Nancy was definitely not Renee. She wasn’t easy to reach by phone, but hers is a numbers game: many clients, few paychecks. If she chitchatted with every author she represents every week, she’d get no contracts negotiated.

What she reliably did was send out email bulletins when she was heading to New York. She’d ask for our revised proposals and manuscripts. She’d report afterward, also via email, what had happened on those trips.

And based on what she was hearing from publishers, those whose books she hadn’t sold received homework.

Once it was to develop what she called E-blast lists, exhaustive lists of people and businesses who could be alerted via email about a book’s release. E-blast lists are free, she said, unlike traditional mailings. Publishers loved them and loved authors with an eye to the bottom line and an aggressive, hands-on marketing plan.

Another time it was a test reader study. I sent selected chapters and a survey to 50 people, many of them strangers, and compiled the results.

She wanted competition analyses of books in our arena. That information was already in my proposal, but I expanded and revised it.

At Nancy’s request I also updated my bio, began learning about blogging, developed a website, and wrote a brief ‘catalogue’ description of my book and of myself.

I’d given up magazine and newspaper freelancing, my old standby source of income and validation. Nancy said that had been an error. At her direction I started writing short fiction so that I could ‘get my name out there’ as had been the case when I freelanced.

And I received emails like this one, dated March 2008:

Our catalog submissions proved very successful for certain kinds of non-fiction titles, while challenging for others.  Yours came under the “challenging” category, primarily because the market is overbought with current and new titles.  That said, I will still be presenting your work in person when I’m in New York (next week through mid-April), and be back to you after my return.  In the meantime, keep that bulldog faith.

At the end of that particular New York trip Nancy wrote to schedule a teleconference. She had said she planned to pare back her client list and by now she’d been working for me, without a paycheck, for eight months. She was going to drop me.

She didn’t. Instead she gave me more homework. And told me that, of her unpublished clients, she had decided to keep a handful and I was one. The reason, she said, is that I’m a hard worker and a professional. I’m pretty sure that meant that I did her homework assignments.

All told, by March of 2009 I had spent as much time on Nancy’s homework as I had on any one of the major revisions of my book. And both of us were still working for free. Go ahead: add up the hourly wage that was going to be mine if Nancy could come through with that $20K advance, less 15%. Dare you!