QuickTalk Friday Interview Series
Her Fifteen-Year Journey To Find a Literary Agent and Book Publisher
An interview with author Aly Brown
Are you looking to find a literary agent?
Got an idea for a non-fiction book?
Or writing a memoir? A novel?
It took Aly ten years to find a literary agent.
Another five to sign her first book contract.
She felt like giving up but persevered.
And we can all learn from her experience.
I bet it must’ve felt pretty damn good to sign a publishing contract after all those 15 years.
Yes, indeed! I began querying agents in 2005 and didn’t sign with Moe Ferrara of BookEnds until 2015. We’ve gone on “sub” (submitting a book to an editor of a book publisher) with multiple books. We went through a lot of revising and crying in between books— but she never gave up on me.
I became the editor of a newsroom during that period, I became the editor of a newsroom, and that helped to sell me as a nonfiction writer, even though we had started the process with fiction.
We finally inked a contract with Feiwel & Friends (Macmillan) in 2020 for the nonfiction…
