Ok, I'm NOT going to mention the name of the literary agent in question (because if you read the Writers and Artists yearbook you'll know what I'm talking about), but a while back I came across this agency that offer to showcase sample chapters of your work. That is to say that you pay them a fee (about £50) and they put a short bio and a sample of your work up for everyone to see. They then claim that many agents and publishers click onto their site everyday and look at them and will contact you if they like your story. Sounds good, right?

However, doing some research on this, I found some arguments against this kind of thing. Firstly, agents and publishers are usually bombarded with paper and/or email submissions every day, so why would they go online to look for more? Secondly, from what I understand from some Writers Beware Blogs, these kinds of sites attract some--um, shady characters within the industry (that is the agents that could possibly be scammers).

On the other hand though, this agent IS in the Writers and Artists handbook--so it would suggest that it's genuine... I guess.

Admittedly, I did do this for my first book I tried to publish, and was thinking of doing it again. But after my research I'm not so sure.

Of course, I'm still going down the route of querying and submitting to agents and publishers, but thought I'd get everyones thoughts on this.

Nooooo! Look at it this way. If this so-called 'agent' takes £50 for every sub they receive, is it likely that they are going to choose the best of these to 'showcase' to agents? No. They will take their money and post the work - anyone's work. And what kind of message would that give to an agent? Would it make them hurry on over to said site to see what delicacies await? No.
The only sites that agents MAY occasionally look at are those like YouWriteOn, Authonomy, Litopia etc., where the work is critiqued and voted on by other members. I'm not a fan of this personally, as I think that a lot of valuable writing time can be wasted, but for a very few it has paid off.
Susiex

WAAYB make no promises about what's listed, so that in itself is no kind of guarantee. Basically, wot Susie said - don't waste your money. Agents and editors get everything they have time to read - and considerably more - via the traditional routes, plus, very, very, very occasionally, the peer review sites.

There's a conviction among some parts of the community of aspiring writers that there's tons of marvellous stuff out there, if only they could lure the book trade into finding it. Sites like these, and other services which send out standard query emails, for example, trade on this conviction but it simply isn't true. If your stuff's good enough, and saleable enough, it will, in the end, be picked up. That won't include everyone who's writing to a publishable standard, because publishable doesn't necessarily mean saleable. But that's our problem, not the book trade's.

Emma

Well that's exactly the response I needed to know that this isn't the way to go. It's a good thing I'm now cynical enough not to take things at face value anymore. Thanks for the warning, I'll scrub this off the list and go back to my list of agents I still have to submit to.