The best possible position is to have a breakout self-published hit. An author with that can hand the boring difficult expensive parts - print and distribution - over to a trad publisher, and keep the rights to ebooks, audio books, movies, and the rest, hiring negotiating talent as and when it's needed.

For breakout authors, publishers will often get in touch directly.

Agents are basically - well, I don't know any more. There used to be a point to them, but now they're running a kind of cottage industry of pointless gatekeeping for wannabes who will make pennies even if they are picked up.

It's not the same industry it was fifty years. It's not even the same industry it was twenty years ago.

A lot of wannabes haven't worked this out yet. They still think a proper author goes through proper channels, and is properly anointed with a proper agent and a proper contract.

And then most of them are surprised to discover their properly published book sells less than a thousand copies, and it's off the shelves almost immediately - because that's how print works unless you're a Big Name - and they can't give up their day jobs.