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Finding A Literary Agent: A Numbers Game

When it comes to writing, when it comes to life, there are some things that can wait for inspiration, and there are those things that we just have to do. Finding an agent to represent your project falls into the latter camp, and that’s because it’s a numbers game. 

Some of our authors have found their agent on the 100th reach out, the 83rd, the 17th, the 1st. There’s no rhyme or reason. While that may strike you as discouraging, the productive takeaway is that all we have to focus on is our own efforts. All we can do is keep reaching out. That’s it.  

To put some figures to it, we recommend going to 6 to 8 agents every three weeks, to strike the right balance of generating momentum while ensuring things stay manageable and organized; it’s important you’re able to track your efforts, perhaps through a spreadsheet, in order to manage the air traffic control effectively. 

Reaching out can be time-consuming. Every agent has a special twist. We want the first 20 pages. We want the first 40 pages. We want a synopsis of 800 words. We want a synopsis of 1,000 words. While these preferences can create a headache, that’s what agents have to do in order to avoid getting blanketed by submissions. Tailoring your pitch to fit within their parameters is crucial, as is infusing some sense of why you are going to this specific person in the very first paragraph of your query. 

It can be a challenge not to be emotionally reactive throughout the process. All kinds of psychological demons might surface: your fear of rejection, your entitlement, and the like. I can’t believe they wouldn’t even write me back, you might find yourself thinking. Or maybe you come across an agent who’s open to queries and recently published a comp title, so now you’re getting excited. You’re thinking, This is the person! And you fall asleep with their name written on a piece of paper under your pillow. And then they’re not the person…but maybe your person is over here instead…

The point is, you can’t think of this process as an evaluator of your self-worth. There are so many factors at play; what this agent is looking for, what they feel they can do a good job selling, what they think is selling at all. You could be rejected because they just represented someone very similar to you and it didn’t work out, or because they just represented someone very similar to you and it did work out. But really, it doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your time having emotional reactions to these things, and don’t waste your time trying to suss out why the agent you thought was the perfect fit said no. Instead, put that time and energy into continuing the search. 

Here at Book Architecture, we provide support for your agent search as part of our Phase Three services, which is marketplace assistance and project management for a completed manuscript. (More on that here).  

Phase Three can include the generation of a query letter and synopsis for a fiction manuscript, or the cover letter and nonfiction book proposal for a non-fiction project, as well as a database of literary agents hand-selected for your project or publishers you can approach without an intermediary. 

The databases we put together for our clients aren’t constructed with any proprietary tools that you can’t take advantage of, but we have an efficient methodology to cull through the online platforms. QueryTracker, Publisher Marketplace, and The Directory of Literary Agents are our most utilized, but it’s really a matter of which interface feels the most comfortable and intuitive for you. 

Then, the assembling of the actual database is a rather manual affair. We sort through the mass for the agents who work within your genre, follow the links to see if they’re open to queries currently or if the office is closed, and take note of how they accept submissions and what it is they’re actively interested in. 

As you can imagine, it’s not the most riveting work we do. But the main reason why we keep doing this, and why it’s part of Phase Three, is because it feels really good to be the one to find an agent that’s right for a project. In fact, there’s nothing quite like it.

The Non-Fiction Book Proposal: An Overview

When a client is seeking traditional publication of their nonfiction manuscript, they will need a nonfiction book proposal to accompany the query letter they send out to agents. While there is a technicality akin to grant writing involved, generating these documents does not need to be a dreaded exercise. Instead, the process can be used to learn more about their work, which will help hone it through subsequent revisions, and also be of practical use in the book’s press release, back cover, web copy, and other promotional literature. 

Let’s take a look at each of its parts in turn…

The Non-Fiction Book Proposal 

The traditional nonfiction book proposal has six sections. You may see numbers that fluctuate from that slightly, but that is because some sources recommend combining certain sections and exploding others. Here, we will take a look at the four that should comprise the bulk of your proposal. 

1. Overview/About the Audience (2-4 pages)

Some agents recommend separating these two sections from each other as well as starting with a writing sample—something dramatic that draws people in, either one medium-length story or more short snippets that demonstrate what makes your work unique. I suggest that we combine all of these approaches in the same section and that we make sure to address your book’s uniqueness (What does your book do that no other books do?), its audience (Who is your book for and what will they get from it?), and how it fits into the marketplace (Where would it be housed in a bookstore, or what would people search for online?)

2. About the Author (1-2 pages)

Literary agents and smaller publishers want to know about you, both from the perspective of the traditional CV but also in terms of who you really are. In the former camp: What are your largest accomplishments in the field in which you are writing? What degrees do you hold? Where have you been recognized as an expert in your feld? In the latter: Where does your interest in this area come from within yourself, or when did you realize you had empathy with people who read about this topic? What makes you unique?

3. Marketing & Promotion (1-3 pages)

Having defined your audience in the Overview, in this section you will talk about how you plan to reach them. Here, we will need to answer:  When it comes to the active promotion of your book, where will you be putting your attention? How much time do you have to devote to the promotion of your book, and how naturally do these efforts dovetail with your current position?  Where are your current contacts? 

Numbers are key here; I spoke with an agent recently who said the only thing that really matters is your book’s concept and your platform. By platform, she meant how many people you currently reach. Numbers, in other words. How many people visit your website monthly? How many followers do you have on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? How many subscribers are there on your email newsletter list? What organizations will get the word out about your book—and what are their numbers?

4. Competitive Titles (2-3 pages)

The way I usually approach this section is to begin with one opening paragraph about your book. This is followed by 3-5 individual entries on the other top books in your field, and possibly a brief conclusion (or if your opener to this section is strong enough, you may have covered everything already).

The opener addresses what your book is about, really, and each other titles’ section addresses how your book compares to the others available on the subject in terms of style, content, and/or voice. We have to be careful not to put other books down too much in this section—it will be the same publishing house editors who are reviewing your proposal that purchased these other books! Depending on your genre, I think it is useful to note that readers often don’t have just one book in the fields of writing reference, say, or business memoir— therefore you can shade this discussion toward how your book complements the others and present its publication as a kind of win-win. I have even gone so far as to sometimes retitle this section, “Comparative Titles,” in that light.

After assembling the four main sections of your proposal, you will also want to present your material in both highly synopsized form in a Proposed Table of Contents and in full-blown fashion in your best Sample Chapters. Along with your query letter, this completed document is the tool most crucial in securing an agent and moving your manuscript that much closer to publication. 

Clients Crushin’ It: Kathy Kleiman

Madison Utley speaks to Kathy Kleiman following the release of her first book, Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer, a detailed history–and, perhaps more importantly, a celebration–of the female pioneers who triumphed against sexism and technical challenges to invent computer programming.

 

Q: I understand that Proving Ground is the first writing project of this scale you’ve undertaken, so can you tell me a bit about what motivated you to write this book?

I am a public interest internet lawyer and a professor of intellectual property and internet governance. Normally I write legal things: comments, articles, advocacy pieces. Writing books is not my forte, so a full-length narrative story was quite the challenge. 

That said, I knew this story–the story of the programming pioneers who worked on a secret Army project during WWII–had to be told. These six women programmed the ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer, which is the grandfather (or, dare I say, grandmother) of today’s laptops and smartphones.

I had known for many years I was sitting on a great story that contradicted the one I was taught in my computer science courses. The truth is the history of early computing, and the ENIAC project at the University of Pennsylvania during WWII, was quite diverse. The team included women and men, new immigrants, and people with diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. That diversity was key to the team’s success in creating a new technology and ushering in the Information Age.

Whenever I hit a snag while writing, and I encountered many, I thought about my students and my desire to attract the next generation of young women and young men to STEM and STEM policy work. There is so much opportunity in these fields, with many jobs open today and millions more projected to open in the next few decades. This history inspired me to seek my career and I hope Proving Ground will inspire others to explore this space too.

Q: Can you talk about how the research process unfolded?

My undergraduate thesis at Harvard centered around the women at the heart of Proving Ground, the ENIAC Programmers. But 10 years after that, I found out most of those women hadn’t even been invited to the 50th anniversary of ENIAC because no one other than the original generation they worked with knew their story. As I saw it, that was a big problem. 

In 1997, I got a grant to continue my research. I spent six months in the Library of Congress, among other archives, researching materials. I then interviewed four of the original six ENIAC Programmers, resulting in 20 hours of broadcast quality oral histories. I wanted to turn the cameras on them and let them tell their own stories. They did it wonderfully, beautifully, creatively. They’re funny. They’re brilliant. They were in their late 70s and early 80s at that point in the late ‘90s. They really became my mentors and role models. It’s their voices that I try to bring out in the book.

These interviews resulted in my co-producing the documentary, The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers. We premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival and then won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short from the United Nations Association Film Festival.

The demographic of a typical audience for a PBS documentary is 50+ year old, well-educated, white people but I explained, “No, we’re making this for everyone 12 and up.” So in telling the story, we didn’t assume any prior knowledge about the war, and we didn’t assume any technical knowledge either. We really wanted the film to be accessible to everyone, and that was something we tried to carry into the book as well. 

It was an honor to watch the surviving programmers finally get some of the recognition they deserved, to watch them light up, to watch the audience at the screenings light up, and to watch the young women converge around them after, laughing and crying at the same time, wondering how they had never known this history.

Q: How did the process look different as you then prepared to tell the story through the medium of a book? 

I had thousands of pages of research in my house, much of it in paper form. And while it may have been challenging to organize, thank goodness for that, because during COVID the libraries and archives were closed. I took over the den. The floor space became my filing space. I had piles of papers sorted by chapter spread across the room, that I was trying to arrange into a sequential story; at the same time, once I got into the later, technical chapters, I was really trying to break down a rather obscure method of direct programming which is both modern and esoteric at the same time. I was writing for a general audience, so I knew I had to make it accessible and I couldn’t “talk tech.”

Q: What role did Stuart play in getting Proving Ground out into the world? 

Stuart was many things. He was an editor, but he was also the audience. He is someone who was incredibly well prepared to read this book on its different levels–the technology, the history, the law–and help make it accessible. He could answer: Did I get it right? Was I explaining this all well? 

Stuart was also a sounding board; he was an encourager–Encourager, capital E; he was an architect. A lot of times, I felt like I was writing for him as I shared these stories. Then we’d get together and discuss if I had hit the marks and he would help me make sure we got it even better. We were working on a fast timeframe and he was turning things around very quickly, which I appreciated. 

But perhaps most importantly, Stuart encouraged me to say what I wanted to say. With so many historians pushing against this story for so many years, telling me not to say what I wanted to say, it was powerful for me to hear, “Go ahead and say it. We’ll massage it into the right words after. For now, just say what you need to say.”

Q: Your book came out a month ago now. How does it feel to have it circulating in the world, and what kind of feedback have you been getting?

It’s very exciting. Publisher’s Weekly was the first to come back and say nice things about it. They loved it. Across the board, people seem to really be diving into this book and they’re seeing what I saw–that this is an inspirational story. My book has also made it onto some ‘Hot Summer Reads’ lists which I could have never have conceived happening, seeing as it’s a story about six techy women programming a 30-ton computer nearly 80 years ago. But it’s great.

I’m also getting a lot of fan mail, including from men. Many are telling me how moved they are by this history and others are asking questions, but my favorite are those who have been inspired by the book to tell me the stories of their own mothers, grandmothers, or great aunts–the women they know in tech who encouraged them to go into the field.

Stuff We Love: Read This if You Want to Be A Great Writer

Writers of craft books on writing still read craft books on writing. It would be dangerous to think you know everything. Of course, it’s easier when that book is published in the UK. There’s not so much competition.

Read This if You Want to Be a Great Writer - BIS PublishersOr maybe I’m wrong. Have you heard of the book Read This If You Want To Be a Great Writer by Ross Raisin? The title is pretty sales-y, although I hear aspirational marketing works wonders. (For the record, I did not come up with the title, Blueprint Your Bestseller, either.)

Then I found out that what’s they call all the books in the series, Read This If… you want to be great at drawing, at taking photographs, etc. I was contemplating the move to writing my first fiction in thirty years. I better buy a book.

Broken into roughly sixteen categories, ranging from Place to Sex to Planning, I learned new things throughout. I also felt empowerment to apply what I already knew across the looming bridge from creative nonfiction to made-up storytelling. 

But hey, that’s my process. You will have your own experience of this book by the British novelist, Raisin. To entice you further to buy it (note absence of affiliate links), here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“The plan you drew up at the end of your first draft will have more value than any plan you make before the first draft.”

“If you are stumped for the point at which to enter the narrative it may be helpful to forego, for now, an adherence to writing in a linear way from beginning to end.”

“Some works of fiction that play with preconceived notions of what fiction is supposed to look like can be so compelling that they create their own market. When form is bent to something new, your previously programmed way of reading a text can be, too.”

I think I realized that — as perhaps is true in all genres — it is the voice that beckons to us first. Ross’s expertise is combined with his confidence and warmth to make it feel like it is not such a cold world. I recently heard from one of my readers, “I just read your first book and I’m on your second book. I just wanted to let you know that I loved the graphics, humor, and voice. As I read, I felt as if a real person was talking to me and explaining the process. Most books I’ve read thus far have yet to have that same effect…”

I mean, that’s why we write craft books. It doesn’t send the kids to college. But maybe it helps a few lifelong learners along the way.