What Does a Literary Agent Do?
Quick answer: A literary agent sells your book to publishers, negotiates contracts and rights, and manages your career, earning a commission on what you earn.
A literary agent represents authors to publishers. Concretely, that means pitching your manuscript to editors, running negotiations when an offer comes, handling the contract's fine print, selling subsidiary rights such as translation and audio, and advising on your career across books. Agents earn a commission on your income, standardly 15 percent of domestic deals and around 20 percent on foreign and film rights, and a legitimate agent never charges you fees.
Picture a professional who knows two hundred editors by taste, knows what each imprint paid for comparable books last year, and gets your manuscript read by people who do not accept unsolicited submissions at all. That access, plus contract expertise most authors lack, is what the commission buys.
Before the sale: shaping and positioning
An agent's work starts well before any submission. Most agents edit: they will send you notes, sometimes through several revisions, until the manuscript is as sellable as they can make it. This is not a courtesy; their income depends on the book's condition. They also position it, deciding which imprints suit it, what comparison titles frame it, and whether it goes out quietly to a handful of editors or widely in the hope of an auction.
Positioning is where a good agent earns years of goodwill in a week. The same novel pitched as literary suspense to one set of editors and book-club fiction to another can meet wildly different money. Authors rarely see this map; agents live on it.
The sale itself: submission, auction, negotiation
The agent sends the manuscript to selected editors with a pitch letter, then manages the replies. If one editor offers, the agent may use that offer to prompt others; if several want it, the book goes to auction, with rounds of bidding or best offers. The agent negotiates the advance, the royalty rates, and, just as important, what the publisher does not get: which rights stay with the author for the agent to sell separately.
Advances arrive in instalments tied to milestones like signing, delivery, and publication, and the agency handles the money, taking its commission and passing the rest to you. If a publisher underpays or a payment goes missing, chasing it is the agent's job, not yours.
After the deal: rights, royalties, and the long game
A book contract is dozens of pages of clauses that outlast the launch: option clauses on your next book, reversion of rights when sales fall, royalty definitions that decide your income for decades. Agents read these for a living and know which clauses publishers will bend. Then comes the rights trade: translation deals at book fairs like Frankfurt, audio editions, and film or television options, each a separate negotiation.
Beyond any single book, an agent advises the career: what to write next, when to change publishers, whether that flat-fee anthology invitation is worth your time. Good agent-author relationships run twenty years and several publishers. The agent is often the only constant.
What an agent does not do
An agent is not a publicist, so they will not book your interviews; not an editor of record, so the publisher's edits still happen; and not a bank, so they cannot advance you money. They also do not sell short stories to magazines as a business, because commission on small sales cannot fund the work. Writers place stories in journals and contests directly, and agents largely enter when a book is in play.
Nor is an agent mandatory for every path. Self-published authors, and authors with small presses that accept direct submissions, work unagented, sometimes hiring a literary lawyer for contracts instead. The agent question is really a question about which market you are selling into.
Spotting the real thing
The rule that filters almost every scam: money flows toward the writer. Legitimate agents earn commission when they sell your work, and charge no reading fees, no marketing fees, no editing packages. Professional bodies publish this as a code of practice, including the Association of American Literary Agents in the US and the Association of Authors' Agents in the UK.
Check a prospective agent's recent sales, which agencies list publicly and databases such as Publishers Marketplace track. An agent with no visible deals, a fee schedule, or a habit of recommending a paid editing service they happen to own is not an agent. They are a business model, and you are the product.
What poets can take from this
- Remember the filter: legitimate agents earn commission on sales and never charge writers fees.
- Query agents only with a finished, revised manuscript if you write fiction; they sell books, not intentions.
- Check an agent's recent sales and client list before submitting; real deals are publicly visible.
- Expect editorial notes from a good agent and treat them as pre-market intelligence, not interference.
- Keep translation, audio, and film rights in mind during any deal; what the publisher does not get, your agent can sell twice.
Try it yourself
Write the one-page pitch letter an agent might send editors about your current project: two paragraphs of story, one of positioning with two comparison titles, one about you. Writing it as the agent, not the author, will show you instantly what your book still lacks.
Questions
How do literary agents get paid?
By commission only: typically 15 percent of your domestic earnings on deals they negotiate, and around 20 percent on foreign, audio, and film deals where co-agents share the work. They are paid when you are paid, from the same cheque.
How hard is it to get a literary agent?
Genuinely hard: established agents receive thousands of queries a year and sign a handful of new clients. Strong query letters, a finished manuscript, and a track record of story credits or contest placings all improve the odds, but persistence across many queries is normal.
Can you sell a book without an agent?
Yes. Many small and independent presses accept direct submissions, and self-publishing needs no permission at all. The large conglomerate publishers, though, mostly read agented submissions only, so the agent question depends on where you want the book to land.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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