March into some Links
Longer posts in progress… In the meantime, here’s a roundup of useful posts you might have missed:
The post that comes up most often in conversation as the one they recommend to friends:
Just write another book
Sometimes when I’m participating in some sort of conference or agent-advice-giving forum, I speak with writers who tell me they’ve been querying their novel for years.
If you’re expecting a royalty statement at the end of March:
Will I Make Royalties?
So your book has been published, congratulations! Your agent tells you that it’s selling well, and now you’re wondering if you’re going to make royalties. You’ve heard about authors “earning out” their advances and getting more money after the book is published, and you would like this for yourself, too.
If you know that the London Book Fair was last week:
Interview with an Anonymous Literary Scout
Within book publishing, the job of the scout can be the hardest to explain. I’ll often speak with people who’ve been working within publishing for a few years who still don’t entirely understand who the scouts work for and what they do.
If you’re currently querying agents and anxious about it:
What to do while your book is on submission to agents
Usually I’m advising authors on what to do while their book is on submission to editors. But for this post I wanted to direct it outward for the side I don’t see. Some of this advice is similar to what I recommend for writers on submission to editors, and some is more specific.
How many clients are signed from slush
When I first started working in publishing, there was this mythical dream of pulling a client from the slush pile. In this dream, anachronistically, the agent would be leafing through a physically printed manuscript, turning pages in their corner office long into the night, shocked that there was a writer out there who could write so well, so fully capture a world, and hadn’t been recommended through any of the usual channels.
If you want to know what I read last year:
All the books I read in 2025
Here is a list of every book I read “not for work” in 2025 (I don’t count books I read for research, books on my own list, or manuscripts I considered.) I log how I read them but don’t review. But fo…