Perfect Pitch: Melody Schreiber's Query for What We Didn't Expect
When it comes to querying, the most popular questions I get tend to be around non-fiction projects and anthologies.
What should my platform look like? How much should be written? How many contributors can I have? Should the pieces be done?
Well, now that Melody Schreiber’s beautiful anthology of essays is out and about (via Melville House), it’s time for another Perfect Pitch post… one that tackles both a non-fiction project AND querying an anthology, in the same query letter. The sheer power of it all. Thank you, Melody, for being willing to share this!
And if this is helpful, please pick up a copy of Melody’s collection, in bookstores now.
Let’s learn how she pitched What We Didn’t Expect.
Dear Eric,
It feels strange to email you for the first time, after seeing your posts on Facebook and Twitter for so long! I've enjoyed following your journey into fatherhood, and Nena has also been an excellent resource on maternity fashion and surviving sleepless nights. My own experiences as a mother have been quite unexpected at times, and I'd love to serve as a resource for others--which brings me to this query.
WHAT WE DIDN’T EXPECT will be an anthology of creative nonfiction of 90,000 words. It will feature diverse voices and experiences of premature birth, in the form of essays, interviews, letters, poems, to-do lists, and comics. When new parents are sleep deprived and stressed out, reading a whole book can be daunting; but this collection will be a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure for navigating NICU and beyond.
Ten percent of babies are born premature in the United States—that’s 400,000 families who go through this every year. But that one word, “preemie,” encompasses a range of medical and cultural experiences. For example, Black women give birth prematurely 50 percent more than white women—14 percent of African American births happen early, compared with 9 percent of white births. The statistics for Hispanic and Native women and children aren’t much better, at 12 and 13 percent respectively.
Furthermore, babies of color immediately begin facing racial discrimination in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) across the country. Yet there are no books reflecting this diversity of circumstances and experiences around premature birth—from racial discrimination to health and income inequalities; from parental leave policies to adoption; from practical advice on raising a premature baby to approaching loss and grief—in compelling, relatable stories.
I’ve written about my son’s prematurity and open-heart surgery for Catapult, and I tapped into personal experience for a story on the booming business of breast milk donation for The Atlantic. Over the past seven years, I have reported on maternal and child health, as well as other topics, for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, Vice, and others. I am also a contributor to Book Riot. In addition to marquee contributors, I’d also like to give emerging writers a spotlight, with a special focus on writers of color and LGBTQ contributors.
I was inspired by your recent essay about Welcome Home. What I wanted most after having a preemie was to be seen—to have our struggle to survive recognized, to feel a little less alone, to see our experiences reflected wherever I could find them. My hope is that the diverse and wide-ranging stories in WHAT WE DIDN’T EXPECT will help those 400,000 other families through one of the most difficult—and beautiful—times in their lives.
All the best,
Melody Schreiber
Okay, so there is a lot to unpack here, about why this query is so extraordinary. Let’s dig in.
Personal Hook: So, Melody and I knew each other from bookish social media circles. She opened up with that, which is of course okay. We have some mutual friends in real life (in particular Swapna Krishna, who was instrumental in getting this query to my inbox, thank you Swapna!), have written for a few of the same places… so the warm and personal opening was very welcome here! Are here kinda pals with the agent you’re planning to pitch? Cool. This is fine.
But! If you’re maybe not that close with the agent you’re pitching… I don’t know, there is the possibility talking about their cute family might feel a bit off. So gauge your relationship there accordingly. I’ve known Melody online for YEARS. I loved hearing from her.
Author Platform: We talk a lot about platform in non-fiction and why it’s so important. You want to show a potential agent (and the publisher!) that you are THE person to be writing this story. Gathering these pieces. Investigating this topic. Whatever it happens to be. In Melody’s query, she jumps right into it. She spotlights her piece on Catapult, she brings up her reporting in the Atlantic, and she drops a bunch of impressive, high profile outlets where she has covered maternal and child health.
All too often we hear about platform as social media reach. And while that’s wonderful… platform through publication, establishing yourself as that professional in your space, is just as (if not more) valuable.
The Market and the Why: So Melody’s book is a mix of both literary non-fiction essays and a parenting book! It’s a bit of a category genre blend, which is one of the many reasons a place like Melville House ended up being so perfect for it. They get challenging titles. And one thing Melody did so well here, was explain the why of this book. It’s not just a traditional essay collection or memoir, where the why might be just learning from someone’s story. It’s effectively a sort of guide through this experience.
She shares statistics, news articles, and explains why this kind of book would be so wildly important. This is something I did with Eat to Feed (a cookbook for breastfeeding mothers) and the proposal for that project.
Her Plan Moving Forward: As with most non-fiction, this isn’t a finished project. Melody mentioned her plans for finding an array of diverse and inclusive voices (and if you look at the table of contents, she absolutely did that).
Vision: There’s an interesting bit in here where Melody talked about how she saw the project with poems, comics, etc. It ended up being a straight forward essay collection, a discussion we had moving into the project. Agents (and editors!) will often have a vision for your book. You can push along with it or not, remember, this is your idea. But we agreed and off we went.
Now, one thing we tend to bring up a lot with anthologies and collections like this, are having core contributors that are going to grab an agent or an editor. Full disclosure, the original query here had some names that didn’t make it to the book (this absolutely happens with anthologies, people get busy, life happens!), so I cut that section. I don’t want anyone feeling like they are on the spot here.
But they were names I recognized and were excited about, and the new voices Melody pulled in for the project after I signed her were more than enough to still get the book into the right hands at a publishing house.
The project also ended up being 70,000 words, so remember, queries aren’t set in stone when it comes to your word count estimate!
-#-
And there you have it. Lots to learn here.
And again, if this was helpful, do order yourself a copy of this stunning collection. And stay tuned! I’ll probably post the proposal for the project in the coming weeks or months.
Thanks you Melody!
