According to Google, literary agents reject 88 to 96 per cent of queries from authors without reading the manuscript. They then reject 85 to 95 per cent of the manuscripts they do read.

How do you like those odds? If you were gambling money, instead of the hours you spent writing, sacrificing the other things you could have been doing, would you even consider the bet?

In addition, how much time are you willing to spend researching to identify the agents who represent the genre you write in, and then composing a query, which in 300 words or fewer, captures the essence of of a manuscript consisting of anywhere between 80,00 words to 200,000? The agent will spend an avarage of 30 seconds reading your query. And then how long are you willing to wait for the answer? The average time it takes for authors to find an agent is 6 months to a year. And then the average time between a publisher signing an author and the book’s release to the market is from 1 to 2 years.

How much contol do you want? Only the top selling authors like Stephen King have contracts that allow consultation over the cover, for instance. The publisher, not the author, decides how much money and human effort will be allocated to marketing and publicity. And your book will hardly sell at all if you don’t spend a lot of your own time and at least some of your own money on marketing.

How much money do you hope to make? According to Google, the average traditional publisher advance is $3,000, skewed way upwards by the 1 per cent who sell 50,000 to 100,000 books, while 85% of books fail to sell 5,000 copies which is considered break-even. And roughly 15 percent sell fewer that 12 copies! Not a dollar is paid for royalties until the book earns out the advance. Then subtract 15% for the agent’s fee.

Clearly, this is not a business model that works for most authors.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Once upon a time, tradtional publishers answered only to themselves. Now they are part of massive national or international conglomerates whose only focus is on profit. That is a very different model from the organizations whose only focus was on bringing books to market. Nobody went to work for a publishing house who wasn’t in love with books. I know because I grew up in the 1950’s in Riverside, Connecticut where Mr Harcourt, Mr Brace, Mr. Farrar and a high ranking executive of Doubleday were neighbors and my parents friends, and also because my wife worked for Doubleday for a short time. They came to dinner at our house. Guess what they talked about. Books- why they just had to publish a book they admired. They were way more willing to take a chance on an author than the big five publishers are today. Years ago, in 2005, I asked Tom Jenks, who had recently left Scribners, where he’d edited many big name writers to found Narrative Magazine, if my novel, Saving Miss Oliver’s, which he had just finished editing for me, would find a publisher. His response: “Ten years ago in a heartbeat.” (More about that in a later post not yet written)

I believe that this change from focus on books to focus exclusively on profit will continue until most serious authors will abandon traditional publishing entirely. Many serious authors already have. Forget all the amateur writers who put up a book on Amazon that nobody but their mothers will read. Think, instead, about the 48.8 per cent of committed, professional author publishers writers who make at least $20,00 per year and the 20% who reach six figures. They make more money for each book sold than traditional publisher pay for the simple reason they don’t have to share the profit with a publisher. Amazon will pay up to 70 percent of list price minus prduction cost for a paperback. Traditional publisher royalties range from 8 to 15 per cent.

Whatever doesn’t work any more in whatever field inevitably is abandoned in favor of whatever does work.

It’s like a law of nature.