Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.
People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don't have to keep using them.
You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.
The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
The professionals are going to be joined by the average Joe. Everybody's a publisher.
Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It's an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.
I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money.
I was tired of illustration. You'd work so hard on a commission and it would go in to a magazine, and you'd turn the page and it was gone.
No, my publisher has always done the marketing.
I didn't have to struggle at all to get an agent and a publisher. Everything fell into my lap.