At the moment, the publishing business refers to a rather risky and having a long payback period. At the same time the publishing house is always interested in talented writers who can bring money to this publishing house. The problem is that finding a good writer today is particularly difficult – a huge number of graphomaniacs imagine themselves to be the greatest writers, publishing houses receive a myriad of manuscripts, of which not even one percent will be acceptable. There is a problem on the other hand – because of the considerable number of applications coming to publishing houses, a good manuscript by a novice writer is often left unattended, and editors are forced to look through too much waste paper. Hence the need for literary agents – these people are intermediaries between writers and publishers, but they take on the responsibility to review, evaluate and even revise manuscripts, they select promising works, and then send them to the publisher who will be interested in them with the highest probability.
Many such firms work entirely remotely because they don’t have to accept clients in their office (or, rather, they can do without it, at least in the early stages). Even agency employees can work from home. Writers today find agencies (or agencies find writers) on the Internet, and negotiations with publishers take place on their premises, which saves the entrepreneur from having to maintain an office. As a last resort, it can be set up at home or simply rent a small space in some bedroom community of the city. But there is another difficulty – today it is advisable to open a literary agency in major cities, where there are many publishers (it is probably only cities with a population of one million or more, or at least the large regional centers), having previously studied the situation with publishers in their region, you can understand whether it makes sense to open a representative office. But no matter where the agency works, he almost certainly will have to work throughout the country, because even when working, for example, in Moscow to miss cooperation with St. Petersburg and even regional publishers is not worth it. Hence, it turns out that agents have to constantly travel on business trips, some of them may work only in their own region, but the rest will almost certainly spend a lot of time on the road. Thus, opening a representative office is not a necessity, but simply a way to do business in a more organized way.
Here it is quite difficult to give exact figures. It should be noted that the office is not only a representative function, sometimes it is really necessary to have equipped workplaces for all employees (for example, if the agency offers writers also editorial services). It is possible to equip an office for a relatively small amount of money – within a hundred thousand for a full-fledged representative office, but usually this figure is several times less.
Now we need to go into a little more detail about what exactly needs to be done in order for the agency to be successful. At present, the services of literary agencies are turning to a relatively small number of people, many novice writers prefer to start working directly with the publisher, that is, send the manuscript immediately there. In most cases, they don’t even get a response. Sooner or later almost every beginning writer thinks about seeking help from professionals. And here it is necessary to distinguish two categories of people – those who want to publish at the expense of publishing houses and those who have decided to publish a book on their own. There are advantages and disadvantages in both cases of promoting a work (for example, publishing at their own expense – not only the cost and risk of not paying them back, but also often reducing the chances of cooperation with publishing houses, because the publisher is interested in editing the manuscript, not in getting the finished book). There are a huge number of contests for aspiring writers today, but they all rarely effectively promote the work of aspiring writers, and only an agent can really help promote a book. He has to work with both those who want to publish a book at their own expense and those who are willing to pay for it. Let’s look at the first option.
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