How to Write Really Bad Fiction and Enjoy the Benefits of Rapid Rejection

As a writer I am always looking for articles to help me improve my writing. I happened upon an absolutely hilarious article by Hank Quense. His advice is given the other way around… but it works!

Hank: "I'm an author of five books and over forty short stories along with a number of fiction writing articles. From my experience, I've learned a number important lessons and I want to pass them onto others. One important lesson involves getting a book published; it changes your life. No longer can you sit in your office and spend your time writing more fiction. Once you become a published author, you also become the book's marketing manager and its sales manager, a terrifying situation if you're not prepared for it."

To protect others from the trauma of this situation, I've put together a list of fiction writing techniques that will guarantee non-publication. Following them will ensure a rapid reply from editors who will use a preprinted form or a terse email. This rapid reply will allow you to maximize the rejections you receive in a given period of time.

Here is the list in no particular order:

• Always use adverbs! Lots and lots of adverbs. One of your writing objectives should be to use an adverb to modify at least fifty percent of your verbs. And don't forget about using them in dialog tags. Why show the reader a woman shredding a paper tissue? Make it easy on the poor readers. Tell them the woman is nervous. Thus, "He's making me so fidgety," she said nervously.

• A naked noun is evil! Adjectives exist to be used. Their primary purpose is to modify a noun, so make use of this most excellent writing technique. Load up your nouns with modifiers so the reader will have no doubts about the noun. “The skinny, ugly guy wore a hideous, ripped t-shirt, dirty, baggy pants and shredded sneakers.” Here's an even better example of clever adjective usage: “The scrawny boy used his undersized biceps to try to pick up the clumsy weight and place it in the old-fashioned truck before the foul-mouthed old man became aware of his clever trickery.” Get the idea? Remember, a naked noun is e-v-i-l!

• Use conversation. Don't limit yourself to dialog. Conversation is the stuff of life. Don't allow your characters to be stuck inside the story by restricting them to dialog that moves the story forward. Make your characters more life-like by letting them engage in idle conversation just like real people do.

“ How you doing?”
‘I'm cool. What’s up?”
“I'm good. Couldn’t be better. Watching the Yankees tonight?”
“Who they playing? . . . Yada, yada, yada.”
This stuff doesn't move the story along like dialog does, but it shows the characters are just as boring as real folk.

•Motivation is overdone. To properly show motivation requires a lot of creativity, time and words. It is much better to skip over that part and get right into the action. So what if the guy disarming the ticking bomb is only doing it because his shift doesn't end for two hours and he doesn't have anything better to do. The character doesn't have any motivation, but who cares; it keeps the story moving and doesn't slow it down with a lot of words explaining the motivation.

• Don't worry about Point of View rules. POV is perhaps the most technical of all aspects of writing and handling it correctly is time consuming and requires advanced planning. Who needs all that extra work when there is another scene to write or another crisis to defuse? Most of the readers will figure it out and sort of follow the story.

• The fine art of the -ing word. It's wise to develop writing habits such as peppering the page with –ing words. This technique will give your writing a pleasing sing-song effect. “Opening the door and running down the corridor while waving her hand, she tried shouting, calling attention to her life-threatening situation.” Doesn't that sentence make you want to hum along from all the –ing words?

• Use empty words. Very, really, ever, still, just and others are words with no meaning but they do fill up sentences and make them look more impressive. Fiction writing is filled with opportunities to use these words and titillate the readers. With a bit of imagination, you can also use these words to punctuate the sentence.

•Why bother with multiple-dimensional characters? Flat characters work just as well. Flat characters can fight, love and die just as well as the more complicated ones, but take considerably less work. The simple approach gives you more time to write still more stories.

• Character Voice. This attribute allows the reader to identify the characters from their dialog “voices.” What nonsense. That's what names are for. Just use the names in all the lines of dialog and the readers will be able to keep the characters straight.

Keep this list near your keyboard and refer to it frequently. Within a short time, your friends and family will be impressed by the huge stack of rejection notices you've accumulated. A side benefit is that your family will know you're really doing something in your office. Right now, they probably think you're goofing off and playing computer game. If you chose to ignore this excellent advice, there are alternatives listed in my book, Build a Better Story. Be advised that following the advice in Build a Better Story can significantly increase the response time from editors.

By Hank Quense © 2011 Originally published by Writing-World.com March 2011

Award-winning author Hank Quense lives in Bergenfield, NJ with his wife Pat. They have two daughters and five grandchildren. He writes humorous fantasy and sci-fi stories. On occasion, he also writes an article on fiction writing or book marketing but says that writing nonfiction is like work while writing fiction is fun. He refuses to write serious genre fiction saying there is enough of that on the front page of any daily newspaper and on the evening TV news.


I am looking forward to reviewing Hank’s latest work Zaftan Entrepreneurs. In it, an alien mining ship discovers a planet that holds promise to be a mining bonanza. Unfortunately, it is inhabited by humans, dwarfs, elves and other races and they object to the mining expeditions. Sounds like a whole lot of fun. Watch this space.

Find out more about Hank on his website.

Are You a Perfectionist?

If the answer to the title question is yes, then look no further for advice than Jami Gold's excellent article A Perfectionist's Guide to Editing: 4 Stages.

Jami's words will strike a resounding chord with anyone harboring even vaguely paranoic perfectionist tendencies.

Jami says, "Perfectionists tend to be nitpicky, no surprise there. But there’s a time when that trait is very helpful, and a time when we need to ignore the compulsion to tweak. How do we tell the difference?"

That's a good question: how does one tell the difference between useful tweaking and compulsive (possibly ultimately destructive) tweaking.

Finish the Story!
As the song goes, "start at the very beginning" and that means "finish the story."

Jami: "Before we even start on the revision process, we need to finish the story. Many people give advice to not edit previous chapters before finishing the draft of the whole thing. Usually, the thinking goes like this: If we start editing before we’re finished, there’s a greater chance we’ll never finish the story and much of that editing time will be wasted further down the road."

4 Stages of Editing 
Expanding upon these four stages of editing this excellent article tackles:
*Revising - scene structure and character
*Dialogue, POV and motivation
*Polishing - grammar, sentence structure, use of words/adjectives/adverbs etc
*Tweaking - everyone's favorite! There is no finality about tweaking. One can tweak forever but that's when one has to rein in the tweaking tendencies and know when to say, "It's finished!"

Oh, but is it ever finished? Possibly not, but by then your product should be at a stage where you can submit it to the eagle-eyed agent of your choice. Good Luck!

How Many Times Your Book Is Sold

PUBLISHED ONCE, SOLD FOREVER AFTER

Successfully articulating the publication of a big book is the test of good publishing, involving the ability to keep in one’s head not only the numbers and their daily fluctuation but the harmonious synchronizing of publicity, manufacturing, advertising, and sales departments often run as independent fiefdoms. —MICHAEL KORDA 

As publishers shepherd books from writers to readers, they face the challenge of sustaining the enthusiasm of the editors who convinced the house to buy the books. Your book will be sold many times as it makes its way to your readers.

• You are the first person to sell your book. First you sell yourself on the idea for it.

• Then you pitch the idea to your professional networks for feedback.

• Then, assuming you want an agent, you send your proposal or manuscript to prospective agents.

• Your agent sells your book to a publisher.

• To buy your book, editors must first sell it to others in the house whose support they need.

• The editors use that support to sell your book at the house’s weekly editorial meetings. Depending on the makeup of the editorial board, your editor may need to convince the house’s publicity people, sales and marketing staff, and executive officers to take a chance on your book.

• Your editor meets with the sales and marketing departments to decide on the size of the first printing and the marketing plan that will be presented at sales conferences and in the catalog.

• Your editor presents your book to the publisher’s sales rep at a sales conference. This may be done via a Web conference to save the cost of bringing the reps and in-house staff together.

• The sales reps return to their territories and use the publisher’s catalog to sell your book to independent booksellers. Special reps sell to the chains, the two largest wholesalers—Ingram and Baker & Taylor—and other large customers.

• Pre-publication reviews in periodicals such as Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews sell your book to libraries.

• The art director decides how best to create your book’s hardcover jacket or paperback cover to sell your book to bookstore browsers.

• The production department creates or farms out the design of the interior of your book. The goal is to come up with the most effective design, paper stock, and typeface for selling your book.

• The subsidiary rights department tries to sell the publisher’s subsidiary rights, such as book clubs, first- and second-serial rights, and film and foreign rights. If your agent has retained any of these rights for you, your agent, usually helped by co-agents, will try to sell them.

• The publicity department decides how they will publicize your book to the media, which helps to sell your book to the public.

• When your book is published, booksellers sell it to their customers. Where your books are stocked in bookstores and whether they’re shelved face-out or spine-out makes a big difference. Independent booksellers use shelf-talkers—handwritten notes taped to the shelf below the book—to push the staff’s favorite books.

• For literary books, especially novels, the eagerness of independent booksellers to hand-sell books can make the difference between a failure and a best-seller. Competition from the chains and online booksellers is destroying this path to success by putting independents out of business, at the rate of three a week.

• The first group of readers reads your book, and if they love it as passionately as you want them to, they sell everyone they know on reading it. Through the comments they write for online booksellers, your readers can also help sell your books online.

The ultimate challenge your book faces is arousing enough passion in your readers that their recommendations cause whoever hears them to buy your book, swelling the size of your unofficial but unstoppable word-of-mouth sales force.

Best-selling authors have an army of such readers. That’s why they’re best-selling authors. The most clever, heavily financed promotion campaign can’t make a book sell if it doesn’t provide the benefit—whether it’s information or entertainment—that book buyers expect.

If your books don’t require revisions, you only have to write them once. But because of the endless book chain between you and your readers, your books will continue to be sold.

Even after books go out of print, libraries continue to lend them, and used bookstores and online booksellers continue sell them. Print-on-demand publishing can continue to make books available around the world until a better technology comes along.

Reprinted from "Rick Frishman's Author101 Newsletter." Subscribe at  http://www.rickfrishman.com/  and receive Rick's "Million Dollar Rolodex."

So You Want to Write a Book? 10 Tips for New & Aspiring Writers

I love tips and advice. Of course, given the plethora of articles around, many writers have possibly read the advice a number of times. Hmmmm, how come we never seem to take it? Just think how rich and successful we’d be if we had… When I tumbled into the world of book publishing I knew absolutely nothing. No, really, I knew absolutely nothing. It’s embarrassing how naïve I was. I thought you just wrote a book and someone else would do all the hard work. Ha ha ha!

Lists of things to do are great. Writers often need lists to keep their heads in the right place. Sometimes we often use these lists as a means to avoid actually churning out the required number of words a day. But this is the kind of list you need as a writer. If you found my previous blog link about 50 Tips for Writers a trifle daunting, then this one's for you.

Here’s a fantastic list of 10 Top Tips by Nancy Ancowitz especially for writers who (like me used to) think that all you have to do is write a book and magically someone else does the rest of the hard work!

So You Want to Write a Book? - Excerpts from a blog on PsychologyToday.com by Nancy Ancowitz

My advice: 10 tips for new and aspiring authors

1. Purpose. Get clear about why you want to write a book versus an article or something else. Is it to reach more people, build your personal brand, and hit the jackpot on the New York Times' Best Sellers list?

2. Money. Determine how you'll juggle making a living while writing your book. Will you save up plenty of money, go on sabbatical, work part-time--or work full time while writing your manuscript at night and just take catnaps while standing in elevators?

3. Self-publishing versus conventional publishing. Weigh the pros and cons of self-publishing and e-book publishing versus conventional publishing. If you decide to go the conventional route, find a literary agent who is passionate about your book idea. She will "shop" your manuscript around at publishing houses and help negotiate the best terms for you. For a list of agents, check out the Association of Authors' Representatives; also ask published authors for their recommendations.

4. Branding. Start building your brand long before your book is published by writing, speaking, using social media tools, organizing and/or joining special interest groups, and spreading the word through your network.

5. Product. Consider whether you want to offer a product or service in connection with your book. If so, set the wheels in motion now so that when your book comes out, you'll have more to offer your readers.

6. Public speaking. If you're not already comfortable with public speaking, which is an important skill for an author, take a course, hire a coach, join Toastmasters International, and get some practice, even at small, approachable venues. Down the road, closer to the time of your book launch, also consider investing in press training to buff up your skills at answering questions on the spot for media interviews.

7. Published authors. Meet them. Buy their books and review them on Amazon. Gain from their insights. Build relationships with them and ask for their advice about your book.

8. Publicity. Save up now to hire a publicist, but don't rely on him to do all the work. You're the engine; start building relationships with journalists and organizations where you can speak that are interested in your topic.

9. Information for authors. Read books, magazines, blogs, social networking sites, and other resources to become an informed author. Check these out: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Published by Sheree Bykofsky (whose literary agency represents me), Jennifer Basye Sander; Poets & Writers magazine and (of course Jerry D. Simmons web site).

10. Support. Get the support you need to write your book. Join or form a group of other authors, turn to a mentor, hire a coach, start a Meetup or Tweetup, and read, comment, and post questions to authors' blogs. You'll benefit from having a community of authors and can learn a lot from one another.

There you have it, writers! With so much advice, you cannot go wrong.

Excerpt taken from Jerry D. Simmons newsletter and web site www.WritersReaders.com. All written material Copyright 2010 Jerry D. Simmons. Readers can access additional information free at his web site www.WritersReaders.com - the SOURCE FOR INFORMATION ON PUBLISHING for WRITERS and AUTHORS where we take pride in Preparing Writers for Success.

A New Kind of Eden with Author Louise Wise

Say hello to Louise Wise who hails from Northampton, United Kingdom. Louise is guest number 12 on my Virtual Book Tour.


Louise, tell us a bit about yourself: I am the author of Eden, my first published novel. It's a sci-fi romance—Beauty and the Beast for grownups. My second novel, A Proper Charlie, is going through its paces with my editor, and I'm busily working on my third, which I haven't named at the moment. I have written many short stories for People's Friend, Best, Take a Break etc and enjoy entering short story competitions where I can. I am a mum of four boys, happily married to Dave and live in damp England.

JOURNEY TO THE PAST... A tale of romance and survival as three people travel from 2236 to the beginning of time. Jennifer Daykin joins the three-man crew to explore the newly discovered planet, Eden. All was going well until Jenny found herself deserted...She listened for an answering shout - there was nothing. In the distance, Jenny was transfixed with horror as the space shuttle rose into the blue sky of Eden. 'No...Don't leave me here!' Only the pounding of her heart answered her...but not alone The instant she hit the floor she curled into the foetal position. Finally, the bare feet walked away. A Native American warrior, had been her first thought, but it was his eyes that had alerted her he wasn't an Indian or even human. They were completely black; black, dry orbs in a battered face. Ordinary people with ordinary emotions, fears and insecurities. Only this isn't Earth, and he isn't human. A modern day Adam and Eve.

It sounds fantastic! What inspired you to write Eden?
I had a dream, cliché, I know. I was stranded on the moon as my fellow travelers left me (I think I was Buzz Aldrin in the dream), such an odd dream and it stuck with me. I “romanced” it and turned the moon into a habitual planet, added an alien and crazy co-travelers. I started writing it about six or seven years ago, but the manuscript has been in my bottom drawer for several years.

How did you find the publisher?
I received many rejections, which stated that the novel was just too original for the current market. An agent took it on but failed to find a publisher for it. This urged me into believing in the novel and myself as a writer. Again, I put the manuscript away and concentrated on other things. Then I heard about youwriteon.com (a review website) and uploaded Eden to the site. It received brilliant reviews, and then YWO offered a fantastic publishing deal I just couldn’t say no to, and it went from there.

Your second novel, A Proper Charlie, can you tell us a bit about it?
This is a chick lit. I loved writing sci-fi/romance with Eden but it’s almost impossible to find a publisher for cross-over genres. I like comedy (there’s a bit of comedy in Eden), and really love reading chick lit myself and so I thought I’d give it a bash. I think I’ve found my niche.

Now that you have one novel under your belt, was the second easier to write? Did you make the same mistakes?
Because I took my time with Eden it seemed easy to write. Charlie (I’m editing it now) has taken 18 months, and it seems harder. It’s frustrating because chick lit is something people think is easy, almost badly written, but jokes have to be strategically placed, people have to be realistic yet still be “characters” and there has to be a plot. I made mistakes with Eden, and hopefully I haven’t repeated them with Charlie.

How do you juggle a writing schedule with a husband, four boys, and the English weather?
I write when the kids are at school and after my housewifey jobs, and again at night when they are in bed. The weather doesn’t bother me—I don’t like the heat so I’m suffering at the moment because it’s hot here. Love it cold and the sound of rain—guess I’m in the right country! I don’t think my husband understands my need to write. He’s proud of Eden, but thinks a book is something you “knock up” in between supermarket shopping and collecting the kids from school. It’s frustrating when I’m trying to concentrate and he keeps coming over to me to talk, then he gets all hurt when I’m snappy! Men!

What do you look for in a novel when reading for pleasure? Your Desert Island books? I'll let you choose three.
1) False Memory by Dean Koontz has stayed in my mind. It was really interesting, but as with all his books, they end a bit too abruptly.
2) Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella which is a chick lit but was sort of a cross-over to a ghost story. I thought it was very well written, and the author really knew her 1920s!
3) A Spring Affair by Milly Johnson, another chick lit. This had a multi viewpoint, and as writers we’re always told to avoid that, so it was interesting for that aspect. It had a good storyline and a nice “feel good” feel to it.

Who has/does inspire you with their writing? Anyone you've learned a lot from by reading their works?
I suppose Dean Koontz has inspired me the most. Even though he’s a thriller/horror writer and I’m a comedy/romance I love the way his novels are fast paced and hope that I have imposed some of that tension in my books. When I was a child I read a lot of Enid Blyton, and in hindsight now, think maybe the trigger for writing was then.

What made you decide to become a writer instead of a world-famous, filthy rich tennis player or a reality show star?
I think being famous would freak me out. I wouldn’t turn down filthy rich though. I generally think writers are born. Then they either hone their craft or fail.

What's the best/worst part of being a writer?
The best is for me is meeting other writers and be able to talk about my passion and them understanding. I used to write before the Internet on a little battered Amstrad and thought I was the only writer in the world struggling.

The worse is editing or rewriting when you thought you’d finished! You send it off to the editor, and get on with something new. But then it comes back with this, this and this that needs to be changed and you don’t want to do it because your mind is full of new characters and plots.

Do you eat chocolate to break writer's block or do you eat chocolate anyway?
I love chocolate, especially Cadbury, but I’m on a diet at the moment. Have you heard of the Ducan Diet? It’s a carb free diet and unfortunately chocolate is full of carbs. I’m excited though, I found a website that sells low carb chocolate (probably tastes disgusting!), and I’ve ordered a box! I shall stay in that day when it arrives.

If you'd like to read more about Louise and her books, please visit her blog. You can purchase her fascinating debut novel Eden on Amazon.

50 simple rules for making it as a writer - The Writer Magazine

50 simple rules for making it as a writer - The Writer Magazine

Yes, we've all read all the rules and tips on the art and craft of writing, getting an agent, dealing with rejection, marketing, persevering etc. But here is one of the best and simplest list of tips by Harvey Rachlin to help any writer, aspiring or established, get on track and stay there. Often we become distracted, confused by advice on what to do, how to do it, and other angles we feel might be worthwhile. A lot of time can be wasted chasing the wrong rainbows, hoping they will turn into great leads (or pots of gold!).

There are a number of tips I have read before, but I hadn't given much thought to them. An example is the possiblity of foreign rights.

Tip #15. Write books with international appeal. Foreign publishers buy books they believe will be of particular interest to their countries’ readers, so keep that in mind when planning or writing your book. (Harvey Rachlin)

Is your thriller/romance/mystery/adventure set in a foreign country or an exotic location? Does your story have an interesting French/Italian/other culture flavor? An overseas publisher might just open the right door for your work.


This is just one tip that sparked my interest.


As for the rest? This is a list I shall print out and stick on my wall!


Harvey Rachlin is an award-winning author of a dozen books. His most recent book, Scandals, Vandals and da Vincis (Penguin), was published in June 2010 in Poland, following other foreign editions in Korea, Spain and the U.K.

Are Book Trends Killing Your Creativity?

When I receive posts from literary agent blogs I always check to see what’s hot and what’s not. One year it was boy wizards; then no one wanted any more Hogwarts lookalikes. Then it was vampires; suddenly no more vampires, please. Ditto werewolves. Currently in favor one finds angels (both good and bad varieties) topping the list, along with dystopian YA, and Swedish detectives and girls with tattoos. Zombies have held their own, with extra help from a few variations on a Jane Austen theme. Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has a compelling first line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” I just had to put that in. Back to the list—I think vampire hunters will break into the closed circle with Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by (you guessed it) Seth Grahame-Smith. (Personally I prefer Hugh Jackman as Gabriel Van Helsing)

So, on the serious note with which I began … when you write, are you writing for the trends, or are you writing because you have passion for a story that must be told?


To be honest, Michael Crichton brought about this post. Yes, since I recently confessed to loving Clive Cussler’s rollicking adventures (along with his delicious heroes), I might as well go the whole hog and add Michael Crichton to my list of commercial fiction favorites. I really enjoy his blend of scary fact with even more frightening fiction. Jurassic Park farfetched? Well, now that nanotechnology is all the rage, who’s to say extracting dino DNA from flies trapped in amber gazillions of years ago can’t happen in the future? It was actually the sequel to Jurassic Park, i.e. The Lost World, that made me think about how literary trends might dictate writers’ output.

Here the bit that sparked my brain:

“I think cyberspace means the end of our species … Because it means the end of innovation … Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s McDonalds on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap cross the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees.” (So says a character named Ian Malcolm, iconoclastic mathematician)

(The Lost World, Ballantyne Books, 1995, pg 339)

That was published in 1995. Have we disproved this author? Are writers turning out books at the rate of knots that explore a wonderful world of diverse, challenging, fantastic, and moving literary concepts and ideas? Or, when something becomes fashionable do people immediately copy it? Will there suddenly be a plethora of Swedish detectives and quirky tattooed female sidekicks following after the success of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

The question I’d like to ask is: are writers brave enough to plow on with their original ideas, or are they bowing to trends? Of course, I’m not saying The Development of Knitting Patterns in the Outer Hebrides Since 1865 will be a bestseller, but what I am suggesting is that writers should have enough faith in their writing not to think, “Oh gosh, I’d better write a book about boy wizards/angels/demons/dystopia/vampires/Swedish detectives.…

The literary world needs unique ideas to continue to be fascinating and challenging. Let's not lose our intellectual diversity.

The ABC of Agents

Rick Frishman always has a clear, concise way of explaining things and when I read this information in his newsletter, I thought, "What better way to explain agents?" The role of the agent seems to be a complex one and many authors are not quite sure exactly what their role is. Some authors even end up being ripped off by unscrupulous individuals. Read on and be advised.

How Agents Work:
Literary agents fill two primary, and often overlapping, roles. They serve as both their clients' Sales representatives and as their literary advisors. In order to sell their clients' work, agents read it, assess it, and advise clients on its quality and market potential. They also create strategies for its sale for publication. Agents identify potential publishers and offer their clients' writing to publishers, negotiate publishing contracts and monitor publishers' contract compliance. Good agents constantly position their clients and work with publishers and the media to build their clients' careers.

Agents' Compensation:
As compensation for their services, agents receive a percentage of the gross income from the publishing agreements that the agents obtained. They essentially function as commission salespersons who act as middlemen or vendors to sell their clients' writing to publishers. What does this mean to you? At present, the standard percentage for literary agents is 15 percent of all income that authors receive from the sale of the book and its subsidiary rights. Unless otherwise stated, this amount is calculated on gross sales on the book's cover price. Agents also usually receive 20 percent on foreign sales, and some are getting more. They receive more for foreign sales because they have to co-agent with colleagues abroad.

Reasonable and Unreasonable Charges:
Many literary agencies also charge for certain expenses such as photocopying, postage and long-distance telephone calls, which are reasonable. However, some may charge for marketing, travel and administrative expenses, which can be expensive. Reasonable expenses that you should expect to pay are those that your agent must lay out to represent you and submit your work to publishers. The expenses you are charged should be the same that all of your agent's other clients pay. Before you sign with an agent, get a list of all the expenses you will be charged and try to get an idea of how much they should run.

What To Do About Expenses?
Here's a good tip: When you negotiate a contract for an agent to represent you, insist on a provision that gives you the right to approve all expenditures over a stated sum, say $50. Unless unusual circumstances exist, you should not agree to pay for ordinary phone calls and other basic administrative expenses. If a provision is included in the contract that requires you to pay a percentage of the funds you receive for office, administrative or managerial expenses, think twice, because those tasks are normally part of the agent's job. If the agent insists, put a dollar cap on those expenses. And whenever your agent requests or deducts expenses, request an itemized statement of those costs.

Contracting with an Agent
At a certain point, most agents will insist that you give them the exclusive rights to sell your writing; they will ask you to sign an author/agent agreement. This point varies from agent to agent, but many won't give you much of their time until you sign. Your agreement with an agent should specify that it applies only to a particular book or project. It may contain an option for your next book. If you create spin-offs or new, revised, or updated versions of the agented book, the agent who negotiated the original deal will be entitled to share in revenues received.

Reprinted from "Rick Frishman's Author 101 Newsletter"

Subscribe at http://www.author101.com/ and receive Rick's "Million Dollar Rolodex"


Before You Sign On The Dotted Line
My tip: If you don't understand what you are reading then get some legal advice. Caveat Subscriptor...