I confess: Every morning, often before I even drink that first longed-for cup of coffee, I feel besieged by numbers. As a writer with a manuscript out with editors, and an editor trying to help other writers publish and market their books, the sheer number of numbers that have become critical to my professional life…
I recently met a writer who had begun submitting her first novel to literary agents and had a lot of questions: “Why did an agent tell me that I should work with an independent editor and then resubmit it? Why didn’t he offer to help me himself?” “Why do agents mail out form rejections instead…
Though there are always matters of taste and every literary journal is different, I suspect that many editors respond to creative nonfiction queries as I do.
The power of a query letter cannot be overestimated. An agent forms a first impression of you and your manuscript from your query letter, and it’s often solely responsible for convincing the agent to read your work. There’s no true formula for a query letter; if there were, every single manuscript would be requested by…
Anyone who intends to get a nonfiction book published must write a book proposal first. Here’s what you need to know.
You’re at a writers’ conference where you’re lucky enough to meet a literary agent. When you tell her you’ve written a book, she asks, “What’s it about?” Do you start rambling aimlessly—and lose her interest? Or do you capture her imagination in seconds with one short sentence that makes her say, “Tell me more!”? A…