HOW TO WRITE AND PUBLISH YOUR OWN BOOKS
Introduction
Sell your book the easy way --- sell a proposal
You can get paid to write a book. It's easily possible to make a fast $10,000, or even a
six figure amount. You could even make seven figures --- over a million dollars for
twenty pages of text. It sounds incredible, but a fast seven figures is certainly
possible if you have a HOT, hot idea or have had an experience that hundreds of
thousands of people want to read about. In his 2001 book about writing non-fiction,
Damn! Why Didn't I Write That?, author Marc McCutcheon says that it's not hard to
make a good income: "you can learn the trade and begin making a respectable income
much faster than most people think possible".
The good part is that you don't need to write your book before you get some
money. You write a proposal, and a publisher will give you an advance, which you
can live on while you write the book.
Writing a proposal is the smart way to write a book. It's the way professional
writers sell non-fiction. Selling a book on a proposal is much easier than selling a
book that you've already written. A book proposal is a complete description of your
book. It contains the title, an explanation of what the book's about, an outline of
chapters, a market and competition survey, and a sample chapter.
A book proposal functions in the same way as any business proposal does:
you're making an offer to someone you hope to do business with. It will be treated by
publishers in the same way that any business treats a proposal. A publisher will read
your proposal, assess its feasibility, cost it, and if it looks as if the publisher will make
money, the publisher will pay you to write the book. When you've sold your proposed
book to a publisher, your role doesn’t end with writing your book. You’re in
partnership with your publisher to ensure the book's success. If you do your part, both
you and your publisher will make money.
You and your publisher: a partnership
The publisher's business is selling books. The company acquires books which it hopes
will sell, and sell well. Your publisher is putting up the money to publish your book,
so you need to approach the project from his point of view as well as your own.
We haven’t got the space to go into great detail about the publishing business
here, but you need to know about "returns", because the challenge of returns makes
publishing different from other businesses. Publishers sell books on consignment.
Publishers ship books to bookshops, and if a book isn’t sold within a certain time
period, it's destroyed. The bookseller strips the cover from the book and sends the
cover to the publisher for a full credit. This is the "return". If a title doesn’t sell, the
publisher takes a beating. As you can imagine, publishers are no more keen to lose
money than you or I.
What does this mean to you as you write your book proposal? It means that
your proposal needs to emphasize the ways in which you, as the writer, will take
responsibility for the book's success.
You will try to ensure the success of your book by gauging the marketplace.
You will work out who the likely buyers of your book might be, and the reasons they
will have for paying good money for your book. You'll assess the competition for
your book. You'll work out ways in which you can promote your book, so that people
hear about it. You're in partnership with your publisher, and if you're prepared to take
responsibility for that role, the publisher will be much more likely to buy your
proposal.
Why write a proposal first?
All non-fiction books are sold on proposal. A book proposal is much easier to sell
than a complete book.
Here are some of the reasons:
• It's easier to read a 20 or 30 page proposal than a 400 page book;
• It's easier to make changes in the book's concept at the proposal stage;
• With a proposal, the publisher, in the person of your editor, can take
ownership of the book. It's like bespoke tailoring: the editor feels that the book
has been specifically written for the publishing house.
Even if you decide to write your book first, you'll need to create a proposal once
you've written it. No agent or publisher is interested in reading an entire book to
assess its viability. That's the proposal's job: to ensure that your book has a niche in
the marketplace. As you do your research for the proposal, you'll work out whether or
not your book is likely to sell. You can shape the book at the proposal stage, much
more easily than you can when it’s a huge stack of print or a giant computer file.
Sometimes you may get an idea for a book, but the idea is amorphous, it
doesn’t have a real shape. You may want to write several thousand words to see
whether the book becomes clearer in your mind. But write the proposal before you
write more than ten thousand words, because your book must target a specific group
of buyers.
How do you write a book proposal?
You write a proposal step by step. In this ebook, we'll work on your book proposal
together. Each chapter has tasks for you to complete. Once you've completed all the
tasks, you'll have a book proposal which has an excellent chance of selling.
Here's what we'll cover:
• (Day One) Getting an idea for your book.
• (Day Two) Developing the idea and expanding on it. Assessing the market.
Who needs this book? What's the competition for the book?
• (Day Three) Writing the blurb. Outlining your book.
• (Day Four) Researching your book proposal, and fleshing out your outline.
• (Day Five) Writing a proposal query letter. Sending your query letters to
agents and publishers. (You send the queries while you're working on the
proposal. This helps you to gauge reaction to your work.)
• (Day Six) Writing the proposal.
• (Day Seven) Writing the sample chapter. Revising your proposal.
I'll be including a sample of a book proposal for you to look at, so you can see what
material the proposal contains. This proposal garnered an agent contract the first time
I sent it out. I'll also include other samples, so that you have plenty of templates from
which to construct your own proposal.
How to use this ebook
First, read through the book, to see what information it contains.
Next, work through the book, chapter by chapter. As you read each chapter, do
the tasks and the exercises in the order in which they appear. Doing them will help
you to write not just one, but many book proposals. Remember, the primary aim of
this book is to help you write your first book proposal and be well on the way to
selling it by the time you've worked your way through all the chapters.
Work FAST
It's vital that you concentrate on getting the words down on paper. As long as you
have something on paper you can fix it. As we work through the material, I'll be
encouraging you to work FAST and not think to much about what you're writing.
Thinking has no business in your first draft. Thinking comes later as you rewrite.
Can't devote a week to writing your proposal?
If you're on vacation you can set aside a couple of weeks to work on your proposal.
But what if you don't have a vacation due? Easy! You can fit writing into your busy
life. You'll still follow all the steps, but it will take you longer. Try to stick to a set
schedule. You may decide that you'll complete a chapter a week, for example.
Work fast. Work on your book proposal EVERY DAY, even if you only have five
minutes to spare. This is because at the beginning, ideas are fragile. Time spent with
your proposal each day helps you to build and maintain your energy and your
enthusiasm.
Grab Your Copy For Only… $29.95 I know you will get something from this well written eBook! Remember: Anything that MAKES you money is certainly WORTH the money you spend to obtain it!
Grab Your Copy For Only . . . $29.95
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