The origin story

Mathew started working as a literary agent around 10,000 B.C.E. making his first sale with Tog's Ink Scratchings and achieving an unprecedented eight-cave distribution deal. He subsequently sold Tog's well-received Running with Spears which was adapted into a cave painting and tribal tattoo.

The actual origin story

Mathew made his first professional sale in 2003, selling himself as a writer to Penguin to adapt the much-beloved Disney film Pinocchio to a 32-page storybook. For this sale he earned a whopping $0 and a promise of future paying work. He followed this up with two further jobs for Penguin earning himself $0 and more promises of future paying work.

Sensing that selling writing for nothing was not a fiscally advantageous strategy, Mathew took a job at Funtastic Publishing as a writer and editor. In his time there he wrote and edited hundreds of licensed titles, including children's activity books, storybooks, joke books and far too many titles involving princesses. He also edited non-fiction titles, copy-edited a recipe-travel book, acquired a children's fiction series and other books, bought in work from overseas publishers, herded authors, illustrators and licensors, wrote marketing and sales material, negotiated contracts, dealt with royalty payments, constructed sales plans and generally worked out how to make as much money as possible. In addition to this, he also managed the Disney publishing licence for Funtastic, focussing on maximum financial return for Disney titles.

At the end of 2005, Mathew took the plunge into freelance writing and editing. Over the next three years he wrote for the Jewish News, Ibis Publishing, proofread large-print books and wrote submission reviews for Australian Scholarly Press, amongst other work. He also wrote and edited activity books which will be handed out to 300,000+ children on Qantas flights through 2008-2009 and books for British Airways which will be given to 1,000,000+ children.

Unlike his first forays into freelance work, he was paid for this writing.

During this freelancer period, Mathew gave out a lot of free agent advice to writers and illustrators all around the world. He edited some books for free, edited screenplays for free, gave contract advice for free, rewrote contract clauses for free and generally did agent work for free.

In early 2009 Mathew decided it was time to start earning commission for the various agent services he was providing.
In a stunning leap of ego, he named the company after himself and went into business.