If A Literary Professional Tells You Any Of These Things, RUN.

It’s a big step to hire someone to help you with your book, your publishing dreams, or your literary career.

Editors, book coaches, literary agents, and many other kinds of literary professionals can be extremely helpful in getting your book written, polished, and off the ground. Most of us try to be honest, straightforward, and supportive in what we do. Most of us are very honest with our clients, too, especially about what we can do to support and enhance their work and their chances of success.

But not all literary professionals are above board, and some of them are, quite frankly, predators whose only real interest in you is how much money they can convince you to give them before you figure out that you’ve been scammed.

Many writers who are just starting out do not realize that this is the case. Some of them get burned. This is bad for them.

It’s also bad for those of us who are honest, forthright, and competent professionals who aren’t out to hoodwink anyone. Believe me, we get it! Being scammed will definitely leave a bad taste in a writer’s mouth. No one wants to put their trust in someone who sounds encouraging and enthusiastic and supportive only to find they are a wolf’s in sheep’s clothing.

Fortunately there are plenty of reputable and intelligent people out there who are ready to help you learn enough to know what looking at.

• I often recommend Chantel Hamilton’s “The Comprehensive Guide to Finding, Hiring, and Working with an Editor,” published by the inimitable and authoritative Jane Friedman.

• I also consistently recommend the “Writer Beware” pages created by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Association, which are valuable for any writer, whether or not you work in those genres.

• Likewise, you will do well following the advice of Preditors and Editors, who are currently running as a Facebook site while they are between website incarnations.

As for me, I’m simply going to give you my personal Top 7 list of things that NO reputable book coach, editor, agent, book marketer, or any other legit literary professional should ever say to you.

If they say any variation on any of these? RUN, do not walk, in the other direction.

1. “I think you’ve got a bestseller here.”
   Anyone who says anything along these lines is lying, full stop, end of sentence. No one can guarantee or even predict a bestseller. If they could, they’d be a legendary kingmaker in a corner office somewhere in the publishing industry and not trying to sweet-talk the likes of me or you out of a few grand. C’mon now. Critical thinking saves lives, y’all.
   

2. “The world is waiting for your book.”
   No, it’s not. Have you been in a bookstore? Looked at Bookshop.org or Audible or Amazon? The world is full of books on every subject under the sun and then some. Many of them are quite good. Some of them are exceptional. And even so, not everyone in the world is waiting for the same book. Not everyone in the world is even going to consider the same book. There is no such thing as a book that the whole world is waiting for, sorry not sorry.

   It is a good idea for you to write a book? Probably! Will there be people who will be eager to read your particular book? Absolutely. But not the whole world, and that is absolutely okay.

3. “This story has never been told before, and you are the only person who can tell it.”
   Your story will be different from any other similar story. That is true! And you are the only person who can write your particular story in your particular way. However, very few human experiences are completely unique. Very few types of stories are completely unique.

   If you’ve ever been in a bookstore or library you’ll notice that there are categories into which books fall: memoir, history, travelogue, fiction, etc. No matter how unique your particular take on something is, no matter how idiosyncratic your viewpoint or your style, there are other books and stories that are at least somewhat like it.

   That’s actually an advantage. Things that are too new or unprecedented can feel weird and offputting. Originality is great! It’s invigorating and exciting and attractive. But there also has to be enough of the familiar that people feel like they have an entry point, or a huge number of readers will bounce right off. I mean, it’s been in print for more than a century and many readers are still bouncing right off of James Joyce’s Ulysses for a lot of very good reasons.

4. “For only X amount of money, I can get your book in front of the right people at the right publishing houses / get it in front of people who buy movie rights, etc.”
   Nope and nope. Agents work on commission. They get paid when and if you get paid. The way they get paid is that they get a cut of whatever a publisher or other producer pays for the right to produce your work.

   You don’t give them money up front. They take on your project because they believe they stand a decent chance of selling it and thus making money for both of you.

   (This, by the way, is one of the reasons it can be hard to get an agent. The agent has to believe they can actually sell what you have to offer. This is about them and their contacts and who they know and the kinds of material they are good at selling and also about the quality of what you produce. Not all agents handle all kinds of material, just like not all writers write all kinds of books.)

5. “I’m sorry, I can’t give you any references or show you any work samples, all my clients work with me under strict confidentiality agreements.”
   Who does this person want you to think they are, James Bond? It’s totally reasonable to ask for references if you’re going to hire a service professional. It’s totally unreasonable for a service professional to say they can’t possibly do that. It does not pass the sniff test.

   Even if every single client a particular literary professional has worked with has required the professional to sign an NDA — which is immensely unlikely, by the way, since they’re not standard in the industry — there is nothing barring any literary professional from asking a previous client if they’d be willing to be a reference. There’s nothing barring them from asking previous clients for written testimonials. There’s also nothing barring any literary professional from sharing a short excerpt of a work sample they did for a previous client, even if they have to heavily anonymize it to avoid violating an NDA.

6. “Your story has been suppressed / repressed / culturally marginalized or is centered in a special kind of trauma, and I am uniquely capable of helping you tell that kind of story.”
   Marginalized peoples and suppressed stories find many ways to expression. No one person, writing method, program, or approach is the One True Way. Especially if your story is traumatic or painful, it can feel really good to have someone tell you that they understand your pain and can help you process it into a book. But there are a lot of people who can help you write a book… and also lots of people who can help you process your trauma and your pain.

   It’s not necessarily true that processing your trauma or pain requires writing a book. Maybe it just requires time and therapy. It’s also not true that if you DO decide you want to write a book about your trauma or pain, that you must find a literary specialist who focuses on trauma and pain. Perhaps you’d rather work with someone who focuses on good and effective writing, no matter the subject. That’s always a solid option, regardless of your topic.

7. Anyone who says they have a “foolproof system” for something — writing a book proposal, plotting a book, developing characters, anything.
   Nothing is foolproof. There are simply too many different kinds of fools for anything to be proof against all of them. One kind of fool, incidentally, is the fool who falls for being told something is “foolproof.”

One of the reasons I write Developmental Edits is because I believe strongly that editing, book coaching, and collaborative writing work can and should be transparent. People should know what literary professionals do and what they can expect when they hire literary professionals.

When it comes to our writing, many things can get in the way of the kind of normal healthy skepticism we’d apply to anything else in our lives. Our desire to be seen, to be validated, to be told that we are worthy and that our stories are worthy and important, even just to be told that yes, you’re good enough to write a book can all make us a little bit more gullible than we’d like to think we are.

That’s human. That’s normal. But it’s also how people get scammed, and I hate seeing people get scammed. Especially in my industry. I don’t like it. And I don’t like it when I get tarred with the “all editors/book coaches/etc. are scammers” brush, either.

Just remember: if you smell horseshit, it’s not necessarily because someone is about to give you a pony just for being such a special person.

The pony is not just over there where you can’t see it, waiting for exactly the right moment to dazzle you.

It’s much more likely that someone’s just trying to sell you horseshit.

— Hanne Blank Boyd

p.s. Free subscriptions to Developmental Edits are always free. If you’re not ready to for a paid subscription, why not leave something in the Developmental Edits tip jar.

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