What MacAgent does

     No matter how good a writer you are and no matter what you write (books, short stories, poetry, or computer programs!), it takes an organized effort to get your work published.  MacAgent is designed to help you stay organized as you search for publishers who are interested in your work.

    It usually takes several attempts before one finds a publisher willing to accept a work.  MacAgent helps you keep track of where you have submitted a work and what the responses were.

     Once your work has been accepted, MacAgent helps you keep track of royalty payments to make sure that the publisher doesn’t miss any of them.

     But, of course, it takes a lot more than just good record keeping to get a work published.  MacAgent therefore comes with the companion “Guide to Successful Publishing.”  This explains the overall strategy needed to successfully publish you work.  It also contains a wealth of tips and ideas that can make the process a lot easier.  Read it carefully!

     As a final note, MacAgent won’t be able to help you at all if you don’t faithfully enter new information when you get it.  MacAgent can’t help you if you forget to tell it what a publisher’s response was or if you forget to enter the information about a royalty payment.

     But if you are careful, MacAgent will make the search for a publisher much easier!

How MacAgent works

     MacAgent stores information on publishers and submissions, including “deal sheets” for published works.

     First, you create a Publishers file to contain information about publishers that you deal with.  This file contains the name of the publisher, the name of their contact person, their address, phone number, FAX number, and E-mail address.  There is also space for miscellaneous notes that can be used to store, among other things, what types of works the publisher tends to be interested in.

     Once you have created a Publishers file, you should create a Submissions file.  This will contain a list of your works and their classifications.  (You might even want to create different Submissions files for different types of works.)  For each work in the Submissions file, there will be a list of publishers that you have submitted the work to.  For each submission, you can enter the date sent, the date when you received a response, what the response was, and notes about the response (whether it was a form letter, an unusually enthusiastic response, etc).

     When you tell MacAgent that the work has been accepted by a publisher, MacAgent will let you fill out a “deal sheet” for this transaction.  This can store all the information about the contract and a list of all the royalty payments that you have received.

     Please refer to the appropriate section of this help system for more details about how the various features of MacAgent work.