EPISODE 20: HOW TO FORM A SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR/AGENT PARTNERSHIP WITH CURTIS YATES
Live Date: October 11, 2021
Show Description: In today’s episode, Heather is diving deep into all things book publishing with literary agent Curtis Yates. They walk through what Curtis says are the key ingredients to every great book, what a literary agent looks for in an author, and the best questions you should be asking when you are considering hiring a literary agent yourself. This episode is so full of great information we’ve had to split it up into two parts. Make sure to come back for part two!
Free Gift from Curtis Yates:
Use coupon code CHOICEFREE to receive a free copy of How to Write a Book: Five Building Blocks for Your Author Career
This Episode Will Teach You:
What qualities make the most successful author/agent partnership
How to create an appealing book proposal with the most essential elements
The key ingredients to every successful book
Biggest Takeaways:
Curtis and Heather discuss where to start in the book writing process. Curtis walks through the first steps, how to move forward when writing a book, and who can help along the way.
Heather and Curtis share the key ingredients to a succesful book. With their combined decades of experience, they are able to dial in on the traits shared by successful authors and how to implement them into your own process.
The pair share the value in each role in the book publishing process, whether that is the author, agent, publisher, or publicist - each person plays a part in making a book successful.
About the Guest: Curtis Yates is a hugely successful literary agent, attorney, husband and father. He began practicing law and serving authors as their literary agent in 2000, an avid book reader and baseball enthusiast, he is a graduate of Westmont College in Economics and Pepperdine Law School (Law Review). Curtis has launched more than 40 New York times best sellers through his partnership at the Yates and Yates agency; they have garnered more than $130 million in publishing contracts in the last 17 years, working with major publishing houses across the industry.
Quotables:
“The first thing is the premise, which is what is the book? It's that elevator pitch. And it needs to be succinct. You have to be able to boil it down and its essence to a handful of sentences at most. If you can't communicate in that nutshell form, it's not honed enough.” - Curtis Yates, 14:42
“The moniker these days in the publishing world is ‘what's in it for me?’ Every consumer when they're looking at any product, but especially when they're looking at a book, they want to know ‘what's in this book for me? What's the takeaway, what's the value? Why do I want to spend 20 to $25 and six to 10 or 12 hours of my time investing in your content? What are you going to do for me?” - Curtis Yates, 15:28
“You have to keep earning their attention page by page, chapter by chapter. And so many of the decisions that you need to make about how to go about doing that are affected by who is the person you're writing to. And how do you communicate with them? How do you win their attention over and over again throughout the entire book?” - Curtis Yates, 19:36
“If the product's not good, if that story is not compelling if that content is not good, then like you said, it's not going to be a win.” - Heather Adams, 22:29
“In this day and age, if you don't have an author who is waking up every day, wanting and eager to tell the world about their book, it's going to be really tough for that book to succeed. We talk about this all the time, these days, the idea that it used to be that authors really all they had to worry about was writing a great book. Content was king, and that was enough. And today authors have to be public speakers, social media, mavens, podcasters. They have to be sometimes their own publicist. Sometimes they have to function as their own publisher.” - Curtis Yates, 23:41
“I would say gone are the days where you can avoid promoting if you want your book to be successful.” - Heather Adams, 31:18
“If we're only going to get to work with a relatively small number of people and we're going to spend a lot of our time pouring into them, we want to work with people that we're passionate about. And we're so fortunate and blessed to be in a position where we get to do that, where we get to kind of pick and choose who we work with. And there's nothing more enjoyable than getting out of bed, going to do a job that you love, that you feel like you were called to do and doing it for people who you can't believe you get to work with.” - Curtis Yates, 38:52
“That person becomes a walking billboard for you. They're an extension of you. They're a reflection of you. So the way that they interact on your behalf is how people perceive you. And so I think it's important to really seriously consider how is this person going to carry themselves? How are they going to reflect credit on me and my brand as they go out and represent me?” - Heather Adams, 45:12
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