Any agents like medical memoirs?

Dr. Musgrave

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Hi everyone,
I am a recent addition to the AW crowd. I was wondering if anyone could recommend any agents interested in medical memoirs. My WIP details my experiences in medical school. The current market mainly consists of memoirs from residents and I thought a student perspective would be a great addition.

My search on agentquery.com, combining both medical and memoir genres, so far has not received interest from agents.

Any thoughts?

Dr. Musgrave
 

ColoradoGuy

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I was told by several agents it's a tough sell, so for my first book I repackaged what was in many ways a medical memoir into another format--a series of instructive cases.
 

Dr. Musgrave

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Not sure if that would work for me as most of my book is a narrative account of my experiences through the different rotations. I suppose it could be described as an informative book for pre-medical students to learn about medical school's structure and difficult courses, however, I would like to retain the general entertainment value to draw in non-medical readers.
 

ColoradoGuy

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I would just query agents who take nonfiction. The key to your proposal would be to figure out just who your audience is. It sounds as if you would be targeting premeds. One of the key things agents would want to know is just how many of them there are and why they would want to buy your book--what information you can give that is not found elsewhere and why they need or want to know it.
 

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This won't really help much, but the novel "Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures" by Vincent Lam, is a book of short stories following medical students through the training process. It's fictional, but written by a doctor. It was very popular, won the Giller Award in Canada (our biggest literary award) and is being turned into a tv series. My point is, there is a wider audience for this kind of work than just med students. You may wish to make mention of this book in your queries.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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I think you should look at who has represented other doctors who've written about similar topics and query them. This involves going to bookstores and libraries, looking at books that seem to be on similar lines to yours (or targeted at a similar audience) and then checking the acknowledgments or Publisher's Marketplace to see which agents represented the authors.

If I'd exhausted all of those folks without success, I'd approach agents who have represented people who have written memoirs about personal medical experiences.

And if I'd exhausted all of THOSE folks without success, I'd probably give up. But that's just me. The next logical step would be to query agents who represent memoirs and/or books about medicine and health in general.
 

Dr. Musgrave

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Thanks for all of your advice. There are hundreds of thousands of premedical and medical students in the US . Additionally, the audience interested in entertaining medical stories is probably even larger. ER and Grey's Anatomy prove this quite well. I'll probably follow much of this advice- except for giving up- which I don't do too well!
 

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Hi Dr.

In addition to the suggestions above, I would search for agents who are looking for medical thrillers AND who also represent memoirs. Good luck.
 
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Dr. Musgrave

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I've decided to give a little teaser...

Sample paragraph:
The residents and I took the elevator up to the thirteenth floor to wheel the patient down ourselves. The window outside was a non-stop display of lightning. We unhooked him from the ventilator and manually bagged him during transport. After we made our way to the basement, we quickly got everything ready, putting the patient to sleep, and were seconds away from making the neck incision. All of a sudden…darkness! The power had gone out in the entire building. Imagine being in the basement of a building about to begin surgery in sheer blackness. To our relief, the lights suddenly reappeared but then, unfortunately, flickered out again. Although the power outages didn’t last long, it was enough to end the case.
 

ORION

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It seems a bit dry and full of cliches(non-stop display...to our relief...sheer darkness etc.) ..."imagine being in the basement..." - takes me right out of the story. The use of exclamation points rather than word choice.
but that's just my opinion- needs editing ( a bit wordy)
You might want to post it in "share your work"
Keep in mind when you post something like this you are unlikely to get "gush"
I'd say this is why there is little interest from agents rather then merely medical memoir disinterest.
Again this is only my opinion- I would really suggest writing the entire book and editing well before querying...It will all depend on the writing.