Absurdity

[Katie-Ellen]

Someone's asking in a writer's community on LinkedIn:

Wait for this.....

'How can a first time novelist evade predatory literary agents?'

The answer is surely, em, quite easily?

 

[AgentPete]

Agents make money for the client... even in this weird day and age. The money flows thru the agent, to the client. Anything else is eyebrow-raising...

 

[Alistair Roberts]

Well that's certainly different!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Predatory agents....she wishes....luxury

 

[Richard Sutton]

Always remember there are fewer honeybees than flies. You want to draw the first, not the latter. It takes time and luck. I'm still waiting, too.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Quite. 'She', meaning the lady who said that.

 

[K.J. Simmill]

I know someone who fell prey to hill and hill. They asked for a small fee for copying etc as a one off payment, I think she said it was about twenty five pound. She got fortnightly updates about who it had been submitted to and the progress. After six months she even receieved word of an interested party who they were meant to get an answer from this publisher the day the agency vanished. She contacted the apparently interested party only to find they had never had anything.
They were quite convincing, they even wrote dust jacket synopsis.
She had looked into them and they had seemed legitimate, but she was new to the world of writing. Since it didn't seem a lot she was happy to pay it.
Sadly after this she hasn't written anything since.