Represent? Manage? Coach?

Just what does a literary agent do? There are probably as many answers as their are literary agents and literary agencies, but the basics are the same. It is the extras that set one apart from the pack.

REPRESENTING
The basics: a literary agent reads your manuscript and may or may not comment on it. They may or may not offer or recommend editing services for you. If they accept it and put you under contract, they will craft a query letter for you and send that letter to a publisher or to publishers. Once a book is accepted for publication, the literary agent waits for the royalty check and then sends payment to the author for their percentage.


MANAGING
Like other agents, we don't make money until the author does, through royalties. But we believe in hedging our bets. We manage our authors and their unique "brand", doing some things our competitors might not:

Pre-Acceptance/Pre-Publication
Before your book is even accepted by a publisher, we begin marketing you (the author) and establishing your "brand." We recommend the following to you and help you along the way:
1. Author website
2. Author Facebook fan page
3. Author Twitter account
4. Author LinkedIn account
5. Author Google+ account

We also provide you with a unique email address to use for all of the above so that your fans, as they come along, can email you through our super spam filter, eliminating 1) needless spam and 2) the need for your fans to know your personal email address.

Post-Acceptance
When your book has been accepted, we develop a marketing plan that is suitable to you and your lifestyle. Not all authors can work full time to promote their boo. Not all authors can afford outrageous marketing fees. That is why our marketing plan is tailored to the individual author. We recommend and even set up, if necessary:
6. Blog interviews
7. Radio and television interviews
8. K-12 and College classroom visits and readings
9. Newspaper interviews and articles
10. Book review contests on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
11. Book launch parties
12. Book signings at bookstores and other places.
13. Book readings at coffee shops, bars, and other places.

We arrange (at author's expense) for marketing materials like bookmarks, posters, postcards, and buttons to be produced for the author to distribute to build their brand and sell their books.

We encourage our newly-published author to continue to promote themselves through the social media mentioned above and through such things as posting to regular threads in Yahoo! Groups that the author is interested in and/or is the subject matter of the book they just published.

And we continue to promote you, our author, from our own website, Facebook fan page, Twitter stream, LinkedIn status updates, Google+ updates, and press releases on the web, to your local community, and elsewhere.

We also encourage your publisher, through phone conversations and emails, to go further than they normally do by entering your book and your book's cover design in contests for such things.

The more we promote our authors and help them get noticed and build a fan base in their local communities and nationwide, the more money the author makes and, thus, the more money we make.

COACHING
But we also coach our authors throughout their writing, waiting, and publishing processes. We regularly inform all of our authors about free and fee-pay contests and competitions. We also regularly update them on current calls for submissions for anthologies, literary journals and magazines, and ezines. We believe that A) a writer gets to be a better writer if they write more, B) a writer who publishes short stories will be in a better position to convince a publisher to publish their books, and C) a writer that is happy for us for one book's run through the publishing cycle (and our role in the process) will extend their contract with us, which only benefits both parties.

So the question to ask when looking for a literary agent is: Do I want an agent to represent me, manage me, or coach me? Your answer will determine just who you choose to be your agent.