Latest posts from Chip MacGregor
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The One Thing You Need… (a guest blog from bestselling author Sheila Gregoire!)
If you want to build your organization and impact people, while also providing at least a little bit of income, you need two things:
- A newsletter list
- Something to sell (your book, your online course, even your speaking engagements!)
Okay, …
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Ask the Agent: Boxed Sets, Memoirs, and Querying Questions
We’ve been spending the month of October doing “Ask the Agent” — your chance to ask that question you’ve always wanted to run by a literary agent…
I had an agent at a conference request my full manuscript. That was …
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Ask the Agent: Were you really hit by a tornado?
So… it’s been a bit of a weird weekend. On Friday, the little town I live in on the Pacific Coast was hit by a tornado. It came in off the ocean, tore right through our small downtown, damaged trees …
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Ask the Agent: Credentials, Genres, and Weird Agent Advice
We’re spending the month of October on “Ask the Agent,” where writers can send in any questions they have of a literary agent. Today’s questions…
I am a fiction author, published under my own name. I also want to publish …
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Ask the Agent: Names, Trends, and Agents
We’re doing “Ask the Agent” all this month — your chance to ask that question you’ve long wanted to run by a literary agent. It’s been nice to see so many people send in their questions. If YOU have a …
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Ask the Agent: Platforms, Pen-names, and Dreams
We’re taking the month of October to do “Ask the Agent.” So what’s the question you’ve always wanted to ask a literary agent? Here are some that have come in recently…
Recognizing I have started to build my platform much …
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Ask the Agent: Publishers, Proposals, and Agents
We’re going to take the month of October to focus on “Ask the Agent” — your chance to ask that question you’ve always wanted to talk to a literary agent about. I’ll tackle a bunch of the questions that have …
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Ten Bookstores in Five Days (a guest blog)
I used to think that the answers to everything could be found in books.
Now the internet has all the answers…or does it? I rarely find depth in Google offerings. So when I want to research something, I still turn …
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What have you always wanted to ask an agent?
I started this blog nearly ten years ago (we’re coming up on the ten year anniversary for this blog), as a way to simply answer the questions writers have about the process. Some people wanted to ask about writing, others …
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The most overlooked marketing opportunity…
I try not to always blog about book marketing, since I don’t want this blog to sound like Johnny-One-Note (though I would say between 60 and 70% of the questions I’m sent have to do with marketing and publicity), but …
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What was the most significant book you ever represented?
All this talk about September 11 caused some people to ask about the books I mentioned in my previous blog post. Both books (Thunder Dog by Mike Hingson and Susy Flory, and Let’s Roll by Lisa Beamer) were big …
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On the 15th Anniversary of September 11th…
I wrote this a few years ago, to remind myself of the events of that day. Life has changed since I wrote this, but on the 15th anniversary, I wanted to share it again and remind everyone what happened, and …
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What’s your favorite proposal of all time?
Since it’s our tenth anniversary, I thought I’d pull out a couple of questions I’ve had sitting around for a long time, just because they’ll be fun to explore. SEVERAL people have asked me what my favorite proposal of all …
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MacGregor Literary celebrates ten years!
This week marks the tenth anniversary since I started MacGregor Literary. I’d been working as a publisher with the old Time-Warner Book Group, got the axe not long after the sale to Hachette, and realized I was being given a …
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Ask the Agent: So what are you reading?
I used to regularly include updates of the books I’m reading on this blog, until I had some people complain that my personal reading habits weren’t that helpful to their writing careers. So I stopped doing it, and I’ve found …
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Ask the Agent: What does an acquisitions editor do?
Someone wrote in to ask, “Can you explain the difference between an acquisition editor and any other type of editor? Who do they do? How are they hired?”
There are a bunch of different types of editors at any particular …
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Ask the Agent: How do I create a career plan as a writer?
I’ve had a bunch of people write to ask some version of “How does a writer create a career plan?” There’s a lot of talk about it, but not much in the way of specifics.
As regular readers know, I …
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Ask the Agent: How do I treat my writing as a business?
We’ve been talking about making a living at writing, and I had three people all ask the same basic question: If I’m going to make writing my career, how do I treat it as a business instead of as an …
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Ask the Agent: What if my book doesn’t earn out?
Someone wrote to ask, “Is it a big deal if my book doesn’t earn back its advance? What percentage of books earn out? And does a publisher lose money if a book doesn’t earn out?”
I frequently get questions about …
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Ask the Agent: What is the formula for making a living at writing?
A few years ago, I created a talk about how an author can make a living with his or her writing. I called it The MacGregor Theory (with apologies to the MacGregor who came up with all the Theory X …