Friday, January 21, 2005

NEW AGENT THOUGHTS

I thought you might be interested in what I think makes a good agent. (Obviously I think my new agent passes the test, which is why I'm working with her!)

A good agent should:

a. Know the producers I'm working with personally. Have dealt with them lots of times before and know how to keep negotiations moving smoothly along. Know which producers are straightforward and which are squirrelly. Know which need to be prodded and with which ones prodding is useless. Have a good reputation with producers.

b. Know producers I haven't met yet, and introduce me to them.

c. Know the market value of my work. Know who'd want to hire me or buy my stuff. Know how to position me and my work so people do.

d. Sell me! Convince people who don't know me that I'm worth hiring, and convince the ones who do know me that I'm worth hiring for a lot of money. An agent should always be selling, even after the deal is made. An agent should be saying "you're gonna love this," and then, once the project is moving forward, remind the producer how lucky they are to be working with the writer. Producers live in a world of fear that they've made the wrong choices. They need to be soothed and reassured.

e. Know how to smooth over conflicts between producers and me. I don't plan to have any of these, of course! But there are always creative conflicts, if people care about what they're doing, and creative people can take things personally.

f. Put my needs first. Some agents want to be friends with the producers they're negotiating with, which is fine, until the point where a producer starts to get mad at them for asking so much for their clients. An agent has to be able to side with the client at the potential expense of the relationship with the producer (who will eventually remember that the agent is just doing her job, but in the mean time he'll be grumpy). An agent has to be able to do all this with a maximum of charm and grace, so everyone feels as good about the negotiating experience as possible, given that any dollar the producer pays you is a dollar he no longer has!

9:00 AM

2 Comments:

Thanks for the list of criteria for a good agent! I'm hopefully 3 days away from getting hired (my fingers are crossed anyway), and I figured I'd need to go find myself an agent.

By  Peter, at 12:26 PM  

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the link, and nice to see you blogging again. If your agent has a sister in the business I'd love to meet her.

By  David C. Daniel, at 11:22 PM  

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