You need a literary agent for nonfiction if you want a large traditional publisher and your book can command a sizable advance. Otherwise, you often do not. An agent’s job is to sell your book to publishers and negotiate the deal, for a commission taken from what you earn. If you write an expert book for a niche, or publish in the Netherlands, you have two other routes: approach publishers yourself, or publish the book yourself and run its production like a small business.
One clarification first: this website is not a literary agency and does not represent authors. (If you arrived looking for software agents, that is a different job.)
What does a literary agent actually do?
A literary agent represents you to publishers. According to the Authors Guild, the US authors’ organization, an agency agreement normally makes the agent your exclusive agent to sell, license, or negotiate the rights to your book, meaning the permission to publish it in a given format, language, or country. An agent may also appoint sub-agents abroad for rights it cannot handle itself, such as foreign-language rights.
Money flows through them. Most agreements say the publisher pays your advance (money upfront, set against future royalties) and your royalties (your share of each sale) to the agency, which deducts its commission and sends you the rest.
The Authors Guild adds that an agent has a fiduciary duty: a legal obligation to put your interests above its own. Jane Friedman, a publishing-industry commentator, sums up the value: agents know which editors buy which kinds of books, negotiate the best deal, make sure you are paid accurately, and handle friction between you and the publisher. She also notes that most New York publishers do not accept submissions that come without an agent.
What does an agent cost?
In the US, the Authors Guild describes commissions as generally 15% of what you are paid on domestic deals, and 20% on foreign deals that use a sub-agent. Friedman gives the same 15% and adds the key point: agents traditionally get paid only when they sell your work.
That gives you the first red flag. The Association of American Literary Agents’ Canon of Ethics states: “Members may not charge any reading fees for evaluating work for possible representation.”
A hypothetical example: a publisher offers a €10,000 advance. At 15%, the agent receives €1,500 and you receive €8,500, before tax. If a German publisher later buys translation rights through a sub-agent, the commission on that deal would typically be 20%.
| Route | Who pays the production costs | Who decides cover, title, price | What you do yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent plus large publisher | The publisher | The publisher | Proposal and writing |
| Publisher, no agent | The publisher | The publisher | Proposal or manuscript, negotiating, writing |
| Self-publishing | You | You | Everything, from editing to launch |
The first two rows follow Friedman: in a traditional deal, “publishers assume all costs and pay you an advance and royalties,” and the publisher “gets to decide the cover, the title, the design, the format, the price, etc.”
Why is nonfiction sold differently from novels?
Because the book often does not exist yet. “Book proposals are used to sell nonfiction books to publishers,” Friedman writes. A proposal is a business case for the book: an overview, the target readers, comparable titles, a marketing plan, an author bio, a chapter outline, and sample chapters. If a publisher is convinced, it contracts you and pays you to write the book. Novels, by contrast, are usually finished before an agent sees them.
The catch is platform: the audience and credibility you already have. Friedman writes that “a sizable platform and expertise is typically required to successfully sell a nonfiction book to a major publisher, especially for competitive categories such as business, cooking, health, self-help, or parenting.”
She is equally direct about the other end. If your project cannot command an advance of at least five figures, you may not be worth an agent’s time, and you will have to sell it on your own. She names niche, academic, and literary work as cases where you might not need an agent at all.
How is the Dutch market different?
Agents for Dutch authors are a younger profession. In a 2017 feature for the trade magazine Boekblad, journalist Maarten Dessing reported that the first agency for Dutch authors opened in 1998, according to its founder. Almost all of the agents he described ran their agency alongside other work, because the 15% they took from their authors’ royalties did not pay enough to live on. One of them noted that some publishers still found the extra link in the chain complicated, and that there will always be authors who do not need an agent because they can stand up for themselves.
The Auteursbond, the Dutch association for writers and translators, confirms that a writer can be represented by a literary agent and that it does not act as one itself. What it does offer is a model contract for original Dutch literary work, negotiated with the literary publishers’ group of the Dutch general publishers’ association (GAU). It guarantees minimum terms for things like royalties, the advance, and electronic rights, and you are free to negotiate better. Members can ask the Auteursbond’s lawyers for legal and business advice, including on contracts.
One Dutch rule applies whichever route you take. With some exceptions, every new printed book in Dutch or Frisian falls under the fixed book price law (Wet op de vaste boekenprijs), self-published or not: you set a fixed retail price and report it to the Commissariaat voor de Media, the regulator. E-books are excluded.
What does self-publishing make your job?
Self-publishing means you become the publisher. You pay the costs, make every decision, and keep a larger share of each sale. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is one such platform; its help pages spell out the terms.
- E-books. You choose a 35% or a 70% royalty. The 70% option applies only within a price band (since 7 July 2026, $2.99 to $12.99 on Amazon.com and €2.69 to €12.99 in euro stores), minus a small delivery cost, and only for buyers in eligible countries. Other sales pay 35%.
- Paperbacks. On Amazon’s euro stores you get 60% of the list price from €9.99 upward (50% below that), minus the printing cost. KDP’s own example: a $15, 333-page black-and-white paperback with a $5.00 printing cost earns $4.00 per copy on Amazon.com, or $1.00 through KDP’s Expanded Distribution channels.
- ISBN and imprint. A free KDP ISBN (the book’s international ID number) works only on KDP, and your publisher name then shows as “Independently published.” To publish under your own imprint, you buy your own ISBN; in the Netherlands that runs through isbn.nl.
- AI disclosure. KDP requires you to tell it about AI-generated text, images, or translations. Content you wrote yourself and only edited or checked with AI tools counts as AI-assisted, which you do not have to disclose.
Friedman’s warning belongs here too: self-publishing “rarely leads to your physical book reaching bookstore shelves,” and it “requires significant and persistent effort into marketing and promotion.”
Len takes this route for his own nonfiction. He publishes it himself through KDP, under his company LPH98.ventures, and produces the books with the system described below. That is a choice about control and speed, not proof that it beats a traditional deal.
BooksOS: the seven stages you now own
BooksOS is the book production system from Len’s book The Agentic Author, which is available. It splits making a book into seven stages, each owning one decision and producing one document the next stage depends on. You do not need the book to use it. With a publisher, several stages sit with the publisher’s team; when you self-publish, all seven are yours.
| Stage | What it decides | What it means when you self-publish |
|---|---|---|
| Brief | Who the book is for, what changes for them, what it refuses to be | One page. If you ever pitch a publisher, it is the heart of your proposal |
| Bible | Terms, voice, and standards, written down once | Your own style sheet, because no house editor keeps it for you |
| Map | Chapter order and dependencies | Structure fails on paper, not at 30,000 words |
| Draft | The pages, written against an evidence ledger (a list of every claim and its source) | Nobody fact-checks you later unless you plan it |
| Edit | Structural, line, and proof passes, plus a hostile review and claim checks | You hire or recruit the editors |
| Package | One manuscript rendered into e-book, print, and web | ISBN, imprint, cover, print files, price (and the Dutch fixed price) |
| Launch | Positioning, assets, channels, and a measurement loop | Every reader you reach, you reach yourself |
The BooksOS framework page and What is BooksOS? go deeper on each gate.
A hypothetical example. A Dutch procurement consultant wants to write a practical book for purchasing managers. The market is real but narrow, so a five-figure advance is unlikely and an agent probably will not bite. She writes the Brief in three sentences, which becomes her proposal if a specialist publisher shows interest. If none does, she buys her own ISBN so her firm’s name appears as imprint, registers the fixed price for the Dutch paperback, and plans the Launch around the newsletter her clients already read.
Try this today: the route test (20 minutes)
Answer five questions in writing:
- Brief. Who is the reader, what changes for them, and what will the book refuse to be? Three sentences.
- Shelves. Do you need your book in physical bookstores?
- Advance. Could this realistically command a five-figure advance?
- Platform. Do you already have an audience that listens to you on this topic?
- Ownership. Will you pay for, and personally run, editing, packaging, and launch?
Yes to 2, 3, and 4: write a proposal and query agents. Mostly no, but a publisher serves your niche: approach that publisher directly, and in the Netherlands compare the offer with the Auteursbond model contract. No to 2 and 3, yes to 5: self-publish, and run it as a production system with gates, not as a single upload.
Cite this:Do you need a literary agent for nonfiction? What agents do, what they cost, and when to publish yourself.Len P. van der Hof. https://lenvanderhof.com/en/blog/do-you-need-a-literary-agent/ ·