Happy Friday!
This will be the longest blog I’ve EVER posted. Since I am personally moving into the agent/publishing phase of my first book… I thought to share this INSPIRATIONAL story about how Nicholas Sparks found his agent and published his first novel, The Notebook! Thank you Jonathan Woodard for sharing this story with me!
Since The Notebook, Sparks has published something like FIFTEEN world renowned novels, several of which have also become MOTION PICTURES including: Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe, and The Guardian! His success is EPIC!
If you guys have the time to read this AMAZING STORY… it will INSPIRE you to DREAM BIG, LIVE BOLD, and MAKE A DIFFERENCE with your own life! Your dream may not be as BIG as publishing a PILE of best selling books that turns into motion pictures… but your dreams really, really MATTER!
Dreams don’t happen overnight… they ALWAYS take longer than we originally anticipate. We have to survive a decade or two in hell… and undergo a hundred metamorphosis’… and we have to learn fifty new skills… and make all new friends once or twice… and…
Sometimes, discouragement sets in on the long journey to a big dream. And if we learn to charge our way through the discouragement, and blast our way through those inevitable barriers of boredom, and we KEEP THE DREAM ALIVE… our day WILL come! And just like Nicholas Sparks… our DREAM WILL ARIVE SAFELY AT ITS INTENDED DESTINATION!
Enjoy the following story… its a LIVELY ONE!
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The Story of How I (Nicholas Sparks) Found an Agent
“. . . In January 1995, after the first draft of The Notebook had been completed, I accepted a job transfer from my home in North Carolina to Greenville, South Carolina. Due to the chaos of that time — selling my old house, buying a new one, the family going back and forth between the two cities, establishing a new sales territory and getting to know new co-workers and the boss, etc. — I continued tinkering with The Notebook until I was finally ready to get an agent. By then it was June.
Now, I didn’t know how to get an agent, and that’s one of the most frequently asked questions I receive from people who want to be published. They seem to regard it as something almost magical, the Holy Grail which will lead them to success. “How did you get a literary agent?” they’ll ask, hoping for my “secret.” So I tell them. What I did was simply this: I went to the bookstore and spent a great deal of time in the writing/publishing section, and read a bunch of chapters in various books, essentially entitled, “How to Get a Literary Agent,” and I pretty much followed the directions. That’s all there was to it. (The most helpful book I bought was, The Insider’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers and Literary Agents by Jeff Herman and I highly recommend it)
What I essentially learned was this: the way to contact an agent varies slightly, but for the most part, the first step is to send a “Query Letter.” A query letter is the first contact with an agent, and is absolutely critical to getting a manuscript read. How critical? A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent one. The odds are tough, but not impossible, and that’s why I believe that a good query letter is the single most important page that any unknown, unpublished author will ever write.
I worked hard on mine — 17 drafts over two weeks and I did my best to make sure every word counted. A good letter will include: previous writing and publishing experience, a brief overview of the novel, other novels that it is similar to but why your novel is different, the reasons you want to work with this particular agent, the market for the novel, and a request to have the manuscript read. All this must be done in one page, by the way, and you must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE). (See Sample Query Letter, for what I wrote).
I then sent the letter off to 25 agents, picked at random. Since I didn’t know anyone in the business, I picked them for varying reasons: this one represents other famous authors, that one represented a similar book, this one is new and might be looking for clients, that one went the same school that I did. There was some method to the madness, though not much more than that.
Now, the books I’d read about publishing said I could wait as long as six weeks to get an answer, so you can imagine my surprise when I received a call from a literary agent the following week. When I called her back, she said she liked my letter and would like me to send up my manuscript. The only problem was, I’d never heard of this particular literary agent — she hadn’t been on my list of 25. I asked her how she’d heard of the novel, and I remember mumbling something along the lines of, “Could it be that based on a single letter, the reputation of my novel is already sweeping through the halls of the publishing world and is already generating enough excitement to set the book world on fire?”
The agent said, “Well. . . er. . .no, not exactly. Do you remember _______ who you did send the letter to at this agency?” I did and said so, and the agent said, “Well, she died recently, and one of my colleagues — the deceased agent’s former assistant — found your letter in her slush pile. It wasn’t right for him, but he thought it might interest me.” With her answer, my shoulders sagged. I needed, I suddenly thought, a more up-to-date book on publishing. But since she said she was an agent, I sent the manuscript up, again not expecting to hear from her for six weeks or so.
Three days later she called me and said, “I’ve read your manuscript and I’d really like to work with you on this project.”
Let me tell you, folks, I felt so good about myself then. I mean, here I was — one letter answered, one agent wanting, practically begging, to work with me. Can’t get much better than 100%! I was batting a thousand and I still had 24 more letters to go! It was painfully obvious that, based on what just happened, that every single one of the other agents was going to have exactly the same reaction and I could imagine myself later that summer sitting at the kitchen table, picking through resumes, weighing my options and saying something to the other agents like, “Well, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to say no. You see, the thing is, you represent Pat Conroy, and you know — I need someone with experience.”
Ah, the fantasies. Those glorious fantasies. My query letter did generate a good response — 12 agents asked to see part or all of the manuscript, which was great — but by the end of the summer, the other 24 all said no, even those that had read the novel. That left the one agent, the first one who’d responded, as my only chance for representation. But she still hadn’t sent me the official, “okee-dokey, I’ll be your agent” agreement form. And since I knew nothing about her, I decided to give her a quick interview. After the customary small talk, it went something like this:
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” I said, pen poised over a pad of paper, ready to jot down the pertinent information.
“Not at all,” she said.
“Well. . . how old are you?” I asked. (In our previous conversations, I thought she sounded a little young.)
“Twenty-six.”
“Oh. . .” I said, thinking, That’s it? “Well. . . how long have you been a literary agent?”
“About six months.”
My heart sank and I swallowed.
“Well, have you ever sold a novel before?”
“No.”
“Okay,” I said, “You’re hired. . . !”
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The Story of How I (Nicholas Sparks) Found a Publisher
“. . . My agent had me do quite a bit of editing on the manuscript version of The Notebook, and by late October, the book was finally ready to be presented to publishers. I made 25 copies of the manuscript and shipped them up, second day air, and she got them on a Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday, they were going out to publishers. Again, I checked my books on publishing, and they said that I could wait up to six weeks to hear anything, so I decided I wasn’t going to be one of those pesky clients who bother their agents all the time.
On Friday night, though, she called me. “You know,” she said, sort of dragging out the words, “I think we might have something. . . big.”
My eyes boggled as my lips formed around the word. Big. . .big. . .
I remember hanging up the phone and running out of the house in search of my wife who was taking the kids and dogs for a walk around the block. I caught up to her, and — brushing my fingers along my chest and examining the nails while I sniffed, I said, “I was just talking to my agent,” I said oh-so-nonchalantly, playing it cool, “and she said we might have something. . . big.”
My wife looked at me, unimpressed. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “But it sure sounds good, doesn’t it?”
Before she hung up the phone, my agent asked if I could be home on Monday, because she was expecting an offer, but since I was selling pharmaceuticals and I had a luncheon for doctors planned that I couldn’t get out of, I told her that I couldn’t stay home, but that I’d check my voice-mail every hour.
My wife and I spent the weekend wondering what “big” might mean. “What if we can pay off the credit-card bills?” she asked. “What if we can get a new car!” I said in response. “It would be like Wheel of Fortune!” Oh, the tension was building. . . building. . . what could it mean? What does big mean?
On Monday, I woke up, put on my lucky suit, and headed off to work with my head spinning. I checked my voice mail at nine o’clock, but no message from the agent. Minutes ticked past, then more, and I checked again at ten o’clock, expecting something along the lines of, “Well, today’s the day,” or something like that. But there was nothing. So I checked again at eleven o’clock.
Nothing.
By then, my hopes were fading fast, and because of the luncheon, I spent most of the next hour picking up food and setting up the luncheon. By the time I was done and had everything ready, it was noon, and no one had come up for lunch, yet.
So I picked up the phone, checked my voice-mail, and there was a message from my agent, asking me to call her.
I took a deep breath, hung up the phone, and called my agent in New York.
“Yes?” I said, my mouth going dry.
“Well, just like we thought, we got an offer from Warner Books.”
I closed my eyes.
“And?” I asked.
My agent paused, drawing it out.
“Warner Books,” she said, “would like to offer you one million dollars.”
For a long moment, I couldn’t speak at all as my mind formed around the number. “Big” didn’t do it justice.
As if sensing my hesitation, my agent cleared her throat.
“What do you think?” she asked. She said this as though this sort of thing happened to me every day.
“I think that’s GREAT!!!!!!!” I screamed into the receiver.
And the rest is history. . .
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Closing remarks from Mr. Chuck
I hope todays blog adds tremendous value to your amazing lives! I just finished praying for you… so make it count! Go have the Friday of your LIVES!
Here’s what I love about this message: It paints a picture of WHAT IS POSSIBLE… if followers of Jesus will MAJOR on the Great Commission! We can be the GREAT LIGHT OF THIS MODERN WORLD… and the moment is perfect for us to rise from the obscurity of our own slumber.
Happy Saturday!
Good Morning Everyone!
Find Me!