I'm looking for a literary agent. I've never published before.
1) What's to keep an agent from taking my manuscript and publishing it themselves, or handing it off to one of their writer friends?
2) What's to keep an agent from taking my original ideas, giving them to a writer friend, and having them create their own work based off of some of those ideas?
How do new writers protect themselves from things like this?
Your ideas are valueless. (Sorry!) My ideas are valueless too. There are approximately 197 billion story ideas floating around the litosphere just waiting for someone with a net to scoop them up.
What is valuable is your ability to take a literary idea and turn it into an interesting story. People who can do that are rare and difficult to find. I don't know if you are one of those people or not. (I don't even know if I am either.) But I do know this:
Agents are not looking for stories, or for ideas, agents are looking for writers. Agents and publishers don't make money (or not reliably) off individual stories. They make money off writer's careers.
This is why an agent is just as interested in your ability to deliver professional work consistently and on time as they are in your ability to write an interesting story. They care about your dedication and reliability as well as your talent.
All of which adds up to, Agents are looking for commercially viable writers, and commercially viable writers are hard to find. If they think you are a commercially viable writer, they will want to represent you, not your story, but you. If they don't think you are a commercially viable writer, they will have no interest in your ideas either.
And to be frank, even if someone does come along and hear your idea and goes and makes a best selling novel out of it, you have lost nothing, because if you are a commercially viable writer, you can generate as many story ideas as you need, and if you are not, you were never going to realize any money off that idea anyway.
Ideas are dross. It is your vision and your talent that will make you a successful writer, and no one can steal either of those.
Two points here:
Under US law, anything you write is copyrighted. Anything. Your question above in fact is copyrighted. You likely can't not copyright something, even if you wanted to. So it is simply not legal for a publisher to pass your work along to someone else to touch up and publish without your permission.
If you are just thinking about the basic story ideas, rather than the implementation of them, Mark Baker has it completely correct. Here's J. Michael Straczynski (author of The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, head writer of Murder She Wrote, Babylon-5, and many others) on this subject:
Story ideas are worthless.
It's very doubtful that you or anybody else has had an idea that nobody in the history of mankind has ever had before. You can take a basic idea and give it to 10 different writer and you'll get 10 TOTALLY different stories. What matters is execution, how the idea is rendered....Most amateur writers don't know or understand that, and think that their story idea is something saleable, something somebody wants to buy, or something they need to jealously protect. There are even people who will exploit that. There was a publication a few years ago which would publish your story idea in a big book, on per page (which you paid for, natch), and sent it to the major studios and networks.
Not one of them ever sold. None of them were worth buying. None of them were really stories. And it was thrown into the trash of every studio or network at which it arrived because of fear of lawsuit.
If you were unaware of the second point, or are further interested in the subject of the pain of writers having to constantly fend off bogus "story idea" lawsuits, I highly suggest clicking the link above and reading his entire 23-paragraph detailed explanation on the subject.
I hear this worry from many beginning writers. Often the question includes something along the lines of "What legal steps can I take to protect my work from being stolen?".
Here's my capsule advice to new authors: Don't worry about it. There are a million would-be authors out there, all competing for attention. Your problem is NOT that someone will steal your work. Your problem is that no one will care about your work. Worry about writing a story good enough that someone would bother to steal it.
I'm not saying that your work isn't any good. I haven't seen anything you've written besides this post. Your work may be brilliant. But agents and publishers just aren't in the business of stealing a writer's work. Almost all first novels by a new author lose money. You have to be an established writer, at least a little bit "famous", before your books are really worth something. The only way a publisher will make money off of you is if you write a series of successful books for them. And you're not likely to do that if they cheat you on your first book. They have far more to lose by stealing someone's work and getting caught than they are likely to make off a stolen story by an unknown writer.
Does it ever happen? Sure. I know someone stole my work at least once: an article I wrote was stolen and offered for sale on one of those "research assistance" web sites, where students can buy someone else's work to submit it as their own as a term paper. I wasn't paid for the original article, so if the thieves sold even one copy, they made more money off of it than I did. Do you know what I did about it? Absolutely nothing. It wasn't worth the trouble.
To answer your stated question, one can protect one's work by "registering" it with Writers Guild of America for $20 online.
But there is a fundamental reason why agents won't steal your work: Because it's too much work and that's not what agents do.
Agents can earn a lot of money for doing relatively little work, if they find the right (sellable) pieces. Consider, an agent can earn 15% of your royalties for writing a few letters and signing a few papers if s/he "connects." It takes only seven such deals to earn as much as you do for one of your novels or whatever. For a lot less time and effort than it took for you to produce it. Of course, the potential downside for the agent is a lot of wasted effort for the works that don't sell, as well as effort for getting to know the market.
No agent (that qualifies as such) would be interested in killing the "goose that lays the golden egg." They want you to write 10 (or 100) works that they can sell. And the same from all the other writers in their stable. If an agent tried to steal one person's work, all the rest of it "goes away."
I want to be harsh or burst your bubble but your worries don't conform with reality. Agencies receive thousands of manuscripts each week - most of which they don't actually read.
Acceptable stories fall within a very narrow window. The boy always gets the girl. Good always overcomes evil. The cowboys always kill the Indians. Publishers have no interest in new authors publishing stories outside the range specified by the bean counters.
Writers tend to significantly over-value their work. At the outset, they all (including me) believe they are writing a best-seller - two years later they're struggling to give the story away on Kindle.
It is also my opinion: in a comprehensive novel there is so much detail and nuance that only the author would name the source. A plagiarist would be discovered under interrogation.
e.g. Adele's pet name for her best friend, Claire, is 'digger' (which she hates) - It is never explained. But there is a scene where Claire is stopped for speeding. The officer radios in the vehicle's registration plate "JCB 888Y" (stylized as "JCB BABY"). He is embarrassed when he learns he's pulled over a high court judge. JCB = Judge Claire Bristol. JCB is also a UK term for Trackhoe - hence the nickname "Digger" . . . Who but the author would know that?
Nobody is going to steal your work.
Unfortunately (particularly in the USA), your manuscript is irrelevant. It's all about your CV. If you are George Clooney's 3rd cousin whose other claim to fame is that, when in college you popped Malia Obama's cherry - they'll publish your fantasy story. Don't worry if your story is a pile of crap, they've got a thousand ghost writers who'll whip something up.
Answer: Because unscrupulous agents / publishers have better ways to make money from you.
Agents and publishers often overlap, the only difference really comes down to the printing of the manuscripts. Writing this relating to publishers rather than agents (as agents like this don't want to spend extra money for printing):
Because the unscrupulous publishers will instead charge you money in order to print the book, then write the contract in such a way that you might be waiting up to two years for your first income from any sales (which are likely to be in the first couple of weeks/months anyway).
Stealing can get them in court. You not realising how unfair a contract you sign is, is just a way for them to get more income.
There are thousands of people wanting their first book published, and they can make a steady income by publishing barely-edited manuscripts for money.
TL/DR: My brother fell for this relatively recently. With dyslexia his spelling can be bad, and the "editing" promised was literally just correcting red underlines in Word, no income for 18 months, and he had to pay several thousand pounds for them doing several hundred pounds worth of work and printing.
