On Book Siblings and Finding an Agent

finding the people whose work speaks to you, and running with it

A lot of people have asked me about this lately, and my inbox is cluttered, so I figured I’d make a small, chaotic post about it. Back to other kinds of updates next week, including some weird pots and book problems. (If you are/become a paid annual subscriber, and would like a signed paperback copy of Cost of Living, email me your address at emily.f.maloney@gmail.com and I will send you one. If you already have a copy, I’m happy to send you a book cup. US addresses only, while supplies last, etc etc).

This little cup went to its new home last week. Will have more to share soon.

Disclaimer: this is for nonfiction books only, mostly memoirs and essay collections.

Frequently, I get emails from folks asking about agenting. Where to get an agent. How to get an agent. When they might need one. They’d like to work with me to help find the right agent for them. Maybe they want to query my agent. There is a lot of anxiety about finding an agent, and much of this is warranted. It’s hard to query. There are some good resources already out there on the book business side more broadly, like Courtney Maum’s book, Before and After the Book Deal, which I highly recommend. Sometimes I help people, like a yenta. I make them a list of folks to query and one of those people ends up becoming their agent. I am not good at charging for this, though maybe I should. I can’t do this now—the book is sort of taking over everything these days—but maybe someday I can offer this.

Figuring out what agents are looking for is fun for me, a kind of weird little puzzle. Don’t get me started on editors; I love trying to figure out what they’re looking for too. If I didn’t write, maybe in another life I’d try to work in this business, somehow. (Though lately I’m thinking a lot about becoming a CPA, because I think writers are generally really bad with money and I’m a bit of a personal finance nerd. Right now, I would like to do almost anything else besides finish this book, but that’s how making a book goes, I think, at a certain point. I am apparently now doing all the work while crying. The pages are happening. But wow, hard. More about this in a future post).

The big thing about finding an agent and determining your book siblings is that it requires you to honestly evaluate your work.

Here’s what I mean by this. Determining what kind of writer you are will help you find an agent over anything else. Yes, the book needs to be “good;” that can feel nebulous, and tastes differ. You may or may not workshop your book to death before sending it out. A memoir is so much more than relaying what happened to you (more about this in a future post, maybe). A lot of agenting advice focuses on finding an agent who represents a specific type of books. I’m not saying you don’t need that too. Don’t send a genre that an agent doesn’t represent. Read what they are looking for very closely. If you don’t, you will waste their time. Agenting is a very small business and these folks all know each other. Don’t mass email people. Make sure you get the agent’s name right. And so on. These are all basic things that plenty of people cover in book querying 101. Get a subscription to Publishers Marketplace and study that thing. Not all deals end up in there, but mostly they do, and can be a really good way to see who’s selling what, and where.

Relatedly, it’s a very hard time for publishing right now. A lot of editors have lost their jobs through layoffs (or offered buyouts) and many agents are scrambling to figure out where to submit instead. And everyone goes on vacation in August, so you might wait to query until September. That’s okay. The speed of this business is best described as glacial in many respects, and it’s ok to take time and find the right people to query.

Who are these people, and what do they want?

This is where you take a minute to do a little advanced googling. Look at the prospective agent’s current clients. How are they like you? If the answer is “they wrote what I feel to be a similar book,” that’s not it. Does the agent only represent people who have MFA degrees or those without or a mix? That’s something to note. Do they mostly represent academics? Do they represent more commercial books from folks with big online platforms? Do they rep mostly literary people? Something in between? Where are these people published when not publishing books? What do their covers look like? Where are the books reviewed? Do the books win prizes or get into celebrity book clubs or optioned for movies? Where is the book on the shelf in the bookstore—what section? Does the book have raised lettering on the cover? If the author has an MFA, where is it from? Maybe the agent tends to represent people from a particular school or background. Always read the mission statement on the agency website!

Truly, researching existing clients is the biggest determining factor when I find agents for folks to query. Then it comes down to fit. Do they rep books like yours?

A bit more about book siblings

Whenever I teach other people to sell their work, in a classroom, I talk a lot about book siblings, or maybe book cousins. I can spend a lot of time on this. It’s basically: books that speak to your book. Books that were forged under similar circumstances. But a lot of people get this wrong. They think that book sibling means books that have the same content or ideas. Books about the same topics. But this is hardly ever the case. In fact, if your book is too close to an existing client’s book, the agent may be much less likely to take you on, because you might be a kind of competition. It depends on the agent, of course. But I have seen this happen plenty of times.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, I managed to sneak into classes at the Nonfiction Writing Program, the MFA program for nonfiction students. I cried a lot during and after workshop. I didn’t really know what was going on. I spent a long time on pieces that I thought were okay, only to have my professors ask me, pointedly, if this was what I was submitting to workshop. My classmates were largely older and more sophisticated and had been places I had not. I only recently learned how to write an essay, long after I took classes in this program. I wrote a lot of scenes, but not essays then. The scenes told a story, but I couldn’t tell you what those scenes meant; I had no big picture view of the essay.

In one class in particular, a workshop, almost all of my classmates published books after completing the workshop. I had no business being in there either, but my teacher for that class helped me identify what I was writing (at the time I was turning in a bunch of scenes that took place in the ER, scenes that would later form the foundation of Cost of Living). When I think of book siblings, I think of the books that were made by my classmates during or following that class. They have nothing in common on the surface, or maybe they all grapple with ideas about truth, and what truth is (at one point, in some other classes, there were rumors of people doing things like bringing in a pair of shoes to workshop, that this might be an essay; almost everything was an essay then) but we are using a sort of common language, a way to describe the world that is partly attributed to the skills developed in and following that class.

So how do you find your book siblings? And how do you find an agent?

Mostly: reading a lot. You find the books that speak to you. You learn to analyze how these books are like yours. You look in the acknowledgements of the books you love and you read the books written by the people listed and watch recorded talks from those writers on YouTube, or attend events or readings in person. You read all their books, and all their friends’ books, and whatever interviews you can find. You write as much as you can and assume your work is probably not any good and you keep writing anyway. Some people find their agent by publishing in a literary magazine (n+1, Granta, etc), or a glossy magazine, or the newspaper (The New York Times). They publish the essay version of their book in one of these places and then agents reach out to them. Reading the lit mags can help, or being a reader for a literary magazine can be useful too, though also understanding that you might not be a lit mag person is also fine. I have only really managed to get into one literary magazine (VQR). If you are a lit mag type, that’s great, but you may also struggle when it comes to audience and platform, because comparatively few people are reading those magazines. And you will need to get into a top tier place in order for it to “count” towards your publication credits. (Think of places that regularly have essays in Best American Essays, if you are a literary writer. There is a guy who counts these).

Finally, there can be a real opportunity in querying a young and hungry agent over someone super established. Don’t be put off by the length of time they’ve been in the business; people I know with younger agents really go to bat for them. Some of those folks get really nice book deals, too.

Lately I am reading & enjoying:

-The Night Parade (out in October 2023—preorder now), by Jami Nakamura Lin

-Bring the War Home, by Kathleen Belew

-The Unsuitable, by Molly Pohlig

Are you querying? Writing? What helped you in this process? How do you find your book siblings (or just other stuff you like to read?)