Before I even start into this best-of-Slope post, I’ll come right out and say it: if you are (or know of) someone in the world of literary agents or publishing, I’d love to hear from you. By the end of this post, I think you’ll see why! So here we go.

I’ve been a professional writer since I was a teenager. I wrote for national magazines at 15, had my first published book at 16, and by the time I was 25, I had written that many books (that is to say: 25). They were all books about computers, and I was financially independent by the time I was in my late teens. Getting published was very easy, because almost every book proposal I came up with was accepted. I had no agent. Just myself.