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An Agent is somebody who has "contacts" in the industry and makes his living selling his clients work to the film industry. Typically he is a signatory to the Writer's Guild of America to agree to stand by and obey all of it's rules for the handling of creative material. An agent gets a flat 10% fee of whatever the script or property he represents sells for. The median price these days for a feature film script is around $800,000. I've been a writer for over 12 years. It took me ten of those years to get GOOD enough that an agent would consider representing me. Hollyweird gets over 12,000 screenplays a year. Of those only about 1200 are any good. Of those perhaps 300 get an option and about 150 actually get made and distributed. ALL of these are repped in one way or another. It is the RARE property that is not represented by an agent...in fact this is almost the stuff of legend.

I have three scripts under active consideration right now. If I sell any or all of them, my retirement will be essentially set! Selling a teleplay for an existing TV series won't quite do that, but it will bring a lot of income in the form of residual payments over the long term versus a single one time bigger payment for a screenplay. My agent works on both types of sales for me and get's 10% of everything, including residuals. In fact HE gets paid before I get paid and thats fine by me. Now I've only been a client for a short while and so he hasn't actually sold anything of mine, yet. But he's established and has been in business for over 20 years, so I remain hopeful just as I remain busy. All in all, I write for me not for the $$ it might bring. Still, it is an important possibility.