Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer. Keep your publisher closest of all. If you are interested in being published, you should do all you can to make the publishing business interested in you. But how? You've already written a good book, so what else do you have to do to give yourself the edge with agents and publishers? Sex, Lies & Book Publishing is your field guide to the nature of publishing - the unspoken rules and conventions deciding which books get published and which don't based on the way the industry and its denizens think and act. It is an up-to-date insider's guide to an often mysterious business, and an invaluable resource for any author seeking an agent and, ultimately, a publishing deal. Sex, Lies & Book Publishing lifts the lid on the publishing world today, and the people who work in it - from the occasionally eyebrow-raising private lives of book editors, to the ways they judge new fiction and non-fiction and prepare it for publication. This guide is packed with trade secrets you won't read anywhere else, including some which publishers might just prefer went unprinted.

The author has, for the past fifteen years, been a London-based literary agent running his own eponymous agency. Prior to that he was a commissioning editor at various trade publishers, most recently Pan Macmillan.