Excellent question! You can usually tell upfront whether a project has the potential to be published by Random House, and it's my job to give the writer a reality check if it isn't.

Very often, a writer is happy to settle for making the book as good as it can be and then aiming for Random House but settling for self-publishing.

In fact sometimes, writers will just buy an hour or two of my time and ask me to evaluate a work-in-progress to give them some sense of whether it's destined for Penguin or for Amazon publishing.

Of course, you don't tell a writer that their book is a turd. But I will tell them if I think that a large publisher isn't going to be interested, even if we work together to make the book as good as it can possibly be.

Often this has more to do with subject matter than the quality of the writing. Sometimes writers want to tell a story that is so personal or idiosyncratic that I'm pretty sure that there's no real market for it. And I'll tell them that.

The point I'm trying to make in this fairly long-winded way is that I try to tell writers what they can reasonably expect when it comes to publication upfront, rather than waiting until they've spent a lot of time and money working with me.