A quote of the day from a book agent

A quote of the day from Tom Dark, an agent with Heacock Hill.

We’re unusually swamped with queries and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the economy and lots of people imagining the way to make a quick buck is to copy some vampire movie and the like (not kidding)…

… from where we stand, the market is glutted with … YA paranormal stories. … there’s so much of it going around. The commercial publishing industry put out 350,000 new titles last year and 93% of them lost money. They didn’t specify what the 7% were that made money, but I rather suspect it was in a “captive audience” area like textbooks. They’re losing billions, we know that much.

We’re both [he and Catt LeBaigue] pleased lately to see that the “Harry Potter” imitators have slowed down, but it’s always somebody they’re imitating. Getting something original published is very difficult—as Rowling’s books were—but flooding the market with imitations does lose money, as we have seen.

He goes on to recommend self-publishing. Of course, self-publishing requires that the author would become the editor, proof-reader, designer and marketeer. And there will be no validation by the peer review before the publishing. I would rather write and let the agent and publisher do the real work.