Author: Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

Try, Try Again

You know that old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again,” that we heard from our parents over and over again? I can recall my mother’s voice, delivering the mantra in that annoying sing-songy way, to this day. Ugh. Well, as a kid I couldn’t stand it. I remember mimicking it – twisting my face and whining it, oh so winningly. I thought it was something grown-ups just spouted at kids to a) shut us up and b) get us out of their hair while we kept trying.

Now I have something to confess. There’s truth to that adage, much as it pains me to admit it, particularly when it comes to books.

In the past few years, I have had a few prospective clients come to me with ideas. I’d take a look at their background, their credentials, their writing and think, there’s something here. But when it came time to do the proposal, it just didn’t click. There was no real content in the Table of Contents, or the Sample Chapter lacked that zing. So I asked them to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new hook. Sure enough, once they did, everything starting humming along. Before you knew it, we had a proposal, and then a book deal, and then a book. It just took some trying (ugh, that word) before it all came together.

Katie Hurley is the best example of this I know. She did a fantastic proposal for me on the subject of infertility. It was well-written and scoped out, and had a little celebrity sizzle as she talked about the difficulties of conceiving when your husband was on tour with a rock band or doing session work with Idina Menzel. Yet it didn’t sell. Infertility is a tough arena – one woman’s story (primary infertility, difficulty staying pregnant) is so different from another’s (secondary infertility, can’t get pregnant at all) so it’s hard for one memoir to cover the range.

Try two: the thorny subject of moms competing with one another, with stories illustrating just how nasty moms can get when playing the my kid is better than your kid game, and advice on how to rise above it all. Katie had great stories, and good advice, but the reality here is that mothers prefer to buy books about their kids, not about the machinations of their peers. Editors just didn’t bite on a book they didn’t think would sell.

Were we really going for number three? Many new authors at this point would concede defeat, go back to magazine and blog writing, and figure that perhaps this book thing wasn’t for them. Not Katie. About two months after the last rejection, I got an email in my inbox.

“I have the perfect new idea,” she wrote. “What about how to raise happy kids?” Now Katie is a therapist and brought much of her expertise to the earlier two projects, but they weren’t exactly therapy-related books. This one was. Great that it was right in her wheelhouse. Even greater that she was fired up about it.

“I know exactly the angle I’m taking – I’m tired of Helicopter moms and Tiger moms using up all the air space. All I hear about is succeeding in this or avoiding that. What ever happened to happy? Isn’t that what we most want our kids to be?”

I couldn’t have agreed more. The very next day there was a completed 70-page proposal in my inbox. Turns out she had been working on it all along, and there it was. The book she was meant to write. After a little back and forth and refinements, it went out. And got universally positive feedback. Eventually we had an auction with multiple houses bidding on The Happy Kid Handbook, and were thrilled when it found a very happy home with Sara Carder at Tarcher Penguin.

There it was. Try and try again. And it worked. Boy, did it work. I couldn’t be so snarky anymore and whine about it.

But there are caveats here. Aren’t there always? The big one being that if you don’t have credentials, like Katie did, or a platform, like Lauren Slayton and Stefanie Sacks have, you’re going to run into problems. No matter how hard you try with a different concept, it won’t get you too far.

That said, perhaps you had the great idea all along but because of your platform, it couldn’t get noticed. Perhaps the trying you need to do is take a year off from your fantastic idea and work on that platform so that by the time you go out again with that great book, you have the publicity necessary to support it. Try, try again.

Who knew our mothers were right all along? Who knew that childhood adage – as annoying as it was – would come in handy? Now the real question is, how many years of torturing my children with this will it take before they actually get it? I sure hope a lot quicker than the 30 years it took me!

How To Non-fiction Submitting

Narrative Non-Fiction and Memoir

Post author By Caitlen Rubino-Bradway
Post date July 15, 2014
2 Comments on Narrative Non-Fiction and Memoir

All right, we’ve dealt with what we’re looking for in practical, prescriptive non-fiction. Now onto the next biggest category of non-fiction that we get submissions for: narrative and memoir.

Let’s start with the good news — unlike with prescriptive, you don’t need those fancy letters after your name for narrative and memoir. All you need is a good story. And a platform. For non-fiction, you always need a platform. For Lauren Slayton, a key part of hooking editors for her Little Book of Thin was the fact that she has a Masters in Clinical Nutrition and has founded her own nutrition consulting business. But for Jenny Feldon, all she needed for her Karma Gone Bad was her crazy, amazing experience being outsourced with her husband to India for a couple of years.

And a platform. That she was a blogger and had a circle of blogger friends all ready and willing to blast out her publication went a long way to hooking an editor’s interest.

The other good news? Like all other non-fiction, narrative and memoir non-fiction are pretty much sold on proposal. That’s right, you do not necessarily need to have the entire book written before you sell it. But it does mean that every single page and line and word in that proposal functions as a writing sample. Even more so than practical non-fiction, your narrative or memoir proposal needs to serve as a microcosm for your book as a whole, so the proposal has to be a tight and exciting read, and capture the arc of the book. Sometimes it is harder to capture that arc in a proposal than in a whole book.

Narrative and memoir can also be a little trickier than practical non-fiction, however, because at heart it’s not a book of information. It’s a story. Real life often doesn’t follow the rules of standard story-telling, but your narrative or memoir needs to be shaped as a story, with character growth and an arc — as in Karma Gone Bad, where in spite of her loneliness and the immediate, staggering culture shock, Jenny learned that her biggest problems were her expectations, and once she was able to accept India for what it was, she was able to enjoy and embrace it. Narrative and memoir also needs a take-away, the perspective or lesson that your readers will carry with them after they turn the last page. It’s something we look for when considering a proposal, and that editors ask us for when we’re pitching one.

That’s general stuff. Now, what are we looking for with narrative/memoirs? The biggest thing we’re looking for is something new — a perspective we haven’t seen before, an experience we haven’t heard about. Ben Mattlin’s Miracle Boy deals with his experience growing up with spinal dystrophy during the cusp of the disability rights movement. His perspective was what set him apart. Instead of asking readers to pity him, he pretty much told readers how fantastic his life was, especially given his time in disability history.

We get a lot of submissions from people who have truly heart-breaking stories to tell — but, unfortunately, simply having a horrible experience isn’t enough to sell a book. The memoir market is very crowded, and there are a lot of misery memoirs out there already (and misery memoirs aren’t really our thing).

What we’re also not looking for is general life stories. If your narrative starts at birth and ends at the present day without a hook, it’s not for us either. What’s a hook in narrative? Well, it’s something detailed that shapes the story. Tom Holland drafted a memoir about his rise in the personal trainer industry, and while it was his story, it was also an expose of gym culture. It aimed to do for gyms what Kitchen Confidential did for restaurants. His was the gimlet eye going behind the scenes and revealing all the dirty little secrets of such institutions as Crunch or Equinox or NY Sports Club. And it had personal growth along the way, how despite the sleaziness of the business, it was a saving grace for him. While he ultimately did another book, Beat the Gym, instead, his narrative worked; it got us, and editors, interested. The best part — readers could learn something, about him, about the industry, about what their trainer probably thought about them.

Another lesson to learn — the narrative can’t be too narrow. While one author’s experience going back to law school as a married woman in her 40s was fascinating and funny and well told, editors ultimately felt it was too specific and passed.

Just the other month at BEA, some of the editors we spoke to made a point of asking about ‘quirky’ memoirs, or experience-based narrative non-fiction. If you’ve made a vow to eat as local as possible for a year and have spent the past twelve months turning your backyard into a fruit and vegetable garden, that’s a book (but it’s been written recently so if you’re doing that, give us a new element). If you decided that you’re going to fulfill your lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut and want to chronicle your adventures in trying to make the cut, we’d love to see it. If you have a memoir about your monster of an ex-husband and your struggle to reclaim your self-esteem after finally kicking him out, I’m very sorry, but that’s not really for us.

What it boils down to? What we want out of narrative and memoir is what everyone wants out of a book: a good story. One that we haven’t seen before, or with a new take on an old idea. We want to see experiences that change people’s lives, how it changed them, their struggles, and how it made them better.

And, please, don’t forget about the platform.

CRB

How To Submitting

Dear Agent – Part 2

Now we get to the nitty gritty (more of those clichés) of what to pitch.

Most of what LKG sells is prescriptive non-fiction aimed at women. Basically how to everything. How to fashion and style, how to beauty, lots and lots of how to diet, health, nutrition, and fitness, and perhaps even more how to parenting. So let’s start with content. If your book is in one of these categories, you’re in the right place. Even if it’s not an exact match, but close, like how to decorate, or how to train your dog, try us. We’re interested.

But it’s not enough to send us a general diet book. The key here is hook. That’s a common word agents and editors use to identify what sets a new title apart from other books already on the shelf.

Katie Hurley’s hook was the notion that today’s parenting ethos, with its focus on achievement, had left the idea of happy behind. She wanted to bring back happy and show parents how to raise joyful children. And so The Happy Kid Handbook was born.

Dieting is perhaps one of the most crowded fields, but Lauren Slayton realized that planning hadn’t really been done in the best way possible. It wasn’t just planning for a typical day of dieting, it was also about pre-planning for the worst possible scenarios that ruin your idealized day of dieting, from holidays and travel to family gatherings and birthday parties. Hence The Little Book of Thin. Even the packaging echoes the message of the book. It’s slim and transportable so that you can take it with you to address all your planning worries. (Though we can’t take any credit for the design — that all goes to Perigee.)

Behaviorist Michelle Segar is tackling the tough issue of exercise from the starting point of how to think about fitness, not just how to do it. That’s what we want you to identify — a sentence or two on what makes your book unique and able to stand out on already crowded shelves.

Next, all of our authors have strong credentials, which means that if they are writing a dieting book, they are nutritionists or dieticians. If they are writing a parenting book, they aren’t just parents, they are therapists, psychologists, etc. (Editors love those letters after an author’s name.) Even my style experts are called experts for a reason. They write style columns in magazines and newspapers, or appear on TV as a stylist. While I’m sure dating massively can give you serious dating and relationship experience, I’m afraid it’s not enough to set you up to write a dating advice book. I might sound curmudgeonly expecting these letters and expertise, but this isn’t coming from LKG, it’s coming from editors, who expect these kinds of credentials. And more significantly from the publicity teams at those houses who need these credentials to sell the books to the press.

Credentials and letters give you credibility, for readers, editors, the media. We need to buy what you are selling and we are more likely to do so if we believe you have the right background.

So sell us — a marvelous approach to reading from a PhD in education who regularly blogs at HuffPo and the Motherlode that is a surefire bet to help your kids achieve literacy and stay readers for life? We’re on it. A new angle on superfast exercise from a Today show regular trainer that can lean out your body? We love it! A how to book on tackling childrens’ allergies from a parent who has been there but isn’t a doctor? Worthy but not for us.

LKG also looks for narrative projects, non-fiction memoirs and the like. But that only comprises about 10 or 20 percent of our list. So we’ll save that for another day.

Non-fiction Submitting

Dear Agent

Sadly there is also no room for zombies on the non-fiction side of our list. As Caitlen wrote, children’s fiction is new to LKG Agency, but non-fiction is our bread and butter, it’s right in our wheelhouse, it’s squarely on our radar. How many other clichés can I conjure up in this one short blog?

The question I’m addressing here is how to submit. Next blog post: What to submit. That’s going to be a longer one.

The mechanics: Your best bet is to craft a pitch letter that encapsulates your idea, why it is different from other books in the category, along with a synopsis of your platform and publicity opportunities. If we are interested, we will email back asking for a completed proposal, which you can attach to an email response.

What we don’t want to see: A mass pitch letter addressed to “Dear Sir or Madam” or “Dear Agent.” Make a little effort — pretend you crafted this just for us. What particularly drives us crazy? A mass pitch letter addressed to “Dear Sir or Madam” and simultaneously sent to 200 OTHER LITERARY AGENTS, which, yes, we can see because you were goofy enough to do cc instead of bcc. Then we have to scroll down through that endless list to even get to your pitch. Which we won’t do. We’ll just hit delete. If you want us to take the time to carefully read about your book, then take the time to carefully sell us on your book.

Next please read, reread, and re-reread your pitch letter. That letter serves as a writing sample, a calling card if you will, for you and your book. If it’s a mess, with poor spelling, terrible punctuation, wretched grammar, chances are your book will be too. And it won’t have a chance in hell of getting picked up even if the idea is strong. After all, as an agent, I gleefully worked on Paul Yeager’s Literally the Best Language Book Ever. (Wondering how this is relevant? Go to Amazon and read about it. Then buy it. It will do wonders for how people perceive you.) This is a peeve of mine. Caitlen is nicer.

Get excited about your pitch and your book. Be creative with your letter (not crazy creative but a little is good), to get us fired up about it. The more your pitch resonates, the more we are eager to read your proposal. And frankly we will be predisposed toward you and your idea. I have gotten some amazing pitch letters where the proposals did not live up to that promise, but generally that’s not the case. The great pitch letters have often meant great proposals, which meant Agency Agreements, which is the goal here.

Last but not least, but which should probably be first, do your research. It’s likely the most often repeated bit of advice, so I know I’m not coming across as too clever or creative here. But it’s true. Read the LKG submission guidelines. If it says no screenplays or no picture books, there’s no point in sending them. It ends up being just wasted effort on your part. We used to respond to all of those by saying they were not for us. Now we just delete and you are left wondering what happened to your pitch. Did it go into a black hole? The answer is yes, it did.

But that’s just basic research. Look at the books we actually did pick up and sell. Is yours comparable but with a key difference? Score! Mention that in your pitch. It shows your effort. “I see you represented Clinton Kelly’s Freakin’ Fabulous. I’ve written a style book all about introducing color to your wardrobe. And by the way, I have a blog with hundreds of thousands of followers.” That is a beautiful statement.

I think that covers it. Now stop reading my musings and pitch, but pitch wisely. Happy writing.

— Lauren Keller Galit

Middle Grade Young Adult

Middle Grade & YA

When I first joined the LKG Agency as Lauren’s Chief Cook & Bottle Washer back in 2008 (wow — 2008? Seriously? When did that become five years ago?), the agency was 99% non-fiction. The 1% was a middle grade children’s book, the last survivor of Lauren’s initial impulse, when starting the LKG Agency, to handle children’s fiction as well as practical how-to. But her specialty, and her success, was primarily in non-fiction, so when that last middle grade project was done, we didn’t really look for any more.

But it gave me hope, because children’s books have always been my sweet spot. A very large number of my favorite books (of which there are a very large number) are children’s books. As a child, I nearly wore out my library’s copy of Lazy Tinka and Ginny and the Cooking Contest, and later committed what I’m sure is a mortal sin when I lied to the library and said that I’d lost their (only!) copy of Robin McKinley’s Beauty because I couldn’t bear to return it. (I’m so sorry.) And Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is my go-to Halloween book. Of course when I joined a literary agency I would want to investigate children’s fiction.

As it turned out, selling Lauren on the idea wasn’t that hard. Actually…as it turned out, I wasn’t the one that ended up selling anything. You see, having written a middle grade fantasy of my very own, I asked Lauren to read it, and she turned around and offered to represent it. Add to that, she told me that if my book sold, then we could open LKG to children’s fiction again. Well, it sold.

So now that LKG is open to it, what exactly am I looking for? I could give you the tried-and-true spiel about memorable characters, snappy dialogue, and gripping plots, but I thought it might help you and me if I got a little more specific. Okay, nitpicky. And, as a bonafide nerd, I can get nitpicky.

First, I’m just looking for middle grade and young adult now. Please, no picture books or early chapter books. And please, no dystopian futures (it’s not really my thing), a lot of violence (also not my thing), or books written in the present tense. (Wow, I just described The Hunger Games, didn’t I?) Please, no zombies. Vampires, werewolves, witches and wizards, angels and demons, the Greek Pantheon, Thor and Loki and Fenrir, superheroes, aliens, super-powered aliens — all good. But zombies give me nightmares.

Please do send fantasy, whether it be like Harry Potter and Sarah Prineas’ Winterling trilogy (contemporary fantasy about modern kids!); or Stephanie Burgis’ Kat, Incorrigible series, and Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s Sorcery and Cecelia (historic fantasy re-writes with both humor and heart!); or Kristen Cashore’s Graceling, Jessica Day George’s Princess of the Midnight Ball, and Erin Bow’s devastating Plain Kate (traditional fantasy! With horses!). And, why, yes, I am listing some of my favorite books on purpose, on the chance that you have read these and your book compares favorably to one of them.

On a related note, please do send sci-fi, which I also love, having grown up on Star Trek: TNG. Anne Osterlund’s Academy 7 will forever hold a place in my heart because it is a futuristic sci-fi with spaceships and lasers, but it also has a boarding school! (I love books with boarding schools.) Ah, that reminds me: please do send things with boarding schools.

Please, please, please send fairy tale re-tellings. Please.

So if you have a sci-fi retelling of The Hedgehog Prince that takes place at an orbital boarding school that circles Saturn, or a story about a girl who discovers she’s descended from the Norse gods and has to earn her place as a Valkyrie to stop Fenrir from breaking free and starting Ragnarok, please do send it along.

But, seriously, no zombies.

CRB