A story: fresh out of grad school, I lived in New York and worked five jobs simultaneously, including working for a “world-famous literary agent.” This agent, whom I’d never heard of, ran ads in Writer’s Digest proclaiming: “Now, world-famous literary agent [name redacted to protect the guilty] waives his reader’s fee…” That’s right. This guy would charge nothing to “read” your manuscript and advise you…to buy his editorial services (or, rather, the editorial services of someone like me, if not the real me).

He’d charge his desperate supplicants hundreds of dollars, pay me 10% to do a complete rewrite (he only agreed I’d done my job if each page was heavily marked-up in red pencil), and then pay a typist an equal sum to turn my chicken-scratchings back into legible text. The author, flattered by the attention and promised the moon and the stars, inevitably said yes to everything. Then the agent would send the book to a single editor—one!—have it rejected, and that was that: he’d have fulfilled his contractual obligation and pocketed a hefty fee.

So that’s what I won’t do: I won’t lie to you. I won’t try to get you to hire me on the basis of false hopes and unfulfillable promises. In short, I won’t flatter or mislead you just so I can make a buck. I need you to understand what you’re after, why you’re after it, and what we’re getting into.