The vast majority of books do not fail miserably. Their authors do. I do publishing and marketing consulting for authors and some of the biggest hurdles that I have found with many authors is their inability to realize that a successful book is 25% writing it and 75% promoting it. If you can’t stand up in front of 10, 100 or 1,000...if you can’t spit out an intelligent sentence on the set of a live national TV program (let alone a local cable production), go rob banks if you’re looking for recognition and a couple of bucks.
Building a platform is also important. Who’s going to buy the book of an unknown author? You need to establish credentials long before your first book. Write some articles for small magazines and get them published. Use that experience to move on to magazines and newspapers with bigger audiences. Build a platform, long before you write your first book.
Subject matter is important too. The “Field of Dreams” approach seldom works. Explore and understand who your audience might be. Look for similar books on Amazon. Sometimes you might mind find that your book is so “unique” that no one has ever done it before. On the other hand, the real reason might be because you’re the ONLY one interested in the subject. Sometimes you’ll find 500 books on a subject-—Chicago history-—for instance. That doesn’t mean, however, that the subject has been overdone. If you can find a different angle, maybe a unique perspective that no one else has done, you might have something.
Try ghostwriting. I’ve put words in the mouths of a number of politicians and wannabes too, some mentioned on FR. “Their” columns, blog entries or radio spots come out and I collect a check. No one knows it’s my words and I don’t care. They look good and I make another mortgage payment.
And finally, realize that a book is merely a means to an end. Standard industry royalties will never make you rich; lectures and seminars might. This week, I made more money from lectures than if I had sold 2,000 books this week. Heck, I even do consulting on different avenues of approach for getting a book published. Books are a means to an end.
Working on my seventh book, I’ve also decided to grab the bull by the horns; I going to self-publish. Not that stupid POD stuff, but an honest-to-God self-publishing effort. I’m talking to printers, lining up a distributor and I’ll be contacting every media person who ever wrote a positive review about one of my books or needed some info for a story (”Please. I’m almost on deadline!”). It’s payback time.
Writing books and getting them published falls under being a business, and until budding authors realize this, they’ll always be disappointed.
Sam, the toddler has it right. A few insights I’ll add...
I’m a lawyer in real life and have my first book coming out with a mid-sized Christian publishing house in 2008 (it’s a nonfiction book offering practical Biblical counsel on everyday legal matters). Like virtually all first-time authors, I did it backwards - I wrote the book, then sought a publisher (really you’re supposed to sell a publisher on your idea, then write the book).
Be careful out there! Scams abound - fake agents, fake agencies, fake editors, fake book doctors, and fake publishing companies - plus some various “joint” or “partnership” alternative publishers that are merely disguised vanity houses.
Best advice I got at the beginning of the process: Money always flows TO the author. If you just go by that rule, you’ll safely navigate the minefield.
Start educating yourself by reading EVERYTHING on the Writer’s Beware blog ( http://accrispin.blogspot.com/ ) and every link they post. Seriously, invest a month or so in reading all that and you’ll be in solid shape, ready to face the realities of the publishing industry.
Now that I’ve signed my contract (two weeks ago) and await my modest (very) advance, I’m gearing up for the 75% percent phase: Promotion. I actually love this part - I care deeply about my message and so I have a passion to sell the book that goes beyond dollars (if I were to calculate the hours I poured into this project over the 5 years I worked on it using my regular hourly billing rate, I believe I would have to sell an infinite number of copies to break even!)- so, I guess I’m saying, make sure you love what it is you’re writing about!
That's an excellent point. In the same way audio recordings are becoming virtually free commercials for a musician's live performances, non-fiction books are becoming virtually free advertisements for one's professional or personal services.
For fiction...just forget it. In our television-dominated culture people don't read books any more, so there are only going to be ten to twenty fiction writers worldwide at any given time who are really making big money from selling novels. There's more money in the anonymity of writing for television and movies, but the barriers to entry there are extraordinarily high.
The best way to get started is to create an eBook, sell it from your own web site, and as you said, build up an audience and credibility.
All excellent points. I have successfully followed & executed similar steps and processes in the technical marketplace. Eventually, I began to focus on electronic publishing, with which I've been involved now for many years.
The only exception I would make to your comment above is that this generally applies to all life activities. It's only through experience that one begins to realize that life is like an iceberg (oblique pun intended). That is, 90% of one's efforts will be directed towards activities you didn't even know existed until you became involved.
This holds true for engineers who exhaust themselves on design, only to discover that debug & integration take X times as long. Or the attorney who only finds out later that initial research has nothing on presentation & review. Writers are no different; only after the manuscript is completed do they realize that the real work begins.
This in turn is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Those who have extra reserves and buck up in the face of realizing this horror can carve out a living. Those that collapse in despair become road kill.