FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Do I need an agent?
Of course I’m going to say yes! There are things an agent can do for an author that an author cannot necessarily do for him or herself. Negotiating a publishing contract is the first thing that comes to mind—a good agent will know what’s reasonable and what’s way out of line, and when a publisher is lowballing you. A good agent will also help to iron out any disputes between an editor or publisher and an author, whether it be about editing, scheduling, deadlines, or personality clashes. A good agent is a mediator, who will work on keeping a healthy marriage between editor and author. A good agent will also help an author to learn the business, and to realize that there is a lot more to publishing these days than just writing the manuscript and sending it in. A good agent can help with publicity and marketing, with promotional ideas, etc., to maximize a book’s sales potential. There is nothing worse than a good book that doesn’t sell well because it never finds its audience.
Will I get rich by writing a book?
The first rule of writing is: Don't give up your day job. The second rule of writing is: DON'T GIVE UP YOUR DAY JOB!!! There is a common misconception that every author sells his book for millions of dollars, and then Hollywood comes knocking on your door bearing suitcases full of money. Maybe if your name is John Grisham or Dan Brown that’s true, but even their early books were not commercial successes. We only read about the biggest deals signed—very rarely do the typical publishing deals get any press. The third rule of publishing? If you don't know it by now, you haven't been paying attention.
What is a typical author’s advance?
There is no such thing. In my 30+ years in the business, it’s truly amazing to me that first time authors still make the same money they did in the 1980s—about $5,000. (Actually, sometimes less...) But there are all sorts of deals from $5,000 on up. Bill Clinton reportedly received about $8 million for his memoir. The Obamas--more! So a typical deal is somewhere in between no advance at all and a million bucks. Not very helpful perhaps, but often an author and agent have a number in mind when they go to sell a book, and they are surprised by what the marketplace has decided the real price is—in both directions, higher or lower. The fact is, you never know until you try to sell it.
Why are advances still so low then?
Publishing is an odd business, as you will come to learn if you get involved in it. The business model is completely obsolete, dating back to the Great Depression. In the 1920s and earlier, books were sold on a non-returnable basis, like clothing, or food (non-returnable from seller to manufacturer—customers return things all the time). There weren’t very many bookstores in the U.S., the population was about one half to one third of what it is today, and relatively few people had college educations, or enough leisure time to read. That’s why first editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway are so rare and expensive—it’s not just that they were great writers, but that a first printing in those days would be about 2,000 or 3,000 copies. When the stock market crashed and the Depression set in, bookstores would have gone out of business if they hadn’t convinced publishers to make the books fully returnable. It kept the publishers afloat as well as the stores, and maybe even a few printers. When the economy picked up going into WWII and the post war years, publishers and bookstores didn’t go back to the pre-war model. But our soldiers had gotten so hooked on reading paperbacks while fighting in Europe or the Pacific, that they took their habit back home with them, and publishing flourished. In the 1960s and 1970s, a bestselling paperback would sell 6-12 million copies. But in the late 1980s, hardcovers began to take precedence over paperbacks. There was a perceived prestige factor associated with hardcovers, and publishers loved the much higher cover price. As they started to price themselves out of the market, the discount booksellers came to the rescue, as well as the on-line booksellers. But a recent study showed that while the U.S. population has increased, readership has not. As technology has taken over our lives, the competition for our leisure time has grown fierce, from TV and movies to cable TV (500 channels!), streaming video (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.) and the internet. And it seems as though our leisure time has decreased and become fragmented--we’re all working harder to stay at the same level. We as a nation have also gotten out of the habit of reading books, especially compared to Europe, but publishers continue to pump out more and more books every year. As costs have risen and profit margins have shrunk, and per title sales have decreased (a mega-bestseller today is 2-4 million copies), publishers have tried to make up their profits by publishing more titles. Great, you say, more books are being published! But since overall readership levels have remained static for 20+ years, that means that each title is selling fewer copies. Publish pump out about 35,000 titles a year. Add in self-published books, and you're looking at four million new books every year. Kind of a long-winded way of saying, “You do the math…”
What is the future of traditional publishing?
Despite people proclaiming the death of publishing for the last 90 or so years, publishing isn’t going away any time soon. It will no doubt transform itself into something else—it’s already changed greatly since about 2007. It may not change fully in the course of my career, but it certainly will in the next generation. Not that we’re going to have microchips implanted in our brains that can download all seven Harry Potter books in 2 seconds while we navigate our flying cars through the floating sky cities, but we will probably see a combination of the growth of print-on-demand publishing and electronic books, both separately and together. The book itself, as a physical object, has been perfected over the course of the last 500+ years. It’s lightweight, portable, does not require an external energy source, won’t become unreadable if it gets wet or gets sand in it, and is relatively inexpensive. The high contrast black type on white (or white-ish) paper is easy to read. So far, no electronic book has come close, but with the Kindle Paperwhite and Nook and iPad and who knows what yet to come, there are excellent e-readers on the market for about $50, and e-reader apps for your tablet or computer or phone are free). As for print-on-demand, where you either place your order at a kiosk or on-line, and then pick up your book or have it shipped to you, that already exists. But neither of these will have the feel of browsing in a store filled with book-laden shelves, leading to the unexpected gem, or the staff recommendation that will keep you coming back as a customer. But think of what's already happened—it has killed the chain stores (only B&N is left...barely), decimated the book printing industry, severely impacted the freight shipping business, and closed down a whole slew of warehouses. Publishers’ costs have dramatically dropped. But there have been further mergers (the Big Six is now the Big Five) to combat Amazon, which sells 50% of all books. However, we're seeing some growth in independent bookstores which can offer the kind of personal service that neither chains or online stores can offer, and a whole slew of small publishers popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm to step in where the big publishers no longer want to tread. With change comes unexpected consequences, both good and bad.
If you decide to represent me, will you sell my ten unsold novels sitting in the bottom drawer of my dresser?
If you have unsold novels in the trunk or the dresser drawer, there is probably a very good reason why they haven’t sold. My recommendation—leave them in the dresser. Don't self-publish them (at least not under your own name)--you will be shooting yourself in the foot. Very few writers are brilliant the first time out. It often takes painstaking years of honing the craft of writing before a saleable book emerges. The late Frank McCourt worked on Angela’s Ashes for twenty years until he figured out the right way to tell the story—through the eyes of a young boy. Otherwise, it would be too depressing and maudlin. But the sense of wonder and confusion Young Frank brought to the stories made them humorous, loving, and truly portrayed Frank’s getting out of Limerick, Ireland and his ability to overcome his miserable childhood as a triumph of the human spirit. John Jakes had been writing and selling all sorts of pseudonymous genre paperback fiction for years (science fiction, westerns, etc.) until his epic Kent Family Chronicles became a huge hit during the nation’s bicentennial. And so it goes with many, many others. So if you want to be an overnight success—work at it first.
What’s the best way to submit my work to you?
I would prefer a query letter by email. Note that I wrote "query letter." Not "query letter plus a chapter in the body of the email." If I’m intrigued by the project, I’ll ask for more—the first chapter, or first 50 pages or so, also by email--but as an attached Word document, which I can then read on the computer or download (or is it upload?) to my Kindle. I’m trying to have a paperless office. Not because I’m going green, it’s just that my wife will kill me if I let manuscripts pile up all over the house.
Do you have a particular format you like to see?
Yes, I do. And I’m not weird or persnickety about it, but it is somewhat of an industry standard. I like one inch margins all the way around, 12 point Times New Roman type, double spaced (very important), with a header or footer showing the title and author, and all pages numbered. It always amazed me as an editor how many agents would send me single spaced submissions, or submissions with no page numbers. To me, it was the height of laziness. Editors are notoriously overburdened with reading—make it easy on them to keep track of what they’re reading, and you might have an easier time making the sale. At least they won’t throw it down in disgust and say “I can’t read that—it’s single spaced!”
Do I have to pay back my advance before I can collect royalties?
No. But you have to earn out your advance first. An advance is technically “an advance against royalties.” Let’s say your book sells to a publisher for $100,000 (just to make the numbers easy). The cover price is $20, which will start throwing off a $3 per book royalty with the 10,001st copy sold (slightly lower royalties up until then, but for this example, let’s assume a $3 per book royalty on all copies). That means that you will need to sell 33,334 books to earn back royalties beyond the advance. That 33,334th copy will generate $2 in royalties above the advance of $100,000. If your book only sell 15,000 copies, you will not receive any royalties, but you won’t have to pay back your advance either. There will be a quiz later on. Aren’t you glad you asked?
What genres are going to be hot? What should I write about?
If you try to hit a moving target by predicting the public’s taste in fiction, you’re going to miss every time. Write about what you want to write about, not for the market. There is no predicting the market. When you’ve finished your great commercial novel in a genre that was hot when you started it, chances are that by the time it took to write and publish this masterpiece (two years), the public’s fickle taste in fiction will have changed. New ideas catch the public’s fancy all the time. Tom Clancy pretty much single-handedly started the technothriller genre with The Hunt For Red October. Dan Brown started a religious thriller kick with The Da Vinci Code. John Grisham started a huge thirst for legal thrillers with The Firm. Could anyone have predicted any of this? No way. Publishers, unfortunately, have a copycat mentality, so once a genre gets hot, they quickly overbuy and overpublish until the marketplace is saturated and the public gets sick of the rotten imitations on the shelves. The publishing industry is great at killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Look at what happened to the Chick Lit genre, the Young Adult Vampire genre, etc. And that’s why the public’s taste changes so quickly. So ignore the marketplace, come up with something brilliant and original, and go for it!
What kind of books are you looking for?
Excellent question! A number of you have written to me asking what kind of books I’m looking to represent. While ultimately I’d like to represent a little bit of everything (keeps life from getting boring, and why put all my publishing eggs in one basket?), at the moment I’m not quite ready to represent all types of books from A-Z. Maybe I’m only at A-M. Here goes...
I'd like to strike a balance between fiction and nonfiction. In theory, non-fiction is easier to sell (both to publishers and to consumers). It takes much less time to prepare a nonfiction book for submission to publishers. A novel can take a year (or more) to write, and then a while for me to read and give notes on, and then for an author to revise. It could then go to a copyeditor to clean up all the sloppy mistakes and typos. By the time I feel the book is ready, two years might pass! Whereas an experienced author can put together a good proposal in a week or two (assuming all the legwork and research has already been done). But I ultimately want to have a somewhat even balance between fiction and nonfiction.
In fiction, the categories I’m looking for are thrillers of all types, from romantic suspense to international intrigue, historical and military thrillers to domestic thrillers. But please, no novels about the terrorist destruction of any cities—I lived through 9/11 and have no desire to revisit it. I like mysteries, too, in all varieties, from cozies to noir (although noir is almost impossible to sell). I like historical fiction, in the John Jakes/Jeff Shaara mode. Sorry, but I'm not looking for fantasy, either adult or YA, nor am I looking for middle grade or YA non-fantasy. And no children's picture books, please.
In nonfiction, I like narratives, memoir, sports, crime, military, history, business, humor, pop science and the occasional medical, health and how-to book. As an editor, I’d edited memoirs of astronauts, war heroes, sports stars, mobsters, diplomats, refugees, etc. I’d worked on oral history/social history, WWII history, Civil War history, business management, leadership, etc.
If you have written a book in a subject I didn’t mention above, send me an email query and ask me.
How important is it to have a platform? And what is a platform, anyway?
Ah, the dreaded platform—a word devised to drive editors, agents, and authors insane by sadistic marketing and publicity people. Well, not quite. A platform is anything that the writer does to give him or her a somewhat higher profile—a regular column in a newspaper, a popular blog or website, their own radio or TV show. If you're podcasting or blogging, don't even think of approaching an agent or publisher unless you're getting a minimum of 25,000 unique hits per entry. And 50,000 or 100,000 is better! I know, pretty hard to come by those things, right? Generally, this is most important for non-fiction writers. It’s virtually impossible to get publicity for novels and fiction, so it’s not as important. But non-fiction writers need to be experts in their field, and have a way to prove it—videos of appearances on Oprah, for example. Being best friends with the producer of the Today Show doesn’t guarantee you a spot on the couch next to the host, though, so be realistic. Publishers love authors who do speaking engagements to business groups, universities, etc., on a regular basis. Often a corporate sale can make a book very profitable whereas the same book might not be acquired without it. It’s not enough any more to have a great idea and do a great job writing a killer proposal, you have to be able to talk knowledgeably about your subject and look good while doing it.
Do I have to write the entire manuscript to sell my book?
Many nonfiction books can be sold by well-crafted proposals running anywhere from 25-60 pages. Some are shorter, some are longer, but that’s the sweet spot. For some nonfiction books, you need to write the entire thing. First novels are almost always sold on the complete manuscript, although subsequent novels (at least if they're in a series) usually sell based on an outline and a sample chapter. Often, when a novelist wants to move from one publishing house to another, he or she will write a complete manuscript.
Why did I include a Frequently Asked Questions page, you may ask...and who is asking these questions?
I decided to include these because these are the questions that always get asked at writer’s conferences, where editors, agents and aspiring writers get together over the course of a weekend to meet, network, eat, drink, and see if they can do some business. I’m trying to anticipate some of the questions that are commonly asked about the publishing business by new writers who are looking for an agent.
If there are questions I didn’t think of but you still want to know, send me an email!
Of course I’m going to say yes! There are things an agent can do for an author that an author cannot necessarily do for him or herself. Negotiating a publishing contract is the first thing that comes to mind—a good agent will know what’s reasonable and what’s way out of line, and when a publisher is lowballing you. A good agent will also help to iron out any disputes between an editor or publisher and an author, whether it be about editing, scheduling, deadlines, or personality clashes. A good agent is a mediator, who will work on keeping a healthy marriage between editor and author. A good agent will also help an author to learn the business, and to realize that there is a lot more to publishing these days than just writing the manuscript and sending it in. A good agent can help with publicity and marketing, with promotional ideas, etc., to maximize a book’s sales potential. There is nothing worse than a good book that doesn’t sell well because it never finds its audience.
Will I get rich by writing a book?
The first rule of writing is: Don't give up your day job. The second rule of writing is: DON'T GIVE UP YOUR DAY JOB!!! There is a common misconception that every author sells his book for millions of dollars, and then Hollywood comes knocking on your door bearing suitcases full of money. Maybe if your name is John Grisham or Dan Brown that’s true, but even their early books were not commercial successes. We only read about the biggest deals signed—very rarely do the typical publishing deals get any press. The third rule of publishing? If you don't know it by now, you haven't been paying attention.
What is a typical author’s advance?
There is no such thing. In my 30+ years in the business, it’s truly amazing to me that first time authors still make the same money they did in the 1980s—about $5,000. (Actually, sometimes less...) But there are all sorts of deals from $5,000 on up. Bill Clinton reportedly received about $8 million for his memoir. The Obamas--more! So a typical deal is somewhere in between no advance at all and a million bucks. Not very helpful perhaps, but often an author and agent have a number in mind when they go to sell a book, and they are surprised by what the marketplace has decided the real price is—in both directions, higher or lower. The fact is, you never know until you try to sell it.
Why are advances still so low then?
Publishing is an odd business, as you will come to learn if you get involved in it. The business model is completely obsolete, dating back to the Great Depression. In the 1920s and earlier, books were sold on a non-returnable basis, like clothing, or food (non-returnable from seller to manufacturer—customers return things all the time). There weren’t very many bookstores in the U.S., the population was about one half to one third of what it is today, and relatively few people had college educations, or enough leisure time to read. That’s why first editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway are so rare and expensive—it’s not just that they were great writers, but that a first printing in those days would be about 2,000 or 3,000 copies. When the stock market crashed and the Depression set in, bookstores would have gone out of business if they hadn’t convinced publishers to make the books fully returnable. It kept the publishers afloat as well as the stores, and maybe even a few printers. When the economy picked up going into WWII and the post war years, publishers and bookstores didn’t go back to the pre-war model. But our soldiers had gotten so hooked on reading paperbacks while fighting in Europe or the Pacific, that they took their habit back home with them, and publishing flourished. In the 1960s and 1970s, a bestselling paperback would sell 6-12 million copies. But in the late 1980s, hardcovers began to take precedence over paperbacks. There was a perceived prestige factor associated with hardcovers, and publishers loved the much higher cover price. As they started to price themselves out of the market, the discount booksellers came to the rescue, as well as the on-line booksellers. But a recent study showed that while the U.S. population has increased, readership has not. As technology has taken over our lives, the competition for our leisure time has grown fierce, from TV and movies to cable TV (500 channels!), streaming video (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.) and the internet. And it seems as though our leisure time has decreased and become fragmented--we’re all working harder to stay at the same level. We as a nation have also gotten out of the habit of reading books, especially compared to Europe, but publishers continue to pump out more and more books every year. As costs have risen and profit margins have shrunk, and per title sales have decreased (a mega-bestseller today is 2-4 million copies), publishers have tried to make up their profits by publishing more titles. Great, you say, more books are being published! But since overall readership levels have remained static for 20+ years, that means that each title is selling fewer copies. Publish pump out about 35,000 titles a year. Add in self-published books, and you're looking at four million new books every year. Kind of a long-winded way of saying, “You do the math…”
What is the future of traditional publishing?
Despite people proclaiming the death of publishing for the last 90 or so years, publishing isn’t going away any time soon. It will no doubt transform itself into something else—it’s already changed greatly since about 2007. It may not change fully in the course of my career, but it certainly will in the next generation. Not that we’re going to have microchips implanted in our brains that can download all seven Harry Potter books in 2 seconds while we navigate our flying cars through the floating sky cities, but we will probably see a combination of the growth of print-on-demand publishing and electronic books, both separately and together. The book itself, as a physical object, has been perfected over the course of the last 500+ years. It’s lightweight, portable, does not require an external energy source, won’t become unreadable if it gets wet or gets sand in it, and is relatively inexpensive. The high contrast black type on white (or white-ish) paper is easy to read. So far, no electronic book has come close, but with the Kindle Paperwhite and Nook and iPad and who knows what yet to come, there are excellent e-readers on the market for about $50, and e-reader apps for your tablet or computer or phone are free). As for print-on-demand, where you either place your order at a kiosk or on-line, and then pick up your book or have it shipped to you, that already exists. But neither of these will have the feel of browsing in a store filled with book-laden shelves, leading to the unexpected gem, or the staff recommendation that will keep you coming back as a customer. But think of what's already happened—it has killed the chain stores (only B&N is left...barely), decimated the book printing industry, severely impacted the freight shipping business, and closed down a whole slew of warehouses. Publishers’ costs have dramatically dropped. But there have been further mergers (the Big Six is now the Big Five) to combat Amazon, which sells 50% of all books. However, we're seeing some growth in independent bookstores which can offer the kind of personal service that neither chains or online stores can offer, and a whole slew of small publishers popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm to step in where the big publishers no longer want to tread. With change comes unexpected consequences, both good and bad.
If you decide to represent me, will you sell my ten unsold novels sitting in the bottom drawer of my dresser?
If you have unsold novels in the trunk or the dresser drawer, there is probably a very good reason why they haven’t sold. My recommendation—leave them in the dresser. Don't self-publish them (at least not under your own name)--you will be shooting yourself in the foot. Very few writers are brilliant the first time out. It often takes painstaking years of honing the craft of writing before a saleable book emerges. The late Frank McCourt worked on Angela’s Ashes for twenty years until he figured out the right way to tell the story—through the eyes of a young boy. Otherwise, it would be too depressing and maudlin. But the sense of wonder and confusion Young Frank brought to the stories made them humorous, loving, and truly portrayed Frank’s getting out of Limerick, Ireland and his ability to overcome his miserable childhood as a triumph of the human spirit. John Jakes had been writing and selling all sorts of pseudonymous genre paperback fiction for years (science fiction, westerns, etc.) until his epic Kent Family Chronicles became a huge hit during the nation’s bicentennial. And so it goes with many, many others. So if you want to be an overnight success—work at it first.
What’s the best way to submit my work to you?
I would prefer a query letter by email. Note that I wrote "query letter." Not "query letter plus a chapter in the body of the email." If I’m intrigued by the project, I’ll ask for more—the first chapter, or first 50 pages or so, also by email--but as an attached Word document, which I can then read on the computer or download (or is it upload?) to my Kindle. I’m trying to have a paperless office. Not because I’m going green, it’s just that my wife will kill me if I let manuscripts pile up all over the house.
Do you have a particular format you like to see?
Yes, I do. And I’m not weird or persnickety about it, but it is somewhat of an industry standard. I like one inch margins all the way around, 12 point Times New Roman type, double spaced (very important), with a header or footer showing the title and author, and all pages numbered. It always amazed me as an editor how many agents would send me single spaced submissions, or submissions with no page numbers. To me, it was the height of laziness. Editors are notoriously overburdened with reading—make it easy on them to keep track of what they’re reading, and you might have an easier time making the sale. At least they won’t throw it down in disgust and say “I can’t read that—it’s single spaced!”
Do I have to pay back my advance before I can collect royalties?
No. But you have to earn out your advance first. An advance is technically “an advance against royalties.” Let’s say your book sells to a publisher for $100,000 (just to make the numbers easy). The cover price is $20, which will start throwing off a $3 per book royalty with the 10,001st copy sold (slightly lower royalties up until then, but for this example, let’s assume a $3 per book royalty on all copies). That means that you will need to sell 33,334 books to earn back royalties beyond the advance. That 33,334th copy will generate $2 in royalties above the advance of $100,000. If your book only sell 15,000 copies, you will not receive any royalties, but you won’t have to pay back your advance either. There will be a quiz later on. Aren’t you glad you asked?
What genres are going to be hot? What should I write about?
If you try to hit a moving target by predicting the public’s taste in fiction, you’re going to miss every time. Write about what you want to write about, not for the market. There is no predicting the market. When you’ve finished your great commercial novel in a genre that was hot when you started it, chances are that by the time it took to write and publish this masterpiece (two years), the public’s fickle taste in fiction will have changed. New ideas catch the public’s fancy all the time. Tom Clancy pretty much single-handedly started the technothriller genre with The Hunt For Red October. Dan Brown started a religious thriller kick with The Da Vinci Code. John Grisham started a huge thirst for legal thrillers with The Firm. Could anyone have predicted any of this? No way. Publishers, unfortunately, have a copycat mentality, so once a genre gets hot, they quickly overbuy and overpublish until the marketplace is saturated and the public gets sick of the rotten imitations on the shelves. The publishing industry is great at killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Look at what happened to the Chick Lit genre, the Young Adult Vampire genre, etc. And that’s why the public’s taste changes so quickly. So ignore the marketplace, come up with something brilliant and original, and go for it!
What kind of books are you looking for?
Excellent question! A number of you have written to me asking what kind of books I’m looking to represent. While ultimately I’d like to represent a little bit of everything (keeps life from getting boring, and why put all my publishing eggs in one basket?), at the moment I’m not quite ready to represent all types of books from A-Z. Maybe I’m only at A-M. Here goes...
I'd like to strike a balance between fiction and nonfiction. In theory, non-fiction is easier to sell (both to publishers and to consumers). It takes much less time to prepare a nonfiction book for submission to publishers. A novel can take a year (or more) to write, and then a while for me to read and give notes on, and then for an author to revise. It could then go to a copyeditor to clean up all the sloppy mistakes and typos. By the time I feel the book is ready, two years might pass! Whereas an experienced author can put together a good proposal in a week or two (assuming all the legwork and research has already been done). But I ultimately want to have a somewhat even balance between fiction and nonfiction.
In fiction, the categories I’m looking for are thrillers of all types, from romantic suspense to international intrigue, historical and military thrillers to domestic thrillers. But please, no novels about the terrorist destruction of any cities—I lived through 9/11 and have no desire to revisit it. I like mysteries, too, in all varieties, from cozies to noir (although noir is almost impossible to sell). I like historical fiction, in the John Jakes/Jeff Shaara mode. Sorry, but I'm not looking for fantasy, either adult or YA, nor am I looking for middle grade or YA non-fantasy. And no children's picture books, please.
In nonfiction, I like narratives, memoir, sports, crime, military, history, business, humor, pop science and the occasional medical, health and how-to book. As an editor, I’d edited memoirs of astronauts, war heroes, sports stars, mobsters, diplomats, refugees, etc. I’d worked on oral history/social history, WWII history, Civil War history, business management, leadership, etc.
If you have written a book in a subject I didn’t mention above, send me an email query and ask me.
How important is it to have a platform? And what is a platform, anyway?
Ah, the dreaded platform—a word devised to drive editors, agents, and authors insane by sadistic marketing and publicity people. Well, not quite. A platform is anything that the writer does to give him or her a somewhat higher profile—a regular column in a newspaper, a popular blog or website, their own radio or TV show. If you're podcasting or blogging, don't even think of approaching an agent or publisher unless you're getting a minimum of 25,000 unique hits per entry. And 50,000 or 100,000 is better! I know, pretty hard to come by those things, right? Generally, this is most important for non-fiction writers. It’s virtually impossible to get publicity for novels and fiction, so it’s not as important. But non-fiction writers need to be experts in their field, and have a way to prove it—videos of appearances on Oprah, for example. Being best friends with the producer of the Today Show doesn’t guarantee you a spot on the couch next to the host, though, so be realistic. Publishers love authors who do speaking engagements to business groups, universities, etc., on a regular basis. Often a corporate sale can make a book very profitable whereas the same book might not be acquired without it. It’s not enough any more to have a great idea and do a great job writing a killer proposal, you have to be able to talk knowledgeably about your subject and look good while doing it.
Do I have to write the entire manuscript to sell my book?
Many nonfiction books can be sold by well-crafted proposals running anywhere from 25-60 pages. Some are shorter, some are longer, but that’s the sweet spot. For some nonfiction books, you need to write the entire thing. First novels are almost always sold on the complete manuscript, although subsequent novels (at least if they're in a series) usually sell based on an outline and a sample chapter. Often, when a novelist wants to move from one publishing house to another, he or she will write a complete manuscript.
Why did I include a Frequently Asked Questions page, you may ask...and who is asking these questions?
I decided to include these because these are the questions that always get asked at writer’s conferences, where editors, agents and aspiring writers get together over the course of a weekend to meet, network, eat, drink, and see if they can do some business. I’m trying to anticipate some of the questions that are commonly asked about the publishing business by new writers who are looking for an agent.
If there are questions I didn’t think of but you still want to know, send me an email!
