Write Nonfiction NOW!

Five Tips for Authors Who Want to Pitch the Media

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While a good media appearance may depend upon preparation—knowing the message you intend to convey and understanding how to communicate in a way that reaches listeners on an emotional level, you’ll never get a chance to speak to a radio or television audience if you don’t know how to pitch the media effectively. My regular guest blogger L. Drew Gerber,…
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How to Prepare for a Media Interview: A Formula for Success

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As we move into the third week of Write Nonfiction in November (WNFIN), we turn our attention to building platform—a built-in readership for your book or any other product you might want to sell. Every aspiring author or businessperson (writers are businesspeople) needs a platform. In fact, an agent or acquisition editor may reject a query or book proposal submitted…
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Why are Some Book Proposals Better than Others?

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Any aspiring author who has every written a book proposal—or considered writing a book proposal—has wondered what might set theirs apart from the hundreds that show up on an agent’s or acquisition editor’s desk each day. I’ve heard about all sorts of new tactics used to gain attention; most agents tell me they prefer the tried and true formats and…
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Query Letters: Avoiding “The Oops Factor”

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Today Mike Larsen, a literary agent and author of How to Write a Book Proposal and How to Get a Literary Agent, offers another post on how to write a successful query letter–one that can gain the attention of an agent or acquisitions editor. He and his partner Elizabeth Pomada run the Larsen-Pomada literary agency in San Francisco. For those…
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Query Letters: The Hook, the Book and the Cook

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For those WNFIN participants writing books, once you have at least 25 or 30 pages completed and you know what content will comprise the rest of your manuscript, you can think about composing a query letter. This precursory to a book proposal gets sent out to agents or publishers to see if they have interest in reading your proposal. However,…
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