{"id":5007,"date":"2009-12-18T12:21:20","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=2306"},"modified":"2025-08-01T18:12:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T23:12:27","slug":"doc-mcghee-literary-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/doc-mcghee-literary-agent\/","title":{"rendered":"Doc McGhee, literary agent"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ImageHang with me for a series of seemingly unrelated factoids.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Y\u2019all know who Doc McGhee<\/a> is, right? He was M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce<\/a>\u2019s manager way back in the day and pretty much made them rich and famous.<\/li>\n
  2. In early November, Amazon \u201csuck[ed] up to literary agents<\/a>\u201d in a bid to kill its monsterly image. Really? They need literary agents to kill its monsterly image? Who\u2019d\u2019a thunk it?<\/li>\n
  3. Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette all announced they would be holding off releasing ebooks of new (hardcover) titles by six months. The brilliance never ends.<\/li>\n
  4. Stephen Covey just told Simon & Schuster to fuck off<\/a>.  Well. I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s not exactly<\/em> what he said.<\/li>\n
  5. There is one thing an unknown or midlist self-published author can\u2019t get that s\/he needs most.<\/li>\n
  6. There is only one thing a bestselling name-brand author has but doesn\u2019t need at all.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"Members
    Oh, shut up. You know I\u2019m a M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce fangrrrrl. But Mick Mars does look a little, um, ready for a nursing home, doesn\u2019t he?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    I\u2019m not going to explain any of this stuff. The graphic should make it, well, graphically obvious. Take the above seemingly unrelated items, throw it in with this, and see what you come up with. Assume the writer has not himself arranged for the actual production of his manuscript into print and electronic:<\/p>\n

    \"A<\/p>\n

    Pop quiz: What word is nowhere to be found in the above flowchart?<\/p>\n

    I think there\u2019s one agent out there<\/a> who already knows all this and is slowly, steadily\u2014over weeks, months, years\u2014training his blog readers to start thinking this way.<\/p>\n

    The difference between how agents work now and how this could work is that a writer would interview agents and hire one (as s\/he would an attorney or CPA), as opposed to becoming a supplicant for the agent\u2019s approbation\/validation. Agents who now work as if they\u2019re doing writers a favor may not deal with this system well.<\/p>\n

    On the other hand, even though this is my own plan, I can see that it could land us right back where we are now if writers won\u2019t let go of the thought that they\u2019re powerless and\/or only incidental to the book creation process.<\/p>\n

    Writers, listen up: You\u2019re the creator. There\u2019s power in being the originator of content. Use that power and take control of your own destiny. It\u2019s your work. Take responsibility for its dissemination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Hang with me for a series of seemingly unrelated factoids. Y\u2019all know who Doc McGhee is, right? He was M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce\u2019s manager way back in the day and pretty much made them rich and famous. In early November, Amazon \u201csuck[ed] up to literary agents\u201d in a bid to kill its monsterly image. Really? They need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[544,546,525,530,559],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookselling","category-marketing","category-publishing","category-self-publishing","category-traditional"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5007"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5007"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17388,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5007\/revisions\/17388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}