Do I Have to Find an Agent?

One of the things that scares me about my writing pursuit is that I might have to choose an agent someday. The more I learn, the less I like the thought of that. Ideally, you want an agent that you can get along with, but you also want someone who can stand behind your work. But when I look at some of the agents out there that seem to be great agents and are practically everyone’s short list, I am left saying “No for me.”


I think that what scares me is that I see a lot of ecumenism in Christian publishing. I suppose it is to be expected because the publishers aren’t going to make money if they are too selective about which authors they choose and the conferences want to be as all inclusive as possible. We start to see a problem when we see that you can go to a Christian writing conference and they attempt to handle it like a church service. I’ve even heard of some conferences doing the communion thing. To me, that just says that the people running the conferences want to play church. What disturbs me is that there aren’t more people taking issue with it.


With some of the agents I’ve seen, they don’t like it when someone opposes their ecumenical views. In other words, Christian has a right to speak, unless you hold non-ecumenical views. If I were looking for an agent right now, I don’t know where I’d look. There are several that I like as people, but I’m not sure that we would agree enough for me to be comfortable with their willingness to promote a book written with my point of view.

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