We writers have it all wrong and it wasn’t until I talked to author Hope Edelman did it dawn on me just what we are doing wrong as far as finding a literary agent to represent us.
Hope Edelman is a multi-published author all represented by Elizabeth Kaplan, based in New York. Her books include Motherless Daughters (1994), Letters from Motherless Daughters (1995), Mother of My Mother (1999), Motherless Mothers (2006) and her more recent, The Possibility of Everything (2009).
The agent who agreed to represent her runs the Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency and represents both fiction and nonfiction, and has represented many award-winning, bestselling books over the years. Their primary focus is on narrative and practical nonfiction, biography, history, memoir, pop culture, literary fiction, YA and middle grade fiction, historical fiction and commercial women’s fiction. You can visit them at
http://elizabethkaplanlit.com/.
But it wasn’t all cut and dry. Elizabeth was the third agent she tried and it was simply because she found a common bond between the two which I’ll tell you about shortly, but the fact she’s been with her for seventeen years is something you don’t usually find in this business as agents drop in and out of writers’ lives at the drop of a hat.
Hope remembers first meeting Elizabeth in late winter when she was in graduate school in Iowa. A month earlier, she had purchased the book, How to Write a Book Proposal, at Prairie Lights Bookstore with the intent of writing a proposal about the long term effects of early mother loss.
With a grin she says, “It helped a lot that the temperature outside was about 15 degrees. It helped even more that my recently ex-boyfriend had already found a new girlfriend much cuter and blonder than me, and was trekking all over town with her, hand-in-hand.”
To avoid seeing them together, she holed up in her apartment and worked on the proposal. “I was studying in the Nonfiction Writing Program, not the well-known Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and there wasn’t much overlap between the two. But somehow, my grad school adviser finagled me a seat at a lunch table with a literary agent who’d come from New York for a day to meet with aspiring fiction writers. I was the odd one at the table, not quite sure what I was doing there myself, and my timidity forced me into silence. At the end of lunch, I worked up the courage to thrust my manila envelope holding my proposal into the agent’s hands and asked him to give it a read.
“That was number one.
“Number two was a female agent, also in New York, who’d been recommended by an author who was the friend of an editor I sort of knew. Three degrees of separation was enough for her to agree to read my proposal, so I dropped it into a mailbox outside the main library, accompanied by two friends who did a funky send-off dance with me around the box for good luck. It involved a main library, accompanied by two friends who did a funky send-off dance with me around the box for good luck. It involved a lot of bended elbows and knees and probably looked ridiculous, but we were convinced it would somehow help.
“Number three was an agent who was representing one of my professors. This agent, also in New York — do you sense a pattern here? — wasn’t interested in the book as I described it, but she passed my query letter on to another agent in the office who she thought would be. That agent asked me to send her my proposal. We went back to the mailbox outside the library, did the send-off good luck dance again, and another envelope was on its way.
“Long story made short: Number One called with some story about losing my proposal on a train when he went to the dining car and asked me to resend it. I didn’t think this boded well, so I never mailed it. Number Two, I never heard from again. But Number Three called me within days of reading my packet and asked when she could meet me. Three weeks later, when I was home in New York for Christmas Break, I went to her office in a suit I borrowed from my sister, since I didn’t own one myself. The agent’s name was Elizabeth Kaplan, and I thought she was young and smart and marvelous. Plus, I really, really liked her shoes—high-heeled Mary Janes. Because I didn’t know anything about anything, I hired her on the spot. Which turned out to be the smartest move of my early writing career, because after she helped me rewrite my proposal about early mother loss she sent it to seven editors who had lost their mothers during childhood or adolescence.
“It was a brilliant strategy. Six of the seven asked to meet with me over Spring Break that March, five of them made an offer, and on April Fool’s Day we closed a deal. It was the beginning of a relationship longer than most in my life. And that April 1 remains, hands down, the most exciting day of my whole fifteen-year career. No fooling. No fooling at all.
“I’ve been with my literary agent for seventeen years, which sometimes feels like a record in a publishing world where switching agents and getting dropped by agents is a fact of most writer’s lives. Everyone thinks I first signed with my agent because I knew right away she was the best one for me. That did reveal itself to be true. But back in 1992 I signed with her simply because she was the first agent of three who read my book proposal to completion and wanted to represent my book.”
So this is the story of how Hope Edelman landed an agent to represent her book, The Possibility of Everything. What an we learn from this?
The way to snag an agent is to send them a book they can relate to and in order to know what they could relate to might involve a little research into their past. So instead of going into it blind, do a little research. That research could land you a publishing contract just as it did for Hope.
If you’d like to find out more about Hope Edelman, visit her website at www.thepossibilityofeverything.com.
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