My boss, the publisher for multiple divisions at Baker Publishing Group, says this often: “The door to publishing is either swinging open, or it’s swinging closed.”
He’s right. If you are a published author or aspire to be one, your chances of publishing are either getting better or worse all the time.
The trick is to keep the door the swinging open. Following are three ways to do that.
Platform. Keep expanding your platform, your ability to find exposure for your work. This can sound daunting, but it needn’t be. Building a platform takes time. Resign yourself to that, decide it’s important (it is), and then block off time each week to work on it.
Read books and blogs about it. Try something new on your blog or Facebook page. Set aside time to compose excellent tweets. Start saving for a good website design.
Also, think about how to sustain your energy for this work. Do you have some friends whose help you can enlist? Is there somebody you should host to lunch? And what’s your mission in all this? There’s nothing like a clear sense of mission to keep you going for the long haul.
Concept. I remember a conversation with an agent about the concept an author was pursuing. The last time this author and I had spoken, we had talked about one concept. “It’s not big enough,” this agent was telling me. “We’re going to save that one for later. Instead, we’re doing this,” and the agent proceeded to knock my socks off with the concept they had settled on.
Concept is just hugely important. I recommend keeping a running list of book ideas. Brainstorm a list and then keep adding to or removing from it as you interact with other people about them.
Concept is so important, in fact, that if you pick the right one and pair it with excellent writing, you can steal past the platform bugaboo, and use your book to build your platform! The wrong concept can hurt you in at least two ways. It can send publishers packing, or, if the concept is contracted, the resulting book can fail to sell, and that hurts you too, which brings me to my last point.
Sales. Getting published can be the worst thing you can do for your writing career. How? If your book does not sell well, you will likely have a hard time getting a second contract. A really hard time. Here’s why. Book buyers have long memories. If we sell your book to an account, and it immediately starts sucking the retail exhaust pipe, that account will remember. If we bring your next book to that same account, the account is likely to say no thanks or reduce the purchase significantly.
Publishing is a sacred trust between author and publisher, and it’s just true that publishers need authors to help move their books. When an author chooses to take a three-month European sabbatical as her book is releasing, that hurts sales. We can’t stop authors from doing this, of course, but we won’t be excited to publish your next one.
Work hard to promote and sell your book because the converse of the above is also true. Books that perform well in the marketplace give you all kinds of leverage the next time around. Publishers will be clamoring for your next one.
What are you doing to keep the door to publishing swinging open?
Thanks for this – it was really useful. (though a little scary too!) Sigh. Right. Platform, platform, platform. Thanks again!
Tanya, judging from the comment counts on your popular posts, you’re not doing so bad! Thanks for commenting, and keep on keeping on!
Thanks for your encouragement – and for taking the time to visit my site – much appreciated! 🙂
Good post. I wish I’d started building a platform earlier. But you’re right to say it takes time. You have to learn something first so you have something of value to give to others. And learning–becoming an expert–takes time.
My question is this: are sales as important as ever or are they becoming a little less important due to the internet? What if people self-publish and they don’t sell much? Do you see them as bad marketers and steer clear of them even though booksellers wouldn’t necessarily know who they were and would probably be looking at them as debut authors?
Thanks for taking the time to blog. I appreciate your posts.
Good point about having to learn something, and that takes time. Another thing that takes time is discovering, for example, what horizon your blog is going to cover. I read a great post at the BufferApp blog yesterday about how their blog has evolved through two or three significant iterations.
To answer your questions, yes, sales are important as ever. If an author self-publishes a book that doesn’t sell well, I can’t say we definitely would not publish that author, but the poor sales performance is an indication of the author’s ability or lack of ability to help us move books. That can be overcome, especially if the book was published five years ago and the author can win us over with all that s/he has going now that s/he didn’t have going then. But yes, sales are important, regardless.
And thanks for your kind words, Sally. You made one of the first comments, as I recall, and I appreciate your checking in. Feel free to let me know how I can make this blog more useful to you. Take care.
I’m a fledgling writer just starting shopping my book for publication. I’m also a veteran online marketer. I have a question about goals.
I’ve seen two opposing arguments regarding author-marketing (I’ve read some echo your opinion, while others say it’s useless) and regarding platform creation (passive v. active marketing – being “findable” v. attracting and growing an audience).
While I try to set goals of my own for my online marketing plan, I’m struggling to reconcile all of these mixed messages. It’s very clear to me that authors are expected to do some of the work promotion following publication (though then I read that it doesn’t do much to help sales).
But what do I need to strive to do prior to publication? What should my goals be at this stage – when I have absolutely nothing to sell but a manuscript?
AK, thanks for visiting and for writing in with this excellent question. First let me say that as a veteran online marketer you have a real leg up, so take heart! I do think it’s important for you to have a marketing plan for any book you’re writing, and you should include the plan in the book proposal that you send out. It makes a big difference. I also encourage you to read Platform by Michael Hyatt and Tribes by Seth Godin, if you haven’t already, and keep building your tribe. I hope this helps!
Thanks for the reply! I’m a Godin follower (my day job is very “Poke the Box”-ish). I haven’t read Platform – will check it out. What you have said makes sense to me, and has been the basic premise I’ve been working on for a while.
This is the article that threw me for a total loop (it has been linked to and retweeted by people whose opinion I respect): http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=7938
“Author promotion is worthless” and “don’t bother.” >> but I’m trying to figure out whether this is a case of he’s talking about book-promotion, not Tribe-building.
AK, thanks for linking to this article, which I read.
First thought: Boy, he’s direct, ain’t he?
A few more thoughts. I appreciate his emphasis on good writing, which is spot on. A legend in my part of the industry says, “The best any publisher can do is get the word of mouth started.” Brilliant promotion by anybody, author or publisher, will only make a bad book fail faster. Good writing (meaning a great concept or story, well written) keeps positive word of mouth going, and that’s what really sells books.
I do see a distinction here between fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction authors can do a lot of speaking engagements on the topic about which they’ve written. Fiction authors can speak at writers conferences, of course, but that’s a very limited audience. There may be a few other venues where novelists can legitimately give a talk, but just by nature of the content I think nonfiction authors have more options when it comes to speaking engagements. And speaking engagements have the potential to sell a LOT of books.
Your distinction between book promotion and tribe-building is also really important. There’s a difference between mere book-hawking and helping people.
Regarding his point about not blogging on writing, here again I think it’s a matter of intention and calling. I don’t recommend blogging about writing if ALL one is trying to do is hawk his/her books, but if an author wants to help other writers and cultivate a mutually beneficial community, why not? And if that author sells a few books in the process, all to the good.
One thing i hear him saying is that, when it comes to novels, “So much depends on reaching a certain level of quality. Focus on that.” And I think he’s right about that. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do speaking gigs and blogging.
Well, I hope these thoughts are useful. You may well have prompted me to do a post on promotion that works and isn’t sleazy. Be well.
This is very helpful, thank you.
I keep the door swinging open by pressing through even when discouragement settles in. Some weeks I feel like giving up, but God has a way of pulling us up again. If I am making a difference with my words and encouraging others I can be proud of that. If I give another person a space to share their voice I can be proud of that.
Like you said, patience has been a huge learning curve for me. I want to rush ahead and be published, but it won’t be sustainable if I don’t have a strong platform and concept. To have that I have to dig in and put in the work!
(I will continue to have a sense of humor about it though, for example, I still feel silly when I am ‘hashtagging’ and ‘pinning’ and adding myself to ‘linky’s’.)
Lisa, good words. It does take time, but most people I talk to in the blogging world, for example, talk about hitting a critical mass followership in about five years. That’s not forever, and we’ll learn so much along the way…
I have heard figures like [500 facebook followers, 1,000 twitter followers, 10,000 views a month on your blog] are these numbers publishers look for or is it different for each author? (and maybe different for fiction and non-fiction writers?)
We definitely look at those numbers, Lisa, and my area is nonfiction so I can only speak to that. We don’t necessarily have numeric thresholds in mind, and we do see social media stats as part of a larger picture, of course. But if social media stats are low, they probably do more harm than good.