Ciao!  I arrived in Italy this past week for the International Women's Fiction Festival in Matera, Italy, and it has been nonstopping walking and talking since then.  I saw Rome briefly during a long layover and got to do some basic sightseeing.
      I memorized about a hundred words and phrases in Italian and was very proud of myself.  But it was all for nothing when I stepped into my first cafe and had a Roman woman say "Prego," and shoot me a look like "God, I hope you're not an American who can't speak Italian to save your life."

Trevi Fountain in the heart of Rome (Roma!).

I then flew to Bari on the east coast of Italy, where I was picked up and driven with other presenters and attendees to the south central region of Italy - where Matera is.  The city itself is a world heritage site and old as can be.  It's famous for the communities that were carved out of caves over thousands of years.

The stone communities (Sassi) of Matera
are thousands of years old and have
been developed by each generation here.

My panels have gone well so far, and I've met with writers and heard some book and article pitches.  About half of the pitches were in Italian, and it's quite a thing to have someone explaining their book, and then have that explanation told through a translator who then has to translate your reaction. 

The Italian woman in the middle
is telling me about her romance book
and looking for advice. The woman
on the left is translating.

So far, it has been a lot of work and my sleep schedule is chaotic, but the country is amazing.  I will be posting a lot more in the coming days - interviews with agents and panel summaries. 

GLA: What's the most recent thing you've sold?

TW: I represent nonfiction in many different categories and I sell new books frequently, so it's best for authors to visit my agency's website for the latest information on our deals, our clients, and their recently published books.

GLA: It seems like if someone wanted to write about cooking or politics or history, it's all been done before.  That said, what stands out for you in a proposal?  What are you looking for immediately to draw you into a project?

TW: There are several factors that can help a book's ultimate prospects: great writing, great platform, or great information, and ideally all three.  For narrative works, the writing should be gorgeous, not just functional.  For practical works, the information should be insightful, comprehensive and preferably new.  And for any work of nonfiction, the author's platform is enormously important.

GLA: Online at your website, people can listen to your speech called "Book Proposal Bootcamp."  To summarize, what do you detail in the speech?

TW: The "Book Proposal Bootcamp" workshop, which I teach frequently at writers' conferences and elsewhere, gives an overview of the whole process from book idea to book tour, but with a central focus on the actual proposal, which is essentially a business plan for a book.  I explain all the elements of a proposal - overview, about the author, target audience, comparable titles, marketing and promotion plans, detailed table of contents, sample chapters - and try to give as much guidance (and true stories) as a 90-minute session allows.

GLA: You look for writers of nonfiction biography.  Are you looking for interesting people who want to write their own autobiography, or are you looking for good writers who can write biographies of famous people?  If it's the latter, how do writers secure the rights to write Mick Jagger's life story, for example?

TW: Memoir/autobiography is a thriving genre (I highly recommend the 826 Valencia Writing Centers' The Autobiographer's Handbook, which I represented), but the appeal of any particular work will come from the literary quality of the writing and the author's ability to make the story compelling to someone who hasn't previously heard of him or her.  We all see too many memoirs where our reaction is either "This just isn't great writing," or "Why would a stranger care about this writer's personal story?"
      For biographies, of course, the writing quality is key, as well as the fame (or infamy) of the subject and the freshness of the material or insights the author presents.  Often an "authorized" biography is more interesting (we all want to read a story where the subject gets to have his or her say, too), but there is no single way to persuade a subject to cooperate.  And nothing prevents an author from writing about a public personality, as long as they don't write anything libelous, of course.

GLA: Can you give me an example or two of where a journalist was working on a topic and made it into a book that you agented?  How did the timeline work?  Did you contact them or vice versa?

TW: Recent examples include Nena Baker, who was a reporter for the Portland Oregonian and the Arizona Republic, and whose current affairs and science book The Body Toxic just came out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.  She and I met at a writers' conference where she first pitched me a different project, but the impact of environmental chemicals had long fascinated her and seemed an important and timely topic to me.  So she and I worked on a proposal, sold it, and although the whole project took several years, she had a wonderful working relationship with her editor, Denise Oswald, at FSG.
      Another client, Eric Janszen, an economics analyst and writer (and former tech executive), wrote the cover story of Harper's Magazine in February 2008, "The Next Bubble," about our current economic situation.  Based on that article, I contacted him and helped him develop a book proposal, and the quality of his insights and the timeliness of the topic led to a frenzied, two-day tour to meet with eight different publishers who were interested.  Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio/Penguin aggressively pre-empted the book on the eve of what was going to be a big auction, and Eric is close to finishing the manuscript now, with publication of The Post Catastrophe Economy scheduled for next spring.

GLA: What are the most common things you see writers doing wrong when composing a nonfiction book proposal?

TW: Professionalism always wins.  A book proposal, as I said earlier, is simply a business plan for a book.  Authors who don't learn all they need to know about writing a great proposal (you know, I heard there's a good "book proposal bootcamp" audio recording available somewhere on the Web...) and then carefully take advantage of what they have learned are much less likely to succeed.

GLA: Will you be at any upcoming writers' conferences where people can meet and pitch you?

TW: I attend a wide range of conferences, which varies each year, and it isn't essential to meet me face-to-face to pitch me a book.  Perhaps a third of my clients are referrals, another third I discovered and contacted myself, and another third I took on from blind submissions via my Web site.  I read every submission I receive, and I'm always looking for that query or proposal where I can say, as in that Tom Cruise/Renee Zellweger movie, "You had me from hello."

GLA: Best piece(s) of advice concerning something we haven't discussed?

TW: Write every day, get in a serious writing group for high-quality feedback, treat writing like the craft and privilege it is.

• Many agents will indeed consider representing self-published books, but they are only looking for the best of the best.
• Agents want to know sales numbers of your book, and they're looking for impressive figures.
• Fiction is tougher to sell than nonfiction, so smaller sales numbers for the former will be considered, just as larger sales numbers for the latter will be expected.
• Just as it's important that your book is selling and has a distinct market(s), selling too many books is a bad thing as well, as you may have maxed out your sales.  There would be no reason to give it a second life via traditional publishing.