Who should you send a query letter to? Agents – If you are writing fiction, memoir, or a children’s books, you must have an agent who will represent your work to publishers. Publishers – If you are writing nonfiction or poetry, you can query the publisher. TIP: Research the agency or publisher. Visit their website and check their submission guidelines.   How do I find agents or publishers who will be interested in my book project? There are lots of useful sites which can help you identify the right agent or publisher for your writing. Here are some you may find useful. AgentQuery.com QueryTracker.net WritersMarket.com ManuscriptWishList.com Poets & Writers Guide to Literary Agents   Writer’s Market publishes two annual reference guides to finding agents and publishers you should consult. Guide to Literary Agents 2016 edited by Chuck Sambuchino includes sample query letters, informative articles, success stories, features on new agents, and listings for more than a thousand literary agents. Writer’s Market 2016 edited by Robert Lee Brewer includes far more than listings for book publishers. They also provide up-to-date information on consumer and trade magazines, contests and awards, lists of professional writing organizations, and timely articles related to the business of being a writer. Some of the best ways to find the right agent for book include looking at comparable books to yours and seeing who the publishers are and reading the acknowledgements to see which editors worked with the author and which agent, if any, represented their work. Attend…

The business of publishing continues to evolve and new finance models have emerged in recent years. There is a lot of new middle ground between self-publishing – Amazon, Smashwords, Lulu – and the traditional route of finding an agent who sells your work to one of the big commercial trade presses – Penguin Random House, Hatchette Book Group, Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. Small and independent presses can’t offer authors large advances or extravagant marketing campaigns, but they do offer many advantages over self-publishing including distribution. Most self-published authors recognize the difficulty of getting their books into retail stores and libraries because they lack access to the distribution systems used by publishers. Finding a good fit with a small publisher who champions your manuscript can be an ideal scenario for authors. Academic presses shouldn’t be overlooked. It might surprise you to discover which university presses today publish commercial nonfiction, memoir, even fiction. Some presses, if they endorse your manuscript editorially, may negotiate with an author for a subsidy to proceed with publication. When an author invests in the initial production costs, it is possible to negotiate a higher copyright royalty rate in lieu of an advance. Subsidy publication is an avenue to explore if the author has the financial resources or can find a benefactor to provide a subsidy for the production expenses of publication. Subsidy publication is a “dirty little secret” in the publishing business. Many traditional publishers don’t want it well known that such business arrangements can…

You spend years working toward the publication of your book. Take writing classes. Attend workshops. Mingle at literary conferences. Develop your craft. Work with a writing coach. Write the manuscript. Hire an editor. Revise and rewrite. Build a website and blog every week. Grow an audience platform. Write reviews of books by authors you admire. Polish a proposal. Query agents. Receive rejection after rejection. And you wonder if it will stop hurting so much if you simply give up now. When you get a “no” it hurts. You doubt yourself. You question whether the book you’ve written is any good. You wonder if you’ve been suffering from grandiose delusions about your own talents. When you reread the latest rejection letter a few days later, you might see a glimmer of hope. The agent complimented your writing but didn’t think it was right for them or didn’t think they were the right person to sell the project. So maybe, you think, it’s not you or your writing but simply this wasn’t the right agent. Or maybe the agent is right about an insufficient audience platform, the lack of character development, or the first 10 pages didn’t have a strong enough hook. And you go back to work. You struggle to improve the manuscript. Tighten the narrative arc. Deepen the characters. Figure out a way to repackage the project. Submit essays, poems, or short stories for publication in literary journals or popular magazines. Give readings of your work-in-progress. Expand your social network.…