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85 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
MY CAREER AS A PRO BEGAN BY READING THIS BOOK, February 8, 2002
By A Customer
First, folks, let me say I am a professional writer who prefers to remain anonymous, whose third novel will come out in hardcover from a major house this fall, and my agent is getting me six-figure advances, including foreign rights and audio sales. Second, like all you aspiring writers out there, four years ago I was a struggling "wannabee" too, with my own gigantic pile of "Dear Author" rejection letters. I quickly learned that wannabee writers fell into one of two groups, which I labeled the "willoughbies" (the people who WILL break in professionally sooner or later) and the "wontabees" (the people who will never succeed no matter how much you try to help them). If you really, truly want to go pro, you have to be honest with yourself that at any point in your early career you still have a heck of a lot to learn -- and the Herman Guide will make a big difference in getting you there. So, I agree with the other 5-star reviewers below, that the 1-star reviewers of the classic, indispensable Herman Guide sound like sour-grape whiners and complainers. Agents have no time or patience for obvious wontabees. And believe me, they can smell a wontabee within 3 seconds of when they open the submission envelope. Don't blame it on Anthrax. So why is this Guide valuable to you? It is the most complete and accurate existing guide to agents -- who are the only people you should contact if you have a full-length book you want to get published, not editors. Whoever below said that editors are more approachable might have been talking about short stories for magazines, where it's true that you don't need an agent and no agent will want to even look at your stuff anyway. And the guy or gal who said below that Herman is out of date probably doesn't realize how long it takes from when the raw material of a book is ready, to when the actual book reaches the bookstores. It takes over a year, sometimes closer to two years!!! Editing, production steps, and advance marketing, all force this long lead time. So, OF COURSE you should double-check the info to make sure it's current and accurate. What Herman says about my own literary agent, for instance, is spot on!!! I strongly recommend that you read every single agent's description of their "dream client" and their "client from hell" -- yes, every darned one of them in this Guide -- and then think hard about what they say, and learn from it before you send out another submission. It WILL make a difference. If you're too lazy to carefully read hundreds of different agent listings, or too self-referential to learn from this solid-gold resource of wisdom, then you're a wontabee for sure. In summary, without this Guide I would not have learned how much there was to know about things that I didn't even know I needed to know, and I would certainly not have learned the "right answers" to all these unasked questions. Nor would I have happily left my previous career "day job" far behind me long ago, and be making a very nice living as a full-time professional writer. If this sounds opinionated to all you wontabees out there, well, what can you do, I'm opinionated. PS: Also strongly recommend agent Donald Maass's THE CAREER NOVELIST. Hard hitting, no punches pulled, eye opening, cynical, whatever, you gotta read it. (No, Donald Maass is not my agent, though I did meet him once at a writers conference.) PPS: I predict this review will get lots of "not useful" votes from bitter wontabees. Too bad.
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