I remember (not necessarily verbatim) what Natalie Goldberg said in Writing Down the Bones, which I read ages ago, about writing a book: Your little will cannot do it; it takes Big Determination.
(I second the request for you to name your Neon Lit sitcom from that photo!)
Okay, this may be too open ended: But what advice would you give for someone going after a contract for their second book?
My debut was in the non-fiction trad published world and seems to have done well. I also have a first right of refusal with my current publisher. My agent (John Blase at The Bindery... badass to the bone!) is helping with the angles to pitch it.
But I so appreciate your wisdom and would love any feedback on your experience here.
Hi, Sam! Haili Blassingame asked something similar downthread, so I'm going to be lazy and adapt that response for you:
Provided you want the next book to go to the publisher with right of first refusal, selling an option is kind of like a more concentrated version of selling a debut. If you're doing it the smart way, you're spending less time on the editorial product -- these proposals can be fairly short -- and a lot MORE time on the market positioning: comps, premise, how your platform has improved since the last book, and why this book is going to sell even more copies than book #1.
Your editor wants to see quant-based demonstrable evidence that the new project will sell a lot. If your debut's already come out, they'll be much more tightly bound to the mathematics of previous sales figures than a new editor and house would be. Even a new house, though, will be checking sales numbers for book #1 as part of their deliberations on acquiring book #2, so you really want to have done brilliant work integrating those sales figures, whatever they are, into a compelling pitch story.
Don't be afraid of going out wide if you think your publisher's being unduly pessimistic on the new book, or you're deeply unhappy with one or more links in the existing publishing team. (Generic not specific "you" here.) Options aren't necessarily worth saying "yes" to "just" to have the slight marketing benefit of being a house author.
Excellent! These are great guiding thoughts. Now I remember you mentioning some of this in that response article to the gambling problem piece on "track." I'll go read the other response and that article again. As always, thank you for your generosity!
Thanks for doing this! Your insider knowledge is gold. Pretty open-ended question: Do you have any hot takes/insights about university presses? And specifically when it comes to memoir? (I know, I know, everyone is writing one, myself included.) I've heard more midlist authors are moving in this direction.
University presses are on the whole wonderful, and as the Big 5 and similar get ever pickier about nonfiction in particular, they're getting more and more competitive in auctions etc. Lots of authors have great experiences with them, although what the great experience looks like varies widely: a tiny university press might just be one grizzled weirdo with a heart of gold, whereas the experience a place like Harvard, Oxford, or Princeton might come with a publicist and marketer and feel pretty similar to a Big 5.
There are some drawbacks. For example, many to most university presses refuse to pay standard commercial royalties off of MSRP, instead paying something minuscule off of net income. Some of their contracts verge on predatory if not vetted by a good agent or lawyer. Many (most?) require manuscripts--even ones aimed at a commercial audience--to go through peer review, which can be agonizing if you're a commercial author and academic reviewers don't Get It. Lots of them have no in-house marketing or publicity teams. Etc. Etc.
On the whole, though, I'm a big fan of these places. For the most part, they're more low-key, friendly, and relaxed than commercial outlets, and they're full of really smart people.
I just wanted to say that I love your short publishing histories so much I got the not-so-short Bennet Cerf biography on audio! Would you ever consider doing something similar on Robert Gottlieb!? (I re-read his Paris Review editing interview often!) Or maybe a series on The Big Editors? Anyway, thanks for doing the lord's work.
LOL - I don’t know if you saw my recent post on professional humiliation, but I might or might not have had an incident with a certain biographer that left me a little worried about the potential embarrassment liabilities involved in writing publishing histories based on “just” like 1-2 books and 2 hours of amateur research. I will eventually work up the nerve again but am taking a little sanity break for the next month or two.
Gottlieb is such a fascinating guy—he had a looooooot going on psychologically—and I do want to write more about him some day, but here’s the thing with him: he was a working editor until like 3.5 years ago, and many colleagues who utterly loved him are not just still alive but still working in publishing. There are many reasons, from the moral and heartfelt to the practical and strategic, that I have to be careful with that kind of profile as a working literary agent. I’m thinking about it though!!
I did! But honestly, if it makes you feel better, as a reader, I really don't expect academic-level rigor in my substacks! I have JStor for that! (I'm also very anti public humiliation! It's not a flex. Those conversations should be pull asides.) I guess I'll just have to wait for my short history of Robert Gottleib, alas!
not that you asked me, but: SUCH a good book. i am kind of fascinated by some subtextual currents in it, though - like how he only seems to care about one of his three children. (i never knew him personally, to be clear; this is just an impression from reading, one that's always intrigued me)
Yes! I loved it! Which was part of the reason I wanted a "Big Editors" series! But in truth, I didn't consider the potential conflict of interest in an agent running that series!
there are many more like him where that came from who DON'T have living friends, though, e.g. the classic maxwell perkins. plus, there are some WILDLY fascinating agents. women are delightfully overrepresented among the most influential agents of the 20th century -- carmen balcells, candida donadio, ann watkins -- and they were all SUCH characters. (donadio had an entire running relationship with a ghost she thought haunted her apartment)
Hi Anna - I adore Glow, in all its flavors (niche publishing history, candid just-like-you’re-my-client Tough Love, the occasional group therapy session) … and since you rep both fiction & nonfiction I’d love your take on how to query an agent when I’d like to pitch both sides of my literary self, rather than a narrow ‘here’s this one manuscript’ query.
I’ve had small publishing successes, been a finalist in a few contests, but would like to figure how to connect with agents who are interested in both long- and short-form of fiction and nonfiction.
This is all about the query letter. Go out with the single book that you feel has the most exciting and immediate commercial potential, and pitch it like a boss -- but pitch it to agents who have experience in both categories, and end with something like: "EGG SALAD is my debut novel, but I have a work of history on the horizon -- and an established career as an award-winning essayist. I'm on the hunt for a long-term business partner who can help me strategize and maximize my work's potential on all fronts."
Hi Anna, thank you for doing this! Glow has been such a helpful (and also entertaining) introduction to the publishing world.
Another memoir-related question for you. I'm in the process of querying a memoir and have a polished and revised manuscript ready to go. What I do not have is a large platform (working on it). I know this makes the odds steep, but am hoping the quality of writing, my professional background, and the uniqueness of the story make up for the lack of platform, at least in part.
Here's the question: I've noticed that many agents request either sample pages for fiction, or for non-fiction they ask for a book proposal.
Given that memoir seems to be the unruly child that doesn't neatly fit in either category, how do you advise people navigate this if their platform isn't large? In my case I think it would be much more advantageous to send pages rather than the proposal, but also don't want to ruffle feathers unnecessarily. Thanks for your input on navigating this!
I'm sorry to say that what agents prefer to see with memoir is totally agent-dependent. My submissions policy is basically "send as much as you've got of whatever you've got, whatever," because (in truth) almost everything I represent in the category is platform-driven and/or* structured with a REALLY compelling argumentative hook of some kind. I know what kind of author I'm looking for, in other words, and have the experience to see whether it's there in whatever I get: pages, proposal, or even just a query letter.
Whatever appears in my inbox, however, if I'm signing it, it's almost always going to go out to editors as a proposal. That's because I almost never rep literary memoir, or memoir billed as worth reading for the writing alone; I'm looking for things I can make a real business case out of, on the more commercial/six-plus-figure advance end.
I know other agents feel differently about this, though. People who specialize in literary memoir--which, by the way, generally sells to smaller presses, if it sells at all--often ask to see whole manuscripts.
My TL DR advice is basically "send agents what they tell you they want on their website." SO HELPFUL, ANNA, THANKS.
Hi Anna! Thank you for tackling questions and for the insight you always bring to this space. I have a trio of long-winded questions if you've still got the bandwidth:
1. I keep thinking about a moment in the book Devil Is Fine where a white university department head tells a biracial professor to stop writing about race because “it’s not 2020 out there anymore.” Given that everyone seems to be taking hits right now, I genuinely can’t tell whether the diversity backlash is still happening or if it’s just folded into the broader societal pummeling. From your vantage point, what does the landscape look like for diverse writers whose work engages directly with race? For context, I’m a Black woman preparing a memoir proposal where race plays a major role in the story, though it isn’t the book’s primary subject.
2. I’m aiming to publish a memoir-related essay in a major outlet before submitting my book proposal to agents, especially since I don’t have much of a visible platform. One of the strongest pieces I can pitch involves a dramatic subplot that’s potentially high-attention, maybe even a bit explosive. I’ve gotten advice that it might be more strategic to wait on this one and use it as a publicity essay closer to the book’s release. I can see the logic, but that also feels like planning a victory lap before I’ve run the race. Does it make sense to save the splashiest companion material for later, or is it fine to choose chaos now (assuming I can place the essay in a top-tier publication)?
3. Comps and proposal question: I can't find any other memoirs that share my book's primary subject, but I do have solid adjacent comps in other media (viral essays, podcasts, etc.). I know the subject matter resonates with people, it's the kind of thing that sets off avalanches in group chats. Does the absence of existing books on this topic mean that I need to work harder in my proposal to demonstrate that there’s an audience for this? Or is this a case where the subject’s appeal is obvious and the lack of available books actually underscores the need for mine? (If it helps clarify anything, my book’s main subject is toxic friendship.)
Thank you!
P.S. Your 90s sitcom (LITcom?) looks like it could be called By the Book.
1. This is an excellent question *and* one I feel unqualified to answer. Like the vast majority of people who work in publishing, I'm an upper middle class East Coast liberal white woman brimming with good intentions and RIDDLED with blind spots. Only a Black colleague is going to be able to tell you what the landscape looks like from the Black perspective and what's really changed in the past few years. (Ditto, of course, for other marginalized identities seeking insight on what it's like for them -- I get the sense that the experience of being Brown in publishing has changed in entirely different and special hellish ways.)
Here's what I can do instead: talk about what I see other white people doing around this topic within big houses. Novels dealing with race do still appear to be selling. Nonfiction that deals with race is subject to the general depressive pressures of the nonfiction market -- it's the hardest time ever in my 20-year career to sell ALL types of serious nonfiction, provided they're not explicitly conservative or self-help -- but authors with big national platforms AND big, bright, clear, compelling, fully developed arguments do still appear to be getting deals. Editors are still saying that they want books on these topics as well.
On the other hand, close to every last BIPOC in-house executive hired in 2020-2021 to diversify the highest ranks of institutional publishing has now been quietly laid off. The industry remains overwhelmingly white at every level, particularly the senior. Senior executives are under immense pressure to deliver profit, and I can't imagine all of this plus the general downturn of nonfiction does NOT result in increased bias against BIPOC nonfiction authors in particular. What I think that looks like in the acquisitions process is basically: if it's not by a celebrity and doesn't have PERFECT editorial execution and market positioning, it doesn't have the chance it might have 2 or 3 years ago. It's basically the overall acquisitions trends all authors are facing, but on steroids.
Hope that helps.
2. In the absence of other compelling platform, I would try to publish the dramatic essay -- but only in a major national outlet. The last thing you want to do is blow your wad in some hinterlands venue that gets 200 clicks. A Modern Love piece that goes everywhere, however, might very well get you all the platform you need overnight (or The Cut, The Atlantic, etc.) But if you can't leverage that amount of benefit from placing the essay, I wouldn't place it and would keep working on platform building in other venues.
3. Here's what you do: look for comps that *do a similar thing for a similar audience*; they don't have to be on the same subject. (Comping on the similar subjects is often an act in self-sabotage, anyway, since those comps might give the impression of market saturation.) For example, you could say that a warm, immersive, first-person, funny journey through the world of competitive Scrabble is bumptious and intellectual itch-scratching like Mary Roach, even though it's not science journalism.
By all means, comp to podcasts as well--although I'm not sure I'd comp to viral essays, as that sends the message that your book could just be an essay. When I'm pitching things to editors, my ideal comp set up is always ~2 recent strong-selling books plus a podcast and a random backlist title as well, since we're in the middle of a kind of classic-book renaissance.
What about a sitcom called "Up Against It"? Two scrappy agents race to find the best manuscript in the slush pile, and discover something else along the way [cue 80s soundtrack noise]
Question about a novel’s first chapter. Many writers make one of two mistakes: They begin the book inconsequentially with the protagonist waking up in the morning and going through a day of random incidents that are plot-points for future action; or, they begin the book more “dramatically,” with the protagonist’s life in danger, leading to a cliffhanger, which fails to engage the reader because we are not yet emotionally invested in the protagonist and so we don’t really care if she lives or dies. Between these two extremes—not enough plot and too much plot—what is your advice for structuring a novel’s first chapter?
oh boy, such a good question -- and one with any number of subjective answers, i think, especially based on genre.
i personally love an opening chapter that makes me feel like there's good gossip here, but i'm not getting all the gossip -- kind of like how one feels when one reads an obituary for a vibrant young person and there's no cause of death listed. that "i need to take some time out of my day to do some googling here" curiosity feeling. no infodumping but also not too much calamity, as you say.
i can also 100% always tell when the author procrastinated during the writing process by going back and back to the opening chapter to pick at it nervously. don't do that. pick at a toy on your desk or something.
I have such an annoying answer: If you read my entire back catalog in the Submissions and Queries and and Proposal 101 categories, I have lots of posts that go into what “ready” means to me (eg the one called “what happens when we’re ready to hit send” and “signs your book (probably) isn’t ready for submission.” I think your goal is an author is to get your materials as close as you can to the shape in which agents like would want them to go to publishers. I would get a one-month subscription to PublishersMarketplace as well, and use their deals database to find juuuuust the right agents.
This is not annoying at all! I love the backlog, and appreciate the reference. I made the mistake of querying too early last year and am not going to do that again. I just want to hew as closely as I can to expectations.
No sorries necessary! I will use this to answer your other question, which I forgot to answer in my previous: I’m not sure when any of us will next be appearing in public, alas. AWP this year coincides with the London Book Fair; Kent and I will be over in England that weekend.
We all still do at least occasional conferences—Eloy the most—but since I have three kids, it’s hard for me to do many anymore outside of DC and occasionally NY.
I am an extrovert, though, and a Glow community meetup really might be fun some day! Remind me where you’re based?
Hi there! I know these have been touched on to some degree in newsletters already, so please feel free to ignore any of them. I thought I'd ask anyway, since the landscape is always changing.
1. What advice do you have for YA authors looking to break into the adult space?
2. I've seen you say the best way to market books (now that social media is dying) is to already be active in the spaces/communities where your audience lives. Is this still the best way to get traction?
3. And related to that; what do you think actually matters when it comes to what authors can actually control? Where should we be pouring our energy and time? I know you've had that really helpful chart of what authors care about vs. what actually matters, so I was curious if that still holds true for you or if anything has changed.
1. What advice do you have for YA authors looking to break into the adult space?
My major one is this: don't try to run away from your innate YA instincts! As in: by all means work with your agent to go for that adult book deal, but remember as you do so that the current adult fiction bestseller list has *such* a teenaged heart (and I say this with admiration, not condescension): big feelings, big love, friends and intimacy as the most important things on Earth. I'm sure plenty of online articles have told you that scaling up from YA is about more than just aging up the protagonist -- it involves more sophisticated moral themes, interior complexity, whatever -- but honestly, in the year of our Lord 2026, I think there's limited utility in that advice.
My practical advice is basically just: when you're a fiction author changing your audience base--assuming a loyal audience has not already aged up with you--comps are EVERYTHING. Know your X meets Y and make those titles incredibly fucking compelling and believable. Have a razor-sharp sense of your market position and prospects.
2. Yes. More than ever. Go look up a Substacker name Sean DeLone and read his latest post on book marketing in a post-institutional world; it's all about this.
Hi Anna! I'm learning soo much from these comments, and feeling less alone! I'm Sophia. I'm a journalist and essayist (for now!), and am waiting on a last round of proposal/MS edits from my agent before we go out on submission with my debut book: a memoir about investigating death row cases at the same time I began investigating my father's death my suicide.
My question is, what do you suggest doing in these interim periods? Like now, and when we're on submission. I know there's a lot of sprints and then a lot of waiting on responses (querying was like this too!). Pitching related reported pieces? Writing/submitting essays to lit mags, to major outlets? Working on book #2? Running into the mountains? I ask from a career perspective, and a sanity perspective. And would love to hear from other writers about how you prioritize what you're working on, balancing creative inspirations with what is good for platform, audience-building, literary visibility, and so on. Thank you!
Professional advice: it never hurts to pitch pieces, especially to national outlets--i.e., making sure you look as googlably active as possible, ideally in front of the same target audience(s) for your book. (For a book like yours, e.g., something in partnership with The Marshall Project might be helpful.) Before or after they take a meeting and before they make an offer, editors who like your proposal are going to google you and see what your platform looks like in the wild. So, you know, the more impressive tinsel you can hang up out there, the better.
Personal advice: I'm guessing your platform is already fine. I'm guessing the real issue is that you're anxious because you're a human being finishing up a massive book proposal that probably took enormous amounts of time, energy, and vulnerability to write and is anchored in what (I sure hope) is the single biggest attachment trauma of your life. You're submitting this proposal into a marketplace that's tougher than ever on serious nonfiction and are about to surrender your last modicum of even partial control over its reception.
For all those reasons, there is simply no way to avoid losing your marbles at this time. Unless you are a sociopath, which you don't seem to be, you're going to be a dysregulated mess for at least the next few weeks, and that's normal--even though we should all remember that book deals are just freelance writing gigs and submissions outcomes are not totalizing pronouncements on your worth as a person or even your overall prospects as a writer yadda yadda yadda.
Just plan to make room for the crazy. Treat it like a visiting cousin who is A Bit Much. Make a bed for it in the guest room of your brain. Plan ways to entertain and distract it while it's in town. Plan temporary escapes when it's acting unbearable. ("I'm off to the grocery store!") If you happen to be in therapy, schedule some extra Very Special Episode sessions during these weeks. Sleep, hydrate, and don't feel like it's any reflection on you or your fundamental freakishness that your crazy cousin just happens to be in town.
Hi Anna! I'd love to hear your thoughts on indie presses (think Beacon, Chicago Review, Zibby, Abrams, Grove Atlantic, etc.) and what authors should keep in mind when publishing with an indie for their debut (a hybrid memoir). Especially (a) as compared to publishing with a Big Five and (b) if said author would like to do as much as possible to continue publishing in the future and continue banging their head at the walls of a creative career. Thank you so much!
P.S. Music recs (all albums): "The Art of Loving" by Olivia Dean, "The After Taste" by Kenya Grace, and the "Nobody Wants This Season 2" soundtrack!
Re: indie presses -- there is alas just no way to answer this question in a categorical manner. All of the presses you're listing there are very solid places with *vastly* different strengths, quirks, challenges, and cultures -- and the same applies for the category writ large.
Some of these companies are for-profit and offer the same royalty structures as your Big 5's, Sourcebookses, and Nortons; some are nonprofit (Beacon, e.g., is affiliated with the Unitarian church); some insist on net (lesser) royalties. Some are wonderfully on time with payments; others need to be chased. Some are owned by larger companies -- Abrams is part of the larger French company La Martiniere -- and some by intermittently problematic billionaire heiresses (this is a subtweet of more than one company) and others by universities and similar.
No matter, though. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that because you're asking about these presses as a category, what you're really asking is if they're Less Than. I think hearing some anxiety that your career might suffer in the long term without the "prestige" of a Big 5.
The short answer to that is no. Readers do not look at colophons at all, generally, and reviewers--the few of them left--have plenty of respect for most of these places. A lot of what makes a book successful falls on authors these days, anyway, regardless of where they're published. While your sales track with a small-press book likely *will* affect future submissions and deals, it is just one important factor among several -- that is, it's navigable with time and patience almost no matter what. Plus, let's be real: your sales track could just as easily be low at a Big 5 house vs. a small press.
As long as a publisher has nationwide distribution capabilities -- all of the ones you listed do -- and decently attentive editors, you're about as fine as you would be anywhere, just probably minus a splashy advance.
Thank you for such a thoughtful (and psychic) response! I am clearly still recovering from my prestige addiction... thank you again for the reality check, and enjoy all the music recs!
Hello! I am generally an online lurker and it's out of my comfort zone to directly engage with strangers 🙈 but I'm trying to be brave!
My name is Kaetochi, I live in DC and started my adult creative writing journey a little under a year ago. I really appreciate your posts, Anna, because of the way they demystify the publishing world...and also acknowledge that the path is kinda scary and hard for everyone.
Music recommendation: The Hu, a Mongolian folk-metal band. They'll be playing in Silver Spring in May!
Ok, on to my question. I've written a memoir that comprises short vignettes about experiencing and learning to live with grief. It's not quite narrative nonfiction because it focuses on themes rather than events. Its not quite an essay collection because the pieces are quite short (generally under 200 words). It's very lyrical, but it's not quite poetry because there is some long(ish) form prose in there.
In short. I have no idea what genre my writing fits into, which is making it difficult to figure out how to get published.
Recently (yesterday) it occurred to me that maybe my writing is speculative CNF or memoir? There are a lot of speculative elements to my work and it feels more accurate to me than anything else I've considered. I'd like a gut check. Is "speculative" a label reserved for fiction? Ir I were to query or submit my manuscript to a small press, would I receive an immediate eye roll for doing too much by describing it that way?
Sorry for the extremely long comment and thank you for all of your insight!
2. I actually LOVE Mongolian music and am so excited for this.
3. "Speculative" and "nonfiction" in the same sentence would confuse me deeply if I saw it in my inbox. If I were trying to describe this project to editors, I would probably describe it as something like "formed in glittering fragments, BOOK reveals [specific, grab-you-by-the-lapels, transformative thing about grief] through a combination of personal storytelling and psychological insight. It's a cool compress to the head in a feverish time." (See how I'm deftly avoiding anything that screams "experimental micro-press literary work" in hopes of convincing big 5 type presses this is an excellent potential business investment?)
Thank you! Has anyone ever told you that you have a way with words? 😂 Every time I try to describe my work it does sound very *experimental micro-press* so it's nice to know there might be a way to present this as a commercially feasible project. Sounds like I can just sidestep the genre question by focusing on a compelling hook?
I remember (not necessarily verbatim) what Natalie Goldberg said in Writing Down the Bones, which I read ages ago, about writing a book: Your little will cannot do it; it takes Big Determination.
(I second the request for you to name your Neon Lit sitcom from that photo!)
Okay, this may be too open ended: But what advice would you give for someone going after a contract for their second book?
My debut was in the non-fiction trad published world and seems to have done well. I also have a first right of refusal with my current publisher. My agent (John Blase at The Bindery... badass to the bone!) is helping with the angles to pitch it.
But I so appreciate your wisdom and would love any feedback on your experience here.
Hi, Sam! Haili Blassingame asked something similar downthread, so I'm going to be lazy and adapt that response for you:
Provided you want the next book to go to the publisher with right of first refusal, selling an option is kind of like a more concentrated version of selling a debut. If you're doing it the smart way, you're spending less time on the editorial product -- these proposals can be fairly short -- and a lot MORE time on the market positioning: comps, premise, how your platform has improved since the last book, and why this book is going to sell even more copies than book #1.
Your editor wants to see quant-based demonstrable evidence that the new project will sell a lot. If your debut's already come out, they'll be much more tightly bound to the mathematics of previous sales figures than a new editor and house would be. Even a new house, though, will be checking sales numbers for book #1 as part of their deliberations on acquiring book #2, so you really want to have done brilliant work integrating those sales figures, whatever they are, into a compelling pitch story.
Don't be afraid of going out wide if you think your publisher's being unduly pessimistic on the new book, or you're deeply unhappy with one or more links in the existing publishing team. (Generic not specific "you" here.) Options aren't necessarily worth saying "yes" to "just" to have the slight marketing benefit of being a house author.
Excellent! These are great guiding thoughts. Now I remember you mentioning some of this in that response article to the gambling problem piece on "track." I'll go read the other response and that article again. As always, thank you for your generosity!
A) Feel it's imperative to offer a double thumbs-up emoji for Kent's hair.
B) [Gotta run out the door but don't close the comments yet, I have a question, kthxbye.]
Music rec: FOXWARREN
Thanks for doing this! Your insider knowledge is gold. Pretty open-ended question: Do you have any hot takes/insights about university presses? And specifically when it comes to memoir? (I know, I know, everyone is writing one, myself included.) I've heard more midlist authors are moving in this direction.
University presses are on the whole wonderful, and as the Big 5 and similar get ever pickier about nonfiction in particular, they're getting more and more competitive in auctions etc. Lots of authors have great experiences with them, although what the great experience looks like varies widely: a tiny university press might just be one grizzled weirdo with a heart of gold, whereas the experience a place like Harvard, Oxford, or Princeton might come with a publicist and marketer and feel pretty similar to a Big 5.
There are some drawbacks. For example, many to most university presses refuse to pay standard commercial royalties off of MSRP, instead paying something minuscule off of net income. Some of their contracts verge on predatory if not vetted by a good agent or lawyer. Many (most?) require manuscripts--even ones aimed at a commercial audience--to go through peer review, which can be agonizing if you're a commercial author and academic reviewers don't Get It. Lots of them have no in-house marketing or publicity teams. Etc. Etc.
On the whole, though, I'm a big fan of these places. For the most part, they're more low-key, friendly, and relaxed than commercial outlets, and they're full of really smart people.
Wow thank you for such a thoughtful and thorough reply!
I just wanted to say that I love your short publishing histories so much I got the not-so-short Bennet Cerf biography on audio! Would you ever consider doing something similar on Robert Gottlieb!? (I re-read his Paris Review editing interview often!) Or maybe a series on The Big Editors? Anyway, thanks for doing the lord's work.
LOL - I don’t know if you saw my recent post on professional humiliation, but I might or might not have had an incident with a certain biographer that left me a little worried about the potential embarrassment liabilities involved in writing publishing histories based on “just” like 1-2 books and 2 hours of amateur research. I will eventually work up the nerve again but am taking a little sanity break for the next month or two.
Gottlieb is such a fascinating guy—he had a looooooot going on psychologically—and I do want to write more about him some day, but here’s the thing with him: he was a working editor until like 3.5 years ago, and many colleagues who utterly loved him are not just still alive but still working in publishing. There are many reasons, from the moral and heartfelt to the practical and strategic, that I have to be careful with that kind of profile as a working literary agent. I’m thinking about it though!!
I did! But honestly, if it makes you feel better, as a reader, I really don't expect academic-level rigor in my substacks! I have JStor for that! (I'm also very anti public humiliation! It's not a flex. Those conversations should be pull asides.) I guess I'll just have to wait for my short history of Robert Gottleib, alas!
Katy, have you already read Gottlieb's wonderful, if of course biased, memoir — Avid Reader?
not that you asked me, but: SUCH a good book. i am kind of fascinated by some subtextual currents in it, though - like how he only seems to care about one of his three children. (i never knew him personally, to be clear; this is just an impression from reading, one that's always intrigued me)
Yes! I loved it! Which was part of the reason I wanted a "Big Editors" series! But in truth, I didn't consider the potential conflict of interest in an agent running that series!
there are many more like him where that came from who DON'T have living friends, though, e.g. the classic maxwell perkins. plus, there are some WILDLY fascinating agents. women are delightfully overrepresented among the most influential agents of the 20th century -- carmen balcells, candida donadio, ann watkins -- and they were all SUCH characters. (donadio had an entire running relationship with a ghost she thought haunted her apartment)
Ooh ooh puleeze do Fascinating Women Agents 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Oh my god, I'm literally BEGGING YOU for a Binky Urban post.
OMG bless you. [sob] Knowing that you love my posts anyway is so nice.
Hi Anna - I adore Glow, in all its flavors (niche publishing history, candid just-like-you’re-my-client Tough Love, the occasional group therapy session) … and since you rep both fiction & nonfiction I’d love your take on how to query an agent when I’d like to pitch both sides of my literary self, rather than a narrow ‘here’s this one manuscript’ query.
I’ve had small publishing successes, been a finalist in a few contests, but would like to figure how to connect with agents who are interested in both long- and short-form of fiction and nonfiction.
This is all about the query letter. Go out with the single book that you feel has the most exciting and immediate commercial potential, and pitch it like a boss -- but pitch it to agents who have experience in both categories, and end with something like: "EGG SALAD is my debut novel, but I have a work of history on the horizon -- and an established career as an award-winning essayist. I'm on the hunt for a long-term business partner who can help me strategize and maximize my work's potential on all fronts."
Thanks Anna!
Hi Anna, thank you for doing this! Glow has been such a helpful (and also entertaining) introduction to the publishing world.
Another memoir-related question for you. I'm in the process of querying a memoir and have a polished and revised manuscript ready to go. What I do not have is a large platform (working on it). I know this makes the odds steep, but am hoping the quality of writing, my professional background, and the uniqueness of the story make up for the lack of platform, at least in part.
Here's the question: I've noticed that many agents request either sample pages for fiction, or for non-fiction they ask for a book proposal.
Given that memoir seems to be the unruly child that doesn't neatly fit in either category, how do you advise people navigate this if their platform isn't large? In my case I think it would be much more advantageous to send pages rather than the proposal, but also don't want to ruffle feathers unnecessarily. Thanks for your input on navigating this!
I'm sorry to say that what agents prefer to see with memoir is totally agent-dependent. My submissions policy is basically "send as much as you've got of whatever you've got, whatever," because (in truth) almost everything I represent in the category is platform-driven and/or* structured with a REALLY compelling argumentative hook of some kind. I know what kind of author I'm looking for, in other words, and have the experience to see whether it's there in whatever I get: pages, proposal, or even just a query letter.
Whatever appears in my inbox, however, if I'm signing it, it's almost always going to go out to editors as a proposal. That's because I almost never rep literary memoir, or memoir billed as worth reading for the writing alone; I'm looking for things I can make a real business case out of, on the more commercial/six-plus-figure advance end.
I know other agents feel differently about this, though. People who specialize in literary memoir--which, by the way, generally sells to smaller presses, if it sells at all--often ask to see whole manuscripts.
My TL DR advice is basically "send agents what they tell you they want on their website." SO HELPFUL, ANNA, THANKS.
*Ideally "and"
This is so helpful--thanks Anna for your insight and for fielding the question!
Hi Anna! Thank you for tackling questions and for the insight you always bring to this space. I have a trio of long-winded questions if you've still got the bandwidth:
1. I keep thinking about a moment in the book Devil Is Fine where a white university department head tells a biracial professor to stop writing about race because “it’s not 2020 out there anymore.” Given that everyone seems to be taking hits right now, I genuinely can’t tell whether the diversity backlash is still happening or if it’s just folded into the broader societal pummeling. From your vantage point, what does the landscape look like for diverse writers whose work engages directly with race? For context, I’m a Black woman preparing a memoir proposal where race plays a major role in the story, though it isn’t the book’s primary subject.
2. I’m aiming to publish a memoir-related essay in a major outlet before submitting my book proposal to agents, especially since I don’t have much of a visible platform. One of the strongest pieces I can pitch involves a dramatic subplot that’s potentially high-attention, maybe even a bit explosive. I’ve gotten advice that it might be more strategic to wait on this one and use it as a publicity essay closer to the book’s release. I can see the logic, but that also feels like planning a victory lap before I’ve run the race. Does it make sense to save the splashiest companion material for later, or is it fine to choose chaos now (assuming I can place the essay in a top-tier publication)?
3. Comps and proposal question: I can't find any other memoirs that share my book's primary subject, but I do have solid adjacent comps in other media (viral essays, podcasts, etc.). I know the subject matter resonates with people, it's the kind of thing that sets off avalanches in group chats. Does the absence of existing books on this topic mean that I need to work harder in my proposal to demonstrate that there’s an audience for this? Or is this a case where the subject’s appeal is obvious and the lack of available books actually underscores the need for mine? (If it helps clarify anything, my book’s main subject is toxic friendship.)
Thank you!
P.S. Your 90s sitcom (LITcom?) looks like it could be called By the Book.
1. This is an excellent question *and* one I feel unqualified to answer. Like the vast majority of people who work in publishing, I'm an upper middle class East Coast liberal white woman brimming with good intentions and RIDDLED with blind spots. Only a Black colleague is going to be able to tell you what the landscape looks like from the Black perspective and what's really changed in the past few years. (Ditto, of course, for other marginalized identities seeking insight on what it's like for them -- I get the sense that the experience of being Brown in publishing has changed in entirely different and special hellish ways.)
Here's what I can do instead: talk about what I see other white people doing around this topic within big houses. Novels dealing with race do still appear to be selling. Nonfiction that deals with race is subject to the general depressive pressures of the nonfiction market -- it's the hardest time ever in my 20-year career to sell ALL types of serious nonfiction, provided they're not explicitly conservative or self-help -- but authors with big national platforms AND big, bright, clear, compelling, fully developed arguments do still appear to be getting deals. Editors are still saying that they want books on these topics as well.
On the other hand, close to every last BIPOC in-house executive hired in 2020-2021 to diversify the highest ranks of institutional publishing has now been quietly laid off. The industry remains overwhelmingly white at every level, particularly the senior. Senior executives are under immense pressure to deliver profit, and I can't imagine all of this plus the general downturn of nonfiction does NOT result in increased bias against BIPOC nonfiction authors in particular. What I think that looks like in the acquisitions process is basically: if it's not by a celebrity and doesn't have PERFECT editorial execution and market positioning, it doesn't have the chance it might have 2 or 3 years ago. It's basically the overall acquisitions trends all authors are facing, but on steroids.
Hope that helps.
2. In the absence of other compelling platform, I would try to publish the dramatic essay -- but only in a major national outlet. The last thing you want to do is blow your wad in some hinterlands venue that gets 200 clicks. A Modern Love piece that goes everywhere, however, might very well get you all the platform you need overnight (or The Cut, The Atlantic, etc.) But if you can't leverage that amount of benefit from placing the essay, I wouldn't place it and would keep working on platform building in other venues.
3. Here's what you do: look for comps that *do a similar thing for a similar audience*; they don't have to be on the same subject. (Comping on the similar subjects is often an act in self-sabotage, anyway, since those comps might give the impression of market saturation.) For example, you could say that a warm, immersive, first-person, funny journey through the world of competitive Scrabble is bumptious and intellectual itch-scratching like Mary Roach, even though it's not science journalism.
By all means, comp to podcasts as well--although I'm not sure I'd comp to viral essays, as that sends the message that your book could just be an essay. When I'm pitching things to editors, my ideal comp set up is always ~2 recent strong-selling books plus a podcast and a random backlist title as well, since we're in the middle of a kind of classic-book renaissance.
oh, and: I think you win on the sitcom title!! lolololol
What about a sitcom called "Up Against It"? Two scrappy agents race to find the best manuscript in the slush pile, and discover something else along the way [cue 80s soundtrack noise]
Thank you!!! This is tremendous.
Question about a novel’s first chapter. Many writers make one of two mistakes: They begin the book inconsequentially with the protagonist waking up in the morning and going through a day of random incidents that are plot-points for future action; or, they begin the book more “dramatically,” with the protagonist’s life in danger, leading to a cliffhanger, which fails to engage the reader because we are not yet emotionally invested in the protagonist and so we don’t really care if she lives or dies. Between these two extremes—not enough plot and too much plot—what is your advice for structuring a novel’s first chapter?
oh boy, such a good question -- and one with any number of subjective answers, i think, especially based on genre.
i personally love an opening chapter that makes me feel like there's good gossip here, but i'm not getting all the gossip -- kind of like how one feels when one reads an obituary for a vibrant young person and there's no cause of death listed. that "i need to take some time out of my day to do some googling here" curiosity feeling. no infodumping but also not too much calamity, as you say.
i can also 100% always tell when the author procrastinated during the writing process by going back and back to the opening chapter to pick at it nervously. don't do that. pick at a toy on your desk or something.
Thank you so much, Anna!
I have two questions:
First, what are the checkpoints you would suggest to make sure a manuscript, etc. is query ready?
Second, will either of you be anywhere we can meet you this year?
I have such an annoying answer: If you read my entire back catalog in the Submissions and Queries and and Proposal 101 categories, I have lots of posts that go into what “ready” means to me (eg the one called “what happens when we’re ready to hit send” and “signs your book (probably) isn’t ready for submission.” I think your goal is an author is to get your materials as close as you can to the shape in which agents like would want them to go to publishers. I would get a one-month subscription to PublishersMarketplace as well, and use their deals database to find juuuuust the right agents.
This is not annoying at all! I love the backlog, and appreciate the reference. I made the mistake of querying too early last year and am not going to do that again. I just want to hew as closely as I can to expectations.
And sorry, just to be clear: I mean the package in its entirety, not the manuscript itself.
No sorries necessary! I will use this to answer your other question, which I forgot to answer in my previous: I’m not sure when any of us will next be appearing in public, alas. AWP this year coincides with the London Book Fair; Kent and I will be over in England that weekend.
We all still do at least occasional conferences—Eloy the most—but since I have three kids, it’s hard for me to do many anymore outside of DC and occasionally NY.
I am an extrovert, though, and a Glow community meetup really might be fun some day! Remind me where you’re based?
I would love a meetup! I’m in Seattle, but will take just about any excuse that I can to travel with my small family, so please keep us posted here!
Q: What is the name of your 80s sitcom based on that fab photo?
I am not going to reply to this until I've come up with something truly brilliant.
Hi there! I know these have been touched on to some degree in newsletters already, so please feel free to ignore any of them. I thought I'd ask anyway, since the landscape is always changing.
1. What advice do you have for YA authors looking to break into the adult space?
2. I've seen you say the best way to market books (now that social media is dying) is to already be active in the spaces/communities where your audience lives. Is this still the best way to get traction?
3. And related to that; what do you think actually matters when it comes to what authors can actually control? Where should we be pouring our energy and time? I know you've had that really helpful chart of what authors care about vs. what actually matters, so I was curious if that still holds true for you or if anything has changed.
THANK YOU!!
1. What advice do you have for YA authors looking to break into the adult space?
My major one is this: don't try to run away from your innate YA instincts! As in: by all means work with your agent to go for that adult book deal, but remember as you do so that the current adult fiction bestseller list has *such* a teenaged heart (and I say this with admiration, not condescension): big feelings, big love, friends and intimacy as the most important things on Earth. I'm sure plenty of online articles have told you that scaling up from YA is about more than just aging up the protagonist -- it involves more sophisticated moral themes, interior complexity, whatever -- but honestly, in the year of our Lord 2026, I think there's limited utility in that advice.
My practical advice is basically just: when you're a fiction author changing your audience base--assuming a loyal audience has not already aged up with you--comps are EVERYTHING. Know your X meets Y and make those titles incredibly fucking compelling and believable. Have a razor-sharp sense of your market position and prospects.
2. Yes. More than ever. Go look up a Substacker name Sean DeLone and read his latest post on book marketing in a post-institutional world; it's all about this.
3. Same answer as above. See Sean's piece.
A x
thank you so much!! and for anyone reading and also looking for the link, it's here: https://dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-search-for-what-sells-books-or
thank you for doing this omg
Hi Anna! I'm learning soo much from these comments, and feeling less alone! I'm Sophia. I'm a journalist and essayist (for now!), and am waiting on a last round of proposal/MS edits from my agent before we go out on submission with my debut book: a memoir about investigating death row cases at the same time I began investigating my father's death my suicide.
My question is, what do you suggest doing in these interim periods? Like now, and when we're on submission. I know there's a lot of sprints and then a lot of waiting on responses (querying was like this too!). Pitching related reported pieces? Writing/submitting essays to lit mags, to major outlets? Working on book #2? Running into the mountains? I ask from a career perspective, and a sanity perspective. And would love to hear from other writers about how you prioritize what you're working on, balancing creative inspirations with what is good for platform, audience-building, literary visibility, and so on. Thank you!
Professional advice: it never hurts to pitch pieces, especially to national outlets--i.e., making sure you look as googlably active as possible, ideally in front of the same target audience(s) for your book. (For a book like yours, e.g., something in partnership with The Marshall Project might be helpful.) Before or after they take a meeting and before they make an offer, editors who like your proposal are going to google you and see what your platform looks like in the wild. So, you know, the more impressive tinsel you can hang up out there, the better.
Personal advice: I'm guessing your platform is already fine. I'm guessing the real issue is that you're anxious because you're a human being finishing up a massive book proposal that probably took enormous amounts of time, energy, and vulnerability to write and is anchored in what (I sure hope) is the single biggest attachment trauma of your life. You're submitting this proposal into a marketplace that's tougher than ever on serious nonfiction and are about to surrender your last modicum of even partial control over its reception.
For all those reasons, there is simply no way to avoid losing your marbles at this time. Unless you are a sociopath, which you don't seem to be, you're going to be a dysregulated mess for at least the next few weeks, and that's normal--even though we should all remember that book deals are just freelance writing gigs and submissions outcomes are not totalizing pronouncements on your worth as a person or even your overall prospects as a writer yadda yadda yadda.
Just plan to make room for the crazy. Treat it like a visiting cousin who is A Bit Much. Make a bed for it in the guest room of your brain. Plan ways to entertain and distract it while it's in town. Plan temporary escapes when it's acting unbearable. ("I'm off to the grocery store!") If you happen to be in therapy, schedule some extra Very Special Episode sessions during these weeks. Sleep, hydrate, and don't feel like it's any reflection on you or your fundamental freakishness that your crazy cousin just happens to be in town.
Thank you, Anna--this is such a generous and grounding answer. Time to get ready for the cousin coming to town!
Hi Anna! I'd love to hear your thoughts on indie presses (think Beacon, Chicago Review, Zibby, Abrams, Grove Atlantic, etc.) and what authors should keep in mind when publishing with an indie for their debut (a hybrid memoir). Especially (a) as compared to publishing with a Big Five and (b) if said author would like to do as much as possible to continue publishing in the future and continue banging their head at the walls of a creative career. Thank you so much!
P.S. Music recs (all albums): "The Art of Loving" by Olivia Dean, "The After Taste" by Kenya Grace, and the "Nobody Wants This Season 2" soundtrack!
Re: indie presses -- there is alas just no way to answer this question in a categorical manner. All of the presses you're listing there are very solid places with *vastly* different strengths, quirks, challenges, and cultures -- and the same applies for the category writ large.
Some of these companies are for-profit and offer the same royalty structures as your Big 5's, Sourcebookses, and Nortons; some are nonprofit (Beacon, e.g., is affiliated with the Unitarian church); some insist on net (lesser) royalties. Some are wonderfully on time with payments; others need to be chased. Some are owned by larger companies -- Abrams is part of the larger French company La Martiniere -- and some by intermittently problematic billionaire heiresses (this is a subtweet of more than one company) and others by universities and similar.
No matter, though. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that because you're asking about these presses as a category, what you're really asking is if they're Less Than. I think hearing some anxiety that your career might suffer in the long term without the "prestige" of a Big 5.
The short answer to that is no. Readers do not look at colophons at all, generally, and reviewers--the few of them left--have plenty of respect for most of these places. A lot of what makes a book successful falls on authors these days, anyway, regardless of where they're published. While your sales track with a small-press book likely *will* affect future submissions and deals, it is just one important factor among several -- that is, it's navigable with time and patience almost no matter what. Plus, let's be real: your sales track could just as easily be low at a Big 5 house vs. a small press.
As long as a publisher has nationwide distribution capabilities -- all of the ones you listed do -- and decently attentive editors, you're about as fine as you would be anywhere, just probably minus a splashy advance.
Oh, and: these music suggestions look fabulous! Thanks!!
Thank you for such a thoughtful (and psychic) response! I am clearly still recovering from my prestige addiction... thank you again for the reality check, and enjoy all the music recs!
Hello! I am generally an online lurker and it's out of my comfort zone to directly engage with strangers 🙈 but I'm trying to be brave!
My name is Kaetochi, I live in DC and started my adult creative writing journey a little under a year ago. I really appreciate your posts, Anna, because of the way they demystify the publishing world...and also acknowledge that the path is kinda scary and hard for everyone.
Music recommendation: The Hu, a Mongolian folk-metal band. They'll be playing in Silver Spring in May!
Ok, on to my question. I've written a memoir that comprises short vignettes about experiencing and learning to live with grief. It's not quite narrative nonfiction because it focuses on themes rather than events. Its not quite an essay collection because the pieces are quite short (generally under 200 words). It's very lyrical, but it's not quite poetry because there is some long(ish) form prose in there.
In short. I have no idea what genre my writing fits into, which is making it difficult to figure out how to get published.
Recently (yesterday) it occurred to me that maybe my writing is speculative CNF or memoir? There are a lot of speculative elements to my work and it feels more accurate to me than anything else I've considered. I'd like a gut check. Is "speculative" a label reserved for fiction? Ir I were to query or submit my manuscript to a small press, would I receive an immediate eye roll for doing too much by describing it that way?
Sorry for the extremely long comment and thank you for all of your insight!
1. Yay for a fellow Washingtonian! Hi!
2. I actually LOVE Mongolian music and am so excited for this.
3. "Speculative" and "nonfiction" in the same sentence would confuse me deeply if I saw it in my inbox. If I were trying to describe this project to editors, I would probably describe it as something like "formed in glittering fragments, BOOK reveals [specific, grab-you-by-the-lapels, transformative thing about grief] through a combination of personal storytelling and psychological insight. It's a cool compress to the head in a feverish time." (See how I'm deftly avoiding anything that screams "experimental micro-press literary work" in hopes of convincing big 5 type presses this is an excellent potential business investment?)
Thank you! Has anyone ever told you that you have a way with words? 😂 Every time I try to describe my work it does sound very *experimental micro-press* so it's nice to know there might be a way to present this as a commercially feasible project. Sounds like I can just sidestep the genre question by focusing on a compelling hook?
That’s what I would do, and no one’s ever called me out lol