How I got a literary agent

On what I did en route to getting offers of representation from three New York City literary agents.

Fourteenth-century book chest, 1930s top, Hereford Cathedral, England. Probably part of a bishop’s travelling library. Photo by Surekha Davies.

Four years ago today, on Friday March 13, 2020, the mayor of New York City declared a State of Emergency. It was COVID.

This was also the day of my first call with a literary agent. I wondered how many ambulances might be screaming past her door in New York City. Over the next few apocalyptic weeks, I talked with three NYC agents, all of whom offered me representation, and I signed on the dotted line.

Many people have asked me how I came to sign with an agent, so I wrote a summary for this newsletter.

 The market

Since grad school I’d looked at history books that bricks-and-mortar bookstores stocked and occasionally wondered whether I wanted to write one. I began to think about this seriously the summer my first book came out.

A few turns around some London bookstores confirmed that there were books that, in terms of topic, breadth, structure, and style, I would have been happy to have written. This genre could work for me!

I looked in the acknowledgements pages of books that were comparable to the sorts I could imagine writing: histories of culture, science, ideas, or cultural encounters with styles, structures, and approaches I appreciated. Perhaps these authors’ literary agents might be willing to represent me. Their names went on a list.

The book proposal

In summer 2016 someone recommended I read Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato’s Thinking Like Your Editor. This I did, and then drafted a dozen pages of book proposal for what would become my current book-under-contract, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY.

But it wasn’t until 2019, after fellowships to work on academic stuff and moving to a four day/week job, that I had time for the trade-list book project. I got most of the proposal drafted in a few months, but couldn’t figure out the chapter synopses. I seemed to be stuck. Maybe I needed a literary agent to help me finish this proposal. Perhaps now was the time to approach them.

Agents everywhere

I signed up for Publishers’ Marketplace, which is THE industry news and people database for the US publishing world (and it has other stuff, too). I ran searches to see who represented books that seemed analogous to mine, which agents had made deals that suggested they would like my book, and which editors and imprints were currently buying the rights to books comparable to mine.

I also asked a few agented friends, colleagues, and mentors if they liked their agents, and whether I might mention that they had referred me when I approached said agents. Many wrote back and said yes (thank you!). Now I had even more agents on the to-approach list, and a sense of where might be a good fit for the book.

Querying

On December 12 2019, I sent out half a dozen query emails, with a view to sending batches out regularly after the winter break, improving my pitch each time. In a couple of hours, I had a reply! One agent asked me if I would give her “an exclusive” look at my proposal, and promised a quick answer if so. I had to google to figure out what an exclusive was: she wanted to be the only person to look at the proposal for a brief time - to have first dibs.

I said yes, and promised to get her the proposal within few days. It was mid-December; if anyone else wanted the proposal I could offer to send it in early January. Suddenly, those chapter synopses wrote themselves! I sent off the proposal to the agent I’ll call Agent Zero - my first nibble - and gave them two weeks’ exclusive access.

Agent Zero wrote back nicely, but declined: the book was a little too academic. This was great! Now I had some feedback with which to pick apart and rebuild the newly, magically, completed proposal.

I bought another how-to book: Jody Rein and Michael Larson’s How to Write a Book Proposal.

I rebuilt the proposal.

I queried another three agents in early Feb 2020. They wrote back quickly asking to see the proposal. By late February one of them wanted to do a phone interview!

Now to that fateful Friday 13 in March 2020. I chatted with the agent I’ll call Agent 1. While on the call, she offered me representation! I was thrilled. I asked for a couple of weeks to think it over and to email her with any queries I might have.

Then I wrote to the other agents who were looking at the proposal, letting them know that I had received an offer of representation, that I would make a decision in a couple of weeks, and would be pleased to chat with them before then if they too were interested in the book idea.

Two more calls got scheduled - leading to two more offers of representation!

I did not expect to be in this position: three stimulating agents wanted to work with me! I emailed each agent, asking them some of the same questions, and other questions relating to our conversations. Their answers gave me a glimpse of how they envisaged the book, and of their working process.

In making the final decision, there were two deciding factors.

Agents 1 and 3 (my first and final calls) thought the proposal would work better if the chapter progression was chronological rather than thematic. I was expecting agents to have unexpected ideas about how to improve the proposal, but this was…a big one. Yet it seemed to me that what I had to offer that was new came out of a thematic structure. And it was how my brain worked.

Friends with agents advised me to go with my gut, and to go with someone I liked. After all, this person was going to be the first person I’d be writing for, and would be in my corner. Remember that this was early spring 2020, with all that COVID horror and uncertainty.

It was Agent 2 who made me laugh in our initial Zoom call, and whose responses to emails gave me jolts of endorphins - and who didn’t mind the proposal’s thematic structure.

If I was going to write a book during a pandemic, or even get a proposal and sample chapters ready to submit to publishers, then Agent 2 was the person who was most likely to get the best out of me.

I signed with the delightful Roz Foster of the Frances Goldin Agency!

This is just a snapshot of how I got to the “agented” stage. Good luck to everyone on this journey!

Notes

Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor. This has been out for a while, and the digital sphere has changed a great deal. But it’s still illuminating if you’re coming to writing non-fiction history as someone trained as an academic historian (and needing to break out of that mould).

Jody Rein and Michael Larson, How to Write a Book Proposal. Tremendously well organized and illuminating.

Publishers Marketplace.