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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 3438446" data-attributes="member: 5171">While you may be writing humorously, this is an insulting statement to a great many agents who bust their butts trying to get good writers published. It's also largely inaccurate. There are people who call themselves agents who are in fact evil fleecers, but by using "Preditors & Editors" (see below) and other sites, along with a few simple rules, you can pretty reliably weed out the bad ones.The simple rule of "They only get paid when they sell your book, and they don't refer you to an editing service" will answer the question for you right there most of the time.Just to play devil's advocate... two points:1) I'm not sure what your qualificataions for "the bomb" are, but I'd recommend an agent for anyone who's serious about their work. It's not a vital first step, but it's a step you'll likely want to take if you move from "occasional writer" to "serious novelist". If you walk through the local bookstore and look at the books in the F&SF shelves, it's a safe bet that 99% of the novels on those shelves are written by people who have agents -- or by people who didn't have agents when they wrote that book, but do now. (And the only reason I'm saying 99% and not 100% is because I'm sure there's one or two people who self-rep, because they have a strong contract-law background.)2) If you don't consider your work "the bomb", why are you writing? I know that modesty is appealing in a public forum, but to be completely honest, if I didn't think that my writing was good enough to sit on the shelves at Borders (or on the way to being that good), I'd probably hang up my keyboard.I disagree with this, but your mileage may vary. I hope that the POD gig works out for you!My experience has been like that of the other folks who posted big lists. Write, edit, submit. A couple of addendums:1) I recommend submitting to both an agent and a publisher. You can submit to one of each at the same time. It used to be that publishers very rarely looked at unsolicited manuscripts, and agents were a sort of first boundary -- the unofficial slush readers for the publishers. (That is to say, getting an agent was an indication to the publisher that your work was good enough to be worth looking at.) That's still true, but it's actually getting a lot harder to get an agent these days, and a lot of people are getting a novel accepted and THEN getting an agent (either for the first novel, or after they get the first one published).2) With that in mind, there are several major markets that accept unsolicited manuscripts. I don't have an agent, and I currently have novels sitting with Tor, Daw, Baen, and Roc. The wait times are very long (measured in years, not months), but there is a chance -- every year, Tor publishes novels that they pulled from the slush pile (the pile of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts).(Currently, the Tor and Baen novels have me cautiously optimistic -- the Tor editor asked for the full novel after seeing the first few chapters, and the Baen novel was passed up to the senior editors. Daw hasn't read my piece yet, and I just submitted my most recent novel to Roc a few days ago.)3) The one step I'd emphasize from ha-gieden's post is "write another manuscript". That doesn't mean giving up on the existing one. With wait times measured in years, the best thing you can possibly do for your career is to keep writing, keep getting feedback from friends and fellow writers, and keep improving. Even if your current novel never sells, it might well give you the writing practice you need to write the one that WILL sell.Also, most major publishers sign authors to multi-book contracts, and with a new writer, they often want proof that you aren't a one-hit wonder. So they could very well accept your book contingent upon you having another book proposal that interests them -- and having one or more additional novels already completed is a great way to keep the wheels turning.4) Finally, if you don't want to shell out money for the Writer's Market books, don't. You can get good information that's more up-to-date by visiting one of the following sites:<a href="http://www.ralan.com/" target="_blank">http://www.ralan.com/</a>   -- a market listing with a good list of book publishers<a href="http://www.agentquery.com/" target="_blank">http://www.agentquery.com/</a>  -- a large list of agents<a href="http://www.invirtuo.cc/prededitors/" target="_blank">http://www.invirtuo.cc/prededitors/</a>  -- a wonderful list of reputable and disreputable agentsI say all this with no novel publications of my own (although I've got about ten short story sales), so please take all that as the advice of someone else who's on the outside of the market looking in.</blockquote>

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