There's a Reason Agents Get 15 Percent

So, you’ve written a book. Congratulations! That’s the easy part.

Now, get ready to find an agent. I like to think there are three primary methods of securing an agent:

1. The Set-Up. You know someone who knows someone who met someone who had the business card of an agent. Or, you are fortunate enough to know an author who has an agent and is willing to recommend your manuscript to his agent.
2. The Blind Date. You perform Internet searches into the wee hours of the morning, reading agent profiles and sending queries to those you feel a connection to. After a few rejections, you lower your standards. Your new mandate becomes the ability to fog a mirror.
3. The Destined Deal. By luck, you’re seated next to an agent on an airplane or an agent trips over your laptop cord as you pound the keys in a coffee shop. A conversation about your manuscript ensues, and the agent produces a contract from his briefcase, ready for your signature.

Your agent’s job is finding a publisher for your book, and getting you the best advance and royalties possible. The agent takes a hefty chunk, but you don’t care. She’s worked hard, pimping your manuscript. You’re a grateful little book hooker, and your book gets published.

If you can’t find a book pimp of your very own, there are other ways to get your tome off your hard drive and into the hands of your adoring fans:

1. Compete for Publication. Some publishing houses run contests which award winners with publication. Contests may or may not charge entrants a reading fee, and may or may not offer a cash advance upon acceptance of the winner’s manuscript. Publishers don’t like to take chances; they want to print books that will sell. If your book is atypical in genre, length or style, you’re not likely to find yourself among the finalists.
2. Go to the Source. Most large publishing houses don’t accept queries from writers. Instead, they rely on agents to prescreen manuscripts and submit only the best. Remember, in publishing, “best” means most marketable with highest sales potential. Some smaller presses will entertain queries from authors and negotiate contracts directly with writers. Since small presses have small budgets, an author may get little to no advance and a small royalty per book sold.
3. Do-It-Your-Damn-Self. The stigma of self-publishing is actually relatively new, and already fading. Margaret Atwood, Zane Grey, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe are just a few authors who self-published. For a modern-day self-publishing success story, one need only look as far as The Shack by William P. Young, which has sold millions of copies and spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

I chose Publishing Option 3 for my first book, Everything I Need to Know About Motherhood I Learned from Animal House. That means I have no publisher to market my book, plan a book tour, or provide promotional materials. I know absolutely nothing about any of those tasks. I’m learning as I go.

If you’re lucky enough to secure an agent, and that agent manages to place your book with a publisher, or if you find your way into a publisher’s heart on your own, it will be someone’s job to send copies of your book to important people in the world for reviews.

Should you choose Publishing Option 3, plan to go into the world to find important people on your own. Beg them to review your book. Offer to babysit their kids or weed their gardens. Get them drunk, take photos of them shaking their groove thangs, and promise not to post the pictures on Facebook if they’ll write a review.

Call any relatives within a 200-mile radius and ask if they know a local business owner willing to host a book signing. Ask how many people they can con into showing up at the local self-serve pet wash for an event titled, “Books, Bubbles and Bones.” Voila! A book tour.

Speaking of book tours, I’m hoping you’ll all show up at Riverwalk Books on Friday, June 18th, at 7:00 p.m. for my very first book signing. Can’t make it? You can still order signed copies right here, on my website. Did I mention they make great Father’s Day gifts?

Would you care to review the photos I’m preparing to upload to Facebook before deciding on your purchase?

My Husband: Facebook Celebrity Stalker

People who know Mr. Wright will tell you, unequivocally, that he doesn’t do anything halfway. It is for that very reason that I went to such great lengths to hide the existence of Facebook from him. For some, Facebook is a social networking site where they log on, catch up with old friends and business contacts, log out and sleep peacefully through the night, knowing that they are a little better connected.

Not Mr. Wright. In less time than it takes to grow a Chia Pet, my husband has turned Facebook into an ongoing name-dropping opportunity of the highest order.

“One of my colleagues invited me to join Facebook,” he announced only a month ago. “I think I’m going to join. It will be a great way to promote my real estate listings, don’t you think? I think it’s a good idea.”


Perhaps you, like me, routinely hear sirens of the air-raid variety in your head when your loved one has a “good idea.” The only thing worse is a “great idea.”

To give some perspective, the last “great idea” my husband had involved a late night drive to a service station to blow up a queen-sized airbed, rather than inflate it with our foot-operated pump. The trip to the service station was uneventful, but after using the free compressor, the inflated bed wouldn’t fit inside our Suburban. Attempts to tether the airbed to the luggage rack failed, as the mattress was wider than the racks, and squishy to boot.

I won’t bore you with the minute details, but suffice it to say, I drove slowly through the dark back roads to our hotel with the airbed on top of the Suburban; and my husband, spread-eagle style, on top of the airbed.

Obviously, I’ve lived with my husband long enough to quickly calculate the most outrageous possible results of any good or great idea he cooks up. Somehow, I didn’t foresee the Facebook Celebrity Stalking of 2009.

“Someone wants me to join their mafia. Should I do it?” he asked. I checked my watch. He’d had a Facebook account for two hours. “No,” I responded. “You want to block those applications; otherwise you will spend a whole lot of unproductive time on Facebook. Plus, I, um… I think you can catch a bad case of spam from those things. And possibly gonorrhea.”

Okay, I lied. Seriously, though, I know how competitive Mr. Wright is, and the last thing I wanted him to spend hours each day assessing was whether he had more Pieces of Flair on his profile than his friends.

I thought I’d set pretty good boundaries: Use Facebook for networking only. Don’t say anything on Facebook that you wouldn’t say to your client or your mother. Don’t waste time playing games. Don’t try to make a career out of Facebook. Unfortunately, I forgot the all-important, golden rule of Facebook, as it applies to Mr. Wright: Do not spend hours searching Facebook for celebrities that might add you as a friend.

“Michael W. Smith added me as a Facebook friend!” My husband was elated when the contemporary Christian music legend accepted his friend request. Sadly, it was just the beginning. Mr. Wright, after a month of Facebook use, has over 750 “friends,” and an embarrassing number of them are celebrities. Our dinner conversations usually start with something like, “I was talking to Eddie Van Halen today… we’re Facebook friends, you know…”



Today, he came home and boasted, “Belinda Carlisle, Heather Locklear and Julianne Moore became my Facebook friends today!” He doesn’t even like Julianne Moore.

I'd better get a national syndication deal, so he'll add me to his list of friends