Hello, fellow readers, writers, and thinkers of all stripes!
Welcome to Hook to Book, a step-by-step guide to pitching, writing, and sharing your nonfiction book with the world. If you are a researcher curious about reaching a broader audience, a journalist or science communicator with a bookish story that needs telling, an entrepreneur aiming to share expertise and expand their reach, or just generally a writer cradling a marvelous nonfiction book idea who wants the lay of the land—this newsletter was created just for you! (Fellow publishing professionals are more than welcome, of course—I’m always down to trade shop talk!)
So, what can you expect from Hook to Book? Every other Friday we’ll focus on a single step on the book publishing journey. (I’ll spend multiple Fridays on major steps such as building a book proposal, breaking the beastly task down into manageable parts.) As a nonfiction specialist, I will zero in on the particular challenges (and opportunities!) of nonfiction projects, such as author-idea fit, productive platform-building, and making peace with the fact that you will never win the Booker Prize.
About your guide
I’m Jeff, a literary agent with Curious Minds. We believe that knowledge about the world should be shared with readers around the world, and in service of that mission I represent authors writing about science, nature, business, and self-growth. Before I was an agent, I was an editor at W. W. Norton & Company. Overall, I’ve worked in nonfiction publishing for a decade and a half, collaborating with New York Times bestsellers, Nobel Prize winners, National Book Award longlisters, and Pulitzer finalists at every stage of their books’ lives.
But that’s all the polished professional exterior—my most valuable insight, which will be threaded throughout this entire newsletter, came from my first few months as an editorial intern. I was fortunate enough to be in close contact with publishing professionals at the top of their game, and I learned they all share the same dirty secret: they’re just fellow humans. We all want profit and prestige, sure, but we want more than that—we want to help authors publish books that make a dent in the world. Along the way we get burned out; we make bad decisions; we get frustrated . . . but we also do goofy dance celebrations when we sign up an author we desperately want to work with.
Basically, we want what you want: a life of fulfillment and meaning spent creating something we can be proud of. This means, sadly, that there are no gimmicks or shortcuts to get your book published—you simply need to find that person who is as excited about your book as you are, partner up, buckle up, and hang on for dear life. In Hook to Book, we’ll take the journey together.
Disclaimer
A note on agent representation: subscribing to Hook to Book does not mean you’ll have some sort of “inside track” to being represented by me or any other agent at Curious Minds. We make our representation decisions entirely independent of this newsletter.
