Smart writers and agents know the value of including outside endorsements with the query letters and proposals they send to book publishers.
A persuasive quote from a big name or a well-connected expert can have a major impact on the level of attention we give a new submission, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. It shouts out “Hey! This book is for real!” And not just a blind shot from an unknown author.
Don’t bury the blurb!
A piece of advice: Put the endorsement up high, on top! It’s surprising how many submissions arrive with the blurbs hidden in the platform materials or elsewhere. That’s risky. A reader might not get that far! If you have an endorsement that could make a difference, let us know about it first thing.
It’s how Hemingway got discovered
Endorsements, of course, have been around a long time, going back famously to the time F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s in New York about a new young writer whose work he’d been reading in newspapers, noting that the upstart might well “outlast his own scribbles.” Heeding Fitzgerald’s endorsement, Perkins tracked down the writer and that’s how Scribner’s came to publish Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises.
Closer to home, a well-placed endorsement led me to a new writer who has since become one of the most prolific authors at Wiley & Sons. A well-known psychologist, Nathanial Branden, whose book we’d recently published, wrote me about a young special-ed teacher’s proposal for a book on parenting. He said that I’d love her work and that he’d give us a blurb for the cover. That immediately got our attention, so we kept reading, met the author Michele Borba, and ended up publishing her book, Parents do Make a Difference. She also procured a major blurb from Jack Canfield, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. We went on to publish seven more books by Michele, who’s still going strong and has also become the resident parenting expert on the Today Show.
What if you don’t know any celebrities?
OK. We don’t all hang around cafes in Paris or hobnob with famous authors. Don’t worry. That’s not the only way to get an endorsement. Here’s where some self-promotion and ingenuity can help.
Target
Make a hit list of authors or experts who’ve written books something like yours. Whom do you admire most? Try to find a direct contact email or address. It may be on their personal website or available through their publisher. Send them the proposal with a persuasive letter filled with respect, affinity, and chutzpah.
Meet
Attend bookstore readings, workshops, lectures or other public events where your target authors are appearing. Enroll in writers conferences like the San Francisco Writers Conference, Vermont’s Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Cape Cod Summer Conference and others. There may be pitch sessions, and other opportunities to meet with an established author and talk about your book.
Then follow up the next day with an email, a hand-written note or a phone call reminding the author that you’ve met and enclose the proposal for endorsement. This is no time to be shy.
Recruit
Experts in your field may be teaching or otherwise working just around the corner. Think about people in your business or personal life within a few degrees of separation with expertise or a professional connection to your writing.
If the chef of a famous restaurant where you dine regularly likes your ethnic family cookbook, for example, that can help a lot. If the head of the neuroscience department at Harvard Medical School, reads and endorses your book about the relationship between the brain and falling in love, that can help get the attention you need.
So can a top executive at a brand name company like Dow Jones, if you’ve written a muckraking expose of recent financial blowouts.
So could an author whose book is at #5 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list, especially if it’s in your genre. Remember, with fiction you need to have your completed manuscript ready to offer, since a partial doesn’t tell the whole story.
What about you?
Are endorsements part of your strategy to land a book deal? Or to find a literary agent? Have you found prospects willing to endorse your book? Please share something about your experience, successful or not, here in comments. I’ll watch for any questions.
I actually just typed a synopsis of my book with samples from chapters and a list of benefits to endorsing my book recently before reading this article. I began to send it out to authors I knew from various genres because I thought some endorsements were better than none. My question is do you think that using endorsements from artist, singers, actors, etc are just as helpful. I know a few of them that have giving me reviews for presentations that I have given. My books is more of a self help / nonfiction work.
James,
Your wife shouldn’t worry and should definitely ask her author friend for an endorsement. I haven’t seen friendships strained for asking, especially since successful authors know very well what it takes to get a book published and it sounds like this friend admires her work to begin with.
Go for it!
My wife has a good agent who’s represented several #1’s and the agent is really excited about her book on the Titanic (her first non-academic), but so far no takers and it’s been a year, and the anniversary of the sinking is only a little over a year away. My wife is good friends with a well-known nonfiction author but is reluctant to ask her to even look at the manuscript because she’s afraid it will affect their friendship. I know the author, too, and she adores my wife and has deep respect for her mind. Do you think my wife is worried over nothing, or have you seen relationships in publishing strained over asking such favors?
Good advice, but many respected insiders pay gate keepers to bar the door. They usually (but not always) view such requests as intrusions. It’s a crap shoot at best. Some are advised not to consider any material with potential similarities to their own for legal reasons. Sure, your idea works in certain instances, but experience indicates that if you want recommendations, it helps to be born with the right cousins.
Good post! I had a similar post on this subject on Nov. 13 and I totally agree with everything you said. If interested, you can check out my comments on this subject at http://lesedgertononwriting.blogspot.com/2010/11/value-of-pre-publication-blurbs.html
Blue skies,
Les
Susan,
Include a copy of the entire letter you’ve received and also refer to it in your query. Very impressive that you have these responses, even more so if you didn’t actually go after them.
And yes, you could have definitely used those comments from USGS and FEMA experts to attract attention from agents and publishers!
Does an endorsement from a therapist help? Something like “Publish this book to save the author’s mental health.”
No?
Wow! I had never heard this before. And, in reading the comments, I am still not sure how to go about it.
I have a published book Earthquake! (Guardian Angel Publishing) and I had three or four comments from experts at USGS and FEMA saying it was a good book. It never occurred to me I might use those to attract attention from a publisher.
Right now I am working on an adult novel and I have a very nice comment letter from Kelley Armstrong, one of my favorite authors.
I am looking for an agent for this one. So somewhere near the front of the query I should mention that Kelley Armstrong liked it?
I want to see a query letter where someone did mention a famous author so I might see how it’s done. Thank you so much for posting about this.
That’s great advice. As daunting as it seems to approach an author whom you don’t know, the few times that I’ve done it, I’ve found them to be surprisingly nice about it if you’re respectful and engaging. You definitely don’t want to cross the stalker line, though. I enjoy this blog a lot. Thanks!
Another good tip for my collection. Thanks!
Here’s the thing. As a reader, I won’t buy a book blurbed by a famous author. I just won’t. I know too well the log-rolling that goes on and how very few books are actually read by the blurber. I’ve seen books abruptly take off because of the blurbs and then suddenly take a dive when actual reader reviews come in. Sales go down and the author becomes persona non grata. Sucks to be them at that point.
Publishers and editors need to do a better job of finding debut gems in the slush pile without looking for the sainted endorsement. After all, books are not commercials waiting to be made. Also, it would help if publishers and editors read the damn manuscript or partial themselves, and not leave it up to young, newbie interns more interested in reading about werewolves and vampires or YA fiction.
The problem with publishing today, though, is that its driven by greed, and that’s driving debut writers to self-publish rather than risk getting rejected because a) they didn’t walk into the toilet stall of their favorite author and politely ask for a blurb, or b) they discovered they’d rather spend what free time they have writing, and not marketing or frequenting social venues to make connections that may or may not pan out.
A book will succeed or fail based on its own merits, and through word of mouth. That’s how it’s always been and how it always will be.
Sheila,
George Levy and Marlis Day would both be fine and not at all ridiculous to use as endorsements. They’re professional, published writers, and not your best friends. So they qualify.
I apologize for giving the impression that an endorsement must come from an author who’s written something like you have. It’s OK to quote these two since name recognition and professional expertise count the most, and genre is secondary.
Alan,
The last couple of summers at the Chicago’s Printers Row Book Fair, I’ve met and stayed in touch with two successful author’s (both saying specifics about why they enjoyed my(re, re, re, re, re, re…) edited manuscript. Now, you said in this post, “…well connected expert.” and, “experts who’ve written books something like yours.”
Laugh out loud. One writer, a history scholar, To Die in Chicago, by George Levy, the other, Marlis Day, a super children’s book creator – neither of them being close to my genre for the benefit of an endorsement, yes, no? Would any published name endorsement be better than nothing or could that appear ridiculous?
Although, speaking of Levy, you just never know. I publish/query articles on anything Chicago related and now I’m doing a piece on a Chicago hotel that still stands after having post Civil War, important meetings, and after the 1893 World Fair. Levy alone is credited with the Camp Douglas Civil War prison discovery, Chicago, and his years spent in the national archives, is giving me “insiders” information that’s priceless.
Thanks for your valuable time Alan and thanks in advance for addressing my questions!
Sheila
I haven’t had an endorsement for an unpublished work yet, but I did sell more copies of one of my middle grade novels after Piers Anthony endorsed it.
I can’t imagine anything more terrifying than contacting my favorite authors for a possible plug. Oy! I guess I need to grow a pair eventually.
Thanks for this post, Alan. It was the kick in the pants I needed to finally reach out to a long-time contact who’s a multi-pubbed NYT bestselling author in my genre. She agreed to read my ms based on revision letter comments from a couple of agents and a comment from an editor who’d brought the ms to the acquisitions table where it didn’t make the cut.
Sort of a catch-22, though. Bestselling authors are inundated with requests and I’m not sure she would have agreed to read the ms on spec if it wasn’t for the industry “endorsements” that validated for her the ms isn’t total dreck.
Of course, getting a famous author to read is just the first step. This one was quick to note she’s had to disappoint a number of authors by not being able to endorse their work after reading it. So getting a blurb for a work not under contract may well prove as difficult as getting an agent or contract.
Alan,
Endorsement works at reader-level, too. It’s how I decided to buy a DJ Machale, Philip Pullman or Garth Nix novel. I say “or” because I’m pretty sure two of them wrote a blurb for the other, and now I love them all so equally that I don’t know which came first.
On another note, I have written to one of the three above. He absolutely did answer. It happens! I wasn’t asking for a blurb, but if I had, I would have recieved a polite letter either positive or negative.
Richard,
I’m speaking in this post about proposals and manuscripts that I receive as submissions, not under contract, that are sent in with actual endorsements from authors, experts and academics. It’s not unusual.
We also see many submissions that include the promise or hope of a future endorsement, but that’s not nearly as persuasive as the real McCoy.
Josi,
When it comes to an author endorsement, name recognition to the agent or publisher is more important than whether they write in your genre.
Good luck!
I was surprised by this post. I have two novels in print, two more under contract, and in each case I’ve gotten good endorsements, but always from authors who say they don’t undertake to consider writing blurbs for books until they are under contract. Are you speaking primarily of recommendations by an established author to an agent or publisher, or actual commitment to writing a blurb?
As always, thanks for sharing your experience with us.
In all honesty, I never considered getting an endorsement from an established writer. The only one I know personally does not write in my genre (she’s sci fi and I’m YA), though she does beta read and critique my work. It’s definitely something I will think about as I get closer to being ready to submit to agents. Thanks for the advice :)