The Friday afternoon session on how to publish a book was truly exciting and insightful, providing me with a big picture of publishing process, how to write the book proposal and how to approach publishing houses. One of the most important keys to become a published author may be finding the right agent for you. There are some authors who wrote the New York Times bestselling books without helps of agent, but all of the authors on the panel emphasized that agents are extremely helpful and you should have one, too.  The challenge is to find a right agent, because good agents don’t usually reply to your query letter (the chance of getting a face-to-face meeting is roughly 5%), so you would need to use all your journalist skills to find the right source, by attending book conference, networking with authors and editors. You will also need to approach many agents to find out who is your best match because “it is like a dating” and you need to have the right match in terms of the subject of interest and human chemistry.  Also, the authors seem to have had a very clear idea about their target readers segment when approaching agents.

— Koji Takahashi