How To Get An Agent Or Publisher For Your (Self-Published) Book
I get this question a lot: “Now that I’ve self-published I need to find an agent, how do I do that?” Well, it might seem to be a simple and easy transition. I mean you’re already published so it shouldn’t be that hard, right? Not so fast. There are a number of things you need to know before you run headlong into an effort to get a publishing contract.
First off, publishers like what other people like. Well, generally they do. If you’re building success for your book, getting great reviews, building your audience and online presence this is a good thing and will often be viewed favorably by publishers. While there are agents and publishers that won’t even consider a self-published book, there are a number of them who will. The key is to find those agents and publishers and get to know what they specialize in. Since there are a million articles and books on how to craft a query letter and submission packet I’ll skip that. For the purposes of this article, though, we’re going to focus on personal branding and industry positioning.
The first question authors will ask me is how do they know they’re “ready” to submit? Ok, so you’ve got a dozen or so great reviews, you’ve been blogging regularly and you are a regular at author events. Sales, however, are still slumping. You’ve sold 1,000 copies at best and struggled to even make that meager number. Is that a bad thing? Not always, but it depends on how your book was published. If, let’s say, your book was published through a print-on-demand company, a thousand copies is a fairly high number (the average print-on-demand book sells 75 copies).
Also print-on-demand is limited in its distribution, meaning that even if you’ve gotten great media interviews, reviews, and buzz for your book, the reason you’re not selling a ton of copies is the broken distribution systems these books often wrestle with. Bookstores won’t stock them because of the non-returnable factor. (Note to the savvy author, avoid, at all costs, the “returns program” POD publishers offer, bookstores don’t care if you’ve paid to have your book returnable. Don’t believe me? Sign up for it, pay your 0 and then do some calling around to find out).
Here’s the deal: print-on-demand has for years been the red-headed stepchild of publishing. Are there good books published through POD publishers? You bet. But for most of these authors it’s like pushing a boulder uphill. Now don’t get me wrong, all of my first books were published via POD and still they’ve been successful despite the biases and all the other things New York publishing likes to heap on this form of publishing. But the point being: knowing your market and understanding how the market works will go a long way to giving you the insight you need to be successful. Distribution is not defined as a place on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, because anyone with an ISBN can get this type of placement.
Distribution is defined as a distribution company actively marketing your book to bookstores and other sales channels. This doesn’t happen in POD and the New York publishers know this. So, if your book is still selling well despite these obstacles then you’ve got a winner on your hands, and it might be time to seek a bigger publisher for your work. On the flip side, if you have self-published and you do have a distributor in place, then consider trying to pitch your work after you’ve sold over 3,000 copies of your book. But there’s a small catch: you don’t want to sell out of your market. Generally speaking this won’t happen, but in certain cases it could.
Let’s consider, for example, that you wrote a regionally-focused book about the history of a town or state and you’ve focused all of your marketing efforts in that region. It’s likely that if you’ve sold 5,000 copies a publisher or agent could view this as sold out of the majority of the market. You might counter that you could sell this in other markets but unless there’s some tourism angle, it’s not likely and even then, the appeal needs to be really strong. Most books based on towns or cities are sold in the city and generally not outside of that area unless they are big tourism draws, in which case the market becomes much more competitive. Also note that if you’re thinking of trying to cheat the system you should know there’s a little thing called Nielsen BookScan that logs all sales by book and author, so no fair counting your author purchases as sales – BookScan notes sales through commercial sales channels only (major market retailers and bookstores).
All right, so you’re ready to pitch your book. You meet the sales criteria and you know you haven’t sold out of your market. What’s next? Next, ask yourself what your platform is. Platform is one of those words that agents and publishers love to toss out to unsuspecting authors. So what does platform mean? Well, it’s a bit tricky because it varies depending on what you’re writing. Platform isn’t who you know but who knows you. It’s your area of influence. For fiction writers it could be your e-mail list, the subscribers to your blog, conventions you speak at, conferences you attend (as a participant, not just an attendee). For non-fiction authors, defining your platform is a bit easier. Often non-fiction books are tied to speaking, coaching, or some other business model. These are all part of your platform.
When I sold Red Hot Internet Publicity to Sourcebooks, one of the first things I listed on my marketing/book outline was my platform: subscribers to the Book Marketing Expert Newsletter, business revenue, speaking events I am booked on, average client base – everything. All of this is your platform and all of it lends itself to having a built-in audience. This is what publishers look for. Regardless of how you publish you still have to market your own book, and publishers know it’ll be easier to market a book that has a following than one that doesn’t.
After you define your platform the next thing is to define your hook. Especially with self-published books, agents and publishers expect you to have a hook. Since the book is published, if you don’t have a hook this is a tell-tale sign that you haven’t been marketing this book correctly, if at all. (There are additional platform-building tips that appear later on in this issue).
How can you find the right agent or publisher for your book? The traditional ways certainly work: getting books and guides designed to give you agent and publisher contact info, but there might be a better way. Try going to some writers’ conferences that allow you to schedule editor and agent appointments. This is a great way to get some immediate feedback on your book, pitch, and the possibility of selling your work. There are a number of conferences around the country, just be sure to look for ones that offer one-on-ones with publishing professionals.
And finally, it’s sometimes tempting to switch genres to get published. But unless there’s some compelling reason for you to genre-hop, like a changing focus in your business, I recommend sticking with what’s been successful for you. Don’t one day write on true crime and the next day start offering dieting advice unless that’s where you want your ultimate focus to be. Also remember that if you’ve been writing true crime for years, and have built an audience and following, you’ve now lost that base by jumping ship.
The truth is that the odds aren’t always in our favor. With eight hundred books published each day in the US the market is narrow, to say the least, but if you know your market, have a platform and are selling books, you’re already 90% of the way there – the rest is just finding the right match for your book and maybe a little bit of literary luck.
Tagged with: book publishing industry trends
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Are African-American women interested in reading books outside of “Street Lit”?
I work in the book publishing industry. For the last couple of years, the dominant trend in African-American fiction has been books set in the “streets” or “hood” featuring characters who are strippers, prostitutes, gold diggers or the girlfriend of drug dealers.
It’s my belief that African-American readers like to read about the same things that readers of other ethnicities like to read about but with characters they can relate too.
I would like opinions on this subject.
Thank you.
As an African American woman writer, I too have noticed the trend of “street” and “hood” literature. I personally find it disturbing due to the implication that all sistas come from bad neighborhoods and live lives parallel to the characters within these fiction novels. So, yes… we are interested in reading REAL literature -some of us- to the point of complete and utter disinterest in “hood” stories. Doesn’t the media feed us enough negative images? It’s time for a change!
Do you believe the New York Times was wrong for making our security measures news?
Three Jewish Newspapers
The suppression of competition and the establishment of local monopolies on the dissemination of news and opinion have characterized the rise of Jewish control over America’s newspapers. The resulting ability of the Jews to use the press as an unopposed instrument of Jewish policy could hardly be better illustrated than by the examples of the nation’s three most prestigious and influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. These three, dominating America’s financial and political capitals, are the newspapers that set the trends and the guidelines for nearly all the others. They are the ones that decide what is news and what isn’t, at the national and international levels. They originate the news; the others merely copy it. And all three newspapers are in Jewish hands.
The New York Times, with a September 1999 circulation of 1,086,000, is the unofficial social, fashion, entertainment, political, and cultural guide of the nation. It tells America’s “smart set” which books to buy and which films to see; which opinions are in style at the moment; which politicians, educators, spiritual leaders, artists, and businessmen are the real comers. And for a few decades in the 19th century it was a genuinely American newspaper.
The New York Times was founded in 1851 by two Gentiles, Henry J. Raymond and George Jones. After their deaths, it was purchased in 1896 from Jones’s estate by a wealthy Jewish publisher, Adolph Ochs. His great-great-grandson, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., is the paper’s current publisher and the chairman of the New York Times Co. The executive editor is Joseph Lelyveld, also a Jew (he is a rabbi’s son).
The Sulzberger family also owns, through the New York Times Co., 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe, purchased in June 1993 for $1.1 billion; twelve magazines, including McCall’s and Family Circle with circulations of more than 5 million each; seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.
Of similar national importance is the Washington Post, which, by establishing its “leaks” throughout government agencies in Washington, has an inside track on news involving the Federal government.
The Washington Post, like the New York Times, had a non-Jewish origin. It was established in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, purchased from him in 1905 by John R. McLean, and later inherited by Edward B. McLean. In June 1933, however, at the height of the Great Depression, the newspaper was forced into bankruptcy. It was purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Eugene Meyer, a Jewish financier and former partner of the infamous Bernard Baruch, industry czar in America during the First World War.
The Washington Post is now run by Katherine Meyer Graham, Eugene Meyer’s daughter. She is the principal stockholder and the board chairman of the Washington Post Co. In 1979 she appointed her son Donald publisher of the paper. He now also holds the posts of president and CEO of the Washington Post Co. The newspaper has a daily circulation of 763,000, and its Sunday edition sells 1.1 million copies.
The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (the Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications); in television (WDIV in Detroit, KPRC in Houston, WPLG in Miami, WKMG in Orlando, KSAT in San Antonio, WJXT in Jacksonville); and in magazines, most notably the nation’s number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Company’s various television ventures reach a total of about 7 million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers.
In a joint venture with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely distributed English-language daily in the world.
The Wall Street Journal, which sells 1.8 million copies each weekday, is the nation’s largest-circulation daily newspaper. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial tabloid Barron’s, among other things. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann, who is a Jew. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Most of New York’s other major newspapers are in no better hands than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In January 1993 the New York Daily News was bought from the estate of the late Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell (born Ludvik Hoch) by Jewish real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The Village Voice is the personal property of Leonard Stern, the billionaire Jewish owner of the Hartz Mountain pet supply firm. And, as mentioned above, the New York Post is owned by News Corporation under the Jew Peter Chernin.
What is your question? About the times giving secrets…yes it was wrong, it was stupid, maybe even bordering on treason.
What is the rest of your crap here, who cares about the history of the papers and how does it relate>
Should we “Go Cheney” on climate change?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/opinion/09friedman.html?em=&pagewanted=print
December 9, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Going Cheney on Climate
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In 2006, Ron Suskind published “The One Percent Doctrine,” a book about the U.S. war on terrorists after 9/11. The title was drawn from an assessment by then-Vice President Dick Cheney, who, in the face of concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to Al Qaeda, reportedly declared: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” Cheney contended that the U.S. had to confront a very new type of threat: a “low-probability, high-impact event.”
Soon after Suskind’s book came out, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events — such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president — Al Gore — can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent).”
Of course, Mr. Cheney would never accept that analogy. Indeed, many of the same people who defend Mr. Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine on nukes tell us not to worry at all about catastrophic global warming, where the odds are, in fact, a lot higher than 1 percent, if we stick to business as usual. That is unfortunate, because Cheney’s instinct is precisely the right framework with which to think about the climate issue — and this whole “climategate” controversy as well.
“Climategate” was triggered on Nov. 17 when an unidentified person hacked into the e-mails and data files of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, one of the leading climate science centers in the world — and then posted them on the Internet. In a few instances, they revealed some leading climatologists seemingly massaging data to show more global warming and excluding contradictory research.
Frankly, I found it very disappointing to read a leading climate scientist writing that he used a “trick” to “hide” a putative decline in temperatures or was keeping contradictory research from getting a proper hearing. Yes, the climate-denier community, funded by big oil, has published all sorts of bogus science for years — and the world never made a fuss. That, though, is no excuse for serious climatologists not adhering to the highest scientific standards at all times.
That said, be serious: The evidence that our planet, since the Industrial Revolution, has been on a broad warming trend outside the normal variation patterns — with periodic micro-cooling phases — has been documented by a variety of independent research centers.
As this paper just reported: “Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday. The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record.”
This is not complicated. We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.
What we don’t know, because the climate system is so complex, is what other factors might over time compensate for that man-driven warming, or how rapidly temperatures might rise, melt more ice and raise sea levels. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before. We just know two things: one, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for many years, so it is “irreversible” in real-time (barring some feat of geo-engineering); and two, that CO2 buildup has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” warming.
When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is “irreversible” and potentially “catastrophic,” I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.
If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? Well, during a transition period, we would have higher energy prices. But gradually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering more and more of our homes and factories with wind, solar, nuclear and second-generation biofuels. We would be much less dependent on oil dictators who have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs; our trade deficit would improve; the dollar would strengthen; and the air we breathe would be cleaner.
Why is their a unisex preference for mail authors in the writing industry?
I’m studying gender differences in writing styles for my psychology project… and I noticed that men who write books are more likely to get published then woman…
But I find that the books written by woman are more interesting (I am a woman so I could be biased)
If you haven’t noticed this trend:
Men tend to write books that focus on physical action, law, order, justice, religion, ethics, crime, and heroism
Women tend to write books that focus on art, relationships, family, social status, culture, imagination and physical features in the environment.
I don’t want to alienate the people in the books and authors section because 98% of them are female… and they will probably hate me for asking this question…
Brilliant.
Of course we surpassed the 90% mark years ago, but hell if Cheney is as smart as promoted by the right, I guess they have no argument against climate change.
1a 2d 3c 4d 5a 6a 7c 8d 9b 10a
help with study guide, asap!?
please help me out, i need this for tomorrow. thank you
What is the best definition of remote sensing?
collecting data without physical contact with the object being observed
using technological equipment to gather data about the world
gathering environmental data without using human beings
analyzing data through the use of computer software
2. Which statement is true about remote sensing?
It can only be performed by scientists.
It always requires special training.
It is at least as old as the telescope.
It was invented in the 1960s.
3. Hector used a conversion table to make calculations in a study of ocean evaporation relative to illuminance (light intensity). What was the table for?
to convert English measurements into metric ones
to find locations for his study
to convert scientific terms such as evaporation and illuminance
to work out details such as what equipment to use
4. Which environmental lesson can you derive from the ecocide hypothesis for what happened to Easter Island?
The introduction of nonnative species has environmental consequences.
The overexploitation of resources has serious environmental consequences.
Scientists do not necessarily agree on the interpretation of data.
Climate changes have environmental consequences for all inhabitants of an environment.
5. Which was the most immediate action taken after publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring?
President Kennedy ordered a panel of scientists to appraise the DDT hazard.
The chemical industry took the lead in restricting the sale and use of DDT.
President Kennedy banned DDT over the objections of experts.
DDT was banned in the United States by the Department of Agriculture.
6. What was the function of the Tigris River in Mesopotamian irrigation?
It was the source of the irrigation water.
It was the drain for irrigation water.
It was the determining factor in the water table level.
It supplied silt to the nearby farmland.
7. A scientist makes a graph showing population growth rates for the future of 10 countries. Which is a necessary source of error in his graph?
No one can predict future trends accurately.
The countries he chose may not be the best for his purpose.
Population growth differs from one country to another.
Scientists often disagree with one another.
8. What conclusion from the study of Mesopotamia can be used in irrigation practices today?
Continuous irrigation is a good thing.
Irrigation should not be used in hot climates.
Farming should not be done in hot climates.
Irrigation methods with the least impact on the water table may be beneficial.
9. If environmental scientists want to publish a paper on an experiment for an audience of fellow specialists, where do they do so?
media interview
journal article
newspaper story
public hearing on issues
10. Which of the following is the best testable hypothesis, correctly written?
My puppy likes dry dog food better than moist food.
When my puppy wakes up, he is hungry.
If the earth moves out of its orbit, life will not survive.
If grass gets fertilized, it grows faster.