From Hook to Book Deal

What actually happens when a literary agent pitches publishers

Photo by Aung Soe Min on Unsplash

Today (the day I’m writing this introduction to this post) is April 6. Today was a Pitch Day—this morning I started pitching editors for a new project, and I wasn’t finished with those initial pitches until lunchtime. My inbox is a wreck of my own making.

And this is only the first step toward getting a book deal. There are only three guarantees about what’s going to happen next:

1. Chaos will reign;

2. the process will be nerve-wracking; and

3. it will either proceed MUCH slower or MUCH faster than we want it to.

How about your own project? By now, you’ve got a full proposal and an agent (or you’ve done your homework and are ready to roll up your sleeves and pitch your project directly). Let’s get into what actually happens when you or your agent pitches publishers.

What do I gotta do to get you into this book today?

When I covered the process of building a book proposal, I didn’t cover what your literary agent is doing in the meantime. For 90% of the process, your literary agent is there to provide feedback, not only on whichever section you’re actually working on at the moment, but also with an eye on the overall package, target audience, and driving mission of the book project. When the proposal is nearly finished, however, your agent has some homework of their own: they need to create a submission list—a list of editors they think the project should be sent to—and they need to draft the pitch they’re going to use when they approach those editors.

The submission list can vary widely depending on the project—your agent’s aim at this point to curate a list of editorial kindred spirits for your book, drawn from their existing network and from their own research. For a hypothetical popular-science project, for example, I might send it to 30 US editors and 20 UK editors, 90% of which would be existing contacts and 10% would be new folks I want to connect with.

For the pitch, I obviously draw heavily from the book proposal—by the time the proposal is finished, there’s a wealth of thoughtful, polished material to choose from. But I will tweak it to make sure it hits home in just 200 words or so, rather than the ~2,000 of the overview section, and I will customize it for each editor before I send it out.

Submission

Every agent’s submission process is different—it will involve some mix of calls, written queries, follow-ups from advance pitches that happened weeks/months ago, or simple one-step submissions (a.k.a. I just send an email to an editor with a pitch and the book proposal attached). Ideally, the queries and submissions are fairly tightly time-boxed (see my note above about pitching a new project in the first half of a single day), to increase the odds that enthusiastic editors are checking in with your agent at roughly the same time, the better to gauge the overall interest in your project.

Regardless of the method, what often follows after the initial submission is what I like to call the “Week of Rejection.” In the first week after submission, editor responses typically fall into three buckets: a quick reply confirming receipt of the proposal, a quick reply saying the project is not for them, or radio silence. In aggregate, this means that the initial reception can feel quite negative, but in my experience this is a natural phenomenon—an editor can send a rejection without checking in with anyone else in-house, but if they actually like a project they’ve got a whole gauntlet to run before they get back in touch:

They have to add the proposal to their reading queue first. Editors are receiving several proposals every week, and—real talk—they are usually burdened with so much work that they have to read proposals nights and weekends, even during their commute if they can.

Then they have to share the proposal with the in-house deciders: the editorial, sales, marketing, and publicity directors, usually along with a whole host of other colleagues that make up the publisher’s editorial board.

Then they have to get your book proposal onto the actual agenda for the (usually) weekly editorial meeting.

Then they have to pitch your project in said meeting, hopefully win the day, and get the green light to get back to your agent (or you) to continue the conversation.

Editors have shortcuts for all of these steps if they are 100% jazzed about a project, but if they are following the steps above it can easily take at least two weeks to hear back from them. Hence: the Week of Rejection.

Source: https://bucks.com

(The Week of Rejection does not always occur, to be clear! Some proposals resonate with editors more quickly, and there is immediate, heated interest. But many projects, even those that wind up with a terrific book deal in the end, start with a Week of Rejection.)

Conversation

At some point, often after the Wave of Rejection has crested, your agent will start to hear from interested editors. The natural next step your agent will take with any interested editor is to schedule a conversation with YOU, the star of the whole dang show. As with the initial submission process, the more tightly you can time-box these conversations, the better. If an editor has a good conversation with you, they don’t always wait around with their hands in their pockets—they’re going to report back to their in-house deciders and perhaps come right back to the agent with an offer and a deadline.

What do these conversations look like? I like to think of them as two-way auditions—the editor of course wants to learn how clear your vision is for the book, and how engaging you are in conversation about it. (Hot tip: In these conversations, most editors will start with some variation of this opener: “You’ve already done a terrific job describing the book in your proposal, of course, but I’d love to hear a bit from you about your vision for the book, and how you decided you needed to write it.” Prepare accordingly.)

But conversely, editors know that if they liked your book proposal, other editors probably did as well, so they are also auditioning for you. These conversations are your chance to ask any and all questions you’d like to ask the person who may well be your editor for the book. How do they like to work with authors during the writing process? What other books have they worked on recently that seem to jibe with your project? What drew them to your project? How many books do they work on each year? How would they launch the book? This, and more, is all fair game—don’t be afraid to get curious!

Close

Ideally, at some point in the pitch process you and your agent have spoken with several interested editors—if so, it’s time to CLOSE.

This is not some hard-nosed Glengarry Glen Ross scenario, to be clear. Everyone involved at this point is a fellow book nerd, and wherever your project lands you will be working closely with said nerd for years, so deception, emotional blackmail, or anything else nefarious or manipulative from your agent has no place in the process.

Closing scenarios can be formal or informal—sometimes an agent will simply encourage all interested editors to submit their offers, share those offers with the author, and negotiate with whichever editors the author would like to.

But often, when multiple editors are interested, an agent will set up an auction-esque closing scenario. They will set a deadline by which offers need to be received, they will delineate the rights that are on offer, and they will define the auction format (traditional, top four, best bids, or something more esoteric). Let me explain one of those formats just to shed a little more light on them: in a top-four auction, editors will be asked to submit an opening offer. The top four offers (that is, the four highest advances offered for the rights available) will proceed to the second round, which often will then proceed in a traditional format—the lowest remaining bidder will be presented with the highest offer and asked to either improve upon that offer or leave their offer as is and exit the auction. Then it’s the second-lowest bidder’s turn, and so on.

I call this process “auction-esque” because while it resembles an auction, it actually isn’t one. That is, the publisher with the highest offer at the end of the auction doesn’t necessarily sign up the book. Once all the offers are finalized, they are presented to the author, and the author is free to choose any of them—or none of them at all. This means that highly un-auctionable factors come into play: which editors the author connected best with, which publishers seem best-positioned to launch the book successfully, which publishers have more marketing muscle than others, which publishers are independent, and so on.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself—what do these offers actually look like? I mentioned this way back in October, but let me refresh our collective memory: a publisher will offer you an advance (money they will pay you to write the book), a set of rights they’d like to exercise (the right to publish the book in print, ebook, audio; the right to publish excerpts from the book; and a host of other subsidiary rights), a territory in which they have those rights exclusively (e.g. North America, UK & Commonwealth, or even the whole world in rare cases), and a payout schedule (how they propose to pay you the advance over several installments).

Handshake

Once you’ve fielded offers, and through auction or negotiation arrived at an offer that you would like to accept, your agent gets to make one fun phone call, and then has to write several un-fun emails. The fun call is to the editor whose offer you’d like to accept, letting them know that they’ve got a deal in principle! The emails are to the other terrific editors who spent time and energy (and likely some workplace influence) on your project, letting them know that the book has gone elsewhere.

At this point, however, this is still just a handshake deal—your agent (or you) will be waiting to receive a contract draft from the publisher, to negotiate the finer points of the agreement before it’s ready for you to sign. I mention this now because there are two things that you as the author should NOT do between your handshake deal and the actual signing of a contract:

First, don’t announce the book deal anywhere yet. There’s always a very small chance that some point or another in the contract will end up being a dealbreaker, and you’ll have to go back to other publishers or simply decide it’s more sensible for you to self-publish. There will be PLENTY of time between the contract signing and your publication date to celebrate the book deal. If your enthusiasm is simply uncontainable (hey, it happens to me too!), try to stick to something lovely and enigmatic like the inimitable Eric Smith:

And second: don’t start writing the book in earnest—UNLESS it brings you genuine joy and you know you’ll publish the book no matter what. Otherwise, give yourself a month or two break from all the proposal-building work, and tackle the writing process refreshed and ready to go.

We’ll cover what happens after the handshake in the next post—it’ll be time to talk publishing contracts!

Speaking of my next post, a bit of logistics: you’ll next hear from me on May 5, because I’m headed to London next week for the London Book Fair. See you in May!