This genre has no name, so I just call it ‘regular non-fiction books’

If you read my interview a few weeks ago with Irina Dumitrescu, a prolific book reviewer and literary essayist, then you know that the nonfiction world is something that has baffled me. That interview was about literary essays, but what’s even more baffling to me is the world of nonfiction books.

Like, I know a bit about memoir, because I’ve met many memoirists, but what about the other books? The bookstore is full of nonfiction books, and I have very little understanding of how that side of the publishing industry operates.

Well, my new agent, Alia Hanna Habib, mostly represents these kinds of books, and she is one of the best in the world at doing it. She represents Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nikole Hannah-Jones and a number of other nonfiction writers—many of whom have combined a considerable amount of commercial and critical success. And now she's written a book called Take It From Me, that tries to educate people about this mysterious category that seemingly makes up half the bookstore: "regular nonfiction books"

I first encountered Alia only six months ago, when I saw her email address in my subscriber list. It was from the Gernert domain, and I knew that this was a very well-respected literary agency. But when I googled her, I found this wild New York magazine piece:

“When a submission comes in from her, you stop what you’re doing,” says Doubleday senior editor Yaniv Soha of Alia Hanna Habib. The 45-year-old agent possesses the rare ability to start a bidding war just by sending over a manuscript.

This was good PR. I was very impressed. When I was looking for a new agent recently, she was the first person I emailed, because I figured editors would believe her if she told them I was popular online.

Alia represents clients who've been on the bestseller list and have won every kind of award (Pulitzer, MacArthur, NBCC, and many other ones). Most importantly for my purposes, she also represents Merve Emre, Lauren Oyler, Anastasia Berg, and a number of other writers who’ve found a way to bring their humanities expertise to a broader audience.

However, what I also really valued about her was her accessibility. My experience is that highly successful literary agents—especially those who represent the more high-end prestigious books—tend to feel somewhat elusive. They often have no web presence. It's hard to get a sense of what they’re like.

But Alia has a newsletter that I read avidly, precisely because it tends to have interviews with this genre of highbrow agent and editor that I find so mysterious. It's such a great window into that world.

She also has a book forthcoming, and it is one of the best publishing-related titles I've read. Take It From Me is so concrete and practical and straightforward, in a way that's quite rare to find.

As Alia tells it, she encounters a lot of highly-accomplished people, experts in their field, who have a desire to start communicating with the public at large. The purpose of this book is to educate them about publishing and get them thinking about how to frame their expertise in a way that’s legible to the publishing industry.

If you’re at all interested in writing nonfiction, you should buy this book (it’s out January 20th)—there’s nothing else like it.

Anyway, I asked if she’d be willing to sit with me for an interview about this book. I see it as a good complement to my discussion with Prof. Dumitrescu. Irina explained how to get your first clips, and now Alia will talk a bit about how this turns into a book.

As always, this interview was conducted via video call. I took written notes and assembled them into an interview, and I distributed it to the subject so she could have the opportunity to correct or clarify anything.

Alia Hanna Habib / photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

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Q: I loved the book and how it traces this very coherent career arc, that many people are interested in, but which has always seemed kind of mysterious. Until now, what I knew about nonfiction mostly came from memoirists. But in your first chapter, you introduce a different kind of nonfiction writer: a tax law professor, Dorothy Brown, someone who has some ideas and has a yearning to reach a broader audience with them. However, I don't want to put words in your mouth–how would you describe the audience for this book?

A: First, memoir represents just a tiny part of the nonfiction market. I represent a client named

Laura B. McGrath

, who does a lot of data analysis about publishing.¹ She is studying memoir now. Her data proved what you see anecdotally. Memoirs are what a lot of people fantasize about writing, and what a lot of agents say they want to represent on their Manuscript Wish Lists. But it's not necessarily what is being published, at least at the moment, and memoir is currently very over-represented by celebrity memoir, which is its own animal. I wish this weren’t the case! I love memoir and love representing memoir. I want publishers to buy memoirs and for book readers to support them. Write your memoir! But know that is not the only path. I also wanted the book to clarify some misinformation about how memoirs get bought and sold and what publishers look for in them to put you in a better position if you do want to write one.

So while there is plenty in the book for memoirists, I wanted other types of nonfiction writers to find some much-needed resources.

Dorothy Brown is the classic example of another kind of writer I want to reach. Dorothy is someone who has now gone on to have a successful career as a writer for a broader audience. But she came to nonfiction publishing as a deep expert in one particular thing: she’s the world's foremost expert on tax law and race. That does not translate into being an expert on how books get published, nor should it be.

Just because you're an expert in tax law or the history of immigration, or you're a reporter with a particular beat, or you're doing creative nonfiction work on a given subject, be it on surfing or American literature or animal husbandry, that won’t necessarily translate into being an expert on the world of publishing. However, that doesn't mean you can't be published well. That's the gap I wanted to bridge. To help people who want to reach a range of readers but don't know the means to do so.

2. I love how you think about platform in this book—because it can't just be reduced to the number of social media followers you have—it feels like in your understanding, your platform is more about your ability to generate excitement about this book. Does that seem accurate?

If I disabuse writers of one thing, it's that platform does not equal social media followers. Every single time I am on a publishing panel, I get one poor soul who asks if they need to be on social media or Twitter or Instagram or X. And I know they're asking because they want me to give them a hug and tell them no, and to be on their way. And I do think that's the answer: you absolutely don't need to have a social media platform to publish a book!

But while you should liberate yourself from thinking about it as an aggregate of your social media followers, platform does make it a lot easier to sell a book. I just encourage writers to think about platform a bit more expansively. In the simplest terms, a platform is the place from which you speak. So let's use the case of Dorothy Brown—she's not into social media. She is a very recognized expert in her field. And she's spent years building that expertise. Before she came to me to publish a trade book, she had started trying to publish outside of academia. Her goal was the NYT, but she started with targets that were easier to break into, and that worked.

She went out and wrote for outlets in order to build her platform; whereas she would have totally been spinning her wheels if she’d just tried to build a social media following.

Q: This is something I didn’t really understand until I got a platform myself. But your platform isn’t your social media numbers: it’s the fact that you exist in the minds of other people who care about a certain subject. So even if you have only 2,000 subscribers, if they’re the 2,000 people who really, deeply care about this issue—if they’re the most important people in this field—then that’s a great platform. However, I find that it can often be very hard to explain your platform to agents.

A lot of people, when they want to explain their platform, they bury the lede. You want to explain it in the quickest possible terms at the outset as you don't have a lot of time to get someone's attention—and then get into the nuances.

For instance with you, Naomi, I might say, “She has published novels, but she’s really best known for her widely-read newsletter, where she publishes irreverent takes about the publishing world and literature, and she posts this truly unique new form of fiction.”

When I am walking a writer through a book proposal, what I sometimes do is I ask them to explain their platform as a kind of intellectual history. For instance, you might say, “I am Naomi, a writer with a popular newsletter that has been featured in the New Yorker and New York magazine but I really struggled before I found my platform—I built this newsletter to showcase a new style of short fiction that I had given up on trying to sell to mainstream publishing.”

You might lead with the thing that is most exciting to publishers and put that in your very first sentence but then say, that’s not my whole story, this is how I got here. I am going to lift up the hood of the car and show you how it works. This creates intimacy with your reader. It shows your platform is not just a gambit you’re doing for likes. You're a real person with a real history, who has had ups and downs. It also makes for a more interesting read. Good book proposals are also great reads.

Q. In the introduction to the book, you describe talking to a woman who is a reporter at a national news organization, but who doesn't know much about book publishing. Personally, I find that I encounter a lot of people who have the profile and the platform where they could conceivably interest an agent or publisher in a book, but they're still thinking about what the book should be. How do you advise people in that situation?

I don't think anyone should write a book because it feels like the next logical step. It's not a career stepping stone. Some people who are professionalized writers approach it that way. They’re constantly thinking “What is my book? What is my book?!” They’re casting about for a book idea just to write a book. Writing a book is really hard. Writing a nonfiction book can be grueling. Don't approach it as part of a checklist of a brilliant career.

I would say you want to have something that really interests you and that you're willing to be stuck with for a long time—it shouldn't be about ‘The market is interested in this.’ What are you interested in, what is stuck in your brain? Then, you think, what is unique about you—your personal story—your expertise—your argument that nobody else has made. That is what makes for a perfect book—the ‘you’ part that only you can add.

But it shouldn't come from looking at the market because the timeline to market is really long. Nonfiction books are sold on proposal—the quickest to market will be in bookstores two years after you sell it to publishers, so whatever people are obsessed with this week they won't be obsessed with in two years.

4. It feels like in the last year or so, we've started to see writers who don’t have much experience with the traditional publishing world, but who have developed a following online for their newsletters and are now thinking about how publishing a book fits into their plans. How would you advise someone in that situation?

It is so exciting to me that Substack exists as a place where writers can be found and can write with freedom. I used to find some writers on Twitter, but what's so great about Substack is someone like me who loves to read—who's flipping through Substack to entertain myself-can find a writer and in one place can see their whole body of work. That's a great way for me to see the range a writer has and what they're interested in.

For a writer who has a Substack and wants to write a book—I would urge you to not to think about a book as the next logical step in your career. Ask yourself, What can a book do that a Substack can't? With a book, you have a captive audience reading your seventy to a hundred thousand words.

And get yourself familiar with the length of actual books, ideally by reading them. I get a lot of pitches from writers who write short form, and they'll say “I am writing a book that is forty thousand words”. But that’s too short for most publishers to consider—very few books of that length get published.

I’d urge you to think instead: What can I be doing if, instead of running sprints. I was running a marathon? That's what I’d start from—what can I do in a book that I can't do on Substack.

When Twitter got popular, people would think, oh my tweets are popular, let's put them into a book. But a book is a different form, and tweets won’t really translate. Similarly, a collection of Substack essays won't translate that well. You have to think what can a book offer that a Substack can't. With my own book, for example, I didn’t just give advice, as I do in my Substack, but—as you mentioned—I traced the arc of a writer’s career and tried to give aspiring writers a sense of the many different ways a career can unfold. Substack doesn’t afford me that kind of longitudinal presentation.

At the same time, if your Substack is about the beauty industry, the book you're proposing should not be about Elon Musk. There should be a relationship between your Substack–what you're known for–and whatever book you're trying to sell. Because that's your audience.

Q: Then we have the flipside, where we have traditional writers who maybe haven't had the success with publishing that they wanted, and the newsletter world offers another chance at a career.

To them I say why not try it. I get asked so often from people: “Should I try Substack?” I’d answer, why not—it's free. (And to be clear, this is a different question from the one posed above: “Do I have to be on social media?”)² The only cost is your time. Go ahead and see if you like it. It's a place where you can experiment with form. It's fairly low risk. The worst you can do is write something embarrassing and delete it. What's different about Substack versus the early era of blogs, is that part of what you're doing here is networking. You're following other writers who are doing similar stuff. So part of what you're doing is reading other writers, reposting them. That's not for everyone, but if you have the bandwidth, it's worth trying.

Maybe that's not your favorite part of Substacking, but again, it’s also worth trying. Let's say you like writing on Substack, but you don't love reaching out to other writers and reposting them. But I would say that if you like reading other writers—and I hope, as a writer, you are also a reader—you are capable of reaching out to other writers and reposting them and supporting their work. Just say to yourself, “For six months I am going to write on Substack and share other writers’ work and see what happens.” Then the worst thing you've done is gotten some practice writing and done some reading and made some other Substackers happy and maybe made some friends.

Q: Is there anything else you want people to take away about your Substack?

I started my Substack because I wanted to be very accessible to people who don't know me personally through the world of publishing—I wanted people who were looking for advice about publishing to be like, “Oh there was this lady with a newsletter. She has an approach that is straightforward and transparent. She knows a lot of other people and brings in other experts.” And the best way to show that was on Substack.

One little takeaway for Substackers: I think about this a lot. I have a Substack, and I am really busy, and in Substack world, you gain more followers the more you post. But with my job I cannot post more than twice a month—it is so hard for me to do even twice a month. When I started to do this, I thought there is no way to do well. When I see other people who do it, I get so envious of the volume of their posts. But I thought something is better than nothing—I didn't let this barrier to entry, the fact that I have a busy job and a busy life, the fact that I don't have the time to post three times a week—stop me from putting out a post every other week. And I have no regrets.

P.S. Pre-order Take It From Me here, and/or visit Alia’s newsletter here.

1. Laura MacGrath has an incredible Substack. She’s an English professor who uses data science to draw big-picture conclusions about the publishing industry.

2. After the interview I talked a little bit with Alia about whether “being on Substack” is different from “being on social media”. I see it as being different, but similar. I would say that Substack is the social media platform that is friendliest to writers, because you don’t need to gain new skills to use it—you don’t need to craft short jokes or little videos or take beautiful pictures, all you need is to write. But, on an emotional level, it feels very much like social media and carries a similar chance that you’ll be consumed by envy and/or attacked by strangers.