Alexander Patten

May 29, 2024

At long last, yesterday I finally submitted my first ever book proposal. It’s taken me months to actually complete this task, with all the bells and whistles, but the next one should be much faster. I will not pontificate a little bit about my experience in this pre-publishing process so far.

First off, most traditionally published authors will tell you about the “querying” process. Queries are a common form of getting books submitted to a perspective agent or publisher, a very terse one at that. A query letter is typically well under 500 words. Also, even if an agent gives a positive response to an author query, it’s still quite likely the document won’t even see a publisher.

I started my journey looking for traditional literary agents to query back about mid-February. I quickly found an overabundance of agencies staffed entirely by exactly two types of agents: those looking for “Up market” literature (read: “books for rich folks”), and people who wanted to publish “underrepresented groups” and “non-white/non-European” characters and settings.

As a result, I have yet to query a single traditional agent. (Pro-tip, don’t just spray and pray queries, but actually get a level of familiarity with the agent you want to represent you.)

After scouring many different traditional literary agencies and quite literally finding no feasible agents to query, I discovered Steve Laube’s literary agency. They’re a Christian agency looking for Christian authors, yet not all of their books scream out from the front cover “I’m a Christian book for a Christian audience.” Rather, his philosophy is that what determines whether a book is Christian literature is ultimately the author, not some minimum number of Christ references or gospel presentations, or something like that.

And that’s how I want my books to be as well, not in your face with #TheMessage, but simply purveying truths on their own, which lead to greater truth. “Finally!” I thought.

However, there was still plenty of work to be done. I read, read, and re-read and re-read again the various articles on their website relating to how to write a cover letter, and how to write a book proposal, and what each of their agents are looking for.

In addition to that, I went through every single published fiction author they’ve ever represented, and looked for what kinds of books each one had written. If it looked like the author had written sci-fi fantasy, I would search for who their agent was, with varying results.

Then, I went to Christian Writers Institute, and got their course on book proposals and went through all of that twice. By about the second time through, I realized that in all my note taking this whole time, I hadn’t even recognized the difference between the 4-Part Cover Letter, and the Book Proposal itself, which is a separate thing.

I’d be happen to perhaps write a future entry going more into detail on that, if you’re interested, let me know.

Moving on, I finally went through all the work of separating out the Cover letter and Literary proposal, and was ready to send on May 28th right before it was time for work…

Then my computer decided it needed an update with our spotty internet. Once that was finally done, I rushed through everything one last time, saw it all looked good enough, hit the send button, and sped off to work.

Now it’s finally done, and as I begin a good old fashioned game of… waiting, I’m already excited for the new projects I can begin. Hope to see you soon.

Peace!