In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns discusses how his client landed literary agent representation with just one email.
Kevin walks through the process his client went through, from seeking out coaching to improve his nonfiction book to researching agents and crafting a personalized query. You’ll learn lessons on the importance of revision, developing a clear mission or purpose for writing, putting together a strong book proposal, and finding the right agent through personalized outreach.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #198 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #198 Transcript
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Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
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In today’s episode of the podcast, we will talk about how a client of mine landed representation from a literary agent with a single email. That was all it took. Let’s walk through the process he went through to make this happen.
First off, he wrote a book, and let’s clarify: this was a nonfiction book. You might know me as primarily working with fiction authors, particularly commercial fiction authors, but I certainly work with nonfiction authors from time to time as well, and that was the case here. So, first off, my client wrote a book, and he shopped it around to some small presses. While he got some positive feedback, it became pretty clear that the book was not ready for publication and that it needed significant improvements. Rather than giving up or rather than trying to figure out how to fix the book on his own, he sought out a writing coach, and he found his way to me.
This is actually the process a lot of my one-on-one clients go through. It would be lovely if everyone out there said, “I am going to write a book,” and the first thing they did was seek out support and a coach to help them do it. But the reality is most people decide to write a book, sit down, write it, and then realize it’s not good enough and need some help. That’s a very normal and very common process, particularly for my one-on-one clients. They come to me with a manuscript that is half-written or three-quarters-written or fully written and it’s not good enough, but they don’t know how to make it better. They find their way to me, and we work together to make it better.
That’s what I did with this client; for a good year or a year and a half we went over the book again and again. We did multiple drafts of the book, as is to be expected. Anytime you’re writing a book, fiction or nonfiction, you have to embrace the fact that writing is iterative and that you’re going to go over it again and again. My client was more than willing to do that.
In fact, he had a real drive to make the book as good as it could possibly be. There were entire chapters of the book that got thrown out and completely rewritten multiple times so that we could get the book to where it needed to be. We also sent the book out to beta readers. Eventually, once we thought it was mostly there, my client was very receptive to the feedback from the beta readers. He continued to work on the book and revise it based on the feedback that we’ve received from beta readers.
This drive my client had to really make the book as good as it could possibly be, I think it goes back to something we touched on in last week’s episode, which is this idea of having a why, having a reason for why you are writing the book. My client was very passionate about helping people on this topic; it was his life’s work, so the desire to make the book as good as it could be was really a desire to help as many people as he could. When things were hard, and when things were frustrating, he could always go back to that why and recharge himself and come back reengaged.
In one of my group coaching programs last week, we had author and marketing expert Ben Settle come and talk to us. Something Ben settle is very big on is having a mission. He has a couple of books called the how to be a villain, or something like that. He’s great at marketing and great at creating a persona, and his persona is somewhat evil, but these books are really talking about having a mission and how when you have a mission, it can drive you forward, and it can get you through challenges, and it can get you over hurdles, and it can get you to that finish line. So one of the key factors of my clients success was his willingness to invest in the revisions process, his willingness to push the thing to be as good as it could be because it was all being driven by a mission to help people in a specific, important way.
Let’s discuss literary agents, given that this podcast episode is about literary agents overall: How do you get a literary agent, and how do you do it with one email?
You might be familiar with literary agents already, but basically, they’re the intermediaries in the publishing industry. You cannot just submit a query package or a book to a mainstream publisher; they have gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers are these literary agents. Literary agents, they’ll take 15% of anything you make off your book, and what they do is they represent you to the publishing industry and they help get your book sold to a publisher.
In the fiction space, how you land a literary agent is you write a full manuscript first. You have to have a fully completed, fairly solid manuscript completed, and then you send a query letter to an agent. This is a letter where you say, “Hey, here’s what I have to offer. I’m seeking representation.” These agents normally will ask for five to ten to maybe twenty pages pages from the book sample pages to include with your query letter. Then, if they like those pages, they’ll request the full manuscript for review. So that’s what you need in the fiction world: a query letter opening pages that are super solid, and ultimately a full manuscript that’s super solid.
Things are a little different in the nonfiction world. The expectation in non-fiction is that you don’t actually have a completed book yet. What you submit to literary agents in the nonfiction world is again a query letter but also a book proposal. This is a fairly comprehensive pitch package that you use to sell the book concept to the literary agent. And then they expect you to have a sample chapter. So you don’t have to have the full book written because a lot of the time, the reason nonfiction writers pitch a book to an agent and ultimately to a publisher is to get the funding to complete the research or the writing process. They need those funds upfront before they actually write the book.
In my client’s case, he went ahead and wrote an incredible book before querying; he was willing to fund himself on the research, writing, revisions and coaching, and invest in the book out of his own funds. He actually had a fully polished book ready to go to include in his submission package, which I’m sure put him ahead of the pack in many ways.
You might have heard that the query process is fairly arduous. You’ve probably heard nightmare stories of agents rejecting masterpieces and authors submitting their books 50 or 100 or 150 times before landing that right agent. There are many horror stories online about the query process, and there are many tools out there to help you try to keep track of your querying because you’re probably going to have to query 25 to 50 to 100 agents and deal with all those rejections. That is just part of the process.
In fact, right coach Jennie Nash says, you are not allowed to complain until you have at least 50 rejections; that’s what she tells her clients who she’s working with: “You’ve been rejected 40 times? I don’t even want to hear a complaint. That is just the process.”
The reason it’s so complicated and arduous and difficult is that it’s not just about the writing quality. You might think, Hey, I’ve written an amazing book; it’s going to be easy for me to land an agent, but the fact is you need to find the right agent. If you’ve written a romance and you’re querying an agent who only represents thriller authors, there’s not going to be synergy there; it’s not going to work, you’re going to be rejected. In addition, you might be querying an agent where you’ve written a romance and they rep romances, but perhaps you’ve written a romance set in a bakery, and they just published a book with one of their authors writing of romance and a bakery. And so that’s not what they’re looking for right now.
Writing an incredible book is just the starting point for landing an agent. Then you need to find the right agent who’s right for you, and who looking for what you have to offer at the exact right time that you are querying. It can really be difficult.
Let’s go back to this idea of the nonfiction book proposal for a moment. This is not something you throw together; this is something you put just as much effort into as your query letter as the book itself. And as I said, it’s a fairly robust product.
When you’re putting together a book proposal, it’s normally going to include an overview section, which is really the pitch section; we’re saying, this is the book; this is what it’s about and this is why it’s unique.
You then have an About the Author section where you talk about your experience, your expertise, and why you are the right person to write this book.
We then go into a target audience section. This is really where you need to get into the research; you need to know who your potential target audience is, but also what their interests are, how many of them there are, where they seek out books, and all that sort of marketing data goes into the target audience section. This is really a research-heavy section.
The next section is quite similar in terms of research-heavy in terms of having comparable titles; you need to find books that are similar to yours and yet yours also needs to be different. In fact, in this section, we often use the phrase: similar, different, better. You find a book that’s like yours, but then you point out how yours is slightly different, and then you argue that this slight difference makes yours even better than the book that’s already out there. You want to do this for three to five books.
You then have a marketing and promotion section. This is where you lay out the marketing plan for the promotion of your book. So many authors try to go traditional; they seek out an agent and they seek out a publisher because they think the publisher is going to do all the marketing for them. Well, guess what? In the world of nonfiction, you need to have a strong marketing plan laid out and presented to the agent in your book proposal.
The next section is a chapter-by-chapter outline. Even though the expectation is not that the full book is written, you still need the full outline for the book written and included in the proposal. Then the expectation is that you are going to have one sample chapter included.
These book proposals are not short things. My client’s proposal that he put together was around 10,000 words long once it was all completed. A big piece of work, but he put in the effort to put together an incredible book proposal to do the research on the target audience to put together the marketing plan and talk about how he was going to leverage his existing platforms.
Once you have that amazing quarry package ready, you go back to that idea of finding the right agent at the right time. When I hear people saying they’ve been rejected 50 times, even though their book is really good, I suspect at some point here they’ve begun spamming agents. They’ve just picked random agents who perhaps look like they might represent the thing they’re pitching, and they query those agents. When you’re getting rejected again and again, it might be because you’re querying the wrong agents.
You have to look for an agent who’s not just looking for what you have but who is right for you. I know there’s this level of desperation where authors want to be chosen; they want some literary agent, any literary agent, to say, “I like your writing. you’re great. I’ll represent you.” But if that agent and you don’t connect on a significant level and don’t have the same vision for the work, it’s not going to serve you any. You need to find someone who’s right for you, and who is looking for what you have to offer at this exact period in time.
Now, keep in mind that the agent does not need to be the most famous agent out there. You don’t necessarily need James Patterson, Stephen King, or Malcolm Gladwell agents; you just need the right agent for you. In the case of my client that we’re talking about, he comes from the punk rock world just like I do and so he’s not necessarily interested in being published by the biggest publishing corporation out there. He wanted a publisher to support getting the book out into the world, but he was looking for more of a mid-range publisher who shares the same values that he has. And it’s the same with the agent. He was looking for an agent who isn’t necessarily looking to make the most money in the world, but to make a difference and to connect with the correct readers. As such, my client did extensive research on the agents out there and narrowed down who he thought would be right for him.
Before you ever query an agent, even if you have an incredible book, even if you’ve put together an amazing query letter, even if your submission package is rock solid, and your submission pages are great, you still need to follow the submission criteria guidelines. Every agent is going to be slightly different. They all have different templates, different rules, and different ways of submitting the work; some of them want you to email them, some of them want you to upload it to their website, some of them want this, and some of them want that. Again, when I hear people getting rejected time and time again, it makes me wonder, did you actually go through the submission guidelines? Did you actually jump through the hoops you were asked to jump through? This is the thing: one of the reasons those guidelines are there is to root out people who can’t follow rules and who can’t put in the effort to research what the agent is looking for. These agents get 1000s of submissions every year, and they’re looking for reasons to reject things before they have to waste time reading them. Something as simple as saying, “Hey, I want your submission in Times New Roman, and not in Arial,” is just one more way for them to say, “Okay, this person didn’t listen, they didn’t even put the submission in the correct font that I asked for, why would they be a good partner to work with on any other aspect of the publishing?” Follow the guidelines. That’s what my client did. He went through every agent who he was interested in, and he meticulously read through their submission guidelines and made sure that he adhered to them.
I think there is this mindset out there amongst authors that so long as you follow the rules, so long as you put the right paragraph at the right spot in your query letter, and so long as you use the right font in your submission package, you’re going to land an agent, right? It’s like they think of it as a test. It’s like, “Hey, I followed the rules. I did everything I was supposed to do. Why aren’t I landing an agent?” Well, you aren’t landing an agent because it’s not just about jumping through hoops. It’s not just about following rules. There’s a person at the other end of this process receiving that submission package, a human being, and you need to personalize your package to that person because they’re not a robot. They are a person who you are going to collaborate with and whose future is going to be invested in your own.
When you’re putting that query letter together, it absolutely has to be personalized. You need to tell the agent this is the exact reason I’m reaching out to you. Maybe it’s because you’ve read their books and you liked them. Or maybe it’s because you’ve been following them on social media for a very long time. Or maybe you were at a conference that they spoke at, or maybe you pitched them at a conference, and they asked you to follow up somewhere down the road. Or, even better, perhaps you have a shared connection, perhaps you know someone who they’ve worked with, or perhaps you’re one degree of separation away on LinkedIn for some reason. Those sorts of personalized connections can make all the difference in getting your foot in the door.
When my client queried the number one agent he was interested in, they had a shared connection that he had found through research. You can bet he mentioned that connection in his query letter. And guess what happened? He emailed that agent, sent that query letter over, and was offered representation.
The very first agent he emailed offered him representation. One email.
Now how did he make that happen? Let’s go over it again:
- He sought out help when he knew his book wasn’t good enough.
- He worked extensively with me, a writing coach, to revise the book and to get it as good as it could be.
- He had a clear mission driving him forward, a reason for writing this book based on empathy for his fellow human beings and his desire to help people.
- Throughout the revisions process, he was open to editorial advice from me, from other readers, and from his BETA readers, and he was willing to revise his manuscript in response to reader feedback.
- He put together an excellent query letter.
- He put together an excellent book proposal package that included extensive research about his target market, comparable titles, and how he was going to leverage his current platform and market this book independently.
- He also wrote the book and made it publication-ready, which is not a necessity in the nonfiction world but a benefit.
- He then researched agents extensively and found agents that were right for him, not just the biggest agents out there, or not just the first name he saw on a list, but agents who represented the type of book that he wrote and who were looking for that book at this period of time.
- He then went further and found ways to personalize his query email to make a personal connection with that agent.
- He then read through all of the submission guidelines and made sure that, long before he hit send on that query, email and query package, he had followed all of the guidelines that the agents he was interested in had set out for him to follow.
- He then picked his number one agent, fired off that query package, and was offered representation from the first email he sent—one email.
I hope you learn from his experience and the hard work he put in. No, you don’t have to query 100 or 200 agents if you put in the work ahead of time to make things as excellent as they can be. When you finally do hit send on that query email maybe, if you follow the same steps he followed, you’ll get offered representation on the first try.
All right, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. If you’re interested in working with me as your writing coach the way my client did, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com, where you can get all sorts of information about me and my work. While you’re there, you can download the Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist and get on my mailing list for even more goodness.
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