A literary agent is your business partner. They are not your friend, your confidant, or your editor. And the only part of your business they care about is revenue from your book. This is not a knock on agents. Agents are wonderful people and can be quite instrumental in helping you succeed. But because they…
The best way to get a book agent is through a referral from somebody who works with them. The worst way is to fling a manuscript, proposal, or query blindly at a Web site. But it is so difficult to find an agent — and they are so selective — that some people get desperate….
The process by which agents pitch publishers can be confusing, as it’s often characterized by periods of waiting followed by rapid shifts in perspective. I’ll explain not only what happens, but how long it takes. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll assume that you already have already written a proposal and secured a…
If you’re lucky enough to get several agents interested in your proposal, how should you pick? Surprisingly enough, the answer is not “Pick the agent who swings the biggest deals.” You can pitch multiple literary agents On a recent project, I was helping an author who had some very good connections. He had recommendations on…
You want to publish a book. Do you need a book agent? Yeah. You probably do. Since there’s so much confusion about agent and publishers, here’s an FAQ for you, answering the questions I hear most often from authors. How do agents get paid? To understand when an agent makes sense and what they do…
So, you wrote a book proposal — maybe just a quick little query. You sent it to an editor at a traditional publishing house that somebody introduced you to. And they like it! Time to celebrate, right? Umm, no. You need to check your publisher-to-English dictionary first. The publisher-to-English dictionary Here are all the possible…