Having An Agent Does Not Mean An Automatic Sale

I do believe there are authors out there that have it in their head that once you get an agent, your book's next stop is the bookstore and the public. As much as we would all love this to be true, it is far from it. There are simply times when, no matter how hard we try, no matter how many meetings we have with editors, that book simply will not sell.

Agents do the same thing that publishers do when acquiring books. We are taking a gamble on a project and an author. There are no promises with anything in publishing. Sometimes books come out of the blue and do amazingly well. In other cases, books we had a lot of hopes on, completely tank! We all don't like that last one.

I know that I am not the only agent who has blogged about this. There are a lot of times when we completely exhaust all of our resources trying to get a single project to a publisher. It is, in cases like this, that we have to simply put the project aside and work with something new.

Authors need to consider doing the same thing. As much as you really like a particular project, sometimes the story just will not sell. That's OK! Don't worry about it. During the process of writing it and attempting to market it, you hopefully learned a few things along the way.

And that project we put to the side. Sometimes we can bring it back later. In reality, offering it "life support" may not be in your best interest as a writer, or for us as an agent. That time can certainly be better spent looking forward.