Ilana Masad, Author of “All My Mother’s Lovers,” on Querying Agents, Organizing Time and Finding Fulfillment

"A lot of my paid work is creatively fulfilling at the moment because I love reviewing books, and find criticism deeply satisfying. However, for years I wrote listicles, which paid okay but were largely very dull and basically copywriting work."

On January 5, 2022, Study Hall held an AMA with Ilana Masad about publishing, book reviews, and the daily toils of being a professional writer. Ilana is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. She is a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers.

 

My name is Ilana Masad, and like many of us, I’ve worn and still wear many hats. I’ve been a literary agent’s assistant and in-house editor, a freelance editor for hire and manuscript consultant, and a query letter consultant. I’m currently a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where I’m getting my PhD in English with a creative dissertation after completing my MA in 2019. I’ve been an instructor, both in my university and in small brief courses elsewhere.

I’ve been a working creative writer for over a decade. My primary love is fiction, from flash fiction to novels, but I also write creative nonfiction. I wrote the novel All My Mother’s Lovers which came out with Dutton in 2020 and in paperback in 2021. I’m also a freelance cultural critic with a big focus on books, with tangents into TV and film and, especially, the Bachelor franchise..

My current projects include an oft-neglected newsletter I’m trying to get back into, a novel-in-progress, and an inbox with over 400 emails from book publicists I have to catch up on.

​​How do you manage all of this? Do you have a strategy for organizing your different tasks? 

I make to-do lists every day. I put my events for each day in a Moleskine journal, which include things that occur at a certain time and my tasks for the day. I transfer incomplete tasks to the next day, or things that are constant that I write down almost every day, like answering publicity emails. I use Toggl because it’s helpful for me to track the time I spend on any given task. I also use Forest because I spend way too much time playing stupid games on my phone and listening to NPR or podcasts.

Do you have a regular writing practice for your fiction?

I don’t currently have a regular writing practice for my fiction. I’d like to start every day with fiction writing for an hour or two and the plan is to get back into a strict routine. I need to not check my phone or anything before starting or I’ll end up doing work things first.

I see so many boxes that queries are supposed to check — who you are, the log line, your quals, your marketing plan, knowing their backlist, etc. What is the actual trick to a good query? 

So there are different kinds of queries — some of what you’re describing here, like a backlist, and a marketing plan are things I wouldn’t actually put on a query, but which would instead go in a proposal.

Here are some general guidelines for queries:

• Know who you’re pitching. Use the agent’s name. Don’t say, “Dear Agent” or “To Whom it May Concern.” Does the agent have an assistant? Use their name as well! Assistants at bigger agencies often read way more queries than the agents themselves do, and they’re often more open and excited because they’re newer to the field.
• Know why you’re pitching this agent. Know what they like or have worked on in the past. They might have this on their website, or they might have this in an interview. Don’t reference an interview that’s older than a couple years though. If you can afford it, pay for a month or two of Publishers Marketplace. You can look up agents there and see what they’ve sold most recently. It’s really useful and shows that you’ve done your research.

Here is what a successful fiction query to an agent should look like:

“Dear [Agent Name], My name is [name] and I’m writing in the hopes you’ll consider my manuscript, [title] for representation. [title] is a [genre] about [introduce main character or main plot arc — more or less the elevator pitch]. [continue plot or mention anything interesting or relevant about its structure and then go into themes].”

Then you could say something like: “Like [recent successful book/tv show], [title] deals with [tktk] and like [recent successful book/tv show] it explores [tktk].”

OR

“[title] is like [recent successful book/tv show] meets [recent successful book/tv show] in examining [tktk]. [A little about me/first person bio] Thank you for your time and consideration. Please find pasted below the first [x] pages of [title]. I’d be happy to share the full MS with you, which runs [tktk words]. Best, [name].”

Short and sweet is really the key here, and some kiss-assery never went amiss either. Agents like knowing that you’re paying attention and really into their particular work. But the point of the query in fiction is always to get agents past it as fast as possible so the pages below can be what grabs them.

I always feel bad when requesting ARCs if I don’t have a plan to review them, like I’m somehow betraying the reviewer-publicist bond. What’s your process of requesting forthcoming books and feeling good about how you utilize them?

I wouldn’t feel bad. The cost is the publishers’ problem, not yours. Publicists know full well that sending someone an ARC does not guarantee a review, but if you feel like that’s something you want to add in, you can always tell them, when asking for an ARC, that you can’t guarantee coverage although you’re hoping to cover. Another option is to ask for eARCs, either PDFs or eGalleys via Edelweiss or whatnot.

What are your thoughts on the “New Adult” fiction genre? I’m working on a novel and the characters’ histories mean that in their present day they could be either college age or mid-20s. I’m wondering whether queries between YA and Adult are broken out as NA or recommended to fall into one or the other.

My understanding of New Adult is that it’s never really caught on outside specific areas like romance and erotica, and even there I believe — though I may be mistaken — that it’s largely applied in self-publishing spaces. If you’re looking for traditional representation, I’d recommend pitching this as an adult book about people in college or their mid-20s.

Can you share more about non-fiction queries? 

With nonfiction, it depends. Some agents ask for a proposal right off the bat, and others want manuscript pages. So you might want to have a few versions of your query around for this. It’ll also depend on the genre you’re working in, whether that’s history, memoir, cultural crit essays, or something else. Generally, the same rules apply in terms of the way you’d reach out to the agents — you want to know that you’re querying the right person, that you’re addressing what they’ve worked on and how you’ll be a good fit.

If the agents request manuscript pages then you’ll want to keep the query pretty similar to the fiction one. If the book is complete, tell us about the book’s arc, and what the themes are, and what it might be compared to. If you’re talking about a proposal, then that’ll be a little different. You’ll still want to have a short and sweet query letter, but then the proposal will work differently in that you might not send it until asked to, since it’ll be an attachment rather than something you paste in below.

Proposals should typically include an overview, chapter summaries, your bio/platform if you have one, a publicity and marketing plan, and competitive/comparative titles. The marketing plan is mostly about showing off the contacts you may already have in the industry, but you don’t actually need to know how to market or publicize yourself or your book at this point.

As a working creative writer, how do you balance and prioritize work that pays well vs. work that is creatively fulfilling? What does that Venn diagram look like for you? 

I am very lucky in that I had some parental financial support when I was in college and right after, and was able to do some really poorly paid or free work on reviews for about a year. This helped me get clips so I could start reviewing in venues that paid better, although it took a long time. A lot of my paid work is creatively fulfilling at the moment because I love reviewing books, and find criticism deeply satisfying. However, for years I wrote listicles, which paid okay but were largely very dull and basically copywriting work.

Full disclosure: I don’t make all my money from my freelance writing, which is part of why I’m in a PhD program. I get a stipend. I wouldn’t, unfortunately, be able to live off the money I make as a professional writer or creative writer.

Creative work is almost always going to come in second for money-making purposes. But making specific time blocks or days for yourself when you work on creative stuff can be a good way to protect your time. I have a teacher who tells people she can’t do anything on Fridays from 8am to 3pm because she has standing appointments. The standing appointments are with herself to write.

How has your mindset changed over time re: writing for money and for your own edification?

For years, I hustled SO hard. My first paid freelance writing gigs were $30 a listicle, or $50 a personal essay and I was writing a lot. I’ve been burnt out for years to be honest. Grad school helped me to make time for my own writing, in that it provided an excuse that I needed to set some boundaries. To be completely honest, I have a pretty unhealthy relationship with writing for money vs. for myself right now. I have a hard time writing anything that I don’t think I’ll be able to publish. In part this is because I have a chronic illness that has given me early onset osteoarthritis (I’m 31, so pretty early) and so my hands hurt a lot when I use them to type too much so it’s made me a bit stingy with my typing. For another, my hustle culture training is hard to unlearn.

So I’m actually in the process of trying to remind myself that I can just fuck around and find out, as it were, with my fiction and have some fun. I’m purposefully just writing for fun and to stretch those muscles and trying to do a little bit of that every day.

Do you have thoughts about how to find readers you trust for feedback during the early stages of writing a novel? 

There are paid spaces that can help you find communities for writing feedback, like the London Writers Hour that I mentioned above. Another option is Paragraph Workspace for Writers, which I think now has a digital membership version. But mostly, I’ve found that utilizing my friend networks can be helpful for this. You can start by meeting with friends to write and eventually critique.

Another fun way to find community is through the regional NaNoWriMo boards. Many regional groups meet regularly — or did before the pandemic, and I bet they meet virtually these days — and that can be a good way to meet other people who are dedicated to making the time to write all year round.

How would you recommend early career writers find mentors in the fiction world? It’s been so difficult to find workshops meeting during the pandemic, much less deeper connections

The only mentor I’ve had was a teacher I had in college that I kept in touch with after but who was never involved in my career; we just became friends. So while I used to call him my mentor, he wasn’t really in the way that people tend to think of mentors. All this to say that I have no idea how mentorship works in the fiction world because it seems to me that some people are just magically chosen and the majority of us are not.

In terms of how to make connections, the pandemic is definitely making this rough. I suggest attending people’s readings or launches via Zoom, which can be a good way to get to know some of the names in whatever genre you’re writing. You’ll find there’s sort of a big, but overlapping group of people that will probably show up.

I’ve also enjoyed finding my writing community in places like the London Writer’s Hour. There’s a paid version but the meetings themselves are free, which can also serve as an accountability process. This might also be a good way to find and commit to regular writing time.

What issues do you think freelance media workers should be organizing around in 2022?

I think that pay equity is one of the most dire issues because we know, and can see, how people are paid differently. I also think that media workers need to put pressure on the way that media companies continue to use ads and clicks to count what topics matter and are important. We know that this is a terrible way of counting what is news and what is relevant. I have no idea how to make this change but I think it’s important. I also think that pushing for accurate language in headlines and in articles is really important. I push back a lot with my editors when they want to change things so that a white or straight audience will “understand” it, and while that’s small in the grand scheme of things, it’s also one of the few places that I have power in my position as a freelancer.

Finally, I know that everyone is into the gig economy and that a lot of people prefer freelancing, but the fact is that we have no benefits, and in this country we need those to survive. I want media companies to hire more people full time at a living wage AND keep taking freelancers.

Also, this may be bitter, but it would be nice if media companies stopped circle jerking the same five people around their various editorial and staff writer positions.

ILANA: Thank you so much for having me! I wanted to mention Study Hall Creative which the wonderful Eliza Levinson runs, and which I believe has some writing groups in it.

UPCOMING AMAs:

RACHEL SIMON
April 13, 2022
3PM ET

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