I've got a crackerjack idea for a book (doesn't everyone?) and have succeeded in securing a decent amount of press coverage for my tentative self-publish by date.<p>Of course the goal is to eventually win the attentions of a literary agent and find a publishing agency to take the project further.<p>Does anyone have advice/stories from their own experience, going through an agent and publisher? How did you make the contact? What was your approach? Or was it just a matter of don't-call-us-we'll-call-you, star-is-born type discovery?
Write the book first. The rewrite it, then shop it around. Ideas are great but only established authors get paid for treatments. It's not so much the idea (although that certainly matters) as whether you can use it to engage the readers' emotions. One of the neat things about writing a book (as opposed to writing for the screen, which is where I work) is that you don't have to keep your imagination on a budget, because words work for free - so take advantage of that.<p>Of course I have no idea what sort of book you have in mind - it could be <i>Malbolge for Dummies</i> or <i>Harry Potter in Outer Space</i>. The usual deal with publishers is to to identify a dozen or so who publish in the relevant field and have already put out books from authors you like, and then send query letters. You can do something similar for agents - authors often thank them on the Acknowledgements page, so hit a bookstore or start looking inside a lot of books on Amazon and build up your target list. Find their submission guidelines, by calling their secretaries if necessary, and work on short engaging query letters that tell them why you contacted them, something of what your book is about, and which create <i>a desire to read it.</i> You have to be able to do this within a couple of sentences, regardless of the subject matter and tone of your book. Expect to get rejected a lot.<p>You're welcome to drop me a line with or without an NDA, although I can't give you any particular contact names - the only time I talk to literary agents is if I'm inquiring about buying the rights to something.
My girlfriend recently signed with an agent. It was the end of a long process of query letters, revisions, and waiting ... and waiting. Probably just shy of a hundred rejections.<p>That's the traditional way. So am I telling you you need to hack the system? Nope. As it turned out, there is a correlation between how much practice you put in. Some of her writer friends also struggled mightily, wrote better and better books (note the 's'), and found themselves offered representation by multiple agents.<p>I was all about a tech/entrepreneur solution with self publishing, but I have to admit the system does work too (we'll see about royalties later though).