Trying to Publish a Book? Here Are a Couple Tips

Illustration by the author.

Things were different in the early 1980's when I started my writing career. There was no internet, so all correspondence with editors (except those you already had a relationship with) was via the U.S. Postal Service. If writing articles, you would send a query letter (your pitch) along with a self addressed stamped envelope (SASE). If you were submitting a short story, you might send with instructions to discard if they rejected it.  You would still include the SASE so the editor could easily respond. If you desired the story back you'd include an envelope with sufficient postage to return it.

Those were the rules of the game. 

The book publishing world was also different. Back then there were only 50,000 books a year being published. Something like 2000 were fiction and the rest non-fiction. According to Berrett-Koehler there were nearly 1.7 million books self-published in 2019.  

In the old days, to get a book contract you worked with an agent who would shop it around, or you submitted a book proposal yourself. In 1993 I sold my first book with a pitch letter. The VP of marketing called me on the phone to let me know the ideas was good, but someone famous was already covering that topic. She then pitched an idea to me. I said yes, wrote the manuscript and was paid. Unfortunately, the book was part of a series that was never completed. I still got paid, but would rather have had my name on the cover of a book.

There were seemingly countless books that helped writers learn the ropes in all these things. Magazines like The Writer and Writer's Digest also addressed the practical matters of getting published. Writers conferences served a similar function. I attended two and they were immensely helpful, in part because in meeting with editors face-to-face I discovered that they were simply people like you and me. 

One of the books that helped me was called The Awful Truth About Publishing: Why They Always Reject Your Book and What You Can Do About It. The book was published in 1986. A couple years later I borrowed it from the library.

According to John Boswell, the author -- not to be confused with James Boswell, the 18th century Scottish biographer -- there are four minimum requirements for a book proposal. And actually, these requirements are also the main points in a query letter to pitch a story to an editor. For your book they would be these:

1. It must define the book's audience.

2. It must describe the book.

3. It must show how your book fills a need of its audience.

4. It must show why you are qualified to write the book. Or to put it another way, you must persuade the decision makers why you are the one who should execute this concept or idea, and not someone else.

These are the main features of a query letter as well. When pitching a story to an editor, you must hook the reader (editor), describe what you are selling, explain why it is important (and a good fit for this publication) and what your qualifications are. 

Business propositions aren't that different from this template either, except you will also need to include the financial aspects of the proposal as well. How much will it cost? How long will it take? 

In short, the way to get buy-in from a publisher, editor, or movie producer is to do your homework. Answer those four fundamental questions and be prepared to substantiate those answers with additional data if necessary. 

Nowadays there's one more item that seems to have become important for book publishers. Do you have a following on social media? According to one speaker at a writer's conference my brother attended this past month, "If you don't have 100,000 followers on social media, you might as well not try." 

Is this true? I dunno. 

One thing I do know is this. People are busy. So when pitching, don't waste their time getting to the point.  

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