100% of a dollar is nice, but 85% of $1.20 is even better

I harbor no delusions (well, not many) of being able to turn my writing into my primary career anytime soon, but I do like the idea of making some money at it.

And while I’m proud of the way I handled myself when negotiating my first contract (the folks at my publisher are welcome to laugh up their sleeves like Heck Jones, but it’s true), I figure that a good agent could have made the deal 20% sweeter by pulling various levers that are beyond my grasp just yet.

What’s more, for the moment I’m just talking about a contract-by-contract comparison — for any single contract I could get on my own, this Good Agent of my dreams could make that contract more lucrative for me while saving me time on things like maintaining my publishers database.

I’ll take it. No arm-twisting required.

Next: Because I want to have books published more than just once every two or three years