If you've been following our recent coverage of the whole ReganMedia shitstorm, you know that "interim PR director" Paula Conway has already had a close working relationship with Maureen Regan (left). Conway served as a freelance publicist for Regan's book about fertility, A Few Good Eggs, which was published by ReganBooks—and then the two of them are the co-authors of another forthcoming ReganBooks title, The Beauty Buyble. Now, we also know that Maureen is the sister of Judith Regan, the head of ReganMedia, and, according to Maureen's author bio, she's a longtime veteran of the entertainment industry who's "owned The Regan Agency, a literary agency, since 1995."

Well, heck, you'd expect that if Maureen Regan has even half the publishing acumen of her sister, she'd be lining up some major deals for a whole bunch of clients over the last ten years, right? Yet the deal database at Publishers Marketplace lists only one deal with her name attached in the last five years, and it's for A Few Good Eggs (or, as it was called back then, What Do You Expect?). Now, most 15-percenters would starve on that kind of track record, if it reflected the entire story...but it probably doesn't, and I'll give you two good reasons to think so. (And then, in a later item, more and better explanations...)

First off, there's the possibility that Regan simply hadn't discovered the Deal Lunch (once it was created, that is) before she sold her Eggs, or that she's not industrious enough to send in an announcement every time she scores. Supporting that thesis: the lack of any notice concerning Buyble, for which Regan presumably repped herself again. Secondly, it's possible that, even with co-writers on both projects, she's simply been too busy in recent years to take on anybody else's books and pitch them to publishers; after all, both books deal with research-heavy subjects.

And, as it happens, my theories seem to be not too far off the mark. I sent an email off to Maureen Regan last night, asking about her client list and the recent absence of deals, and as she explained this morning, "Having a teenage son and a two year old daughter and writing my own books have kept me quite busy in the past several years, and I am careful about the projects that I take on. I pride myself on being a very hands on agent that gets very involved on many levels, and not someone that just throws things against the wall to see if they will stick." Among the clients she gave that level of attention in the past: Grace Slick, Sonny Barger, Juliano (Raw the Uncook Book), Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, Cynthia Robins (The Beauty Workbook), Stephen Hannock (Luminosity) , Carolyn Mein (Different Bodies Different Diets. Those deals actually appear to predate the Lunch, so that's why they aren't included. And, yes, before you make the joke, some of those books were sold to Judith—but some of them weren't, too.