The rules for American literary agents changed yesterday.
On 1 September the Association of American Literary Agents adopted a revised Canon of Ethics, the second update in four years. Agents may now sell clients and non-clients paid services beyond editing. Marketing, publicity, web design, and in some circumstances editorial work, provided representation is not made conditional on buying them. Agents may also enter into publishing agreements with their own clients, with consent.
I have queried between 150 and 200 agents over four years. Not one has offered me representation. Under the new rules, any of them can sell me a website.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this piece is bitter and the easy version is wrong.
Why they did it
The stated reason is honest and I believe it. Authors are asking agents to do more than sell rights, because more authors are publishing outside the traditional system and carrying the marketing themselves. The AALA’s president put it as members needing flexibility to meet evolving needs.
The harder reason is in the association’s own numbers. Jane Friedman, writing on 5 August in a piece called Agent Business Models May Be Shifting, points to the AALA’s 2026 member survey. Around 39 percent of agents reported annual income from agenting under fifty thousand dollars. Twenty-one percent reported under twenty-five thousand.
That is the whole story in two figures. Fifteen percent of an advance that never arrives is fifteen percent of nothing, and a fifth of the profession is earning less from agenting than a junior office job pays.
So this is not a scheme. It is an industry adjusting to the fact that its old economics stopped working.
But adjustments have consequences, and this one has a specific consequence for people in my position.
The gatekeeper is now also a vendor
For as long as I have been querying, the relationship had one shape. An agent either wanted my book or did not. There was nothing to buy and nothing to sell. The only thing they could take from me was time.
That is no longer the only possible relationship. An agent who does not want to represent my memoir can now offer to sell me publicity for the books I published myself. Legitimately, within the rules, with no deception involved.
And I am exactly the customer for it. Self-published, unagented, seven books out or waiting, no marketing budget and no distribution. The change is aimed at people like me, and it is aimed at us because there are now a great many of us.
That is the part I keep turning over. This revision is, read plainly, an acknowledgement that independent authors changed publishing enough that the gatekeepers have restructured around us. We did not get through the gate. The gate opened a shop.
Where it gets uncomfortable
The safeguards are real. Representation cannot be conditional on buying services. Agents still cannot charge a client for editing done to prepare a manuscript for submission. Reading fees remain prohibited, and agents cannot take money directly from authors for evaluating work. On referrals, the AALA requires that members act in the client’s best interests and disclose any payment they receive, and it maintains its prohibition on secret profits and on soliciting referral fees.
Friedman’s summary of the effect is the sharpest I have read. With the association’s blessing, agents can now earn money in whatever way they choose, provided the arrangements are disclosed and they do not directly ask for payment in exchange for representation.
Her concerns are the ones that matter: referral fees, conflicts of interest, subtle pressure, and the power imbalance between an author and the person deciding whether to represent them.
That last one is the whole thing. The rule says representation cannot be contingent on purchase. It cannot say what happens in a room where one person has something the other has wanted for four years, and also has an invoice.
Nobody has to behave badly for that to distort a decision. The querying writer will supply the pressure themselves.
What I would check before signing anything
Not advice, just what I intend to do.
- Ask directly whether the agency sells services, and which ones. Before submitting, not after an offer.
- Ask whether anyone at the agency receives a referral fee for recommending an outside provider. They are required to disclose it, so ask early and in writing.
- If an agent offers to publish my work rather than sell it, treat that as a publishing contract and read it as one. It is not agenting. Different document, different lawyer, different question.
- Keep the two conversations separate in time. Never discuss buying anything in the same conversation as representation.
- Remember that AALA membership is voluntary and the canon binds members. A great many agents are not members at all.
The thing I actually think
I am not angry about this. The people who wrote these rules are trying to keep a profession alive that has been financially squeezed for a decade, and they wrote real safeguards into it. When a fifth of your members earn under twenty-five thousand a year, you either change the rules or you lose the members.
But something has changed and it is worth naming. For four years I have been trying to be chosen. Starting yesterday, I am also a market.
Those are not the same relationship, and an author who does not notice the difference is going to have a bad time.
The gate is still there. It is just that the people standing at it now have something to sell you while you wait.
