Getting Published – Do You Really Need an Agent?

Writing a book is hard. Getting published is even more difficult. I recently read Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I bought this book several years ago thinking it might give me some useful advice on writing and publishing a book, but ironically I only got around to reading it after I published a book on risk management last year with McGraw-Hill.

Bird by Bird has some good recommendations, especially for people that would like to write a book but have not done much writing. A key lesson she imparts is to start with short writing assignments. The title of the book comes from advice her father, an accomplished novelist, gave to her brother about a school assignment. Her brother was given three months to write a report on birds but had waited until the day before beginning it. Their father put his arm around her brother’s shoulder and told him to take it “bird by bird.” The moral is to break a long assignment down into smaller pieces in order to avoid getting overwhelmed.

This was a lesson I learned many years ago when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation. My advisor was a prolific researcher and constantly gave his students problems to solve. I made a decision early on in my research to focus only on specific problems that were related to each other. I spent a month solving one problem that seemed interesting to me. I then worked with my advisor to write a paper about the problem and it solution. From that point forward, I would pick out the problems he posed that were connected to the first problem. Two years later, after solving five of these problems, I had enough content to fill a dissertation. All that was left was to write an introduction, a conclusion, and do a lot of editing.

Anne Lamott has written several best-selling nonfiction books. In addition to her career as a writer, she also teaches writing. At one point in the book she writes about her students: “…someone will raise his or her hand: ‘Can you send your manuscript directly to a publisher, or do you really need an agent?’ After a moment or so, I say, You really need an agent.” I found this comment ironic because I did not use an agent to get published. I spoke to an agent a friend recommended to me but she never signed me to an agreement. I submitted a book proposal to one publisher and got rejected. I considered self-publishing, but remembered that a colleague of mine had a connection with a publisher, and at one point had an agreement to publish a book on cost estimating, for which I was going to write a chapter on risk. I reached out to him and he got me in contact with an editor at McGraw-Hill. After some back and forth, they agreed to publish my book, which came out last November. I feel very fortunate to get published, with or without an agent. My experience may be very unique, but I found it was not necessary to use an agent to get a publishing agreement.

If you are interested in project risk management, you can read Chapter 1 of my book, Solving for Project Risk Management: Understanding the Critical Role of Uncertainty in Project Management, for free. You can watch a 10-minute video overview on YouTube, and order from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other booksellers.