Boom!

Through reading the comments at Miss Snark I came across this fascinating link in which an agent proposes the idea of charging a reading fee.

This is a hugely hot-button issue. People get mad about it immediately, and I've never really thought about it in-depth enough to wonder why. But today I did - hey, I have a looong commute - and when I followed the logic, what I came up with was staggering.

First, let me say that this Andrew Zack - by all accounts a successful agent and in no way a hack or scammer - has a point. To wit:

One might assume that if the typical reading fee was $75.00, authors would do more due diligence regarding the agents to whom they are submitting. Thus, they might only submit to two, rather than ten.If you go to my site, you'll find a very specific list of areas in which I like to represent books. I can say with confidence that every day I get at least one query that demonstrates that authors do not always bother to visit that page. I get YA novels, romance novels, children's books, religious books, and the like. All of which I clearly rule out on my site.

And:

... [T]he bottom line is that the universities charge an application fee and the majority of applicants get nothing for their money. Yet universities couldn't exist without students, so why shouldn't they allow everyone to apply for free? Right now, every agent I know is allowing every writer to apply for free.

Really, there are a lot of idiots out there, and agents have to deal with all of them. The stuff written in crayon, written on scraps of newspaper, sprinkled with sparkly glue. The idea of cutting some of this dreck must be very tempting, and to make some money at the same time is a bonus.

However, follow me here.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that agents begin to charge a $75 fee.

If the agent spends an hour reading the query and writing a personal response, he/she is now earning $75 per hour. How many books would you sell if you were earning $75 per hour? How many $75-less hours would you spend sending stuff to editors? Because you no longer have to sell books to make your money.

Now, a writer querying 10 agents has just spent $750. If you don't have $750, you cannot market your work as widely as someone with more money. That's a problem. The other problem is that you've just spent $750 sending stuff to agents who don't have to sell a damn thing.

I don't know about you, dude, but I'd be sending to editors.

I hope agents have no editor friends, because the editors are going to be some pissed to see their slush piles increase astronomically. I think tenfold is a realistic, if not conservative, estimate. The result will be editor meltdown, and can't be sustained.

So, editors could start charging fees. Goodbye to most of their submissions - people will just give up. Do not pass Go. Let's say they don't start charging fees, but instead have to hire more assistants for the slushpiles. Assistants make pitiful salaries I'm sure, but money is money, and it comes out of the publisher's bottom line.

When publishers have to spend more money, they will take fewer risks on new authors and genres and only go with "sure things." This means that the market is so tight that bookshelves are full of Nora Roberts and no one else. The rest of us just aren't sure enough.

For the writers: Publishing on demand. Because we won't stop writing, that much is sure. For the readers: Complete boredom with the airport-sameness of what's out there - the nosedive of sales - possibly leading to the purchase of books straight from authors doing publishing on demand.

Thus, the complete revolution in, or possibly the end of, the mainstream publishing industry. Boom!

Yes, there are some leaps here. PoD means next to no editing, lots of crap, and no distribution. Personally, I'd hire an editor, publish my books, and market the crap out of them. Hey, I would already be spending $75 a pop to lick some agent's boot soles. Why not invest that money in my own project rather than putting it in the agent's pocket with no chance of a sale?

I'm no insider, but from my view the entire industry is sitting on a house of cards anyway. Andrew Zack probably won't get his way, but hey, I could be wrong.

In case I am, I guess I'll start saving.

Abby