How My Newsletter Helped Me Land an Agent and a Big Five Book Deal

Today’s post is by author Nancy Reddy (Instagram: @nancy.o.reddy).

I’d been querying agents for nearly two years when I got a promising email. After some kind rejections and a couple of “I really like this but—” close calls that break your heart, this agent’s enthusiasm made my pulse race. “Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw your name,” she wrote, describing herself as a fan of my newsletter. She said she’d love to talk more about the nonfiction project I’d described in my query letter.

I’d been writing my newsletter, Write More, Be Less Careful, for just under a year at that point. It had started as a daily writing prompt to celebrate National Poetry Month in April 2021, and I’d continued after that, sending newsletters two or three times a month with writing tips and revision exercises, interviews with writers and other creative types, and encouragement to keep writing. I envisioned it as a place to bring together different parts of my brain: my own creative practice, my love of teaching writing, and my research expertise in the field of writing studies. Across those parts of my life, I’d thought a lot about why writing is hard, and I’d developed strategies for doing it anyway. I imagined the newsletter as a way of sharing those ideas with other writers. I didn’t start it as part of my efforts to get an agent and a book deal—but it ended up playing a pivotal role in that journey.

I’d landed in that agent’s inbox via AWP’s Writer to Agent program, through which writers who are registered to attend that year’s conference can send a query letter and five pages for the consideration of participating agents at five agencies. I ultimately had meetings with three agents through that program and received offers from each. I chose my agent, Maggie Cooper at Aevitas, the one who’d mentioned my newsletter in her initial email, because I was excited about her vision for my book. Of those three offers, Maggie was asking me to make the most dramatic revisions to my proposal before we went out on submission—but I trusted that her guidance would get us there. And her vision for the book was informed by her reading of my newsletter. Because she knew my voice so well through my newsletter, she was able to read the proposal I’d sent her and see her way to something even better, something both warmer and more sellable.

After revising the proposal for nearly nine months, we went on submission in mid-March and sold it (at auction!) in April. I’m thrilled to say that my first nonfiction book, The Good Mother Myth, which blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history of science to examine the origins of our bad ideas about what it means to be a good mom, will be published by St. Martin’s in 2025.

Ultimately, my newsletter isn’t the thing that sold my book—but writing the newsletter changed my work for the better and has helped build relationships that are valuable for my writing life. Whatever stage of your writing career you’re in or whatever goals you have for your writing, my experience writing a newsletter has a few key lessons to offer.

Start your newsletter early, and don’t think you need huge subscriber numbers for it to be worthwhile.

When Maggie wrote to me, I had only 300 or so subscribers, but they were a smart, engaged bunch. Everyone starts small, and worrying about your reach at the beginning will only slow you down. (And, realistically, even those 300 early subscribers were a lot more readers than I was reaching when I published poems in literary journals or articles in scholarly journals.)

There are so many scary stories out there about platform, and every writer who’s been on the internet for more than a minute has heard of agents or editors who won’t even look at a writer unless they have 100K followers on social media or 10,000 newsletter subscribers. But my story shows that it’s still possible to get an agent and sell a book to a major publisher without huge numbers. If you’re reaching people who are interested in what you’re doing, you’re well on your way.

Your newsletter doesn’t have to be the same topic or content as your book, as long as it’s something you can write about regularly.

In a post at Before and After the Book Deal, Courtney Maum explains that newsletters work best when you’ve developed a clear specialization and lots of range within that topic, something she describes as “niche topics with a long-ass runway.”

Rather than sending a Christmas-letter style update, use your newsletter to think about what you’re offering readers.

There’s an old-fashioned way of thinking of a newsletter as just a record of what you’re writing, where you’ve published, and so on. But even if you’re really doing enough to fill a regular newsletter, the audience of people who want a complete report on your recent activities is more or less limited to your mom. (Even Jasmine Guillory, who’s always publishing a new book and recommending books on the Today Show, includes a recipe in each issue of her newsletter!) Instead, start your newsletter by thinking about what you can offer your readers.

In a newsletter like mine, what I’m offering is obvious: writing tips, exercises, prompts, encouragement. Other newsletters offer personal essay round-ups, salad recipes, tips about navigating the publishing world, advice for parenting through diet culture, to give just a few favorite examples. Even newsletters that are less obviously service-oriented still have to keep a reader and their needs and interests in mind. Who are you writing to, and what can you offer them? When you’re shooting something directly into someone’s inbox, you’re always reminded of the reader at the other end of the send button.

Keeping a reader in mind can benefit your writing beyond just the newsletter. That difference in perspective was one of the crucial changes I made in revising the book proposal: instead of just displaying all my research, I had to think about what it would mean to a reader. What would my reader want to know? How could I inform or entertain or comfort them? Writing regularly to the readers of my newsletter—and getting feedback in the form of likes, comments, and emails—helped me refine that perspective.

Consider how you can build community and engage readers.

There’s so much pressure in publishing, especially in nonfiction, to build a platform, and it’s easy to think of that as just follower count or subscribers. But building a platform (I can’t help but hear that in a kind of scary announcer voice) can be pretty demoralizing as a task. It’s always easy to see other people’s bigger numbers, and I didn’t become a writer because I wanted to stand up on a stage and get people to look at me. (I’d rather sit in the back with my notebook, thank you.)

For me, it feels a lot better to think about community, rather than platform, and a newsletter can be a great vehicle for building community. I’ve used my newsletter as an excuse to reach out to writers whose work I’ve admired and a way to celebrate friends’ writing. Writing can be so lonely, and that’s especially true if you’re working on a long-form project or struggling through finding an agent or publishing a book through contests. Sharing your work with readers through a newsletter is one way to alleviate that sense of isolation. My newsletter has helped me build relationships with other writers, both people who are readers of my newsletter and people I reached out to because I loved their writing. (I write on Substack, which has some nice community-building features baked into the design, but you can build community on any newsletter platform.) Think of your newsletter as a space to celebrate the things you love with people who share your interests.

In the end, a newsletter is unlikely to be the single thing that sells your book or otherwise launches your writing career. I still had to write and revise (and revise and revise and revise) my book proposal, and the books, poems, and essays I’d published were an important part of convincing first my agent and then editors that I could write the nonfiction book I was developing. But my newsletter was vital in the shaping of the proposal, and it’s been a great way to network with other writers. I’ve been a writer long enough to know there aren’t any magic shortcuts into finishing or publishing a book. But a newsletter can make the writing more enjoyable along the way—and it might be a surprising tool to unlock something new.

Curious about Nancy’s newsletter? Sign up here.

Nancy Reddy

Nancy Reddy is the author of the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx and co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her first book of narrative nonfiction, The Good Mother Myth, is forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.