www.inkthinkerblog.com — I’ll be blogging my notes for the WIW 2008 Annual Conference and posting them between sessions throughout the day. I’ll be fixing typos later!
Moderator:
Howard Yoon, Gail Ross Literary Agency
Panelists:
Diana Finch, Diana Finch Literary Agency (formerly Ellen Levine Literary Agency)
Lisa Haven, Paraview Literary Agency
Regina Ryan, Regina Ryan Publishing Enterprises
Good times, the moderator for the Nonfication Agents Roundtable session isn’t here, so the agents are self-moderating and introducing themselves down the line.
Regina Ryan likes helpful and surprsing books and covers a WIDE range of topics. Lisa Hagan got started in documentaries and then fell in love with being a mansucript agent. Diana Finch brought some of her current titles:
- Lipstick Jihad, journalist memoir
- Stalin’s Children, journalist memoir
- Three Cups of Tea, on the bestseller list currently(sold in 15 foreign countries)
- What to Say to a Porcupine, business fables
DF: When you’re writing nonfiction, what goes into deciding what to write. Nonfiction, you and your agent work with a proposal, and rarely does a nonfiction writer write the whole manuscript. Editors prefer that they NOT do that because they want to have input in shaping the book.
LH: Most of her editors want outline, synopsis, 2 chapters, author bio, marketing plan, platform, competition. Michael Larsen’s book is the best one.
DF: once you have an idea for a book, be aware of what’s out there on that topic. If there’s another book that’s very similar, often yours will not be viable.
RR; What you want to say is what’s out there and why your book is different and better. Draw sharp comparisons. Don’t knock it or be negative, but be specific.
DF: It isn’t always the case that others are competing but ratehr than there may be a sequence of books and yours would be the next step. Competitive books are books that are still selling. Sometimes you have to talk about a book that’s 10, 20 years older if it’s very significant.
RR: Part of your job in becoing professionals is doing your research. I coach. Writing a proposal is an art form. When i get a hold of it, I can see where it needs to be tweaked. Sometimes authors will say, “Well there’s NEVER been a book on this subject.” That’s a little scary, because tehre must be a reason. When I work with an author, I will guide them on stuff like that. But you have to get the basics.
RR: Your platform is how you reach the public. Ideally, it’s once a month on the Today Show. Twice a month. Every day is ideal. Public speaking, getting known, Internet, how many hits you get to your website. Publishers want you to deliver that audience in an easy way. Who’s your list, who will promote for you, internet publicit and promotions.
DF: All of my nonfiction authors have a website. It’s better if it’s very simple. You can develop it by lnking to other sites in your area, blog for other sites, affiliate with different organizations in your area, build a subscriber list. Post important new news, e-mail newsletters.
RR: Penny Sansaveri who specializes in internet publicity: Red Hot Internet Publicity. She says the best way to get known is to comment nicely on other people’s blogs. You get known in the community, show people you have something nice to say.
DF: Even if you have a finished manuscript, you should create a proposal to show where your book fits into the market. It’s really meant for the editors to convince them to publish the book itself.
RR: It’s a selling document. What you’re really doing is giving the editor a script so that editor can present the book to the salespeople and everyone else without hype.
DF: A problem that coems up with writing the sample chapter. You have to choose one that will be representative enough, but that won’t require so much research that you would need an advance for doing it. Some people will sell an article and then expand the article into a chapter so then you’re getting paid for the article.
RR: You have to do an annotated chapter outline. And that isn’t a summary, by the way. You need to do it in a way that piques interest. Your annotated outline should give the sense of that chapter as a building block in the course of the development of that book.
DF: If there’s research that you haven’t done, part of the proposal might be your research plan: what sources you would go to and how you propose to reach them, what methods you will use and how long it will take, etc. I do conceptual editing.
LH: You go with the flow. Every editor wants to put their thumbprint on the project. I tell writers not to be married to anything because it’s going to get changed. But don’t approach an agent without a proposal.
DF: We want to see the best you can do on your own. Our expectation from a query is that you have the proposal ready to go.
DF: It used to be that you didn’t need to have a platform. But now, look at the NYT bestseller list. Everyone on that list is nationally known, national TV publicity, etc. I would bet that currently every single person on the list has had that kind of national exposure.
RR: the other reason this platform business has become so important is the huge bookstores, the B&N and stuff, and they are just deluged with titles. Chances are, they will go with someone they know, someone who’s been on Oprah or the Today Show thing. Stand out.
LH: A lot of midmarket books don’t get on the bestseller lists, but they stay on the bookstore shelves. They’re the backlist. You want to have your book making money every six months.
(A lot of people are asking really basic questions. People, this is NOT the place for “what’s a book proposal?” or “what’s copyright?” Get a clue. If anyone asks the difference between self-publishing and commercial publishing, I’m going to scream.)
DF: In memoir, the quality of writing is very important. We’ve probably seen 5 to 10 proposals for similar stories. Also improtant is the way you’ve focused it into a book, the way you’ve found a narrative for it, made it a story. You have to come up with a shape for the story and a way of making whatever the experience is singular. You have to have some kind of focus on it.
RR: It also helps if you have a really good angle on it. it’s hard to publish memoirs now unles they’re really striking.
DF: NYT column Modern Love has generated an amazing proportion of memoirs. Look at that every week ands ee what it is that the writers are homing in on. Also back page in NYT magazine.
RR: The first thing I do is look at the writing. I skip right to that and then I back up and see what it’s all about, the proposal and the overview and all that. But I want to see the writing.
LH: I heard David Sedaris the other day on NPR saying that only 10% of his story is fiction — because who doesn’t embellish — but it’s being classified as fiction.
RR: Quality of writing is voice, the way you speak, the quality of the descriptions — how they all add up.
LH: Sometimes writers are married to their idea and don’t want to change anything, so they go on their merry way.
DF: One thing editors are looking for now is narrative. It has to be told as a story. Journalistic technique.
DF: Some university press doesn’t offer any advance at all, but the larger ones may pay advances as high as the smaller publishers. It could be $10-20K if they’re competing with publishers in New York.
RR: University pblishers are kind of stepping into the gap and publishing books that they never used to publish before. U of Nebraska is now the 2nd largest U press.
DF: I don’t have a problem with multiple submission to agents if they let me know.
RR: I just don’t want to spend my time on somthing and then the writer say, oh, I got an agent.
DF: You want to choose the best, not just the first or fastest. If more than one agent is insterested, that is wonderful. You should talk withe ach of them, let them see the book, get a sense of how you work.
LH: A good author-agent match, you have to like each toher. Jeff Hermann said, “If you dread a client’s phone call, you need to drop that client.”
RR: it’s like a marriage. You want to stay out of your agent’s life-is-too-short department.
LH: I prefer a query letter via the internet and ask me if this is something to see. Then I want the proposal as an e-mail attachment.
RR: I have guidelines if anyone’s interested.
DF: A query letter is very important. Usually that’s what you should approach someone with initially. it should describe the project, why you’re writing the book and what your motivation is, and your biography as to where it’s relevant to your writing the book.
RR: What’s very effective is WHY you’re writing the book and why you’re willing to devote a few years of your life to this.
LH: Appropriate length for nonfiction book is 70K-80K words. My last few have been 76K.
DF: 60K is too short and less than 60K probably isn’t a full length book. Over 100K is a lot, too much.
RR: You have to be really careful about length so you don’t price yourself out of the market.
LH: I did a book not too long ago called Never Throw Rice at a Pisces, an astrology related wedding guide. They put it in astrology not wedding, so it’s a dead book. Focus your genre and be specfic.
RR: Parenting books are hard because there are so many out there. Publishers just aren’t looking for parenting books. You have to really Push them.
DF: Editors also tend to publish parenting books related to where they are in their life. Editors in their 30s are more for younger children, and the ones in their 50s would go for teenagers. ADHD treatments are hot now. There was a time before where it was focused on girls, but now it’s more focused on boys because it’s believed that girls now have it easier.
RR: One of my authors did just use a pseudonym. She had a really unusual name, and she didn’t want her family to know she had written the book. But it wasn’t a memoir or anything and I can’t imaging you would want to do that. It just complicates things.
DF: An agent doesn’t take on a project unless you anticipate you’re going to sell it. There are reasons books don’t sell, and it could be that someone else is working on something similar and you don’t know it until your launch.
RR: And the market changes.
LH: We just take a commission on the advance and the royalties. No upfront money should be paid.
DF: Another reason a book might not sell is that the publishers have published similar books that just didn’t do well.
LH: If you’re employed full time and write [your] for your[company’s] target market, there is no conflict of interest. I would say you have a built-in market.
DF: The only problem would be if you’re writing it on the job, or maybe if you’re a newspaper reporter.
RR: People complain about university presses publishing midlist books, but I wouldn’t say it impinges on my life at all.
DF: For a lot of big houses, if they don’t think they can sell 20K, 25K, 30K copies, that’s often their line.
LH: But some of those big houses publish books that only sell 5K copies and they just sit there.
RR: There’s no way to know. Sometimes a book starts out small and becomes huge.
LH: [[follow-up with her about the author with the big personality who landed a $15K advance and got $1.3M for his first royalty check]]
LH: I decide that I’m going to take a client on before. I do consulting, but not everyone does.
LH: Contract written up by lawyer for the lifetime of the book.
RR: I like to do future books, too, because I have long-term relaitonships.
DF: I often work without an agreement unless the writer asks for one and then the clause about commission, etc, goes in the publishr contract. Also an instruction to the publisher as to how the money is going to be paid out. AAR (Association of Author Representatives) has a code of ethics that lays out requirements. The agent only represents you as far as you say the agent represents you.
RR: I have tried that approach and I don’t like it. I like to be clear and spell everything out. I want to author to understand that they’re getting into a long-term committment. I’m putting a tremendous amount of works into this.
DF: Foreign rights are part of the negotiation wiht the publisher. Sometimes the pub wants to handle the foreign rights, and in that case they might pay a higher advance than if they were planning to publish it only in the US or only in English. If you think your book has an appeal overseas, then you should consider than when selecting an agent.
RR: I use an agency called [[books overseas???]] that’s like having my own foreign rights department.
DF: A few agents deal directly with foreign publishers, but only a few, because it’s complicated.
RR: If they can’t sell the book, you can go to someone else but you need to let your agent know and cancel the agreement.
DF: But you need to think about it, because the new agent would probably go to the same publishers, so you may need to think about the BOOK.
RR: And if someone comes to me from another agent, I would want to know who else saw it first.
LH: When I’m contacting someone, I say I love this book nd I have to represent you.
RR: Narrative nonfiction is the biggest trend.
DF: More trends are holding on more so than emerging. And memoir. It’s hard to sell new memoirs because there are so many published, but they’re very popular. One of the books that started narrative nonfiction is A Perfect Storm. It became a movie because it had such a strong story.
LH: When I’m reading a proposal, I go,, “Oh, gosh, Ellen would love this” or whoever, because when you’ve been doing this a while you know the editors and you’re friends. I’m making notes the whole time I’m reading it and I start querying as soon as the agrement is signed (once the proposal is ready).
RR: Pets are good.
LH: I do a lot of pet books and they do very well and stay on the shelves a long time.
Tags: freelance writing blog, freelance writing, freelance, writing, nonfiction, literary agent, trends in nonfiction, publishing, industry trends, agent advice, howard yoon, diana finch, lisa haven, regina ryan, gail ross literary agency, diana finch literary agency, paraview literary agency, regina ryan publishing enterprises, inkthinker, kristen king
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