Are Literary Agents Really Worth Their Commission? | Digital Book World

The results indicate that the greatest advantage from having an agent may accrue to authors when they traditionally publish. Authors who only traditionally published and hybrid authors both saw substantially higher median advances and total earnings on their most recent traditionally published books when they had agent representation. As I reported in Part I of this series on agents, the authors we surveyed were unsure whether agents were helpful to authors self-publishing their work. In contrast to the results for traditionally published books, there was no advantage for authors who were only indie-published from having an agent, while hybrid authors saw higher median earnings on their most recent self-published books but not by the same margin. In terms of annual writing income, agented authors reported higher annual writing income, only if their publishing history included traditionally published works, either alone or in concert with self-published ones.