Ask a publishing witch

Kate McKean answers your questions about writing and selling books

Welcome! If you’re new here, Evil Witches is for “people who happen to be mothers,” in that parents care about many things, including creative/professional projects. Today’s issue includes professional advice on publishing books.

I hope you cover becoming a paid subscriber to support this work, which gets you:

• additional, more personal-type issues

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Also an upcoming issue is going to be about butts and you don’t want to miss that.

I’m very excited that longtime witch and literary agent Kate McKean, author of the useful Substack

Agents and Books

, is publishing her own book in just a few days. Write Through It is an insider’s guide to publishing and the creative life, providing an honest look at the ride of writing and publishing, on and off the page. I highly encourage you to pre-order it. If you’d like a taste of the kind of empathetic but no-b.s. publishing advice she provides, check out some of the great answers she gave to (paid subscriber) witches who submitted questions for her not long ago:

For someone who is still in the early stages of writing long-form non-fiction, what are some proactive steps they can take now to prepare for the querying process down the line? Also, what are the key indicators that a manuscript is really ‘ready’ for submission?

Nothing. Don’t worry about the query at this point. Write your book/proposal and make sure it’s as clear and evocative as you can. That will help make the query letter writing process easier. Oh, I guess if you hear of an agent you think might be interesting, write their name down somewhere—TO CHECK LATER. But mostly, write your book.

You can only make your manuscript as ready as you can. Someone (agent, editor, beta reader) is always going to have something to add/edit because you, as the writer, will have blind spots. The best thing you can do is be honest with yourself about those places in your book where your gut is telling you something is not working. Your gut says, “Hmmmm, chapter 2 is a little slow, maybe?” Your gut does not say “YOU ARE HORRIBLE AND THIS IS CRAP.” That last part is fear/anxiety, not your writer’s intuition.

Next, try to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. They don’t care about your main character until you make them care. You immediately care about your own MC because you created them. If you can do this without spiraling into a puddle of feelings, try to ask “Who Cares?” at the important turns in your story. “Who Cares?” helps answer if there are enough stakes in your story. Don’t pit it against like Big Real Life Things, because of course we care more about that than some novel, but instead put it in terms of a reader spending their time with your story. If your character’s stakes are what socks she’s going to choose that day, yeah, maybe the reader won’t care.

But again, you can only do what you can do. When you have that little whisper in the back of your mind that the ending is rushed or the prologue isn’t necessary, listen to that. You don’t want your editorial note from your agent or editor to be stuff you already knew.

How does one find an agent? Are they all through the open market now, or is there another process? I am at the ‘finished books, editing them, then what?’ of my own creative process. So far, I’m submitting fiction to The Masters Review and others and soliciting editorial feedback — but what’s next?!

There are two ways to get an agent:

1. Query letters. Each agent has submission guidelines on their websites and/or uses a submission manager like Querytracker.com, and you follow those instructions, and send them a query letter and a sample. And then you wait. There are two whole chapters about this in my book, so obviously this process is more involved, but at its root, that’s it.

2. Get a referral from a friend to their agent/and an agent they know. TBH, very, very few of you are going to go this route, and that’s ok. You do not want to go hunting for a referral. I get referrals all the time that say some person I’ve never even heard of “referred” this writer to me and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That doesn’t do any good. What a referral does is give you a small boost. It says to me, “Oh, this person I like also likes this thing.” That’s it. I still judge the book on its own merits. I’m not more willing to take a flyer on a client just because they were referred to me.

   
   What there isn’t here is a shortcut. There’s no service you can pay for that will move you to the top of my list. There’s no class or conference or method or whatever that will get you an agent faster, easier, or better. There isn’t a tip you’re missing that everyone else knows that is preventing you from experiencing the annoyance and bother that is finding an agent. We don’t need tech to disrupt this process. The process is that the authors send me their work, and I take a look and decide if I can sell it. That’s it.
   

I feel like to get published as a nonfiction author these days, you need to have a big social media following. Do you think that is the case? Also, do you recommend writing a book or book proposal first to get a book deal? And the big one: In your experience, looking back, is it “worth it” to go down the publisher route, or would you have considered maybe just self-publishing?

Yes, you do need a big platform to get published in nonfiction these days. A platform is often, but not always, social media. Think about the reason you bought the last nonfiction book in your to-be-read pile. Who wrote it? How did you hear about it? How did that person get to that place where you heard about their book? That is their platform, and that is the path you need your platform to open for publishers.

It’s not a vetting process. Publishers are not going to say, “Ok this person had 100k followers so they have earned a book deal.” It is because that person can promote their book to 100k people in a marketplace that has very little book coverage in the media.

For nonfiction, you need a book proposal. You don’t have to write the whole book. If it’s a memoir, sometimes it can help to have the whole book done, but 90% of the time it’s a proposal. (That other 10%, I think it’s useful for the AUTHOR to write the whole book so they know what they’re saying.)

When it comes to traditional vs self-publishing, it depends on your goals. Do you want to be able to send a link to someone and say, “Hey, here’s my book”? Or, do you want to see your book in print on the shelves in a bookstore? Self-published books are not going to make it into bookstores. Self-published books are not more likely to get noticed by traditional publishers and then taken to the next level. Most of the time, the sales an author can bring in to a self-pub book are all the sales the book would have had anyway, more or less. In non-fiction, publishers don’t do a lot of breaking out of unknown authors. So, it depends on what you want. Don’t let impatience make the decision for you.

If I pitched an agent at an agents and editors conference and she said, “Yeah, send it to me when it’s ready,” is there a hard and fast rule on how long this offer lasts? Also, she didn’t say specifically what to send her, but in a Q &A session later, she said she prefers to read the whole thing of something (vs the first 5 pages). Can I send her the whole MS if it’s a year later, before I think it’s ready?

Send it when you’re done. It’s ok if it’s a year or years later. I literally got something last week that was pitched to me several years ago, and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s fine. Do not send an agent an unfinished novel. I gotta see if you can stick the landing.

I have a few slightly passive-aggressive agent questions. You can maybe sense where my agent journey has led.