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The short answer to the title question is, “No.” The longer answer is, “No, but it would be extremely difficult to do so without one.” Agents exist for several reasons. Below, let’s outline: 1) what benefit an agent brings; 2) a few different agent scenarios to consider; 3) what lit agents with Hollywood connections are looking for; and 4) ways to navigate around the agent issue if you’re having trouble landing one. Why An Agent First and foremost, agents have the keys to the castle – the castle being Hollywood, which is fraught with walls and moats. Studios, streamers, networks, production companies – they all have very strict policies against unsolicited submissions. Most will only read your material if it’s submitted by a bona fide agent. Second, agents are experts at understanding book option and licensing deals. They know the questions to ask when valuing these deals and how to get the best bang for your buck. They can also bring in entertainment lawyers who will work with them to protect your underlying story rights, including subsidiary rights to adapt your story into sequels or other mediums like audiobooks, graphic novels, etc. Different Agent Arrangements If you’re already repped by More

Say you’ve spent a decade producing whitepapers on fintech trends and case studies about enterprise software. Now you want to tell your LinkedIn audience you’ve signed with a small press for a dragon fantasy trilogy. Will they think less of you or stop giving you work? Corporate clients know me as a b2b copywriter, so admitting I was also a fiction writer felt strange at first. Most of that was just imposter syndrome, the familiar fear of being caught out as a fraud. The answer is to push on. Writers need people to promote to, and this crowd already knows you. Remember businesses are just people Your LinkedIn contacts may have serious job titles, impressive employers, and equally impressive thoughts about their industry, but they are just people, with all sorts of unexpected interests and aspirations. I know one senior industry client whose secret passion is skateboarding. Another loves to make jewelry. They’ll likely respond to your alternate writing news with encouragement and approval. We’re all quietly nosey about what other people are up to out of hours, and clients will find you more memorable if they know a bit more about your hinterland. The power of vulnerability Sharing this More

Many writers are uncomfortable discussing money or selling their work. But, like it or not, we are salespeople. Writers pitch for work, trawl for new clients, network, and negotiate. Over my career, I’ve spent a lot of time with salespeople. They’re energetic, resilient and resourceful, and many of their ideas are useful to writers, too. Feeding the funnel Salespeople use the analogy of a funnel for their activity. The top is wide, where you pour all your leads: contacts from networking events, names from social media, editors you’d love to write for, publications in which you’d love to list your byline. As the funnel narrows, leads fall away. The ones that remain warm turn into prospects (people who’ve shown real interest). The idea is to keep the top filled with new leads so you don’t end up with a dry pipeline down the line when you need it most. The warmer the lead, the more attention it’s worth, which is where writers often fail. It’s also worth ‘qualifying out’ people who are anyone not interested, to save wasted effort. Does this agency even use freelancers? Does this company have a content budget? Sites like Who Pays Writers and The Freelancer’s Year’s pitch tracker give More

Do you need to make a living as a writer and earn an income but suffer with regular writing procrastination? I’ve a few resources you can try that have been game-changers for me. During six weeks of using them, I’ve written two short stories (a genre I’d never tried before), two web features, a health story, and edited a ‘real life’ interview. The health story pitch – and subsequent feature – was accepted by the Editor of the UK Daily Mail’s Femail section. ‘Femail’ comes out on Thursdays, ‘Good Health’ on Tuesdays. The articles are extraordinary personal experiences, overcoming hardship, unusual family situations, successful weight-loss journeys or managing health issues. They pay upwards of £750. UK’s monthly Prima magazine accepted my short story. They accept one a month and pay £100. Best of British magazine will be using my interview. My web feature will be appearing on FundsforWriters ($100). My bank balance has a healthy £1,000 from this short period. I’ve got my focus and motivation back, too. Here’s how. The Pomodoro technique, a way of writing in forced time-management chunks, has been around for years. While this is a great idea for writers, it can be difficult to manage alone if, like me, you’re More

When summer rolls around, commercial writing work often dries up. Don’t panic – use the quieter months to tidy up the backend of your operation in time for the autumn rush. Here’s a handy checklist. 1. Overhaul your website and CV Check that all your latest publications, client names, and portfolio links are up to date and working. This review can get you thinking too: as Elna Cain says in her advice on summer slowness, ‘sometimes I’ll realize my positioning has shifted and certain pages no longer match the kind of clients I actually want to attract now’. 2. Refresh your email signature Check it’s updated with links to your latest book or a new service so that every email you send acts as subtle marketing. Do you need different signatures for different hats you wear? Now’s the time to sort that. 3. Audit your tech subscriptions Check you’re not paying for things you don’t need, like duplicate storage fees, or subscriptions to things like Adobe or ChatGPT you don’t really use. Recently I discovered I was still paying for indemnity insurance insisted on by a client I no longer work for. How about web-hosting and email services? Some services can More

I follow the newsletter and website Plagiarism Today, a long time, tried and true resource on plagiarism, and most recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the writing world. Recently they ran a post on How to Prove That Your Writing is Not AI, and it is most excellent. The tools are wonderful. Now you have no excuses. Why do I say that? Because in writing groups all over social media, writers are justifying using AI in writing and editing because if they didn’t use it, they’d be accused of using it anyway, since AI detectors are flawed. The recent incident where Jerry Falade lost a $2 million deal with Minotaur Books because his agents and publisher questioned his usage (or non-usage, depending on who you listen to), he could not prove he did NOT use AI. If you landed a deal with a publisher, or if you contracted a gig with a magazine or other entity, could you prove you didn’t use AI when there are so many writers using it these days? Would you dare to be one of those writers who uses AI anyway and cries foul if challenged, thinking they can’t prove it anyway? Read this article. It has so many good More

I am an abdominal surgeon. My days are dictated by operating room schedules, emergency consults, and ward rounds. When people learn I also maintain a steady income as a freelance writer—adding a consistent stream of paid invoices to my bank account every month—they always ask: Where do you find the time? The truth is, I do not find time. I extract it. Many writers wait for a quiet Sunday and three uninterrupted hours to work. If I waited for that, my freelance income would be zero. To succeed as a part-time freelancer, you must realize that you do not need empty hours to make money; you need ruthless focus. The 15-Minute Micro-Sprint My freelance business is built entirely in the margins of my day, and those margins pay well. I recently wrote a feature for WineMaker entirely in ten-minute intervals while waiting for my meals or sitting on the sofa. These micro-sprints are truly profitable, provided you eliminate friction. Keep a cloud-based note app, synced across your devices. I use Google Keep because it syncs seamlessly across all my devices and has a clean interface, devoid of unnecessary and over-complicated options. When a window opens, execute a specific, revenue-generating task. More

Many writers want to write about themselves. “I experienced (fill in the blank) and I believe the world needs to learn from my experience.” The problem is, unless you can write it like a novel, or write it cinematically, it’s just words on a page. Converting real emotion into words on a page is not as easy as it sounds. The truth is everybody has a story. Everybody. Nobody wants to read it, though, unless it is written beautifully. It doesn’t matter how incredible it is. It doesn’t matter the hurdles you overcame. If you cannot create a wonderfully written tale with marvelous prose, it isn’t a story worth reading. Have a story? Great. Do you know how to write well? Are you sure? That’s where you start. Not how to publish. Not how to sell it. Thoughts on paper are one thing. The right words in the right order is something altogether different. Work hard learning how to write wonderfully. Very hard. Writing isn’t a race. And it isn’t about you and what you endured. It’s about pleasing the reader.

So you land an exciting new writing commission or a contract that will cover all your bills for a couple of months. You put your head down and get on with delivering the goods. Six weeks later, however, you come up for air and realise you’ve got nothing else in terms of income coming in. You’ve been so focused on getting the work done on this gig that you haven’t had time to pitch ideas or network with contacts. As writers we could probably learn from Aaron Ross, a former Salesforce executive famous for reinventing sales for the software age. One of his key ideas, and the title of his multimillion bestselling book titled Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine, was ‘predictable revenue’. It became the template for how tech companies sell to this day, and several of his ideas translate surprisingly well to our world. They can help us think smarter about finding work, keeping clients and deciding what’s worth our time. Regular work beats glamorous work Have you noticed everyone wants to get you on a subscription these days, from your Ring doorbell to your word-processing provider to your food delivery app? That’s because, as Ross understood, More

I am an abdominal surgeon based in Italy. I am also a self-taught developer. Yet, despite my demanding primary career, I maintain a steady, predictable stream of freelance writing income. How? Not by pitching major consumer magazines, but by turning my hyper-specific, off-the-clock hobbies into recurring assignments in niche markets. Early in my writing journey, I assumed I needed to present a generalized “freelance business writer” persona to succeed. I was wrong. My greatest assets were not broad observations, but my eclectic, deeply technical interests. By leaning into those niches, I transitioned from exhausting one-off pitches to securing reliable, repeat income from specialized publications. Here is how you can mine your own diverse hobbies for predictable freelance paychecks. Audit Your “Sunday Afternoon” Hobbies Generalist markets are flooded with pitches, resulting in low acceptance rates. However, niche markets are starving for writers who genuinely understand their jargon and culture. Take a hard look at your hobbies. I am fascinated by diverse topics including open-source software, traditional Italian dishes and beverages, and stock market technical analysis. Instead of pitching a generic technology or finance article to a mainstream site, I targeted the micro-niches. I leveraged my self-taught coding skills to write for Linux More