What was the wake-up moment earlier in your career that made you decide that you wanted to become an author?

Yeah, the wake-up moment happened actually later in my life, but the book that changed my life was a little book that I read when I was a sophomore at college.

I majored in journalism at Indiana University.

That's what I thought I was going to do.

I thought I was going to be like a newspaper reporter, chasing stories and all that kind of thing.

But halfway through my sophomore year, I was sitting at the Indiana Daily Student Newspaper This is on the pre-computer days.

So I had my fingers on an old Royal typewriter and I couldn't hit the buttons exactly.

Are there specific traits in an author that tell you that they're a good fit or maybe not so much?

So what exactly was happening in those moments?

Yeah, it's a great question, Fortune.

Um, I've been in publishing a long time.

I had written, uh, about 50 books, uh, at that point in my life.

Uh, publishers were paying me in advance.

They were making pretty books.

They were getting them in the bookstore.

So for the novice writer who's just starting out right now, what is the most important attribute for them to develop to become a successful author?

What's the difference between a literary agent and acquisitions editor, and when should an author pitch to whom?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

Let's start with the literary agent.

The literary agent is often harder to find or harder to get them on board than an acquisitions editor in some ways, depending on what it is you have.

A literary agent is basically the go-between between you and the publisher, because what's happened through the years is that publishers get such lousy submissions that they basically close their doors to the unsolicited [laughs] submissions.

And so these literary agents are basically the gatekeepers.

They know the different people.

And you talk about the catch-22 that first time aspiring authors run into, and I wondered if you could explain what that is.