From the story card:
Agent of Change 88,000 words
Finished 10/1984
Submitted as by Lee Miller
Ace: Rejected after being held a year
DAW: Rejected by return mail
Del Rey Books: SOLD 12/31/1986, Owen Locke, ed.
PUBLISHED 2/1/1988
* * *
Sharon speaking. Owen Locke did not remain our editor; shortly after accepting Agent, he was promoted and did not take our book with him on the way upstairs. Instead, it fell into the honor of editor Shelly Shapiro, who felt that science fiction could “do better” than space opera. Her first letter to us stated that we needed to rewrite the first 50-ish, I believe, pages of the manuscript into something “less cartoonish” or she could not work with us.
We accepted the challenge, to, I believe, Shelly’s astonishment. We also got us an agent, damn quick. Upon being informed that Del Rey did not allow books to be published under pseudonyms, we instructed our agent to let our editor know that we would like our book to come out as by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.
Which is why it — and the two novels following — was published with the byline “Steve Miller and Sharon Lee.”
To be fair, Steve had been the elder author, and I was nobody. Worse, I was a female nobody, and the Wisdom of the Time was that SF readers would not buy a book written by a girl, so obviously the man’s name needed to come first if Del Rey wished to sell books. Which it did, and all honor to it. Agent went into four printings, something we discovered . . . a number of years down the road. For the purposes of royalty statements, it never earned out.
* * *
Tagline: “He was a spy and she was a mercenary and together they were on the run from both sides of the law.”
About the Authors
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller live in the foothills of Owings Mills, Maryland, with three cats and a large cast of characters. Born and raised in Baltimore in the early Fifties, they met when Sharon won the BaltiCon short story contest and have been a team since 1979.
Their fiction, written both jointly and singly, has appeared in Fantasy Book, Dragon Magazine, Amazing, and other magazines. Both are published poets, and their nonfiction work has appeared in a number of newspapers.
Sharon’s interests include music, pine cone collecting, and seashores. Steve also enjoys music, plays chess, and collects cat whiskers. Both agree with Oscar Wilde that life is too important to take seriously.
Artwork by Stephen Hickman: