103: How to Land a Literary Agent and Publisher with David Moldawer (Part One)

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

I am so excited to bring you this two part conversation with David Moldauer. As you'll hear in the intro, David has decades of experience as a book editor working in the biggest publishing houses to his own independent writing and editing and even ghostwriting shop. You will Hear in Part 1 why most books fail, that most people don't read books how to make your books stand out, what a bookitect does. That's David's term for his work. What types of books most interest literary agents and big publishing houses. The most important question to ask yourself as a potential author packaging your big idea and the difference between a platform book and a good book. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy Part one. Foreign.

Hello my friends. I'm so excited to be here today with David Moldauer. David spent over a decade as a book editor at a slew of New York publishing houses including St. Martin's Press, McGraw Hill and Penguin, acquiring and editing best selling nonfiction in the areas of business, technology, health and memoir. Today he's an independent writer and editor. I've seen many projects pass through the David book attack train and then come out and be super successful on the other side. He writes one of my favorite newsletters, the Maven Game for experts, authors, publishers and agents on making ideas and knowledge public, writing, speaking, sharing without hating yourself in the morning. We met through a mutual friend. Who else? Dori Clark. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks Jenny. Thanks for having me. This is great.

I'm so happy to be here. It's been really fun tracking all the projects that you've been part of along the way and I want to start by asking what is a book? A tech? What do you do?

Well you know, when I left publishing, I was an editor for a long time. And then I got into online education and, you know, I had a choice of continuing on into that world of technology. And it was all very exciting, but I missed books and. And authors would reach out to me for help. People I'd worked with or just people in the industry. And I realized the very best part of being an editor is working with someone on figuring out their ideas, where they stand as a thought leader, how they present themselves, their brand, all those interesting topics. And I decided to give it a shot. And then the question was, what do I call it? And looking back, I probably didn't need to call it anything. A lot of my peers just say so and so, collaborator. But I had to get clever. I like to name things, I like to name books, I like to name businesses. And it popped into my head after about 30 seconds. I think of the architecture of a book as the most important part of the process. You know, figuring out what the point is, a step that is very often skipped. You know, when people come to me, they know they want to write a book, they have all this information, but they don't really think about, you know, why the reader would ever want to read it or what it's going to do for the reader. And as a result, they can spend years developing a project without ever really getting anywhere. And by laying the right foundation, by figuring out what is the point of all this, which we can talk about what I mean by that. But it feels like architecture. It feels like creating a blueprint. And so I combined book and architect and came up with bookitect. And the domain name was available. I couldn't believe it. I thought somebody else must have come up with that word before, but no. And so I trademarked it and all that stuff. And, you know, it always kind of. People raise an eyebrow and then they get it again. I didn't really need a name, but I think it's pretty clever.

I love it. Once you have the domain, lights out, it's yours, right? A lot of people that I interact with are on the cusp of a book. They have a big idea starting to form. It's kind of in a goo state, as my friend Penny and I might call it. And it feels for a lot of people, like there's this invisible or, I don't know, very visible, daunting wall. There's. There's the hope of the book on one side, and then on the other side, there's maybe getting a book deal or at least Having the confidence to really go all in and finish the book, even if they're going to self publish. And I feel like you come in to help get them over the wall. I almost think of a tough mutter and you come in and you say, I got you. We can do this. And you're sort of helping take people from this goo state into what eventually becomes a finished book. And I'm wondering, what do you notice? Like, what do you see in common among people who come to you when I don't know before they're your client? The biggest unknowns or the biggest misconceptions or even mistakes? At that goose state stage of things.

There are a lot of emotions at play. And that's especially interesting in the area of business books or practical prescriptive nonfiction, self help books. With a novel, right? You sort of expect the person, they're an artist, right? They're supposed to be stormy and, or odd or quirky. But if you're coming into this as a business leader, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, you're supposed to have yourself together. I don't know if we use naughty words in this podcast. You're supposed to have your stuff together. If not, it doesn't feel natural to talk about all the emotions necessarily that people have about putting themselves out there, making themselves vulnerable. Anytime you say anything publicly that's worthwhile, that's worth saying, someone will disagree with it. If no one can disagree with it, you aren't really saying anything. And so there's a lot of stuff swirling around. And our initial conversations before we even officially start working together are all around basically me feeling out their emotional interior and what exactly they're trying to achieve with this. Because a book, this is symbolic power. You know, like the people that teacher who said I would never amount to anything. Like, there's a lot of buried stuff that publishing a book is intended to address, whether people realize it or not. And so I talk first and foremost about what is your goal here? What does success look like? People will come to me having written a book or at least a certain number of words in a manuscript somewhere in a Word document. And I ask them very frequently, I'll say, okay, well, what if we just took this right now and, and we spent the next 15 minutes making this a Kindle book and uploading it. We could do it in an hour. If you had 60,000 words in a Word document right now. If we just spent the next hour, we could get a book designer on one of those sites. We could use Canva. We could Very quickly create a Kindle file that anyone could go, and there's your book. And whenever I say that there's a certain kind of person who really stops dead in their tracks because they hadn't thought of that, they'll talk about, well, I've got to get this out there. I've got to get this out there. I don't really care what happens. There's a lot of that I hear. It, of course, is defensiveness. It's like, if I don't go into this saying I want this to be a bestseller or something, I can't get hurt, I can't fail. And for someone who is an entrepreneur who's used to situations where they have some degree of control and knowledge, and if I open up this retail store in this location and I look at how many people walk by it every day, I can calculate my revenue, they have none of that anymore. And so suddenly, for them to set a goal like, I want this to sell on a certain number of copies feels very uncomfortable because they don't know how they're going to get there. So they'll say, well, I just need to put this out there. This is so valuable, I'll feel better once I publish it. But of course, they don't actually want to upload a Word document and have it available on Amazon as a sort of dinky ebook that they spent an hour putting together. So once we get over that hump and they're willing to acknowledge that maybe there's a little bit more to this vision, then we can start talking about what success actually looks like. It's interesting because everyone comes at this. You know, many people don't even read these kinds of books. You know, people will go into it saying, I want to write a business book. And they've never read a business book before. And that's a common expert issue in general, because if you go to school for something or, you know, become very good at something, you're not generally reading books for a general audience in that area. You're reading specialty texts. If you're a doctor, you're not reading the latest diet books. You know, you read textbooks on nutrition and molecular biology in med school, and so you're trying to write a diet book. You've never read a diet book or have any idea what is in the most popular diet books that your readers are already familiar with. So I got to kind of dig into what kind of a book do you think you're going to write? What are some books that might be similar, might fit on the shelf next to your book. And it gets them thinking. Often they'll realize they actually have no idea what this end product looks like, what success looks like, what they're hoping to get out of it. Then I start talking. Once we've gotten to that realization, then I can start pointing them towards, you know, what the real picture is.

I'm glad you brought up the emotional qualities of this time in the process. And it strikes me that some people have read no books in their category. Others, like me, have read every single book in the category. And that can sometimes lead to less confidence because it's like, well, who am I to step in? Or everything's been said. And it seems like in my experience, when I have a new book idea, I either think it's brilliant or it's terrible. And I don't actually know. And I do the comps and, you know, try to figure out where it fits and what my unique spin is. But I love that you brought up this emotional side of the process because I bet a lot of authors come to you with a little bit of shaky confidence at this stage. How do you see your role or anyone's role in terms of helping just keep someone's confidence high enough while still being humble and knowing what they don't know and open to all the feedback?

Well, there's two general categories. There's the person who has shaky confidence, and then there's the person who has tremendous confidence, and they are actually the least confident of all. When someone comes in like you, like, is this new enough? Does this stand out? Like, that's normal? When someone comes in and says, this is a book like no other, I know that they're really scared. That's actually a much, much harder client and one that I will often foist off on someone else.

How come that's so fascinating?

This is 100% true. I had a person come to me and say that their book advance should be over a billion dollars.

What?

And by the way, this was not a crazy person.

I don't even think James Clear could get a billion dollar.

No, of course not. Oh, my God. But it was one of these things. Like, it was their way, I think, emotionally, of expressing, even though they were saying this was a totally realistic, you know, judgment of how many copies this book could sell. I think it was based on this emotion of, like, this is so important. How can I convey to this guy who does me, who doesn't know who I am and really appreciate how significant my message is? How do I convey that to him in business terms. And I think that was what came out of that person's mouth without realizing how absurd the notion was, no matter what the book was. That scares me when somebody is so out of touch, because, again, like, you read a lot of books, so you know that when you're entering the public sphere with a book, the readers, especially the core readers who buy a lot of these books and are sort of the tastemakers and the influencers who will then spread your book beyond that core group of people who read a lot of these kinds of books, they know what's out there. They know the trends. They know people are talking about habits or stoicism or whatever. And we don't use this word anymore. We don't know this word is tired. If you're aware of that, you're hoping to kind of make your little dent. But if you don't know any of it, it's like, well, I'm going to tear this world wide open. They've never heard of to do lists before, right? I have to tell them, people do know about to do lists. Maybe your clients don't know about to do lists, but readers of these books are well aware that there's a thing called a to do list. And that can be a very uncomfortable conversation. But I will say that, Jenny, when someone comes to me from your world, which is less often than the highly read person, but it is a thing that can be very challenging in another way. Confidence for sure, right? Because you know what's out there. You know how tough the competition is. You know how good some of these books are and what you're up against. But there's also the thing where someone will come to me and say, hey, I've got nothing from my own personal experience, but I have read 30 books, and I think that makes me an expert. And I have to explain to them that these books are already digested. These books are already shaped by the author. If you're not even doing original research in terms of the papers and the case studies and where they're getting these ideas from, you're digesting, you know, the cud. You're eating the cud and digesting the cud. Again, there's nothing left by the time you're done with that. And there are some exceptions. I will say. There are some names you've heard of where really they just went and read 10 books and then wrote their own book and succeeded. But generally speaking, you know, there's gotta be. What's valuable is really what is obvious to you. And what you're bringing to the table and the rest of it is just to supplement that, and your unique voice is what makes it valuable.

We'll be right back just after this.

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At this point in your career, people come to you very early to write a proposal or help writing the entire book, maybe before or after they've gotten a book deal. At this point, with how many books you've seen cross your desk, do you feel that you can tell when it's going to be a hit, when it's not? When they will get a book deal with a traditional publisher, when they won't?

I feel pretty good about judging whether a book has a chance of being acquired, because I did that for so long and it has changed since I left publishing, because with the indie hybrid, whatever word you want to call it, those presses, you've had experience with this kind of new model of publishing. The traditional companies that do business books and prescriptive nonfiction and self help, they actually have to be even more selective. The middle area is now much more contested, whereas sort of the big celebrities are still basically focused on traditional. So they really have to focus in that area. They have to focus on the big swings. And so it's even tougher to kind of get over the transom there as an author. So would I have bought this? And then I go 20% below that or 30% below that, and then if it still meets that threshold, then I feel pretty confident. And it's a lot of factors. Generally people who have not been in my position and you don't continue to talk to editors and publishers tend to have very distorted view of what will sell. And the reason for that primarily, like if you're sitting there listening to this and you think, you know, why books succeed is platform. And so people will come to me and say, oh, well, I can do this because such and such books did this. Or I can talk. This subject worked. Or this cover or this title worked. This weird packaging worked. And what they don't realize is that book is better thought of as, like, a rock band merch that you buy. Like a T shirt you buy at an AC DC concert. You don't buy that shirt because it's a great shirt. You buy it because you're an AC DC fan and you're at the concert, and you know, they cost way more than a T shirt should cost. But you're there and you're excited about AC dc. And likewise with the book. You know, some books, it's a badge of membership and a tribe. But it. Does that mean it's a good book or that they would ever have bought that book had they not known who you were and been part of your campaign? That's the real question. So, you know, a big part of what I do is figuring out why books actually sold so that I can distinguish between that title sold that book, and that's a terrible title. And it's sold despite it because this person has 7 million people on their YouTube channel.

That reminds me, I have not read this book yet, and I'm sure she's. I'm a very nice person. However, when I saw Girl Wash your face come out and, like, just rocket launch to the top of the New York Times and every list, I was like, I was so confused. I was so confused. I'm like, girl, wash your face. I was just truly, truly confused. And then I realized, oh, she has a ginormous platform. Like you said, if she was an unknown with no platform, I'm not sure if Girl wash your face would have rocketed to the top. Maybe, maybe. But in that case, it's correlated, not causation, in terms of the title and positioning and everything.

Yeah, I mean, I study this stuff. This is my favorite. Really, my favorite area of personal interest is to see those weird books. I remember when I was much younger, I think it was even before I came into publishing and I saw who moved my cheese on a rack at Barnes and Noble? And I picked it up, and I thought it was a children's book because it kind of looks like one. Then I realized it was a business book. And then I start reading it, and it's a story about rats. And then I was like, okay, well, when does the story about rats end and the advice begin? And I realized it doesn't. And the text is really huge. It looks like it's written for people with vision problems, you know, like those large textbooks. I was just totally flummoxed by this thing, and I dug into it, and of course, there's a whole story of why that book sells. And I have all kinds of theories about those kinds of books.

Tell us your theories, please.

Well, this is a category. I don't know how many people are familiar with it. It was a very, very big book for a long time, and it still sells plenty. But it was a kind phenomenon, and it's a category we call in the book industry a parable. And basically, you're teaching a lesson to a fictional story. Our iceberg is melting is one that they published when I was at St. Martin's Press. That was another very successful one. And so there's two factors. Obviously, there's platform, because the author had big speaking platform. But there's also this. Here's the cynical view at very, very large companies, if you are the CEO or head of human resources or whatever, and you have a lesson that you want the people at the front line of your company to learn. And when I say frontline, I mean if you are the CEO of McDonald's, the people managing the stores, even the people at the cash registers, they're not going to read a big, thick business book. And in many cases, that's just going to be beyond their reading level, period. Or at least that might be your assumption based on your biases or however you want to look at. But I think in many cases, it's actually a very fair assumption. Very few people read hardcover nonfiction in terms of the total American population, which is another. Wake up when everyone says that.

I know, it's not like I'm in a bubble, right?

You're in a bubble if there's 300 million people in America and people will say, oh, well, if only one in a hundred people buy this. And dog owners, it's like, no, you don't get to go after all dog owners. You get to go after the 2% of dog owners who read any books at all.

And isn't it like the average American reads five books a year, something like that?

That sounds a little bit high to me, actually. And if the average is being pulled up, it's being pulled up by, you know, and I can talk about this, but like, 80, 90% is romance novels compared to all other books. If the average is five books, it's not five. Anything else?

Pew says the average is 12 books a year. But you're right. Oh, oh. Fifty percent of American adults read four books or fewer.

Yeah, it's super tiny. It's super tiny. And so if you're the head of a company and you've got all these retail workers and you want them to learn something about salesmanship or about competition and negotiation, what you think that they need to know, an author can appeal to that by basically saying, this is a book that can be read in a couple of hours. It is a story, so it will capture anyone's attention. It's written in very simple language and it's fun. It's like these rats are trying to get through a maze. But ultimately that one lesson is going to get through.

And not to mention, it's cheaper to print.

Oh, my God, it's a cheap book.

And cheaper to buy.

And exactly. The bulk purchases drive it. And then of course, there's the speaking around it. You can send out this whole salesforce to hear the person talk five to a thousand at a time. So if there's one lesson you want to get across to your company, you can very quickly spread it throughout the company with some bulk purchases and a speech and maybe some training. So that's the parable model to one extent or another. And people will try it, however, without realizing that. And they'll just try to do a story without knowing, like, why those stories work. And so you have to explain, like, this is how the sausage gets made. They didn't pick a story at random just because they preferred that than writing a traditional business book. And so figuring out why these things work offers all these lessons. And it also, it really helps distinguish between good, right, good in terms of the book and successful. And that's really important because it's like fashion. It's like the emperor's new clothes. Like, should I wear this crazy outfit that looks silly because I saw that famous person. It's like, no, George Clooney. Remember when he did that haircut on er, and it's like the George Clooney haircut. That is a terrible haircut. And so many people in the late 90s tried it, but they don't look like George Clooney. It looked good on him because he's so good looking that it only accentuated how good looking he was by having this very unflattering haircut. And so that's what you want to avoid as an author is imitating. And not just an author, by the way, but in any public space, on your website or any other sort of part of Your public Persona. If you don't know why something's good or if you don't understand why something is appealing or presents you in the right way and you're just imitating someone, really question that assumption. Are they doing it because it's good, or are they doing it because they can get away with it, because they have all these other things going for them?

Let's talk about agents for a minute in terms of who you think can get an agent versus who can get a book deal at a traditional publisher. And I know I just went indie for my last book, so by no means is this the only path, but I'm asking these because a lot of people in my network or people who come to me are either looking for an agent and then eventually have the hope of finding a publisher. Is there a lot of drop off? Do you see a drop off? And are there people who come to you? Probably by the time they come to you, I'm guessing no. But who come to you and just can't find an agent? Like they don't even clear that hurdle. And why is that? So who clears that?

Oh, absolutely. Agents work for a percentage. They get a percentage of everything. And so they don't get paid, and you shouldn't pay an agent. And if an agent doesn't think that they can sell your book, they're not going to work with you. And this category, like I said, the category has tilted even further towards big advances, big platforms, big ideas. So. And an agent can only work on. So especially a good agent who will actually work with you as an author and help you develop the idea. They can only work on so many books, so they have to be selective. Even if they thought they could sell your book for a $20,000 advance, you know that you can't run as an agent. You can't run your business on those books. You can't stay, keep the doors open for that kind of cut. And so they are quite selective. If they don't think that they can get a significant advance working with you, they're not going to work with you. Now, we can talk about the thing of self publishing, hybrid publishing, traditional publishing, but for me, I think especially business authors don't necessarily realize how crucial the right book is because publishing the wrong book is so easy and such a waste of time. And so if you can find an agent, a good agent, it's a short list who specialize in these kinds of books. There really are not many agents who really know this category. So here's the thing. I would Say if you're writing a book of advice, work with an agent who works on these books, because if they don't, they know as much about this, even a very good agent knows as much about this as anyone else. And they can actually offer you quite unhelpful advice. It's basically like asking anyone else who reads books what their opinion is.

Tell us, how do you get the attention of an agent? And I really want to know now, what is the wrong book? Like when you say, you know, this is a crucial fork in the road for at least if it's a business book. So say more about getting the attention of an agent and what you mean by that in terms of the. The wrong book.

Getting the attention of an agent is not hard. Getting their attention is not hard. They need books. They desperately need books. They exist as a filter because the editors at publishing houses, and again, there are not that many editors who acquire these kinds of books. It's a very short list. If they all received the deluge of proposals, they would have to ignore everything. So the agents are the ones who kind of filter through. But the individual agents, they have assistance, they process a lot of stuff and they almost always have a very clear submission policy. The problem people get into is they ignore the submission policy, they don't bother reading it, they're sloppy, they're lazy. You would not believe the agents get so frustrated because they'll say like, don't do this, do this, put this in your subject line. Like just a basic set of instructions. Probably a similar thing in like hiring at any company you know, you say these are our resume guidelines and then the person ignores it. Of course they're not going to call you in whatever's on your resume if you can't even follow the simple instruction posted on their website. So number one, go to the agent's website and follow their instructions and you'll get their attention. Then of course you have to write a proposal that they want to represent. But this idea that it's hard to reach them is silly because how would they ever get. Sometimes, of course, there are very, very, very big, major famous agents who will only represent big celebrities, etc. But the fact is all of them without exception, are at huge agencies like William Morris. And there's tons of younger agents. So there's always an agent at that big agency. Even if you can't get to the celebrity big time agent. From where you're sitting, there are plenty of agents and they are looking at proposals from whoever. So it's really about you. Have to complete the proposal and you have to follow the submission guidelines. And somebody of course, it could just be someone who's a college intern or new assistant who doesn't know much about books. Somebody's going to look at it. And then as far as the wrong book, that's a much bigger topic.

That wraps up part one of this conversation with my dear friend David Moldauer. If you want to hear the answer to his question on what is the wrong book to write, make sure you're subscribed to FreeTime. Tune in. Join us next week. Can't wait to see you there. And thanks so much for listening everybody.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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