Will your agent help you revise? (& other Qs about author-agent relationships) 🤝

Answering all your burning questions about working with an agent

Getting an agent is a huge step in an author’s publishing journey. It takes a lot of hard work to get to this point — you’ve polished your manuscript, perfected your query package, and sent it to (likely) dozens of literary agents, and now all of your hard work, patience, and resilience has finally paid off. But what happens next? What does the agent-author relationship look like? And, importantly, what do you do if it’s not meeting your expectations?

Today, I’m covering some common questions I get about the author-agent relationship, so you can feel better prepared for what to expect after you get an offer of representation.

Here are the questions we’ll discuss:

• Do agents provide editorial feedback?

• Can you break up with your agent?

• Should you mention your previous agent in your new queries?

• What if you want to branch out into a genre your agent doesn’t represent?

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Do agents provide editorial feedback?

The best literary agents combine business acumen with a creative mindset. They’re part talent scout, part salesperson, and part creative, and they are very invested in storytelling and craft. Many agents are editorially focused, which means that when they sign you on, the first thing you're going to do with them is work through revisions on your manuscript. They're going to come to the table with ideas of how to strengthen your book to put it in the best position to appeal to publishers. Many agents act as a developmental editor in that way and will provide editorial notes on your story.

That doesn't mean you're not going to do more revisions with your editor at the publishing house, but the goal is to get the manuscript as close to publication-ready as possible before going on submission, and your agent will help you get it to that point.

It is a sliding scale, so some agents are more editorially minded than others. If it is important to you to have an agent who is editorial focused, I recommend having that conversation with them when you hop on the phone to discuss representation. This is typically the first step an agent will take before offering representation.

During that conversation, you should ask them: