Tuesday, December 29, 2009

How I Got My Agent 5

Nostrabuttus from the QueryTracker forum contributed his/her/its agent story.

Getting a literary agent to represent me would be easy. The difficult part was convincing the literary agent I was a ghostwriter for several best-selling authors in this country. Everyone has heard of them. I cannot disclose their names because it would violate the terms of my agreement. You see, none of those guys are about to admit I’m the genius who really cooks up all that best-selling prose.

But there had to be a way to prove it without exposing their identity directly. And there was. I told the literary agent to wait until I finished another round of novels for my clients and he would see my name in each one of them. With a name like Nostrabuttus, the chances of it randomly showing up in a best-seller, much less several best-sellers would be extremely rare. In fact, the only way it could, would be if I, the ghostwriter I claimed to be, had put it there.

It took me a few months to pull it off, but pull it off I did in a way that protected the famous authors’ reputations and yet proved my claim. When a new release of four novels hit the best seller list in less than a week, I told my soon-to-be agent to start searching for my name.

The literary agent checked the novels and was able to verify my claim that I had ghostwritten each and every one of them. A day later, the agent begged to let him represent me. I signed with him so he would get off his knees.

For those of you who have never seen the name Nostrabuttus in any best-selling novel, I have explained the reason it is not in plain sight. The ghostwriters for Jesus couldn’t put that stuff in plain sight in the Bible either. Once you learn how to use the software that found the Bible codes, you will be able to find my name in several best-selling novels. Proof positive I am indeed the cook I claim to be.

3 comments:

  1. Happy New Year to Marva and all here.

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  2. That is damn intriguing! Did the best selling authors start off writing their own books and you took over, or did you write their books from the start? I can understand the latter if they are famous people, but does any old Tom, Dick, or Harry decide they'd like to have their name on a book and employ a ghost writers to pen it? It just seems so...odd. Not for you, obviously, because it's your bread and butter, but goodness me, I'd be so tempted to shout out that I had written those books when someone else hit the BSL with them and took all the glory.

    Hmmm. I'm now wondering who the heck these 'authors' are!

    :O)

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  3. Btw, it struck me just now that people reading my previous comment may think I was being serious. I was, uh, getting into the spirit of the post.

    :o)

    ReplyDelete