Secret Agents?

Posted by Colin Harvey Jun 14, 2009

My friend Sharon asked this morning why there are so few British literary agents with a web presence, which got me to thinking....actually, I think the real question is, why are there so many American ones?

There are five times as many people in the US as in the UK, so logically there should be five times as many literary agents, which does seem to be the case. When magazines like Vector list British agents, they are usually in clumps of about ten or a dozen, often the same agents. But to substantiate Sharon's question, many of them will only take hard-copy submissions, and even finding out that simple fact is often tricky. British literary agents do seem to be harder to find on the web.

Partly this has to do with trending. Britain tends to be now where the US was between two to five years ago, although the gap is narrowing as the world shrinks. And at a time when much of the US was already on-line, then new Prime Minister Tony Blair was promising in 1997 that every household should have internet access.

Which is another reason why US agents are so much more web-present; their telecoms industry is far more cut-throat than the UK's, with its lingering legacy of Post Office Telecoms, and 'free-market' competitors intent on keeping prices as high as possible. In the US local calls are free, so web access costs are minimal.

Then there's geography. The US is far more spread out, and with three different time zones, it's hardly surprising that first e-mail and then the internet caught on so quickly . New York and Boiston are near-neighbours in terms US but are only fifty miles closer than Bristol and Leeds, which exist at 'opposite ends' of the UK.

Not only is it far easier to see everyone one needs to in the UK, there are also far fewer cons; in the US no agent can attend all the cons each year, so a higher-profile web presence is essential. And being that much closer, they're much easier to attend.

Population; trending; telecoms; geography; workload. Five reasons why British Literary Agents may have a lower web presence than many American ones. Which is grossly unfair to the good ones, like the Zeno Agency, Mic Cheetham and John Jarrold ....

We Brits work on quality, not quantity...