In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames—the same designer duo who helped define post-war aesthetics and gave us so many chairs—made a short film called Powers of Ten. The film opens with a shot of a man and a woman lying on a picnic blanket in a park. From there, the camera begins zooming out by—you guessed it—powers of ten. We rise ten meters above the picnickers, then one hundred, a thousand. Soon we are above Earth, the solar system, and eventually—at 10²⁴ power—the galaxy.

Eames’s film holds a lesson for the would-be writer. Whether writing a novel, a memoir, or a reported work of nonfiction, a writer must constantly shift between different “powers of ten” as they bring their work to market. During the drafting process, a writer works one meter off the ground. Every comma, every sentence, every word needs to sing. But during the querying process, a writer must zoom way, way out and consider the broader tableau: the query letter; the overview and chapter outline, if you’re writing nonfiction; and finally the subject of this week’s newsletter, THE SYNOPSIS.

WHY DO I NEED A SYNOPSIS?

I have a confession to make: I rarely ever read synopses, and Neon doesn’t require them in submissions (although plenty of agents do—be sure to check individual agencies’ guidelines). I always read the query letter and, if I’m intrigued, the sample pages. But as an agent who specializes in fiction (and I’ll be speaking mainly of fiction this week), I prefer to approach a novel more or less cold. It helps place me in the seat of a future editor or reader who is starting from page one with relatively few preconceptions.

Yet even if the agents you plan to query do not request a synopsis in their guidelines, I still recommend everyone try their hand at writing one. At some point, someone important will ask every successful author to tell them, usually at a moment’s notice, “So what’s your book about?” Cue the flop sweat, the panicked fumbling, the vague hand gestures. The ability to succinctly describe the broad strokes of your story—and why they’re so captivating—can be your lifeline in these uncomfortable moments.

Crafting a synopsis forces you to strip your plot down to its essential components. When you can only summarize a story in a single page, every event and character has to justify its existence. If you struggle to explain what your protagonist wants and what stands in their way, that may signal that your narrative engine lacks gas. Subplots that once felt rich and atmospheric can reveal themselves as distractions, while your central conflict either sharpens into focus or dissolves into incoherence under the powers of ten.

A manuscript allows room for digressions, atmosphere, and voice, which can sometimes conceal a sagging middle or a climax that arrives too late. But when you summarize the story in sequence, link-by-link, those squishy problem spots become harder to ignore. You may discover that the protagonist spends the first third of the novel waiting for others to act rather than making decisions on her own or that a major turning point occurs offstage. Writing the synopsis can reveal that two minor characters serve nearly identical functions, or that an emotional payoff arrives too late.

By forcing yourself to sit down and articulate the narrative in clean, causal sentences, you begin to see hidden patterns underneath the scenes you have already written. You start to see which plot points truly drive the story forward and which serve as adornment. The result is not only a deeper insight into your novel but perhaps a clue as to what still needs tweaking. In this way, crafting a synopsis is less about satisfying an agent’s submission guidelines than about understanding the floor plans of the house you’ve built.

WHERE TO START?

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In the comments, please feel free to:

• Introduce yourselves!

• Ask me questions about publishing, your careers, or anything your heart desires!

• Ask the rest of the commentariat those questions!

• Answer other people’s questions!

• Commiserate on the difficulties of creative work and life!

• Post music recommendations! I need those. (I like basically everything you’d expect an elder millennial from Bethesda, MD would, plus pattern-based minimalism, plus anything where the bassist gets a little steak instead of the typical hamburger.)

Over the next few days, I and possibly Kent and Eloy will be in and out of the post as we’re able, chiming in and answering what we can in as juicy a manner as circumstances allow.

Please do not use this chat to:

• Pitch me or either of my colleagues at Neon. That’s what our submissions procedure is for.

• “Ask a question” that is clearly just a pitch in disguise.

• Be a dick.

• Ask any other commenter for specific professional favors, e.g. blurbs. This is an exercise in mutual aid and group solidarity, not individual networking. (If someone violates this rule with you over email or DMs, please narc to me.)

• Shit talk, gossip, or ask for gossip about specific writers or publishing professionals. Companies, celebrities, foreign royalty, and anonymous, unidentifiable friends who don’t even go here are all okay.

I will delete all comments that violate these rules and reserve the right to delete any others for any reason I want.

Happy chatting! A x

Callista Gingrich, third and most unsettling wife of Newt, enjoys a life of which even the most delulu authors dare not dream. Long before she enjoyed regular soirees with the planet’s most important people, she published books in sundry categories: essays, photography, and Ellis the Elephant, a bestselling children’s series in which a plucky pachyderm learns from various (mostly white) people how America “became a free and exceptional nation.”

If you’re an author who dreams of doing the same, I can see your eye twitching from over here. No doubt some knowledgeable person—agent? Editor? Writer friend?—has already told you it’s a bad idea to publish in multiple genres. Maybe they said, It’s hard to build a platform from incompatible materials. Or: When it’s time to promote your memoir, publishers do not want you distracted on deadline for a diet book.

If it’s all so impossible, however, why has seemingly every problematic person on Earth already done it? Why can’t you be the next Callista Gingrich—or for that matter J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl, Orson Scott Card, Bill Bennett, William S. Burroughs, Ezra Pound, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, C.S. Lewis, or Virginia Woolf? Why can’t you be Gertrude Stein, all but pioneering the genre of board books for babies between the modernist poems and the intimate dinners with Picasso and the unfortunate fangirling for Pétain?

Here’s the truth: you can! Even if you’re not a Vichy collaborator, you can. It’s not impossible to publish in multiple genres; it’s just really hard, and it’s a bad idea for many authors, especially at the beginning of their career.

What you can’t generally do is publish in a lot of genres at once—or without leverage. This is especially true if your preference is to publish everything under your own name vs. pseudonyms. Authors who succeed in multiple genres tend to do so armed with celebrity, institutional clout, or abiding love from one particular demographic. (I’ll tell you which demographic after the paywall—mua ha ha.) First you build the platform, then you cast your confetti all over the bookstore.

You yourself might not have the time, patience, or realistic prospect of waiting for fuck-you fame. If that’s true, how do you give shape to your sprawling ambition? Will it be possible for you to publish your novel, memoir, board books, romance, and collection of satirical essays in the next 5-10 years? Maybe even sooner than that?

My answer is: maybe. Probably not, but maybe. A successful multi-genre career requires lots of sophisticated planning: order, optics, paperwork. Rush through any of it and you might fatally sabotage your career. You might also get sued. We don’t want that for you.

Before you burst out of the gate in all directions, therefore, please take a breath. Let’s run through a concrete plan for giving all your ambitions their due. There are four different paths to becoming a successful multi-genre author, and we’re going to tour each.

Before we start, however, please be honest with yourself: are you really ready to publish in every category you think you might be?

Really?

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Outside PRH’s balance sheets, the book is revolutionizing women’s lives. That’s great, too! (See?! Not a bitch.) All over the country, they’re talking about how The Let Them Theory delivered them from miserable codependence: toxic marriages and friendships; professional and parental burnout; political despair; potentially felonious road rage. They’re crying in gratitude and tattooing “Let Them” on their arms. In an era where women control so little, this book offers a sliver of sanity and hope to many who — for whatever reason — never found it in similar books that came before.

I love this for everyone. I do. I love it as an agent, writer, and recovering people-pleaser who loves company.

I also hate it for all the same reasons.

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There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.

…We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Josephine Hart, Damage (1991)

I’m surprised as anyone that a piece of music did it for me. I was expecting it would be a book or poem or something, and indeed, a handful have come close. But agony? An agony of recognition? Only one artwork has ever hit me with such force—titanic, upending, a tidal wave rushed in to drag me back to the uncanny vastness whence I came—and it’s Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich.1

This piece contains the most useful career development practice you can undertake as an author, I swear. Walk with me; we’ll get there.

When I listened to M418M for the first time—headphones, Acela, September 2019—I felt rapture indelible in the hippocampus as any calamity. I still remember what I was wearing, for heaven’s sake. (Shout out to my cousin Tommy for the rec.)

I didn’t know art could do what Reich’s music did—still does—for me. It’s cracked open my understanding of so many things: the natural world, art, time. It’s steadied me through several turbulent periods and (somehow) dramatically improved my writing. It makes me feel high. I once flew to actual Dresden in actual Germany just to hear it live.

Six years—six years I’ve spent rhapsodizing to anyone who’ll listen about Music for 18 Musicians (and for that matter, Music for a Large Ensemble). And not once in that entire time did it occur to me to aim my rhapsodizing at the one person most likely to cherish the gift:

Steve Reich.

STEVE REICH!

I mean, it didn’t occur to me until yesterday. Which is ridiculous.

When you work with authors full time, as I do, you learn rather fast that there is no height of creative achievement at which praise from strangers loses its value.

NONE.

Au contraire: I’ve watched random fan letters make even “famous” authors’ entire days, weeks, futures. I’ve watched them save people in ways the sender probably couldn’t even imagine.

Most of the artists we consider “famous” are not exactly smothered under I Love Yous, after all. I mean, think about Steve Reich: he’s huge for a certain type of person—Sufjan Stevens, Thom Yorke, Aaron Dessner,2 and countless others have all called him a major influence—but he’s not exactly Beyoncé. He’s not even the most popular 88-year-old working minimalist composer (boooo, Philip Glass, boooo).

I have no idea how many fan letters Steve Reich gets on a daily basis, but it’s silly to assume one from a random literary agent in DC wouldn’t clear his dopamine threshold in 2025.

It’d be one thing if I were writing to Steve Reich expecting something in return: time, attention, reciprocal admiration. But a simple thank you? That cringe isn’t about him; it’s about me, me, me—namely, the yawning void where my self-esteem should be. It’s pure ego.

And if there’s one thing I hope you’ve learned from this newsletter over the years, it’s that egotism makes for bad art.

Which brings me to the real reason you and I should write more fan letters: IT HELPS US IMMEASURABLY IN OUR PUBLISHING CAREERS.

Please write fan letters, OK? Write them as often as you can. Try to write them every single time you’re moved by art from a living artist. Make it a practice, a hygiene thing; try to do at least one a week.

I am BEGGING you to do this, and not because it’s “good networking.” Fan mail is not about starting a correspondence; it’s about completing a circuit. You’re taking the electric awe a work of art sparked in you; grounding it into something visible, with form and meaning; then handing it back, incandescent, to someone whose life might be saved by its light.

You see how important that is, don’t you?

You also see how important it is for you? And why?

Hint: It’s not just something nice you can do for an artist. It’s excellent—and I mean excellent—practice for writing a book.

But it’s also good networking, right?

Guh. Gross. No.

All right, all right: if I’m being honest, it might be. Through the years, I’ve accidentally introduced myself to more than one client—or future client blurber—through them.

However: fan letters hold manifold inherent career benefits per se, whether or not the recipient replies. And all of these are in my opinion much greater than superficial acquaintance with an impressive person.

Let’s go through them together:

One: Writing fan letters helps you find your place among artists—and market comps.

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In order for your book to have any chance at success, by any definition of the word—popular, remunerative, acclaimed, published—you must know your target audience and lard every sentence you write with value recognizable to them.1

You’ve got to exhibit empathy for your readers. This is true for literally every kind of book, although it gets harder with each additional bit of ego you mix into whatever you’re writing. As such, it’s generally hardest with memoirs, autofiction, and family histories.

Put more succinctly:

You can’t just come up to readers like a cat with a dead bird.

…Like I said, though, I’ve told you that before. Many times.

What I’ve forgotten to do thus far is warn you about the opposite side of this dynamic:

Whenever you do manage to publish an empathic, riveting, valuable book, readers can and absolutely will dump their dead birds on you.

And I’m afraid you’re going to have to find a way to be okay with their doing so.

As an author, you must think always of your readers’ needs. However, readers need not return the favor—and they won’t. Why would they?! That’s just not the nature of the transaction.

If you’re lucky enough to have fans at all, the vast majority of them will enjoy your work in total silence, never making themselves known to you outside of their purchases and library checkouts. A few might write you complimentary emails and/or leave nice Goodreads reviews, but that is seriously going to be just a few—like, less than one percent of your total readership.

In addition to those two groups, however, there’s going to be a not-insignificant minority who expect (or at least want) you to meet their needs even more than you already have. These are what we call the cats with dead birds.

At events, in your email, and maybe even on the street, these people will approach you with random anecdotes, overlapping traumatic experiences, and the like. They’re going to drop those stories at your feet and then just stand there, expecting validation. You’re going to need to have a plan for handling it when they do.

You might feel any number of ways about this behavior: interested, nonplussed, touched, flattered, amused, annoyed, exhausted, enraged, awkward, traumatized.

We’ll talk more in a moment about how to deal with those feelings. In the meantime, however, please understand that from a business perspective, dead birds are not a bad sign. Au contraire. As a literary agent, I know they augur good fortune, starting from the moment we hit “send” on a submission.

If editors drop a bunch of dead birds at my clients’ feet during author meetings, for example, I know from experience that the book is almost certainly going to go to auction.

Why?!

I’ll explain shortly. But first, for those of you who might be confused about the nature of the phenomenon I’m talking about here:

Some examples of what I mean by “dead birds:”

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Whether I’m at a writers’ conference or just chatting with an aspiring author at a party, there’s one piece of advice I always make a point to say. It’s not “show, don’t tell.” It isn’t “write every day.” In fact, it has nothing to do with craft, revision, or even querying. No: this is something you can do in the space of a single afternoon.

It’s get a website.

A tough truth you don’t see in a lot of writing guides is this: many (most?) agents sign more new clients via proactive scouting than they do via their submissions inbox. As in: you don’t come to them; they come to you.

This is less true for acquiring editors at publishing houses—I would say most of the time, they’re acquiring agented submissions. Nevertheless, editors do a great deal of proactive scouting as well.

That’s why it’s essential to have a website. Make things easy for any agent or editor who stumbles across your writing; give them a fast and simple way to contact you. Build a website and put an email address on there.

A website is useful for all working writers—freelancers, staff writers, copywriters—but it’s crucial for anyone who even theoretically wants to write a book some day, especially if they’re actively publishing reported pieces, short stories, or essays in outlets big and small.

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean you’re going to have a dozen agents or editors knocking on your door every month. You might not hear from anybody. But without a website, you’re making discovery much more difficult. I wish agents had endless time in the day to go full Nancy Drew in order to track down each and every person whose work they admire, but we just don’t.

OK, so what do I actually put on my website?

Keep it simple. Very simple. My favorite websites have maybe two or three separate tabs and a lot of negative space. Clean, uncluttered, easy to navigate.

Keep it smart as well, though. Certain choices in how you welcome email, for example, can make a big difference in the quantity and quality of incoming messages you get.

Here’s what I’d put on there:

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One of my clients asked me this yesterday, but I’m sure she’s not the only one wondering. After all, my list skews toward journalists, cultural critics, popular historians, activists, and comedians—that is, the sort of people who used to be big on Twitter.

…Used to be. My client list does not skew toward ketamine-addled authoritarian lunacy, however, so not many of the authors I represent are big on “X” now, if they’re still on it at all.

That’s fine. As I’ve mentioned on here before, Twitter was never all that great for book promo anyway—even before Apartheid Clyde took over. The vast majority of authors I knew saw conversion rates in the <1% range—as in, less than one percent of their Twitter followers ended up buying their books.

Still, Twitter was at least helpful for some things: getting on journalists’ radar; building a literary network; honing a quippy voice. And for a few early-ish adopters—Duchess Goldblatt, Jonny Sun, and the like—it was a genuine career-maker: a place where a standout non-psychotic personality could amass a large, loyal readership willing to buy books down the line.

Not anymore. Twitter is now the Pripyat of online villages: you really don’t want to go in there without PPE, and you’re almost certainly not going to meet anyone helpful if you do.

But where can you meet those people?

Lord only knows!

Are they buried like Pompeiians under the pyroclastic slop of Facebook, hiding with your Boomer uncle in a rapidly de-oxygenating air pocket? Are they cringing on Instagram between your politically oblivious high school classmate and a weird GenAI baby fashion show? Are they on Threads with the other 2010s girlbosses, monologuing into the void like the ghosts in Dantean Hell?

Perhaps they’re dancing away on TikTok, willfully ignoring the lights that just came on and the ominous-looking earpiece goons who’ve filled the room. Or they’re vomiting from dread with all the other progressives on Bluesky.

Or worst of all: they’re on LinkedIn, Ranch of Human Mediocrity.

…Yeah, social media is crap these days.

Worse, it’s balkanized. There’s no one place everyone uses anymore, let alone a place everyone trusts or even tolerates.

How on Earth do you sell yourself in a landscape like this? On the off chance you’re able to attract followers on any one of these miserable platforms, will any of them actually care enough to buy your book?

Is it even worthwhile to try?

My answer is yes—yes, I think social media is worth trying, at least for most of you.

It definitely is worthwhile if you’re writing narrative nonfiction: journalism, history, memoir, science, that kind of thing.

Market conditions in narrative nonfiction being what they are, you do not want to pass up on even potentially effective avenues of self-promotion if you want a shot at a commercial book deal (and solid sales beyond that).

If you’re a specialist writing something prescriptive, or if you’re a novelist…meh, I don’t know, it depends, maybe it’s worth it, maybe not. I can’t tell you for sure.

What I can say is that if you’re the sort of author who found social media professionally helpful in the past—or if you have a clear vision of how it might have helped you, had you only started 2+ years ago—there’s no reason it can’t be just as helpful today.

You just have to be a lot more strategic with your choices, is all. This is not an era for throwing spaghetti at the wall, if that ever existed. (Maybe in like 2006?)

Here’s what I recommend:

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In it, a literary writer I’ll call “Mr. Lithub” takes a long time to get to the point that he doesn’t think authors should feel obligated to cultivate Personal Brands. He tells them:

[In the matter of personal branding, a healthy] attitude, to paraphrase Fugazi, is to look at the reader (or “the public,” if you prefer) and say, I don’t owe you anything. Just the book. Just the words. A work of art should be its own explanation.1

Mr. Lithub says this in the last paragraph of his piece. Before that, he spends approximately 40 paragraphs meandering: critiquing Liz Phair, Disney Adults, Britney Spears, Sheila Heti, and of course—completing the #VersoCore Bingo Board with its central square—“late capitalism.” He also manages to drop that he hung out with two members of Sonic Youth once.

Here’s what I think of Mr. Lithub’s essay, dear reader: I don’t hate all of it.

He argues, for example, that authors shouldn’t conflate their worth as a person with the success or failure of their art, and I agree HARD with that one.

As for his ending, however: [smug little smile] I think it’s a bit ironic.

If you read Mr. Lithub’s essay, you’ll see it’s a protracted exercise in personal branding. The constant references to his eyewitness participation in Gen X DIY culture. The numerous reminders that he’s familiar with Semiotext(e) and can totally quote Bakhtin, but he makes learning fun by referencing Marvel movies and Selena Gomez. What is he doing here if not selling himself?

Mr. Lithub’s essay is completely of a piece with the rest of his brand: his essay collection for Graywolf; his literary novels; his other articles; his teaching work; his choice of speaking agent; his headshots; his choices in website design—I could go on and on and on. He strikes me both exacting and deliberate in his self-presentation as Slavoj Zizek 2.0: an ambitious public intellectual with one foot in the academy and one in pop culture.

Mr. Lithub has in fact been incredibly successful in his self-presentation. Here’s how I know: despite a consistently soft sales track in Circana, he keeps getting book deals with major commercial publishers. As an agent, I know this has to be at least somewhat thanks to his cohesive, impressive, wildly disciplined personal branding.

I am going to stop being a bitch now and emphasize that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ANY OF THIS.

I am genuinely impressed by Mr. Lithub. I love the kind of cultural criticism in which he appears to specialize, believe it or not.2

God bless anyone who is writing anything serious against the vapidity of fascist art, culture, and thinking in the year of our Lord 2024. And you know what? Mr. Lithub wouldn’t be getting all of those book deals if his writing weren’t just as compelling as his résumé.

I’m just super annoyed by Mr. Lithub’s take on personal branding in that essay, is all. Because it’s disingenuous.

As for the rest of you:

For God’s sake, do as Mr. Lithub does, not as he says.

If you are an author trying to make a somewhat survivable living through a book deal or series of book deals with a reputable for-profit publisher—hell, even one of the tonier nonprofits—you absolutely need to think about your personal brand. Do not “resist” this for any reason, even and especially if you think it’s beneath you.

PLEASE.

Walk with me; I’ll explain.

What is a personal brand?

When those of us who support authors for a living tell you that you need to care about your personal brand, what is it we’re talking about?

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No, I don’t think you should start a Substack—not unless you meet some specific criteria I’ll get to in a moment.

First, though: can I just say how happy this question makes me? “Should I start a Substack”: I feel like I’m back at the beginning of my career, when the internet hadn’t curdled yet and all anyone asked me at writers’ conferences was “should I start a blog.” I used to be able to tell them maybe with confidence, and I liked that feeling.

Back in 2008, it wasn’t a pipe dream to think you could start a decent blog—high-quality, regularly updated, aimed at a discrete and galvanized target audience—and get yourself a decent national platform and book deal within a couple years. If you were already under contract for a book, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine you could create an effective marketing machine that way. Ideal outcomes were unlikely, sure, but not astronomically so.

That’s how I felt about Substack four and a half years ago when I started “Glow.” Back then, I got the impression that it was not THAT difficult to go from 0 to 100 on this platform, provided you made a real commitment. I felt like you really could use it to drive book sales and make a decent (if not life-changing) income off of subscriptions.

It was unlikely, mind you, but you could.

How I feel about Substack in 2024 is closer to how I felt about blogs in 2012-2013.

By then, everyone was writing a blog or trying to. Audiences had more choice than ever. The people who had been blogging for many years were enjoying the lion’s share of the attention and ad revenue (remember ad revenue??). Newcomers were finding it harder and harder to feast.

Am I telling you it’s no longer possible to break out on Substack in 2024? To generate the kind of national platform that will get you the book deal of your dreams? To gather a street team of dedicated fans who will preorder your book by the thousands and thus render it an instant New York Times bestseller?

Of course not. It’s still possible. It’s just wildly unlikely. The easiest time to break out on Substack was 4-6 years ago, and it was never all that easy, and as the years go on and readers have more and more choice as to how to spend their limited money and attention, here and elsewhere, it’s just going to get harder and harder.

It’s still possible to launch or burnish a book publishing career via Substack. It’s just a long shot, unless:

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Why don’t I sell much in this space? It’s not because I’m ignorant about the kids’ market; I know what’s selling. Although I spend most of my time cultivating editorial relationships elsewhere, I also know who’s buying what’s selling, and they’re always nice when I email them. I make sure to keep track of children’s market trends.

It’s also not because I pooh-pooh the cultural importance of children’s literature. My first job was at a B&N Jr. I have three elementary-age kids, all of whom are obsessed with Aaron Blabey, Dav Pilkey, Rick Riordan, and “Where’s Waldo.” In college, I wrote my senior thesis on the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. I lost entire days of my youth to elegiac yearning for Redwall and Prydain. Hell: just a whiff of a brand-new middle grade paperback can pull me to the edge of tears, entwined as it is with memories of innocent joy and limitless possibility.

I love kids’ books—truly. I just hate selling them to publishers.

The entire enterprise of selling children’s books drives me insane.

INSANE.

I am in awe of my colleagues who can occupy this capricious and arbitrary shrug emoji of a marketplace full-time without dissolving into a psycho-emotional goo ball.

Kids’ books are JUST SO HARD to sell. The uncertainty! The overcrowding! The slow response times! The sheer volume of deals you have to do to make anything resembling a viable living!

It’s all rather heartbreaking for me, really. Nothing is cooler than seeing kids’ eyes light up in wonder over a book you helped bring to market. There’s nothing like making the world more hospitable, open, and legible for small and tender people.

Yes, and: I also have three small and tender people of my own who need food and shelter, and those things cost money. And I like winning. And as hard as it is to get any book deal for a major publisher, it is much, much easier to get one for adults—for much, much more money.

Children’s books are just the hardest. Bleh.

If you’re interested in writing a children’s book, I don’t want to discourage you.

Plenty of people write and publish kids’ books to real and lasting success. Tens of millions of children’s books sell every year, in all categories. Kids still love to read, even with all of the devices and the social medias and Robloxes etc. Graphic novels are a particularly hot and growing sector.

It’s just…well, I believe that every successful journey starts with a realistic map of the challenges one must navigate to get to the promised land. And in this particular publishing subcategory, the rocks are large and craggy.

Walk with me. Here’s why children’s books are so hard to sell.

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If you’re wondering the same, this week’s newsletter is for you.

And I’m afraid most of you are going to find it rather depressing.

Don’t get me wrong: many people make a living—or at least a substantial chunk of one—as ghostwriters. This very well might include you, now or in the future. Ghostwriting absolutely can be a viable career path.

It’s just…how do I put this… far, FAR fewer people are actually capable of doing this job than those who believe they are. As both an intellectual challenge and viable living, ghostwriting is quite a bit harder than publishing your own work—which of course isn’t easy in itself.

In order to make it as a commercial ghostwriter, you need to be a highly, highly specific type of person. It’s an outlandishly rare type.

Beyond that, you need to have the connections and/or career opportunity to demonstrate to publishing professionals that you are this type, which presents its own separate set of challenges.

The good news, however, is that if you are this type of person—and you find an opportunity to demonstrate it; more on how in a moment—you will likely get lots of ghostwriting offers. You will also likely and forever become one of just a handful of people on publishing professionals’ go-to ghostwriting lists. Editors and agents will not just throw work at you on the semi-regular—they’ll sob with gratitude that you exist, which is always a nice feeling.

Why? Because—as I said—VANISHINGLY RARE is the individual who can truly hack it as a ghostwriter. If you’re one of them and publishing types find out about it, they will try to devour you.

So what kind of skills do great ghostwriters need? Why are they so uncommon? And if one has those skills, how can one dangle them like so much 19th century ankle to the suitors of contemporary book publishing?

I’ll tell you in a moment — but first, let’s run through…

Some Definitions

What kind of ghostwriting are we talking about here?

I’m not talking about a paid copywriter or speechwriter or anything like that. I’m also not talking about the people whom moneyed randos hire to write self-published memoirs or family histories. Those gigs are out there for sure; I just have no idea how to get them for you.1

Instead, what I’m talking about is a very specific type of ghostwriting gig: one in which an author who has (or wants) a book deal with a large national publisher (Big 5 or similar) hires an individual to help them write that book.

These individuals are generally referred to as “ghostwriters” in pop culture. For clarity’s sake, I’ve heretofore referred to them as such. Inside the industry, however, we generally use the more flexible term collaborator, which encompasses editorial as well as writing work and also preserves authors’ dignity. That or we just call them writers. (“Is she going to need a writer to get this done?”)

For the rest of this newsletter, therefore, I’m going to use that language.

Collaborators are most often hired (and paid) by authors, not publishers. Sometimes authors pay them out of personal funds and sometimes out of book advances. Publishers occasionally pay for them, too, but only rarely and in situations where they know they themselves have fallen down on the job.

Collaborators most often work on nonfiction.

They work on fiction, too, although not nearly as often and not in situations to which I am often privy.2 This newsletter is therefore going to be about nonfiction.

Nonfiction collaborators generally work with two kinds of authors:

1. Prominent people with amazing platforms, experiences, and ideas—and also, crucially, money—who lack the time and/or skill to convert their wisdom into a compelling 80,000+-word manuscript for the general public. Think: celebrities, CEOs, popular experts, politicians, etc.

2. Career authors who had every intention of writing their own book but find themselves the victim of circumstance under contract. People in this category include but are not limited to jargon-encumbered academics, journalists paralyzed by the size and scope of their unprocessed reporting, authors who have to deal with unexpected crises while finishing time-sensitive books, etc.

For those authors, collaborators will come on board to do one or more of the following:

• write a book proposal from scratch, based on notes, interviews, and other raw materials provided by the author

• ditto for a book manuscript

• rewrite a manuscript currently too janky or shaggy for prime time

• punch up underdeveloped scenes or arguments; brighten dull language; move things around—a suite of services sometimes referred to as “book doctoring”

For this work, collaborators receive hugely varied levels of compensation.

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Does your novel have enemies to lovers vibes, or is it giving grumpy x sunshine?

If my question sounds like gibberish, then I am jealous of your pure, unpolluted mind. If, however, you are familiar with phrases like one bed or dark academia, then it’s likely you spend some time on BookTok. 

Since the platform exploded four or so years ago, BookTok has transformed the publishing landscape. Retailers and publishers keep tabs on BookTok to figure out what genres are trending and what type of titles they should invest in. BookTok has made some authors’ careers and breathed new life into backlist titles. 

Lots of articles have already come out on this. Today, however, I want to pull on one particular thread of the BookTok sweater I haven’t seen anyone analyze yet: tropes.

A trope is a common or recurring plot device, motif, situation, or theme that can be found in a wide number of literary works. You could probably name a number of tropes off the top of your head: the buddy cop dynamic in a movie or a Chosen One prophecy in a fantasy epic, for instance.

In the BookTok universe, however, tropes have taken on a different usage—they’re no longer so much a tool for analyzing or sorting works so much as finding them. Since platforms like BookTok and Instagram Reels prioritize short, snappy videos, tropes have proven to be a quick code users can cite to describe and recommend books. 

Discussion of tropes is most common in the romance genre, but you might also see them mentioned in online reviews of fantasy, YA, and sometimes even literary works. Recently, publishers have even begun to name-drop tropes in their marketing campaigns. 

Allow me to lay my cards on the table: I find much of what goes on at BookTok alternately bewildering and corny. At the same time, however, I understand the appeal of tropes. Yes, they are reductive, but that’s the point. In an increasingly fragmented book market in which consumers want to find certain vibes and feelings vs. topics—particularly in fiction—they are an effective tool for connecting books with a particular brand of reader. 

What I’d like to answer today is 1) the origins of these tropes 2) what writers should not about using (and not using) tropes when querying agents. 

What is a Trope?

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More and more authors are asking me this question these days, usually about 4-6 months before their book publishes. They’re freaked out by the odds. They’re hearing “everyone does it” from other authors they know. They think maybe this is the only way they have a decent shot at sales success.

Look: I get it.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s rull hard out there for authors right now—particularly authors who aren’t celebrities.

Which is, you know…pretty much all of you.1

Being a debut author is hard. Unless you have not one but multiple previous national bestsellers under your belt, being a sophomore or junior or senior author is also hard.

If you don’t believe me, look no further than the current New York Times bestseller lists.

They speak to the market’s, ah, fundamental resistance to newcomers and one-offs.

On Hardcover Fiction, you’ll find mostly the usual suspects—King, Roberts, Baldacci, even the long-deceased Tom Clancy—plus TikTok franchises (Henry, Hoover, Yarros). Kevin Kwan—an author who is wildly well-established, just not quite at the “has his own dedicated in-house staff” level—is the only one who even sort of breaks the mold.

On Hardcover Nonfiction, we have a combination of celebrities writing autobiography, celebrities writing history, and decades-deep powerhouse author-celebrities notching bestseller number, oh, 16? 17? in a row.

Here, the only real exception is Once Upon a Time, Elizabeth Beller’s biography of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, debuting this week at #6. Beller is more of a one-off: not a known quantity in the books world; not a celebrity in her own right. I believe she cracked the list on the strength of a Good Morning America hit she got on her pub day. (I doubt Louis Bayard’s bored review in the NYTBR helped much, but you never know—all publicity is good publicity, etc. etc.) Morning show hits seem to be working for authors right now in a way they haven’t in years; we do love to see it.

At least in nonfiction, there are one or two Elizabeth Bellers on the list most weeks: i.e., fellow one-offs. Don’t get me wrong: these people generally have excellent platforms, top-tier publishers, and everything else going for them except preexisting national celebrity. This is why I like working so much in nonfiction: in nonfiction, there’s a real chance at the bestseller list for people like this.

In fiction? Ehhhh. It is really REALLY hard for fiction’s Elizabeth Beller equivalents to hit the NYT. Like winning-the-national-lottery hard.

Kate Dwyer published an excellent piece about this in Esquire the other day, and I’m going to come back to this piece in a minute. Most novels just plain do not sell that much.

Once they understand how hard things are, many authors ask themselves, what on Earth can I do to help my poor little book succeed?

Sure, being a New York Times bestseller is by no means a requirement for a successful book launch, let alone a writing career.

Still, the NYT lists signify a much larger, depressing reality: in this market, precious few books take up the vast, vast majority of the oxygen.

How on Earth do you secure breathable air for yourself and your work in an atmosphere like this?

THROUGH HEROIC PERSONAL EFFORT AND SACRIFICE, THAT’S HOW!

…That’s how most authors want to answer that question, at least in my experience. That’s because there’s significant Boolean overlap between authors as a population and those who’ve fashioned entire lives out of finding oxygen in Smogsville, metaphorically speaking.

Hypervigilant observation; impressive execution; self-annihilating work ethic; insistent curiosity; almost-creepy intuition: these are the skills of the people-pleaser, the caretaker, the trauma survivor. They also make for a pretty good writer.

Combine this with the fact that being a good writer is one of the fastest ways to receive industrial-grade validation from adults when you are a child, and voila: a lot of people with codependency issues become professional writers.

Authors tend to want to do whatever they can—and then some—to ensure their own survival.

And their books’. And their loved ones’. And the planet’s. They tend to assume a lot of responsibility for saving, like, everything.

Which, again, is why I believe so many of them ask me, “should I hire a book publicist?” Hiring a publicist is something they can do. And they are generally doers.

My job as their agent is not to say “yes” or “no.” I’m not any author’s boss, after all. I’m a thought partner, an expert on the landscape of my industry. I offer my clients horizontal expertise to complement their vertical self-knowledge, then step back and let them make their own choices.

This is my poetic way of saying “I just ask questions.” Questions that in the great majority of cases designed to guide them toward “no.” No, they shouldn’t hire a publicist. Pfft. Like I could ever withhold my opinions!

Here’s why.

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Duh. Anyone who’s ever taken any kind of expository writing course—particularly freshman comp—will have learned as much from “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell’s 1946 essay examining the relationship between bad writing and tyranny.

Among other things, Orwell argues that the passive voice is linguistic propaganda. Bad actors in power—and their allies in media, publishing, and PR—use it to shift blame and obscure responsibility.

He’s not wrong, of course. Consider the newspaper lede announcing that a victim of police brutality “was shot” (by whom?); the felonious CEO at the press conference, acknowledging that “mistakes were made;” and—most recently—this headline spotted by my client Soraya Chemaly, author of the forthcoming The Resilience Myth:

This is exactly the kind of bullshit Orwell had in mind. There’s a refusal to acknowledge the gendered power dynamics at play in what these TikTok influencers are describing. A punch is pulled.

Before you come at me with your buh-buh-buts about journalistic caution and legal liability: yes, I’m aware those things are important. There are good reasons why Yahoo News news might have wanted to exercise caution in declaring “men” responsible for the punchings. The object of their story is clear enough: a handful of women on TikTok, all describing similar experiences. The subject is less clear: were the women all punched by the same man? Was it different men? Perhaps the perpetrator(s) were male-presenting, but not actually men?

Absent ironclad facts, no one should presume to know the answers to these questions. Yes, and: that doesn’t mean Yahoo News was right to run their story with a passive headline. It means that they exercised reprehensible judgment in running the story at all.

Of course I want to know if there’s a trend involving random men punching women on the sidewalk just for shits and giggles in New York. Of course I want to know if it’s just one guy or many—and if the latter, whether they all coordinated this and how long it’s been going on.

I also want to know for sure that I’m not seeing a national media outlet handpick anecdata from the millions and millions of online testimonies posted to the internet every day, then using that anecdata—subconsciously or no—to perpetuate a propagandistic, antidemocratic narrative. (“America’s innocent white women are unsafe walking alone in blue-state cities with their crime and their homeless people and their Black people and their immigrants! Stay inside, ladies! Vote Trump, gentlemen!”)

You know who’s supposed to provide that context? JOURNALISTS. Doing REPORTING. But if you click the Yahoo News link Soraya shares above, you’ll find no original reporting whatsoever. It’s just a description of the TikTok videos and the comments underneath them, coupled with a naive “is this a trend?” type narrative stance.

Yahoo News has done none of the work they’re supposed to do here. None. Their passive voice evinces an institution overtaken by—capitulant to—flaccid in the arms of—the status quo.

Like I said: the passive is always, always political.

But that’s not why it’s so annoying to read.

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Humor makes the entire difference between a good writer and a great one—as is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that the English language has no adequate words for humor. One has to be really, really, really good at writing in order to even describe the CONCEPT, for God’s sake, let alone do it.

Mind you, many great writers have been able to describe humor just fine. Anne Lamott, for instance, calls it “carbonated holiness,” which is just perfect.

However, what I am confident no one can do—not even Anne, not even Shakespeare—is get anywhere close to capturing humor using only what’s available in the storage bin marked WORDS ENGLISH LANGUAGE DONE GOT FOR “FUNNY.”

“Silly,” “slapstick,” “ridiculous”: these are sufficient for—at best—Carrot Top. “Comic,” “waggish,” “jocular,” “jolly”: ditto, but Buzz Killington. “Uproarious,” “riotous”—I’d rather leave the baked-in class neuroses to a competent therapist (or at least some kind of Marxist literary scholar).

“Hilarious”—eh, that one’s okay, but it’s long since overused into toothlessness, and plus, did you know that the Ancient Greek root word hilaros means either “cheerful” or…“prompt and willing”? Which is, like, a narcissist’s definition of humor: “someone willing to laugh immediately and with gusto at all my ‘jokes,’ shoring up my ramshackle self-esteem.”

None of these words get remotely close to humor’s core, is my point. They’re incisive like that one kitchen knife I got for my wedding and haven’t sharpened once in the ensuing 12 years.

The only word that even sort of cuts the concept well is “humor” itself. The descendant of an ancient line—it progenitor one of the oldest words there is, proto-Indo European dʰéǵʰōm, meaning earth—it’s in the same enormous family as human, humus, humble, and humility.

This tracks: humor, real humor, is that which makes us feel our most earthen and grounded when shared. It’s what brings us home to ourselves.

…Which is all beautiful metaphor, but also a dead one, and nobody thinks about dead metaphors at Wal-Mart, Bernice. As in: you can’t bring anyone home to the ancient, tender human fundament from which the word “humor” comes—from which we all come—by just saying the word “humor.” You have to actually do humor to get us there, and you have to do it well.

So how do you do humor well?

Humor is not an easily-teachable skill. That’s another reason it separates the geniuses from the just-OKs on the bookshelf: like all forms of mature intimacy, it’s largely a function of subconscious impulse regulated by well-developed self-understanding. This makes it graspable like the Northern Lights are photographable: not at all, not really; not unless one has some exceptionally powerful and expensive machinery to hand.

Fortunately for you all, however, I’M codependent! Which means I refuse to accept that it’s impossible to teach another adult something they can only learn through the arduous, ongoing process of self-actualization. Which is why I’m about to offer you a bunch of hot tips on how to write humor.

Put another way, I’m hoping to show you the aurora of literary brilliance by photographing it with my metaphorical smartphone. My grainy picture will be a sad, sad reduction of the real thing, but it might be enough to help you sort of know what the real thing looks like, and that might help you recognize it faster when you stumble on it in the wild.

Remember: the literal aurora in the sky isn’t magic; it’s just electrons and protons blowing in from the sun and crashing into our atmosphere, causing more and more beautiful colors the deeper down toward the ground they go.

Ditto literary genius: it’s all just humor—humor which, the more velocity it has and the deeper down to the ground it’s able to go, the more dazzling the display for observers on the ground.

Here come the tips. If you’re capable of executing on these perfectly—I’m not—you won’t just write funny; you’ll write in a way that makes knowledgeable people think, “this person is probably going to win a Nobel Prize in Literature some day.”

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The point of this newsletter isn’t to rag on MFAs, writers’ conferences, or AWP.

Rather, it’s to help you see that in book publishing—to quote Emily Dickinson, my skittish queen—success in circuit lies.1

As I’ve written before, success in book publishing functions like a gut microbiome: contributive factors are uncountably numerous; the overall journey is tortuous AF. The curves resemble other people’s only here and there; the aggregates are like fingerprints, unique among billions.

It is impossible—literally impossible—to replicate another author’s success by doing all the same things they did. There’s just too much to the story that’s beyond any one person’s control. Which means there’s also a real limit on the value of aiming for success via the beaten path: AWP attendance, an MFA, a writer’s conference or two, etc.

MFAs and conferences and AWP have value! Lots!

It just doesn’t include the specific thing we’re talking about here: a sure shot at commercial success as an author in book publishing.

MFAs, for example, offer the value of the academy: time, support, and shelter to take your work seriously without worrying about money (that is, if you’re not paying for the degree, which you should never, ever go into debt to do). They also give you a teaching credential that might make it easier to pay your bills while navigating book publishing and its highly (HIGHLY) volatile finances.

What MFA’s don’t do, however, is guarantee you a commercial book deal. Most don’t even improve your odds of that.2

Ditto conferences. Of my many current clients, just one is someone I met through a conference years ago—LOVE YOU, LAURA J-H. But I didn’t sign her because I met her at a conference; I would have signed her from my slush pile just as fast if she had happened to introduce herself that way.

Good fits are good fits (and vice versa); my bandwidth is what it is; and Laura and I both love a good aviation metaphor.

As for AWP? It’s good for making and hanging out with writer friends who might or might not constitute part of your support network down the line. It’s good for literary journals trying to sell copies and promote their brand. It’s also good for niche, low-stakes community drama fomented by narcissisms of small difference. AWP is not good for getting an agent at all, though, let alone a traditional book deal.

So what IS helpful for getting that splashy book deal and those bestselling sales numbers?

Put another way: If success is like a gut microbiome, what are the probiotics? What maximizes one’s chances for a big advance, good reviews, and gigundo sales, although—reminder—none of these things is entirely within any individual’s control?

The answer to this depends in large part on the book. It includes a combination of platform (primarily for nonfiction), artistic skill (primarily for fiction), and emotional literacy/empathy/maturity (both). It also really helps to have a kind of personal and artistic sprezzatura—one that is specifically recognizable to readers in your target audience. (Incidentally, this is just one reason it’s a good idea for big houses and agencies to bring in the as wide a variety of gatekeeping professionals as possible; sprezzatura varies by community and can be hard to recognize if you aren’t a community member yourself.)

There’s also a lot of hugely helpful stuff that ostensibly has nothing to do with writing, let alone books.

These are the things to which I really wish more aspiring authors paid attention instead of jostling three-stooges style for the more obvious professional development opportunities.

I shit you not: each of the following things could easily be much, much more helpful to your getting a great book deal than an MFA or anything like it.

In alphabetical order, noting that all of these things aren’t accessible to all people at present, and that is a great injustice:

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“Your book needs to be more uplifting.”

This is one of the most common pieces of feedback agents offer in one-on-one sessions at writers’ conferences. It’s also one of the more common justifications for rejection included in personalized rejection letters.

It’s certainly the editorial note that grosses the largest amount of authorial outrage by volume. It sounds so fucking offensive. How do you make a memoir about living with terminal cancer uplifting? How do you make a Holocaust history uplifting? If one were to write a book about what’s currently happening in Palestine, would one need to find a way to make that uplifting? Retch.

Like a neon “good vibes only” sign in a 2010s coworking space, this advice crackles with cheugy. Upon seeing it, many authors think, oh look, this is a place where assholes hang out. They think it’s a call to reduce, reframe, and ultimately dissociate from reality in the name of “being positive” while encouraging their readers to do the same.

Readers don’t want denial; that much is true. (Unless they’re anxious, emotionally immature cable news fans picking up reactionary political screeds, I suppose.)

Denial is like fentanyl: it only helps people in the most superficial way, and for a few minutes; after the first hit, one needs more and more of it to benefit at all; too much of it will suck all the meaning and purpose from one’s life and probably kill you.

When people buy dark books, they generally don’t want fentanyl. They want real help: information, recognition, catharsis, relief, guidance, and the deep sense of safety that comes from knowing other people willing to acknowledge that reality is real.

Sad Book Readers, in other words, are Dantes in search of a Vergil. They’re lost in the woods outside of Hell. The last thing they want in that moment is for Joel Osteen to pop out from under a rock and be like, “JUST STAY POSITIVE, GURL!”

Here’s the thing, though: most agents and editors who tell you to make your book “more uplifting” don’t mean it in the sense of “add some toxic positivity.”

I mean, I can’t speak for everyone. I suppose if you’re writing a prosperity-gospel inspirational cheer sesh for an evangelical publisher, your circumstances might be different. Ditto if you’re trying to prop up America’s MLM industry through Rachel Hollis-adjacent self help. The people who represent and publish those kind of books probably do want you to be less of a downer. But I’m not one of those peopole, and neither are most top agents or editors.

When people like me give out that note—“your book needs to be more uplifting”—what they’re generally doing is trying to convey a hugely important but complex editorial point in a succinct, memorable way. In the process, they’re losing some linguistic precision.

The Merriam-Webster definition of uplifting is “inspiring happiness, optimism, or hope.” When agents and editors tell authors to be “more uplifting,” the last of these is what they generally have in mind. The want authors to find the hope in their story, the crystalline vug glittering amidst the granite.

Even so modified, however, this note isn’t as precise as it could be. Terminal cancer is pretty hopeless, after all, yet When Breath Becomes Air was a massive hit. The Hiroshima bombing: also not known for being super hopeful, yet John Hersey’s account of it remains a classic.

So what exactly is the note?

The note is that authors are smart, agents and editors are dumb, you shouldn’t listen to agents and editors, and there is no one on Earth smarter than you, Bernice.

Just kidding. I’m sure you’re just brilliant, but most of us on this side of the table are, too. ::flips hair::

Unless your book exhibits the precise qualities editors are asking for when they give you this note—however much they’re struggling to find the right words—it simply won’t have a chance on commercial submission. It also probably won’t be a good book. It might be a satisfying-blog or TikTok series or obituary, but it’s never going to satisfy readers on the level they expect from literature.

So, yeah: you need to take the note. And if words like “uplifting” and “hopeful” leave you feeling confused and defensive, as is understandable, approach this note via one or more of the metaphors below.

METAPHOR ONE: YOU ARE NASA, YOUR BOOK IS JUPITER, YOUR READER IS THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT, AND IT’S YOUR JOB TO MAKE SURE YOUR READER LEAVES YOUR BOOK DOING WHAT THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT DID AFTER ORBITING JUPITER

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I now have to append several dozen qualifications to what I just said. Imagine me reading this in the voice of the fine-print guy at the end of a pharma commercial: By “smart people,” I mean “people with the kind of platform, drive, and talent that makes it theoretically possible for them to publish the book of their dreams with a major commercial publisher.” By “disappointing books,” I primarily mean “books that don’t click with agents, acquiring editors, reviewers, and/or readers, causing various disappointing outcomes for the author.” And of course, “the underlying issue is most often…” etc. means that sometimes, unprocessed psychological bullshit isn’t the issue at all. 

…Yes, and: this rule is still incredibly important to remember. In my observation, it’s far more common for unprocessed psychological bullshit to be the Daddy Interferent in a theoretically qualified author’s career struggles than for Daddy to be anything else. Even if Daddy is something else–a negligent agent, a narrow-minded publisher, a structurally oppressive industry–unprocessed psychological bullshit is still likely to be a member of the interferent household, so to speak.

Unprocessed psychological bullshit makes people worse at communicating in every meaningful relationship we have, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but writers generally have to be rull good at communicating.

Another way of putting it is that commercial success as an author is largely a function of applied empathy for one’s readers. That’s true with regard to your craft, your marketing, your pitches–everything. And alas, empathy is one of the trickiest character traits to cultivate. It requires a great deal of emotional maturity as well as time, space, calm, and an ability to tolerate sustained uncertainty. 

More important than all of the above combined: empathy requires an ability to bear witness in the presence of deep, painful, messy feelings–grief, fear, anger–without freaking out, shutting down, or trying to fix, justify, debate, scold, or intellectualize them back down to a less intimidating size.* This applies to both other people’s feelings as well as your own. 

You might be wondering right now if you are or aren’t a person I’m directly addressing with this letter–if its advice applies to you. It might! It might not!

Here are a few questions that will help you tell:

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First of all, L.: congratulations on getting enthusiastic agent feedback straight out of the gate. That’s yuge.

Sounds like you’ve also just taken your first trip through my industry’s psychoemotional uncertainty shredder. From this day forward, you are going to run through this shredder over and over and over again until you either die or run away screaming from book publishing forever. Yay! Welcome to what success feels like in this industry!

The shredder comes for us all on every single project. It comes for us all because when it comes to writing and publishing successful books, there are no right answers. Let me repeat: THERE ARE NO RIGHT ANSWERS, at least beyond such ham-handed basics as “make book coherent” and “make sure author write good.”

Beyond that, a priori, there are only educated guesses, instinct, and market precedent—precedent that, when viewed in the aggregate, reminds one that no one knows shit, really.

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