In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast, hosts Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black discuss why every author should consider writing under a pen name, from protecting your privacy and your family to choosing a name that’s easy to spell and say.
Other questions include:
- How long should authors market a book before publication?
- Can you submit an AI-edited story to a journal that bans AI-generated work?
- How do you spot scam book club and publisher offers?
- Do indie authors need to buy their own barcodes?
- Should a literary agent ever charge an upfront fee for representation?
- Can you register a copyright under a pseudonym?
And more!
Listen to the Podcast: Why Every Author Should Consider a Pen Name
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About the Hosts
Michael La Ronn is ALLi’s Outreach Manager. He is the author of over 80 science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has managed to write while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings (now graduated!). You can find his fiction at www.michaellaronn.com and his videos and books for writers at www.authorlevelup.com.
Sacha Black is a bestselling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, speaker and casual rule breaker. She writes fiction under a secret pen name and other books about the art of writing. She lives in England, with her wife and genius, giant of a son. You can find her on her website, her podcast, and on Instagram.
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Read the Transcript
Michael La Ronn: Hello, and welcome to Self-Publishing with ALLi. This is the Member Q&A, where we answer all of your burning podcast questions. Well, not podcast questions, but writing questions. Everything from writing to editing to marketing, and you can tell that I just woke up. Hey, everybody. My name is Michael La Ronn. I’m ALLi’s outreach manager, and I’m joined by Sacha Black, strategy and communications director. How are you?
Sacha Black: I’m two coffees in, and I’ve been to the gym, so I think I’m doing better.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, you’re doing better than me. Everybody knows, at least if you’ve listened to this show for a couple months, you know I actually do these shows at like 5:00 in the morning my time. So that’s the best time for Sacha and I to communicate since we’re across the pond. And so some mornings are more fun than others.
How Long Should You Market a Book Before Publication?
Michael La Ronn: We got a lot of questions to answer. And so the first question is from Idell, and Idell asks, “How long do authors market their book before publication? Should it be six months to a year?”
Sacha Black: That is like how long is a piece of string, and what are your launch goals? So for example, somebody who’s in Kindle Unlimited is going to find that the majority of their readers probably won’t pre-order because they will be more likely to download it and read it in Kindle Unlimited, and they can’t do that until it’s released. So they’re more inclined to have a shorter pre-order period. For somebody who is super wide and less oriented or focused on ranking, but is more focused on bank, they are more likely to want to drive up pre-orders. So when you have a pre-order on the majority of stores, it will only count on the day of that pre-order. And so you don’t get any sort of algorithm or rank juice on launch day for that pre-order. So it really does depend what your goal is. For someone like me, I try and have as long of a pre-order period as humanly possible because that helps us to understand our print runs. It understands how popular the series is, whether or not we need to push marketing, pull back, well, not that you’d ever pull back on marketing, but you know what I mean. So for me, it really does depend on your goals. You’ve got everything from some people just stick it up and then start telling the audience, and then other people like me will do six months to a year of marketing. Not obviously hard marketing, it ramps up as you get closer and closer to the launch.
But yeah, it will depend on your goals, and ultimately, once that book is released, the biggest amount of sort of juice or eyes and visibility on that book is around launch day, unless you do something to continue to push traffic towards it, whether that’s ads, influencer marketing, social media marketing. But the other thing to say about that is it’s just one day. That book is yours for the rest of your life. I still market the first book I released as Ruby, maybe not quite as hard as the ones that are slightly more recent, but I certainly continue to market those books. It doesn’t go away. So sometimes I feel like people make a big deal out of launch, but it is nice, and especially for that first book launch it’s really important, or even a first book in a new series. But the marketing doesn’t stop once it’s out.
Michael La Ronn: Exactly. It just doesn’t stop, and it’s a constant debate that we have, I think, in the author industry. And I don’t think it has really changed that much, right? Like what you described. You could go the Goldilocks route, which is you do the pre-order and you don’t want to be too short, you don’t want it to be too long. Whatever’s right for you is what’s right, you know? That’s the bowl of porridge you want. Or you can just barnstorm it and just launch the book and be done. I think I would just make the decision and live with it. So yeah, I agree with everything you said. I’ve done pre-orders. I’ve not done pre-orders. I think at the end of the day, everybody’s going to have a slightly different career, ’cause there’s also the pesky little thing of genre and reader expectations too for that genre, right?
Sacha Black: Exactly. What is the frequency and pattern of other people releasing in that genre? Although I say that, there really are no rules. I was really sad actually about the report, but I read a report about the sapphic kind of market, and the report interviewed 490 sapphic authors, and 80% weren’t making money. So there are always going to be majority rules, and then ways that you can break rules and do things that work best for you. For me, I love the hype and I love the build-up, so that’s why I like having really long pre-order periods, because I love teasing the readers and so on and so forth. Some people can’t stand that. They just want to get the book out, write the next one. So I think you have to look at also what is your skill set. How long can you maintain talking about that book before it’s out? That’s really the question you need to ask yourself.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, ’cause if you’re like you and you can keep the ball rolling, and you do a really good job at it, then it’s awesome. But people have very short attention spans, so you’ve got to really keep it going. And if that’s not your personality, then maybe you want to do something different, right?
Sacha Black: Exactly.
Should You Write Under a Pen Name?
Michael La Ronn: So yeah, good stuff. That was a good answer to that. So next question is also from Idell. This is a common question we get quite a bit, but we haven’t gotten it in a while, and that’s, “I’m requesting what to do if I decide to use a pseudonym instead of my real name for my book. I would like to read about the experiences of other authors who decided to do this.” So I guess there’s a question before the question, which is should I write with my real name or should I write with a pseudonym? And then if I write with a pseudonym, how do I do it?
Sacha Black: So my answer to that has changed over the years, and I’m going to say something really controversial. I think every author should write under a pseudonym, which is probably not what you would expect me to say. However, I strongly feel that everybody, regardless of their goals, should plan for success. Even if that’s not necessarily your goal and you just want to get your book out there, have a few people read it. I think we have to, in this day and age of social media, we have to prepare ourselves for the potential for success, right? And you cannot predict what will happen. You cannot predict what will get picked up. Last year, I remember seeing this gentleman that was in a bookstore and nobody was talking to him. And he sort of looked very meek on his own, and this Gen Z YouTube come TikToker whatever went and talked to him and filmed it, and oh my God, it blew up on social media, and he got into the top 10 on Amazon. You can’t make that up. You really can’t. And if that can happen to sort of anybody, then you have to ask yourself how well-known do you want to be as the real you?
Do you want a layer of protection between you and the reader? Do you want a barrier? Do you want your real address to be found? Do you want your house to be found? How open are you here? I feel like a pseudonym is a very inconsequential barrier that serves to protect you in case of. It’s a bit like insurance, right? I feel like a pseudonym is an insurance thing here. So for me, I do feel like everybody should write under a pseudonym, and I never would’ve said that years ago. But having now the level of success I’ve had in this genre, knowing that I’ve been spotted in my car with my kid in the car, things like that, I’m just like, you know what? I think everybody should just have a pen name because then you get to retain some pieces of you for you. What do you think about having a pen name?
Michael La Ronn: I agree with that 1,000%. That’s not where I thought you were going to go, because when you said everyone should plan for success, I thought you were going to go the business route of it. But then you went to the privacy part, and that’s where my head was. So I agree 100%. The reason I use a pen name is because I have a career in insurance and when I’m applying for jobs, I don’t want somebody looking me up and then finding my books. Not that there’s anything that I would be embarrassed about. I mean, science fiction and fantasy. In fact, fun story, The Dresden Files actually got me a job. So in terms of that, no problem, but it’s just the professional image that I want to give off first and foremost. I don’t want writing to be a part of that, and I think that’s true for me, but I think that’s also true on some level for everyone listening.
Sacha Black: Well, and also you and I have kids, and it also puts a layer of protection in for them. Not everybody listening’s going to have kids, but for those that do, it is an extra layer.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, it’s absolutely an extra layer. And there’s other things that you have to think about as well, which we won’t get into, which is how you set your business up, right?
Sacha Black: So I was literally going to say that’s the next bit now, because who owns the copyright? That’s the next question. Who owns the copyright? Who’s paying the taxes? Is it the company? Is it you? And those are questions that you need to answer, and you need to know.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, they are. And the short answer, which is probably going to be accurate for 99% of people listening is, you own the copyright. The company owning the copyright makes sense in a limited number of situations, and I think that if you’re listening to this and you have to ask whether your company should own it, it may not apply to you. Particularly in the United States, the laws here are kind of weird. But there is a fun fact. So registering your copyright in the United States, you are actually not required to provide your real name on the public-facing registration. You can actually register a copyright under a pen name. I think a lot of people don’t know that. But that’s one way you can protect your privacy. But another way you have to think about protecting your privacy is when you register your business with your state or your province or your country, they’re often going to require a real person. You can’t give a fake name to them. So it probably makes sense to set up a business address, whether it be a PO box or a UPS store or whatever the equivalent would be in a country if you don’t live in the United States. You can pick a pen name, but then if you don’t do those things, then you’re still kind of exposing your privacy, right?
Sacha Black: The one thing that I would say is please look at your country laws because I’m not sure that that’s the case in the UK, because if you still own the copyright and the business signs a contract, I think the business would pay corporate tax and you would still have to pay personal tax on that money if it gets funneled through the business. This is something that I’ve been looking at recently, so it’s not the same in every country. Please go and seek advice from professionals on this.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, absolutely. And again, there’s a distinction here between ownership and registration. I was referring to copyright registration. So yes, if you do decide that your business should own the copyright, there’s a series of steps that you have to follow in order to make that happen, and there has to be a written contract. And again, I would just strongly encourage people not to go down that path until or unless you talk to an intellectual property and a business attorney. There’s a lot of tax implications, as you said, Sacha. You definitely have to be careful. But for the vast majority of people I think who are listening to this, I think a pen name makes sense, and I think protecting your privacy makes sense, and I think you should take the steps to do that and protect the privacy of yourself and your family. So I think we settled that. But the second part of this question is, what are some other tips that you might give with a pseudonym? Should the pseudonym be close to your real name or should it be something completely different?
Sacha Black: So my pen names are completely different to my legal name. And there are reasons for that. My legal name’s really long, so that’s why I like having short, sweet, simple pen names. My only other piece of advice is to go for the most obvious spelling. Don’t go for a weird spelling, and go for something that’s very easy to pronounce.
Michael La Ronn: Thank you for saying that.
Sacha Black: Seriously, something that’s really easy to pronounce.
Michael La Ronn: Pronounce and spell. So like when you’re on a podcast interview, like you and me, we do a lot, where you’re going to constantly have to say your name. And you’re going to constantly have to spell it. You don’t want a name that people are like, “Huh? How do I spell that name?” You know, I before E except after C, but not only when you’re spelling your name. So just be careful about that. Just really think about it. I think that there’s something to a name that has, I don’t know, connotations to your genre. I think there’s something to that.
Sacha Black: I do, too. I picked my Ruby Roe name because it sounded a little bit spicy, and also I love alliteration. Well, and there are other reasons for it as well. But I definitely agree. I think there is a naming trend in genres, and so I would go and have a look at what other people write as.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah. And you could do things like market tests too. I don’t know if it’s still around. There’s a website called PickFu. Have you ever used that?
Sacha Black: No.
Michael La Ronn: P-I-C-K-F-U. Again, I don’t know if it’s still around, so you’d have to go check, but how it used to work was you could upload a couple of different choices of something that you were thinking. So let’s say I want to go with the name A and then I want to potentially also go with the name B, right? And it’s kind of like the Amazon Mechanical Turk, where there’s just like thousands of people basically sitting in front of a computer and then it shows them both options and then they pick the one that makes the most sense to them based on the instructions you give. And so you can get like A/B testing from random people on which name sounds better. Or which name might look better on a book cover. That sort of thing.
Sacha Black: Literally never heard of it.
Michael La Ronn: Now, the downside is that that particular website, again, is not reader specific. There may be some reader specific websites out there that are kind of like that. I think I’ve heard of a few, but I can’t remember the name. But that’s an idea. But if you don’t want to do that, if that sounds overly complicated, then you can just ask a few friends. I tend to go complicated first.
Sacha Black: I’m like, this is sounding intense for a name choice.
Michael La Ronn: Yes, but there’s something to be said about data. I’m a big fan of getting data, and if you can get that data cheaply from thousands of people giving you feedback, in addition to asking friends, I don’t think that that’s a bad way to go. ‘Cause PickFu was not very expensive. I think it was like 20 or $30 for a test. And you could get, I don’t know, a few hundred responses. Again, back in the day. I don’t know what it’s like now, if it’s even around, but it’s an option. But yeah, I agree. Something that’s easy to say, easy to spell, easy to put up on a banner. Keep it to maybe a couple syllables, I think is important. That’s something I’ve been saying for a long time, and I don’t often hear it in the pseudonym conversation.
Can You Submit an AI-Edited Story to a No-AI Journal?
Michael La Ronn: Okay, cool. I think we beat that one. So the next question is from Thomas, and Thomas says, “I have used AI to edit and critique a story that I wrote and propose to submit for publication. I have accepted and included some of the platform’s suggestions. The journal’s guidelines say, ‘Work generated by AI will be automatically disqualified.’ Am I precluded from submitting the story? How does using AI to edit my writing differ from hiring an editor?” So assuming this is a short story. Just a disclaimer that a lot of people are not going to like whatever answer we give, regardless of what side we give the answer. But I think we should answer the question and just take our best shot at it.
Sacha Black: Okay, so I think if the submission guidelines say no AI, then I think that refers to any form of AI. So to be safest, I would not submit that story. I would work on a different story and submit a different story where you haven’t worked with AI. That is not me saying there’s anything wrong with what you’ve done. I’m just saying if you take the guidelines and you apply that to what you have created, you could flag up in their system if they’re doing some kind of AI checker. So I personally would err on the side of caution and suggest that you don’t submit that particular story. That’s just my read on it, because I think if you do submit it and then it flags up, it’s almost you’re asking for trouble. Whereas there are going to be competitions and things out there that have looser guidelines, that are more accepting, et cetera. So I think just from a how would you tolerate the exposure that would come from somebody accusing you of and/or suggesting that you have used AI in a no-AI competition. I just wouldn’t do it if it was me, personally. But that is my own tolerance to risk.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah. Generally what you said, I agree with you. I also don’t think that there’s anything wrong with using AI as a sounding board, and certainly whether you choose to upload your work to a large language model or whether you don’t, I think that’s a deeply personal decision that every individual author has to make. There are trade-offs to doing it, right? And there are trade-offs to not doing it. But I think the question I would ask before answering the question is, to what extent were you really using AI to edit the short story? If you were just using it for typos, who cares? That’s not going to get flagged, and I think we can all agree that, whether you agree with AI or not, you’re not using it to generate anything.
Sacha Black: No. I’m all for that.
Michael La Ronn: You’re just using it in the same way someone would use Grammarly or ProWritingAid. I think that’s okay. Where things start to get a little gray is when it starts recommending sentences or fixing sentences, or helping you change your sensory details or things like that. Or it’s writing whole chunks of the story or writing the entire story. I think we can also all agree that that’s a bad idea. But the gray area, that’s where I would be just a little careful. If in doubt, generally magazines are pretty good in their guidelines about saying what they mean by that. And if they don’t say what they mean, like your quote here says, “Work generated by AI will automatically be disqualified.” The key word there is generated, right? What does that mean? When in doubt, I think I would just ask the magazine. Send a note to the magazine, ask them, and maybe they won’t get back to you. Maybe they will. They might come back and say, “Oh yeah, if you just edited it, then that’s fine.” Or they could say, “No, we’d rather not.” And then I think you honor that and you move on.
But the other piece of this that I think you have to be really careful about is that you have to look at it from the magazine editor’s perspective, right? It is a very hard time to be a magazine editor or a short story anthology editor right now, because if you have any kind of submission, you are likely just getting blasted with, for lack of a better word, junk, right? I think I saw the Clarkesworld editor shared a graph or something about when people started submitting AI submissions to the magazine versus before, and it’s like a hockey stick, you know? And I think a lot of short story editors are going through this right now, and I think you have to put yourself in their shoes that it’s very, very difficult right now for them to kind of tell up from down. And their biggest risk right now is publishing a short story that the author didn’t write that could potentially invite a lawsuit to them, right? And then they’ve got to deal with the lawsuit, and then they have to sue you, right? So that is the risk that they’re dealing with, and I have a lot of empathy for that because that’s extremely difficult to be in. And it’s a small world, right? A lot of short story editors know each other. A lot of authors know each other, and so do you really want to be that author that causes that kind of trouble for an editor? I personally don’t want to be that kind of person. So like you said, Sacha, I agree with you. Err on the side of being conservative, honor and respect the challenges that editors are going through right now and, if you want to use AI in that gray area, personally, I think you’ve got to make that choice for your career. Do what works best for you. I just would not submit it to a magazine. So we’re good on that one.
How to Spot Scam Book Club and Publisher Offers
Michael La Ronn: Okay. Next question comes from Jane, and Jane said, “I have a number of questions about how to identify scam offers for author spotlights or author opportunities with various book clubs and literary networks.” So the general gist of the question is, how do I evaluate whether somebody emailing me about a book club opportunity is a legitimate opportunity?
Sacha Black: Most of them are not. I would say 99.99999%. In fact, in my entire career, I have had one book club opportunity, and that came from an individual reader who actually messaged me on Instagram and said, “Oh, just to let you know, we’re doing your book this month.” And I was like, “Oh, are you?” And she was like, “Yeah.” And then there was nothing else, and so I said, “Hey, would you like some bookmarks? And I can send you some book plates.” And she was like, “Yes, please.” And I sent 30 book plates and 30 bookmarks, and that was it. I’m not sure any of these author spotlights are particularly correct, because if it was a genuine, like a Reese Witherspoon book club, whatever it is, that would go through an agent or it would go through a trad pub. The chances of that coming, I just don’t believe it’s going to come to somebody’s inbox directly. Second thing, they’re almost always from Gmail accounts. If they were genuine, money-making book clubs, they would probably have an account email address that was from that book club. You could go check online.
‘Cause the other thing that happens with these is publishers also. Every day I’m getting emails from air quotes publishers. They’re not publishers. Most of the time they have made-up email addresses @gmail.com. But just recently they’ve now started doing it with non-Gmail accounts, and that requires a little bit more investigating. But to be perfectly honest, I just assume that they are all fake.
Michael La Ronn: Me too.
Sacha Black: And the reason that I say that is because there are certain pieces of information that would come in that email if it was genuine. I know that because I’ve had two from publishers that were genuine, and it had information about the terms and the offer and things like that. And ultimately when I got those emails, I just sent them to ALLi, ’cause this was before I had an agent, and ALLi helped me determine whether or not they were real. You can go and investigate because the thing is, as well, with these book club people, sometimes they’ve even made websites or they’ve made groups online, so it is hard. You do have to pay a lot of attention. With the publisher ones, nine times out of 10 they are actually impersonating somebody true, so you could go and check on LinkedIn, and they do have their real name. One little tip, click contact, and then it will show you the email address, and nine times out of 10 it’s not… Well, not nine times, 10 out of 10 it’s not the same email address. You can’t always do that. What I will do, if it’s a really well-worded one, I will then go to that publisher website. I will then look for the information on that person, and then check the email address. But there are ways and means. I’m just trying to think of all the different ways that you might want to check. But honestly, it’s almost always fake. You just have to assume it is.
Michael La Ronn: That’s way more time than I would ever spend. I just delete them, you know? Okay, so there is a feature that I’m just going to throw it out there so people are aware of it. And again, it’s AI, but hey, this is potentially a good use case of it. So there’s a recent feature in ChatGPT that can essentially read an email and tell you what it’s about. It can summarize your inbox. It can do interesting things, like send you a notification if somebody important sends you an email. So what you could do is you could take the last 100 emails you’ve gotten from these scammers, and you could throw those into ChatGPT and just basically say, “If I get an email like this, then review it. If there’s a website, go to the website, look at the contact form, blah, blah, blah. And if there’s something that seems like it could be a legitimate opportunity, let me know. Otherwise, mark it as spam, I don’t want to see it.” It’s an option, but that would require you to set that up and go through the process to do that. That’s doable. I’m just calling that out as a potential tool for anyone who’s interested in doing that.
Sacha Black: AI fending off AI.
Michael La Ronn: AI fending off AI. It’s cat and mouse. I think we have to just accept reality at this point that we’re just in a cat and mouse game, you know? Because if you do that, it’ll work for, like, 10 minutes, and then they’ll move on to something else. But I think for some cases it could be helpful. But honestly, I think you’re probably just better off deleting it. In all the years before all this AI stuff came out, I think maybe, like you, I got maybe one book club thing. Somebody reached out and let me know. But what kind of sucks about all this is if you actually run a legitimate book club. Think about that, right? If you run a legitimate book club, how are you going to reach out to people? Because they’re probably deleting your emails, you know? So it might be worth thinking, if I was a book club owner, how would I get past people’s spam filters today? And I think they would do the example that you gave, Sacha, which is, “Hey, just letting you know that we’re featuring your book this year.” They’re not asking anything from you. That’s probably how you know you have a legitimate opportunity. If it’s not that, then probably not worth it.
Do Indie Authors Need to Buy Their Own Barcodes?
Michael La Ronn: Okay. This is a difficult question. I don’t know if we can answer this, but we’ll give it the college try. This is from Catherine, and the question is: Which type of barcode do I use for a single novel with overseas potential?
Sacha Black: I don’t use barcodes.
Michael La Ronn: I don’t either. I use the barcodes that are given to me from brands.
Sacha Black: Yeah. That’s what I would say. So for example, people aren’t going to be able to see, but this is a proof from Amazon, and there was no barcode space on this book. And Amazon have just printed it on top of the book, and that’s that. So I don’t bother with barcodes. I certainly don’t put them on the books that I print in my warehouse.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah. I guess that might be something that would be a good thing to research at some point. What is the use case of purchasing a barcode? ‘Cause you can buy them at different places, right? And I would imagine that places wouldn’t sell them if there wasn’t some sort of legitimate use for it. I just don’t know what the legitimate use is for an indie author. ‘Cause it’s not like ISBNs, where we say, “You should purchase your own ISBN because here are the benefits to doing that,” and there are very clear benefits to purchasing your own ISBN. But I’ve never heard anybody make that argument with barcodes. You should purchase your own barcode because X, Y, Z. And I would think if there was anybody that would have a use case for it, it would be you, Sacha. You’ve got your own warehouse, right? You’re selling your own books. I feel like if it’s not a use case for you, then who is this a use case for?
Sacha Black: That’s what I wonder. I do wonder if I were using a scanner in the warehouse, would it then be useful? It might be useful at that point, but I’m not there yet.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, for keeping inventory, right? I guess that is a downside to getting a barcode from Ingram or Amazon is they don’t give you a copy of the barcode. So if you have a scanner, to your point, if you have a scanner, you know. But if you had a really good camera, could you take an image of it? I don’t know. If anybody knows, feel free to write us. I would love to know this. What is the, can anybody make a good argument for why an indie author should purchase their own barcodes? And I think it would be a good education for all of us listening, ’cause this question comes up quite a bit, do I need to purchase a barcode?
Should You Pay a Literary Agent for Representation?
Michael La Ronn: Okay. We get down to our final question, which is from Tom, and Tom wants to know about a specific literary agent. We’re not going to name names on here, but the question is what do you know about literary agents in general? Can ALLi answer any questions about literary agents?
Sacha Black: I actually don’t know. We don’t have a literary agency index like we do with our partners. Obviously, we have the Ellenberg Agency, which we’ll consult for authorpreneur members. But we don’t have the capacity at the moment to sort of go and review and evaluate and vet. As indie authors, obviously it’s something that is more unusual, more for the authorpreneur end, unless you’re going in hybrid from the beginning, I suppose. So it’s not something that I’m aware that we do. We can give advice on how you could vet. I would do it very much the same way that I do vet an author service, if I’m perfectly honest. I would use a lot of the same tools and techniques to vet them. What do you know of us? We don’t do it.
Michael La Ronn: No, we don’t. And the main reason is because of our name, right? We are the Alliance of Independent Authors. We are self-published authors first. That’s not to say that we don’t advocate for literary agents, but the majority of our authors are self-published. Some are fortunate enough to work with literary agents, and that’s great. But we don’t have a lot of advice to give you in that area other than to really read your contract very carefully, ask around, and just use your due diligence. So I’m going to be a little cheeky here, Sacha, because there was a second part to the question that I left out that I think is important, so maybe we can create a second question. This particular agent that Tom is looking at is wanting £1,400 for representation. Does that change your answer at all?
Sacha Black: What? Yeah, it does.
Michael La Ronn: Run away. Run away, Tom.
Sacha Black: Run away. Insert expletives that are unpolite for a podcast. No. What? No. Not legitimate. Run away.
Michael La Ronn: So Tom, there’s a saying that a lot of us have in the industry, which is money flows to the author. It doesn’t flow from the author. So when you sign with a literary agent, you should not have to pay anything because the agent is going to shop your novel and get representation at a publisher, and the agent will then take a percentage of your royalty as the representation.
Sacha Black: And your advance.
Michael La Ronn: Yeah, and your advance. Of course. So if they’re asking you for payment, that’s not customarily done. So in terms of vetting an agent, okay, this agent is probably not it, but say this is the path you want to walk, Tom. Just use some due diligence, and I think you did a great thing asking us this question. And the great thing is that this question was asked relatively recently. So I would not engage any further with this particular agent. You can find a lot more reputable agents out there who will not ask you for upfront payment.
Sacha Black: Yep.
Ask Your Questions on the ALLi Dashboard
Michael La Ronn: Okay. Well, here we are at the bottom of another episode. Thank you all. We will be back next month with more questions, so don’t forget that if you are an ALLi member you can ask your questions on the ALLi dashboard. Simply log in at allianceindependentauthors.org and you can get to our question forum on the menu and go ahead and ask your question and, gosh, you just might hear it on the air. So this has been the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast. Got it right this time. I’m Michael La Ronn, been with Sacha Black, and we will see you next time. Bye now.
Sacha Black: Bye.
