Agents

I. Do you need an agent
Figuring out whether or not you need an agent is about determining what you want to accomplish as a writer. Do you:

A. Write purely for your own enjoyment, or just want a book in print for friends/family, and yourself?
Then you don't need an agent. If you want a book in print for friends and family, you can do that through a vanity press. The books will be a little expensive, but much less of a hassle than trying to find an editing company to put it out for you. Also, if you go through a vanity press, you have more control. A publishing company has to spend money to put your book out, so they decide what your cover should look like, and they'll tell you changes that they think you need to make. Vanity presses make their money on people who want to see their book in print, so they let you do whatever you want to your book.

B. Want to share your work with the world?
Then you might want to get an agent. There are a lot of publishing companies out there, and very few of those companies accept unagented materials. An agent might be able to get your work into the hands of people who specialize in distributing the kind of thing you do. But the real questions for you are what exactly you write, and what you consider to be 'getting it out to the world.' There are companies out there who do highly specialized work, and those might be perfect for you. Then again, you might be working on something so ecclectic that nobody really knows what to do with it. In that case, an agent really can't help you. And if you aren't concerned with money, just putting your work on the kind of website that attracts the readers you're looking for may be the fastest, easiest way to do what you want done.

C. Want to write for a living?
You probably need an agent. Every year hundreds of thousands of new titles come out. If you want to attract a readership big enough to support yourself, you're going to need to put your book with the right editor at the right time, and unless you've spent years working at a publishing house, you probably don't know the best time and place.

D. Want to be on the best seller's list/get rich writing?
You need an agent. Not just an agent, you need a good agent. You probably also need a personal assistant and someone to do your P.R., but I'd suggest recruiting a few family members for that. Not because those jobs aren't important, but because hiring non-family members can get expensive.

II. What does an agent do?
A. Opens doors
1. Knows people: publishers deal with massive numbers of submissions every day. Everybody in the country thinks that they have at least one good book in them, and they all submit that book over and over again. Editors get jaded, fast. They have to get through a giant stack of manuscripts every day, and finding some small problem that lets them discard a manuscript basically means that they have one last thing to do. We're not people, to them, we're just another job. Agents, on the other hand, are people. Often they're people that the editor knows. When writer 527 says that he's just finished the next Harry Potter, and his mom agrees, that means less than nothing. When John, that guy who likes the same books as the editor, says that he just read a manuscript that gave him that same tingling feeling as Harry Potter, that actually does mean something.
2. Knows what's hot: I know what you're thinking. You know what's hot right now too. True, but the waiting list to get your manuscript read by a company that doesn't require agented materials is, oh, six months to a year. Do you know what's going to be hot in six months? Me neither. And, I'll admit, neither does an agent. But an agent has access to editors RIGHT NOW. So if something is hot right now, and you've written that something, they can get it looked at, RIGHT NOW!

B. Smooths out edges
1. Agents (good agents) come from the editing world. They know what editors are looking for. I'm not talking about what's hot and what's not, I'm talking about keywords that make an editor quit reading, or focus harder. They know what a good query letter looks like, and they know how to get the right people to pay attention. Basically, they know the right kind of giftwrap to put around your manuscript.
2. Different editors want different things, and emphasizing different aspects of your book may make you more appealing to one person than the other.

C. Knows about contracts
1. Publishers are, as a rule, looking out for themselves. They will be happy to take as many of your rights as they can, even if they have no idea what to do with them, because they know that if they have them, and someone else wants them, they can make money. Some of the clauses in their contracts are written in stone, others are penciled onto tissue. Agents know which is which, and they know which rights are worth fighting for.
2. Agents make their money based on how much you make, so it is in their best interest to make certain that contracts favor you as much as possible.

III. What do you need to know/do if you're trying to sell a book without an agent?
A. Where to submit
1. Preditory publishing companies, how to spot them/avoid them
2. How to find editors interested in what you write
3. Which publishing companies are interested in what you write
B. Contract information
1. Know what kind of lawyer to have looking it over
2. Know what rights you've signed away, and when/if you get them back
IV. How to find an agent
A. Telling the good from the bad
1. MONEY ALWAYS FLOWS TO THE AUTHOR
If an agent wants you to pay them, they are not a good agent. Agents get a percentage of the money you make.
2. Agents never start out as agents: The job of an agent is to know the industry. The publishing side of the industry. The only way that they'll know everything they should know is if they've been in the publishing side of the industry before they became an agent. They need to know names, they need to know phone numbers. They need to have personal relationships. Period.
3. Even an agent who knows the field might in fact be useless. There are two basic approaches to agenting, the first is to find people that you believe in, and try to connect them to people who can help them get as far as they can get in the industry. The second approach is to sign as many people as possible, do virtually nothing for them, and hope that one of them makes it on their own before they dump you as an agent. Get an agent who returns your calls (don't call them every day, or anything, but check up now and then) find out what they're doing for you, and try to work with them. If you find out, after a month or two, that they don't really want to work with you, then you don't really want to work with them.
B. Finding an agent you can work with
There are jobs in this world that you can slug through without getting excited: rignt now I stock shelves at night. Whether I'm happy or sad, excited or bored, the shelves still get stocked, and frankly the effect on the world as a whole is pretty minimal. Agenting is not like that. An agent is a salesman. He/she is trying, not simply to get people to talk to you, but to get people to INVEST in you. An agent who isn't excited about your work isn't likely to sell it.