You may have noticed in my last post about how I wrote my non-fiction book proposal that the class that I took was ten weeks long but it only took nine to write it. That’s because the last week of the class was devoted to writing a query letter. Why write a book proposal if you’re not going to actually try to get a book published?
Before I wrote the query letter, I had to decide if I wanted to contact publishers directly or try to get a literary agent. That was pretty much a no-brainer for me. I had met authors, in person and online, who had not used a literary agent, and they had varying stories of success and not-much-success. But I think that after having been exposed to and part of several types of industries before I decided to write a book, I had already decided that I didn’t want to learn another type of industry, even if it were possible. The world of book publishing was, and still is, inscrutable to me.
Also, in general, I am very much in favor of paying an expert professional for their knowledge, contacts, and experience. I have found that from plumbing to taxes, and everything in between, I save money in the end. Sometimes the money amounts to the time I save that I can then spend working on something that I know how to do. Sometimes it’s the real bucks that flow back to me that I would never have known about or to which I would never have had access. Almost every time, though, I avoid the headache and stress that come from trying to make decisions that will have a very real impact down the line.
So, trying to find a literary agent was something I most definitely wanted to do. To that end, I wrote and rewrote my query letter, in the tenth week of my online course on how to write a non-fiction book proposal, and you can read it below in a PDF.
Next post: Step 4. Querying Agents
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