What is a literary agent, and do you need one to reach readers abroad?

A literary agent is the person who sells your book to publishers and takes a percentage of what you earn. They pitch the manuscript, run the negotiation, and often sell translation rights to publishers abroad as well. If you want a foreign publisher to buy your book, an agent is close to the only way in. If you plan to translate and publish on your own, you don't need one.

What a literary agent does

In English-language publishing, most of the big houses don't read manuscripts that come straight from authors. They read what agents send them. The agent is the filter, and also the bridge.

Once an agent takes you on, they do roughly three things. They pitch the book to editors they know. They negotiate the contract, including the advance and royalties. And after signing, the money from the publisher flows through them. According to the Authors Guild guide to agency agreements, advances and royalties are paid to the agency, which deducts its commission before passing the rest on to you.

How a literary agent gets paid

An agent doesn't take money from you upfront. They get a percentage of what the book earns, and only if it earns. That's the principle, and it's also your most useful tool for spotting someone who isn't really an agent.

According to the same Authors Guild guide, the standard commission on US deals is 15 percent. When rights are sold abroad through a sub-agent, it's usually 20 percent, because two agents split it.

Literary agents and translation rights

This is where it touches a book you want to bring out in another language. Many agencies don't sell in every country by themselves. They work with partner agents abroad who know the local publishers.

One example: the American agency Andrea Brown says on its rights page that it works with a single agency for foreign rights, whose representative attends the big book fairs and pitches the books to foreign agents and publishers. We wrote about one of those fairs in the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Put simply: an agent who represents you in one language can open doors for you in others. But they'll only do it if they think the book has a buyer there.

How to spot a scam

The field attracts scammers, because writers badly want someone to believe in their book. Three things worth knowing:

1. A real agent doesn't charge reading fees. The code of ethics of the Association of American Literary Agents, in the version that took effect on September 1, 2026, bars its members from charging to read a manuscript for representation.
2. Income should come from sales. Writer Beware, a project of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association that tracks scams, says an agent's income should come from commissions on sales, not from payments by clients.
3. An unexpected approach is a warning sign. The same site warns about "agents" who contact you out of the blue and offer paid services. A real agent picks from the many manuscripts sent to them. They don't hunt for clients in private messages.

One more detail worth knowing: according to a Writer Beware summary, the new code lets member agents sell certain services to existing clients, but not make representation conditional on buying them. If being taken on depends on you paying for editing, that isn't representation.

Do you need a literary agent to publish a book in another language?

It depends on which route you take.

The route	Need an agent?
A foreign publisher buys the rights and puts the book out	Almost always yes
You translate and publish yourself	No
A book already self-published that you want a publisher to pick up	Depends on the agency

That last row varies a lot between agencies. Some say openly that they don't accept self-published books, and some invite them. So read each agency's submission guidelines before you send anything.

If you don't have an agent

That's the normal situation, not a failure. Most writers in the world don't have an agent, and plenty of them publish books in several languages anyway. We wrote about the difference between the routes in do you need a foreign publisher for your book to come out in another language?.

If you go the self-publishing route, you'll do what an agent and a publisher would have done: find a translation, from a translator, from an AI-based translation service like Targum or from a mix of the two, take care of the cover and description, and upload to the stores. It's more work, but the rights stay with you. More questions are collected in our frequently asked questions.