Our mission at Author Insider is pretty simple. We put our community in direct conversation with people who have figured out how to turn words into revenue. Usually, that means jumping on calls with successful authors like Gretchen Rubin and Seth Godin. But we also love connecting with industry power players.
Today, that person is Christy Fletcher.
As the co-head of publishing at UTA, Christy is the dealmaker who can take your book proposal and spark a bidding war, then take your manuscript and get it in front of Timothée Chalamet. She’s savvy and, as we learned during our live Q&A last month, refreshingly candid.
She told us why Twitter/X followings are meaningless when it comes to book deals (and what writers should focus on instead). She revealed the kinds of books publishers actually want (and what they’re sick of). She shared her hard-and-fast rules for writing a killer book proposal (and the pitfalls to avoid). She even gave the optimal font size for a book jacket.
Speaking of live Q&As, we’ve got three great ones coming up:
June 19 | We’re hosting a live Q&A with . She’s got a truly remarkable story. Five years ago, she was a public school teacher in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Now she’s a #1 New York Times bestselling author who hosts a hit podcast and writes a Substack with more than 350,000 subscribers. The question at the heart of this Q&A is gonna be simple: How’d she do that? (RSVP here.)
June 26 | We’ll be joined by Cal Newport. He teaches computer science at Georgetown, writes for The New Yorker, hosts a hit podcast, has a thriving YouTube channel, and has written several bestsellers, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Slow Productivity. We’ll ask him, “How do you do so much without burning out?” (RSVP here.)
July 8 | Sarah Fay, creator of
, will walk us through the step-by-step process she used to convert her Substack subscribers into book buyers. (RSVP here.)
These conversations are only open to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider supporting our mission by becoming one today:
Now, onto our conversation with Christy Fletcher. You can watch the whole thing above or read highlights below.
Author Insider: If one of your kids said, “Mom, I’ve decided I want to be a best-selling author,” what would you say to them about how to go about doing that if that was their goal?
Christy Fletcher: It really starts with writing a great book — having a really good idea and a point of view about how to say it. Once you write that great book and we’ve partnered you with the right publishing house where there’s a shared vision for what the opportunity is and how to get there, then it’s all about the strategy of how you position it. Who is the audience? Where is that audience? Who do you bring with you? Who do we need to go find? That’s the gumshoe work of publishing. It’s being ready not only to dedicate yourself to writing the best possible book that you can, with a clear sense of who you’re writing it for, but also doing the work to find readers.
Are there certain types of books for which there’s more appetite right now?
Publishers want two things:
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