You're no fool. Despite your artistic integrity, you know that the selling of a book involves just that: the sell. However, after you've spent years pouring your heart out into your novel, is it then your job to come up with a Hollywood style sales pitch in order to give your book mass appeal? "It's like 'The Corrections' meets 'The Nanny Diaries!'" How on earth do you put a spin on your work, or is that even your job?

"Agent, agent, agent," says writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal. "Absolutely. Every which way." However, Rosenthal is a little more seasoned a published author than some of the other writers I chatted with.

"Before I wrote my book Catch," says writer Will Leitch, "I thought that my job was just to write the thing and let the publicist do their job. I now realize that is foolish. It's not that publicists are incompetent to any stretch of the imagination. I am just saying that they are busy. They have lots of books to promote; I only have one. No matter how good they are at their job, the book will, by definition, mean more to me than it does to them. I have no idea how to promote a book, and if I were the type of person who would willingly say my book is Moneyball meets Be More Chill, I would hate myself more than I already do. But yeah, promoting a book -- even one that's eight months from release, like mine -- is something that I'm going to have to be a part of, whether I like it or not. It requires close to as much ingenuity and creativity as writing the darned thing does."

"Some of this control is given up once you enter the marketing stage (authors don't necessarily control their own flap copy or press releases, for example), so it can sometimes be maddening to find one's baby described as something that it is not," says a first-time novelist I chatted with. "I wasn't entirely happy with how my novel was presented, though eventually I got used to it. I think novelists aren't really supposed to care about things like positioning or book marketing, but the reality is that if you don't know how to position your work, you're going to be in trouble."

Says another agent, "In my experience, it is beneficial to have some type reference to the work in one's pitch letter-but not make or break. As for authorship of these 'log lines,' to my knowledge there's no hard and fast rule, but so help me, if one more person sends me a COLD MOUNTAIN meets THE PERFECT STORM..."

In the end, as in all things in life, a happy medium is best. "I think that ideally it's a collaboration between the writer and agent, but ultimately the agent knows what it takes to sell something in the marketplace," says an agent I spoke with. "A writer must be invested in his and do anything possible to sell the work himself (whether that means calling in favors to promote it, etc.), but in terms of selling the work itself, the agent has to come up with a way to spin it."