority of self-published authors wrote bad books that were poorly edited with terrible covers<\/a> and sales to match<\/a>. There were<\/em> some breakout successes \u2013 there always have been \u2013 but they were rare enough that no agent wanted to tramp those stony fields in the hopes of finding something to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s Changed.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are, still, plenty of lousy self-published books, but the average standard has improved in almost every dimension. Book covers look vastly better, for one thing. If you go to the Amazon Kindle bestseller list (here<\/a>), you\u2019ll find traditionally published and self-published books selling alongside each other \u2013 but I defy you to guess which is which from the covers alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then because Amazon has made it easy for readers to complain about poor copyediting and weak storytelling, writers have responded by improving their attitude to those things too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s true that many of the self-pub successes (Joe Konrath, John Locke, EL James, and many others) write genre fiction aimed squarely at the lower end of the market \u2013 but they tell their stories well for the market they aim at. And it\u2019s not as though traditional publishers are averse to those markets. On the contrary, Random House was happy to take EL James\u2019s work and turn it into the biggest publishing event of the decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And \u2013 no surprise \u2013 agents have noticed all this. Remember: they want any author whose work is strong and saleable. They truly don\u2019t care where that author comes from (and don\u2019t care much about who the author is either, for that matter.) If an author self-publishes a novel that starts to get a considerable following on Amazon, then agents will be interested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the hurdles are high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a rough guide, I\u2019d suggest that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n