on Anne R Allen:
Your agent is your representative in the publishing world. A good or great one will have wide knowledge of the current trends — are historicals hot? Is alien sci-fi romance coming up? Is medieval adventure staggering along on its last legs?
Your agent will know where best to target your work, which editors are looking for exactly what you’re writing, which publishers do a great job with your genre — and which ones don’t.
He/she will know which publishers are great with lit fic and which ones couldn’t place Leo Tolstoy with the perfect in-house editor if his/her life depended on it.
But how do you tell?
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
I wonder what the real world numbers are for authors who even bother with an agent, (or a ‘legacy publisher’) of whatever stripe, these days.
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Good question! I don’t know the answer, but I’ll bet it’s proportionally less than in past decades, before self-publishing became easy and almost respectable.
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