Hi Jenn! Can you please share your view on green, yellow, orange, and red flags in agents and/or publishers?
oy, that's a lotta flags, babe. I'll do red, because it has an emoji.
🚩 they charge you money. whether it's a so-called "reading fee" or "editing fee" or whatever, it should not cost you money to have your query considered or to be repped by an agent. we get paid when we sell your book out of the money you earn from that book -- we don't get a thin dime before that! And publishers, same thing - some publishers have very low advances, or even NO advance, and maybe that's fine -- but if they are making YOU pay, that's a major red flag. (If you are going to pay to be published - why not just SELF-PUBLISH and keep all the profits! What are they doing for you that you couldn't do yourself?)
🚩 the head of the agency/publisher has no tangible experience in publishing. A new agent might just not have sales yet, and that's fine if they are at a good, reputable agency -- but if the head of the agency is inexperienced, it's the blind leading the blind! IMO, somebody without many years of experience either as an agent at a good agency, or at least as an editor or rights person or similar position at a good publisher, should not be starting an agency. Full stop. Same with publishers -- if some random person is starting their own publishing company, I would be very dubious unless they clearly have years (DECADES) of relevant experience. "I just really love books!" is not a business plan.
🚩Their website doesn't list books they have worked on, or all the books look like a third grader designed them. Real agents and publishers LOVE to brag about their authors and books. If somebody is saying they should represent you or you should let them publish your book, but you've never heard of any of the other books they've done, they aren't available in regular bookstores, they look like monstrosities, or you can't find evidence of them at all, that's a problem.
🚩They have reached out to you out of the blue, rather than your querying them. Now, IF you, say, have an amazing instagram account where you post beautiful artwork, it would not be weird for an agent to reach out to say that they admire it and to ask if you have an agent. IF you have a story published in The New Yorker or something like that, or some kind of awesome video go viral that would make a great book, or you just won an olympic gold medal and you have an awesome backstory, it would not be particularly weird for an agent or a publisher to reach out and want to chat about that. THAT is NOT out of the blue, that's contacting you for a reason!
HOWEVER. It's still a pretty slim chance that agents/publishers would reach out even then, and it's vanishingly unlikely that any agent or publisher would reach out to you WITHOUT a reason like that. We just don't sign new authors in that way!
There are a LOT of scam emails going around - I literally get them every day for some reason, and I know my clients do, too, so I am guessing authors who are querying get them just as often! Many of these letters purport to be from real publishers or agencies. HOWEVER, they are clearly AI generated, often full of weird effusive praise and strange turns of phrase, the person's name is often misspelled or is different from the email address, which is often just some random gmail address rather than the real domain of a company, the links don't go where they are supposed to go, ETC. These impersonators want to get money out of you, and I guess it must work some of the time, because they aren't stopping or even slowing down!
Green flags would be like... not doing those things? You know, they are just normal? You look them up, they are real, they obviously work on great books that you have heard of and can buy in the bookstore? They have experience and sales and their website is fine and they don't misspell their own name? They don't ask for money, in fact, they want to give YOU money? THOSE ARE GREEN FLAGS.
(I'm sure there are LOTS more red and green flags, but those are biggies. IDK what orange or yellow would be, or at least, I can't think of any right now. If you give me a scenario I can tell you a flag color lol.)
