What happens once you’ve got an agent?

This came up as an AMA question, but I think it deserves a full blog post as there’s rather a lot of ground to cover. I’m going to try to condense it as best I can.

Assuming that you’ve signed with an agent who wants to represent your first novel, what happens now?

Preparing your manuscript for submission

Firstly, you’ll need to get your manuscript ready for submission to publishers. This won’t be unlike the process you probably went through to get your manuscript ready for submission to agents, only this time you have extra help.

Your agent probably talked to you about their editorial vision for your manuscript when they first offered you representation, so you’ll already have an idea of the changes they’d like you to make. Once you’ve signed with them you’ll discuss these in more detail (unless your initial conversation was detailed enough to cover everything). Depending on the agent and the manuscript, you might be given a long editorial report, line edits, or sometimes just a few brief notes to work from.

At this time your agent will discuss timelines with you for getting the edits finished. Depending on how much work they’ve asked you to do, they’ll probably have an idea of when they’d like to submit your book to publishers. There are a few key times throughout the year during which agents might prefer to submit particular novels – usually around the big book fairs. So they’ll discuss this with you and set a deadline for the first batch of changes.

Depending on the manuscript, your work may go through several rounds of edits, so the process described above might happen multiple times over. It’s not unusual for agents to work on their books for months, sometimes even years, before sending them out to publishers. It’s hugely dependent on the book and on how much time the author is able to dedicate to working on it. Eventually, once you and your agent are happy with the manuscript, you’ll begin the submission process.

Submitting your manuscript to publishers

Once you’ve finished editorial work on your book, the onus moves away from you and onto your agent. They will now put together a submission list of editors who they think will love your book, and they’ll write a pitch that will get these editors excited about it.

It’s important to mention also that your agent will have been pitching your book to editors in person from the moment they signed you up. A big part of an agent’s job is keeping in touch with editors who buy books in the genres they represent, so that they know who to submit to once a manuscript is ready. As such by the time they sit down to write a pitch for your book, they’ve probably already told twenty people how wonderful it is over coffee.

When your agent’s submission package is ready, they’ll let you know and then send it off. From that point onwards it’s a waiting game – editors have loads of books to get through so it can take weeks (sometimes months) for them to get back to agents. Every so often a publishing house will bid on a book within days of receiving a submission but this is quite rare, and mainly happens with non-fiction books since proposals are quicker to read than full manuscripts. For novels, you would normally be waiting at least a couple of weeks before hearing anything.

Selling your book

Once a submission has been sent, your agent will regularly check in with the editors they sent it to. As soon as one editor says they want to make an offer on it, your agent will contact all of the other editors who are considering the book and let them know about this, so that they know to hurry up and make their offers, too.

It’s not unusual for a book to be bid on by only one publishing house. If this is the case, then your agent will negotiate to get the best possible deal with that publisher, and then liaise with you about the terms they’ve agreed. If you’re happy with them, then they’ll confirm with the publisher and get started on the contract.

Sometimes, if it’s convenient, your agent might arrange for you to meet up with interested editors before they make their offers, so that you can see if you’ll get on with them. But this isn’t always possible or necessary.

If more than one publisher wants to buy your book, then your agent might conduct an auction. Auctions consist of agents asking all the different interested publishers to send them their offers for your book, with the idea being that competition between publishing houses will drive up the value of the advance. Sometimes auctions consist of several rounds, with the under-bidders either dropping out or raising their offer each time. And sometimes an agent will conduct a ‘best bids’ auction, where they’ll ask the publishers to come in with their highest possible bid in the first round, and then choose between those offers.

Auctions are really exciting for agents (and authors!) because having multiple publishers interested in a book means that a lot of people are confident it will sell a lot of copies. Although a hotly-contested auction is no indication that a book will do well, it’s always nice when lots of people are excited about a client’s book.

The other possible type of offer you might get on your book is a pre-empt. If a publisher is really excited about a book and wants to get it off the market quickly in order to avoid it going to auction (where they may lose out on it to another publishing house) they sometimes make an offer that they think is significantly better than what other publishers will offer. At this point they’ll tell your agent that it’s a pre-emptive offer, and set a short deadline by which you need to accept or decline.

Working with your publisher

Once you’ve agreed a book deal with a publisher, the editing process starts all over again. Your new editor will give you an editorial report to work from, and set you a deadline by which they’d like you to finish the edits. As with the previous editing stage, you may go back-and-forth a few times until everybody is happy with the final draft.

After the final structural edits are complete and approved by your editor, your manuscript will be sent for copy-editing. This is the stage where any grammatical mistakes are picked up, and the text is checked for inconsistencies (e.g. timeline or dialect conflicts). Around this time your publisher will also start sharing cover designs with you, and begin their marketing and publicity campaigns.

Eventually, after lots of hard work, your book will be published! There’s a lot more to the publishing process than I’ve been able to cover in this final section, but I hope this gives you a broad idea of what happens after you get an agent.

Of course getting your first book published isn’t the end of the road – agent/client partnerships can last whole careers and multiple book deals, with new challenges cropping up all the time. The above is a brief glimpse into the start of that relationship.