POD-dy Mouth sheds a bit more insight into the agent rejection thing — specifically why an agent would love your novel but still decide he/she wouldn’t be able to sell it:
What you, aspiring writer, are forgetting, is that while an agent may sell (as an example) mysteries and yours is a stellar one, he/she may know that his/her editorial contacts will not go for your particular mystery for some offhand reason. Agents, to varying degrees, sell to the same editors over and over. Examples: Jenny Bent (Trident) sells regularly to Denise Roy (S&S), Dorian Karchmar (William Morris) sells regularly to Claire Wachtel (William Morrow), Elaine Koster sells regularly to Carrie Feron (William Morrow), and so forth. The point is these agents know what these editors want . . . specifically. So if your novel’s protagonist happens to be a coke addict and Agent A’s contacts aren’t much for characters with substance abuse issues, you’re out of luck, no matter how deftly written your novel may be.
Interesting. So to some degree, agents act as scouts for particular editors . . . you learn something new every day.
There may be another reality here. And this is based mostly on my gut feeling mixed with the experience of trying and failing to get published. (Hopefully it won’t sound too adversarial.)
I believe agents today are the product of the first round of globalization. With the influx of “new-media” coinciding with the downfall of book prices over the past twenty years, publishers were probably at the forefront of corporate outsourcing. Many of the agents today are a product of that outsourcing. Yes, agents sell to the same publisher over and over – which has lead to something quite profound.
Unoriginality
There is proof of this in Hollywood, theatre and throughout the blogosphere. I believe that if you write well and are ORIGINAL a publisher will be interested – they have to be today! Unfortunately, agents have incorrectly taken on the middle-man role and, in turn, become deciders-of-fate, which has never had anything to do with either creative writing or writing original stories. They have worked too long in cohort with the same publishers that outsourced them. Agents are overwhelmed.
I’m not trying to blame agents for anything here. Some of them are very good, wise and have given me great advice. But as they often tell me, in the end it’s about business. When is the publishing industry gonna wake up to this?
-tgs-
And yet some claim editors move around a lot or leave the industry entirely…so what do the agents do when their buddy is no longer available?