Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

Many writers, myself included, think that books get published through a magical set of circumstances; a process so daunting that we could never, ever complete it.

Today novelist DeLauné Michel (who just published her second novel, The Safety of Secrets) tells us how she published her first novel—a long search for agents, a tough revision process, and finally, a two-book deal.

After you read it, check out my web video interview with our special guest. 

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog: 
How did you go about pitching your first book to agents and publishers? How did the process of finding an editor change the second time around?

DeLauné Michel:
My first novel, Aftermath of Dreaming, was based on nine interconnected short-stories that I wrote. One night, after I read one of them at Spoken Interludes, the literary salon that I started in LA in 1996 and still run, a woman asked me if I had an agent. Continue reading...

I didn’t, so she sent my stories to her friend who as an agent, and she took me on.

My new agent then sent a story of mine that was about boxing to another of her clients, Joyce Carol Oates, since Ms. Oates loves boxing. We heard back that she loved my voice as a writer, but it actually was a chapter of a novel, not a short story. I knew she was right, but I come from a family of writers (my cousins are Andre Dubus III and James Lee Burke to name a couple), so I had always felt a bit intimidated about that, but Ms. Oates’ feedback gave me the courage to tackle that form.

Then right after I finished writing the first draft of that novel, my agent called to tell me she was retiring, which obviously was a drag, to say the least, but pretty quickly I figured that Aftermath of Dreaming must need to be sent out by someone else, so maybe it was okay.

My agent referred me to some agents, and one of them wanted to take me on, but wanted a rewrite, and I did, too. But when I finished the rewrite, I thought, if that agent wants it, maybe others do, too, and shouldn’t I be sure that I like the person I am going with? So I sent over 50 blind queries to agents that I found on the Internet. I never wanted to ask my family for help in that way.

From those queries, five agents wanted to represent the novel, so I picked the one I felt most simpatico with. Then she got me a two-book deal at HarperCollins, so I was very lucky with that and have been able to work with the same editor for both books and that has been a great experience.

I didn’t go to college, much less an MFA program, but my family and my editor have been my writing program.