Agent Interview: Wendy Keller

Great nonfiction

Irving Paul "Swifty" Lazar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Paul_Lazar

Charles Dickens
Edward Rutherfurd
Mark Twain
Napoleon Hill
Allison Weir
Anyone I represented

Selling good nonfiction books is the easiest part of my job, so I focus my attention on helping my clients market their books to grow their businesses as speakers, coaches, consultants, service or product providers. I love the business part of leveraging a book to achieve the author's highest personal and professional goals. I'm the "marketing agent" - one who believes the well-published book(s) are only one piece of an empire.

Have credentials in your subject matter, be smart enough to check if there are similar or identical books and know how yours will be superior, and check any agent's submission guidelines before you submit. That's advice for your own sake, because you will become falsely discouraged if you keep sending your queries to agents who don't even handle books like yours. For example, we get hundreds of fiction, poetry, religious, manifesto, screenplay, memoir and first-person medical trauma stories thrown our way every year, despite the fact that we never have and never will represent any of those projects.

www.KellerMedia.com/query is the only way to attract attention from this agency. We've automated it so that people get treated kindly, respectfully, and that those who are not yet ready get a fair and accurate response in a timely manner...and those who do have something salable immediately rise to the top of the pile within a week.

We are nonfiction agents, therefore we do not represent manuscripts. Nonfiction is sold only via proposal, and if the author doesn't have one, we can help them develop it so that their work can be sold.

Sending to the wrong agency - one that doesn't handle what they are trying to publish; or submitting work that is similar or identical to successful books that were published years ago.

Their credentials on their subject matter and the size, breadth, width, substance of their platform to facilitate the book's success. Publishers of nonfiction buy the platform first, the content second, unless the writer is phenomenally gifted.

Only a proposal is needed in nonfiction.

Talk to them to make sure our goals are aligned; send a contract (sample is on our website); help finish off the proposal; sell the heck out of it to the best possible publisher for the most money we can obtain; sell secondary rights; encourage the author to market, promote, grow, expand, get media, get attention, get the business result she or he most desired when we began.

Busy.