A few days ago it occurred to me that literary agents and university professors are very similar to each other. As a university professor, I receive a lot of emails from prospective applicants, although I don’t sit on the admissions committee. Many of them come across as very eager, and sometimes truly desperate to attend a graduate program in the US. I am sure writers cold-querying agents can come across as desperate too.
Some students really do not have what it takes to succeed in a doctoral program, just as some writers should remain unpublished. Also, some students – especially those who are already at my institution but want to attend a more prestigious university – ask for recommendation letters that they don’t always deserve; for them, it doesn’t really matter if their praise is overblown, as long as they get in, and some writers would gladly be represented by literary agents who don’t feel strongly about their project, as long as they can convince an editor somewhere to publish the book. But just as my credibility to recommend more deserving students to the same program later will be decreased if I write “not great” students dithyrambic recommendations, an agent will have more difficulties attracting attention to an excellent book if she oversold another author of hers.
Also, both literary agents and university professors get little credit for the job they do, but their “clients” (writers or students) often want them to do even more. In the worst case, the writer would like the agent to work side by side to help him improve a book that won’t have the agent’s name on it. In the worst case again, the (doctoral) student would like the professor to guide her so closely in her research that you might argue the professor is writing her dissertation for her. That would be a lot more convenient for the student, and lead to the papers being accepted in more prestigious journals. But the professor already has a PhD. She doesn’t need a second one.
It’s a lot of effort to ask of a literary agent who only gets 15% of royalties and very little recognition outside the acknowledgement page that she should take such an active role in shaping a book. Making comments, sure – just like the professor makes comments on the doctoral student’s papers before she feels it is ready to be submitted for publication. But just as the professor shouldn’t be expected to write the proofs for the student, the literary agent can’t fix the plot or line-edit the whole book from beginning to end. Because, just as advising the student represents only one commitment of the professor among many, the literary agent has other authors to represent as well.
One thing that is different is that students rarely place their whole sense of self into getting a PhD, but many people querying agents do view writing as a big part of their identity, so the despair in those cold queries must be far stronger. Students who apply to a doctorate program are about to graduate college; those who apply to college are about to graduate high school. They do have qualifications – maybe not adequate for admission at a specific institution, but at least adequate for admission somewhere. Because writers don’t need a MFA or any sort of formal degree to query agents, some will be a lot better prepared than others to succeed in the literary world. Dealing with those query writers who are not well-prepared and may not even write well must be very disheartening to the agents, especially when it means so much to the writers to become published.
But we know how the story ends: the literary agent becomes well-established, stops accepting cold queries and no longer has to deal with writers who don't come to her recommended by a client or with the stamp of approval of a prestigious MFA degree. Most professors, though, continue to advise doctoral students of all kinds - super-stars who graduate in four years and strugglers who leave ABD [All But Dissertation] after eight - until the end of their career.
