An assistant weeds them out and rejects them.Ĥ. Many proposals which have not followed guidelines, are inappropriate for the agent's profile, are unremarkable, or are poorly written are never seen by the agent. Agent typically takes several weeks/months to respond to proposal. If submitting to multiple agents, the author carefully fulfills each agent's specific guidelines that may include parameters such as word count, line length, and manner of submission and indicates in the cover letter that the author is pursuing multiple agents.ģ. Author seeks that agent with the completed proposal. Just be sure and make sure the one you choose has an established reputation.)Ģ. I also am a Senior Consultant with Credo Communications, which evaluates manuscripts and offers editing services but there are many such entities that offer such services. Souza offers such a service which I highly recommend. At this point a very wise (and relatively inexpensive) strategy could be to pay a publishing industry professional to read and evaluate your proposal before sending it. This must be as perfect as he can make it because rarely does an agent ask for a rewritten proposal. Author completes a non-fiction proposal (including polished sample chapters) as per the style sheet or instructions on an agent's Web site. Please bear in mind that this is an approximation of the process which any number of factors can greatly lengthen or shorten.ġ. Since most Christian publishers today do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, and if you do not personally meet an editor or agent who requests your materials personally at a conference such as Mount Hermon, I will start the process steps with the acquisition of an agent. Please do not inflict yourself upon the overwhelmed professionals of the market if you have not fulfilled those two requirements. I begin by saying that two things must precede this process: You must have something unique and compelling and marketable to say (and if for the Christian market, inner assurance that you've been called to be a writer), and you must be able to write well. For the sake of those of you who wonder what you might reasonably expect (divine intervention excepted, that is), here is an approximate timetable of the process of a nonfiction book represented by an agent. And the book, The Mormon Mirage, has stayed in print, with only one small hiatus, for nearly 40 years.)īut now, even with almost two dozen published books, I submit myself to the process that may have only slightly fewer steps than that for a complete neophyte. Did I say, “not the norm”? (I see it as the power of God, operational and irrepressible. She said, “I have a publisher who would love to publish a book by you,” - and within a few months I had a contract with Zondervan. I'm not a good example of the norm for getting your first book published by a major Christian publisher, because as a young author with a few magazine article credits, I made a chance comment about being a former Mormon to a published author I'd just met. I don't do much author mentoring, because I have learned a painful truth: The vast majority of people who say they want to write a book for publication are not willing to submit to 1) the discipline of learning to write well and 2) then going through a frustrating and time-devouring process of personal inactivity (that's code for “waiting and waiting and waiting”) to see it through.
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