Sandra’s Miscellany

It started out simply enough: I hate contracts. I hate reading them. I hate trying to understand them. I hate trying to make changes to them because there seems to be some etiquette about it that I’m not privy to.

So when Pamela Harty at The Knight Agency offered representation, I was all in. I’d met Pamela once at an RWA conference just after selling The Orchid Hunter to Silhouette Bombshell, and her no-nonsense but personable approach impressed me. Deidre Knight once referred to Pamela in an agent panel as (and I paraphrase but get the gist of the thing right) “the one we send in when we need a bitch during negotiations.” How could I not like that?

Pamela and I sit down during conferences and talk business. She e-mails and phones periodically to see how things are going. She gently prods me to keep in better touch because I’m easily distracted by each day’s work and will forget to check in. She asks my publisher for more money and author copies, pushing to get the best deal for me that she can and asking for things I’m too chicken to ask for.

But best of all, she’s just there.

When I got the news about Bombshell last week, I was okay because I knew that somewhere in the flurry of phone calls and e-mails, she was representing my best interests. Even if I never heard from my publisher again, Pamela would be there to run interference and do what needed to be done to ease the process.

I’ve heard folks say that if you write for category, you don’t need an agent. I beg to differ. Maybe if you’re made of sterner stuff than I, or don’t have any trouble asking for what you want, or actually like slogging through legalese, you don’t need an agent.

But I’ve found mine invaluable in a time of flux, when things could have been really scary.