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 welcome too, of course—I’m always down to trade shop talk!)
So, what can you expect from Hook to Book? Every 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.
About the vibe
I want that humanity to be the animating spirit of this newsletter, and of our conversations as the community grows. I’ll get things started: everything you read in Hook to Book will just be one human’s opinion. (OK, sometimes I’ll share stories from authors and colleagues. But still—just a handful of individual opinions at most.) I’ll do my best to be thoughtful, to take care in the writing of each post, and to share my thoughts as authentically and transparently as possible. But I know I have holes in my game: I’ve only worked as an editor at one publisher, I’ve only worked as an agent at one agency, I am not an author myself, I do not have an English degree and the well-read foundation that comes with it. I never finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I don’t know how to pronounce “halcyon.” (OK, having written that I had to look it up. Cross it off the list!)
In this spirit, it’s my intention that the comment and discussion threads will be safe spaces as well. The publishing world is needlessly opaque, in my opinion, and that murkiness leads to the fear of looking stupid by asking questions that supposedly have obvious answers. (Authors, you are not alone in this! Meetings in publishing houses can be rife with the fear of appearing dumber than your colleagues.) We don’t need to sustain that apprehension here—if you have a question as we take this journey, ask away in the comments!
Along with fear, there is more than enough pain in the publishing world as well. Whether you are searching for the right literary agent, sharing your book proposal with editors, or steeling yourself for the first reviews of your published book, you will face rejection. (Once again: authors, you are not alone in this! Agents pitching editors, editors trying to persuade their colleagues, and publicists building campaigns for new books will all experience mostly rejection along the way.) The more we can show each other that rejection is not a final judgment, nor a binding sentence handed down from a higher authority, the better we can stand up in the face of it.
And that’s where we’ll pick up next week: with a sunny discussion of the trials to expect as you take the first steps of your book journey.
Everybody loves a disclaimer
As we get started, I do have to add a quick 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.
To maintain that independence, I also ask that no one share actual book proposal queries in free or paid posts—this is a venue to share what I hope is valuable information, not an engine for client acquisition.