Four ways agents make their decisions.
Also: "I'm pitching a memoir but ... do agents prefer fiction?"
Should I pitch my memoir stating I’m willing to re-write it as fiction?
So, SO! grateful! I’ll be one of the faculty at the 54th Willamette Writers Festival: Community, Craft, Career. My offerings:
Build to a Book Deal: Submit Strategically
Effective strategies for submitting all short work—including flash fiction. Learn to build a publishing history that attracts agents and editors to your query or book proposal.
First Page Critique
Learn what makes a first page shine. 20-minutes sessions for a one-on-one sit down with Alle’s supportive yet incisive feedback.
Memoir? Fiction?
Alle sez:
Commercial reasoning: After you sign your contract, it could be two years before your book publishes. Don’t write toward trends.
Artistic reasoning: You will know the answer when you write your story — really write your story, not the story you think you can most easily sell.
Most stories can be told in memoir, in fiction, as an autobiographical novel. Your story can only be told as you can tell it.
Not to steal italics’ limelight, but the emphasis here has to be on your.
Agents make their decisions … how?
Agents are looking for a book they can sell that minute.
Many go through the slush pile only when they need to fill a hole in their client list.
Your manuscript has to cross their desk at the moment they are looking for something like it
Rough odds. How to conquer?.
Tell the story you want to tell, and tell it the way that only you can. That will be your most genuine, your most potent work.
A business note:
As far back as 2010, well-regarded agent Jeff Kleinman wrote in Writers’ Digest that, in selling memoir, he relies greatly on the author’s platform.
He continued: “The author may be ‘unknown,’ but having published materials in well-known, preferably national, forums can provide a useful link to the buyer: I may not know who this writer is, but I know the paper she writes for, and I love/like/trust it.”