One day in March of 2009 I began thinking about the fact that, contrary to our verbal agreement, I had not seen a single rejection letter. How many editors had actually seen my work, I wondered. I liked Nancy but…where were those letters?

I did some online searching. Nancy Ellis, I learned, is listed on the watchdog site, Preditors and Editors, as not recommended. There seemed to be two reasons. One is that she had apparently been a member of a group called the IILAA, which was said to have used questionable methods to promote member agents. Some member agents were said to have charged fees for pre-publication services, a big no-no in the profession.

As far as I can tell, the group, whatever it did, is extinct.

There was also at least one lawsuit, more than a decade previous, in which a client sued Nancy for improperly withheld royalties. Threads mentioning the suit were vague and comprised mostly of hearsay. The internet is a funny place: for better or worse, once a track has been pressed into the soft mud of cyberspace, it never fades.

I was not concerned with those issues. Nancy had never charged me, not even for office expenses she was entitled to. And she couldn’t withhold royalty checks on an unsold book. What did concern me a bit were several threads on writers’ sites questioning whether, after Nancy accepted a client, she did any work for them if they were not her hottest prospects.

Where were those rejection letters?

After a phone conference in April of 2009 I released Nancy from our contract — not because of anything I’d read online;  she’d satisfied my doubts — but for two more compelling reasons. One was that I felt sorry for her. I no longer believed that the time she’d put into me was going to net her a paycheck.

The other reason was common sense.  Nancy wouldn’t have taken me on if she didn’t expect editors she worked with to fall in love with my book. But if she was a good businesswoman she talked to those people the first time she took my manuscript to New York. Since then she had been trolling and, I had to assume, wasting less and less of her time doing so. It was time for both of us to move on.