If you’ve been reading along with me you noticed an agent, R, who made a cameo appearance and then – poof! – disappeared from my narrative. Where did she go? The answer is, I don’t know and as far as I can tell, good riddance.

Websites, blogs and books get written about how to find an agent but few about how hard it can be to get rid of one you are not happy with.

My coauthor and I ended up hiring R as our agent because she was the only agent we contacted. She was the only agent we contacted because she was the only agent any of our friends knew. I think she was willing to sign us because we already had contracts on the table. An (admittedly small) paycheck was guaranteed. But that’s just a guess. I’ll never know.

The first time we spoke with R we concluded our phone conversation and each hung up our extension and I turned to my coauthor. “The woman is a shark,” I said.

I can’t recall why I said that. I don’t recall disliking her. All I am sure of today is that I felt pushed and manipulated, and that I would have bet a lot that I was not the first person who has concluded a conversation with R feeling that way.

“If you’re going to swim in shark-infested waters, don’t you want a shark of your own?” he countered.

When her contract arrived in the mail we quibbled about a few details, mostly on principle since neither of us had ever seen an agent contract before and had no idea what it should say. Then we signed. When she advised us to choose the regional publisher from among our three offers because he was promising the largest advance, we took her advice.

Several months later the cougar book was finished and publication was approaching. R had told us – or at least my records say she told us — that she would market film and anthology rights to our book for us. I began calling her to see how that effort was going. Repeatedly. I mean really. Repeatedly.

The first time I reached her she was lovely, answering breezily — from Greece, if I recall, but perhaps it was Italy — that she was thrilled with how the book had come out. It was a wonderful book. Just as soon as she got back from her travels she’d get started. We waited what seemed an appropriate amount of time for her to “get started,” then I began calling and emailing again. This time she emailed that she’d written a long answer to a shopping list of questions my coauthor and I had generated but it disappeared before she could send it. She’d get back to me when she had more time. Then I think she said her hard drive crashed. Then for several months, as far as I can tell from my records, no calls or emails were returned.

When she finally responded by email, R sounded as tired of my pestering as I had grown of her nonresponsiveness. She explained that she was our lawyer not our agent. It was not her job to promote our book in any way, including marketing the rights we had specifically removed from the publisher’s contract on her advice. She had simply read a contract for us and been paid to do so.

I wanted to believe that we had misunderstood one another. After all, my coauthor and I were both inexperienced authors. Maybe we’d heard what we wanted to hear instead of what she’d actually said. It was hard to imagine that she thought the $1500 she’d been paid (the standard agent’s 15% of a $10K advance) was an appropriate contract lawyer’s fee, but what did we know about media lawyers?  It was just as hard to believe that a lawyer in good standing with the California Bar, which she was, would lie in order to get a measly $1500.

We went back into our notes and contracts to try to understand what had happened. On careful reading the contracts were ambiguous. Our contract with R did in fact call her our lawyer; my notes from our conversations with her had been primarily about her agenting us; our contract with our publisher also called her our agent. Which was she?

I wrote to tell her we wanted to terminate the contract so that we could retain an agent. She wrote back that I’d better hire a lawyer.

Had our shark bitten us? It took a complaint to the California Bar before we got language removed from our publishing contract which had arranged for our royalties to be sent to R so that she could take 15% before sending the balance on to us.

Before I finished editing this post, I googled R and found out that, at least once upon a time, she did act as a media agent. She had clients who seemed very satisfied with her, according to at least one old magazine article I found. I tried to contact R via Facebook (the only contact I could find) to check my old notes with her. I received no response, which is a shame: I will probably never know if the problem was mismatched expectations, poor communication, or if Renee took a paycheck she never intended to fully earn.

And in the end it doesn’t matter. The lesson for me was that no writer is in full control of her fate. Every publishing house, every editor, every agent you sign a piece of paper with becomes a partner in the creation of a book that will ultimately bear your name, implicitly promising readers that you made the decisions, when that simply isn’t the case.

I know of no better reason for a person who hasn’t thought hard yet about why they are interested in traditional publishing to ponder that question long and hard.

Exasperated writers and publishers like to say, in this age where EVERYONE seems to be writing a book, that not all books deserve to be published. And that’s true.

I’d add though, that the vast majority of those who like to write do not need to subject themselves to the publishing industry. Just like a man who plays Stairway to Heaven on his guitar when he’s alone at night, a woman who sings Pavarotti in the shower,  people can write — and thanks to the internet, be easily read — without diving into waters full of moving shadows that might or might not be sharks.