Answer: “You have to write a book proposal an editor will read and say yes to.”

How do you do that?

You get “inside information” from someone who knows the publishing business.

My friend, Terry Whalin, has been in the publishing business for over 25 years. One of the keys (which no one controls) is making the right connection with the right person at the right time and the right place.

While you can’t control that element, you CAN be actively working to learn all that you can about how to make the best possible pitch.

Within the publishing community, the devil is in the details. For example, several years ago when he was a fiction acquisitions editor, he could only acquire a few novels each year. One of the key rejection tools that Terry used was the word count. If the writer didn’t tell him their word count,  the proposal was rejected. If their word count was outside of the typical range for novels, it was rejected. The writers received a polite “thanks but no thank you” rejection letter and never knew they had missed the mark. It wasn’t Terry’s task to inform them of what was missing.

Terry wants to help deepen your understanding of how editors and agents REALLY make their decisions about your proposals and pitches. Remember editors and agents don’t read manuscripts. They read book proposals.

He has developed a 12-week training course on how to write a book proposal. It is at
http://BookProposalsThatSell.com.

You can get the first lesson and start training today.

On Thursday, February 2nd at 8 p.m. EST or 5 p.m. PST, Terry is going to be answering your questions in a free 70-minute teleseminar. You can sign up and ask him any question about proposal creation and proposal marketing here.

In addition, Terry has created a special free Ebook for everyone who signs up at the teleseminar:  BOOK PROPOSAL BASICS. You can get this  24-page Ebook packed with content when you sign up.

If you can’t make the time of the call, please go ahead and sign up anyway. The entire teleseminar will be recorded and EVERYONE  who signs up will receive an email with the replay link. Also if you sign up, you will be able to download the FREE special report right away. This report is loaded with valuable advice. So sign up and learn from the publishing insider who has rejected–and accepted–hundreds of proposals and knows what sells!

As you look ahead to a new year, do you feel hope in your heart, or fear?

For many, fear is the predominant feeling.  So much bad news in the world, and much of hits home.

Yet I want to say, hang on to hope. I’ve had many very “dry” years. Yet, I hung on to hope, even when I could not see how things could possibly change.

Well, they did. For me, 2010 was an amazing year. Despite the economy and the turbulent state of publishing, it was an incredible year for me.

In fact, it was a year when the “bamboo” I’d planted and had assiduously watered and cultivated finally took off.

You know I’ve often said (borrowing from Alex Mandossian), success is like bamboo.

Bamboo grows silently in the ground for 4 years. Not a sign of life.

Then, in the fourth  year, shoots pop up. In the fifth year, it grows 80-90 feet tall!

2009 was like my “fourth” year. Around midyear, the shoots popped up. I’m talking about my business and personal life–everything. This past year, they really took off.

I’m telling you this to give you hope. The things that contributed to my success are eminently duplicatable–by anyone.  I’m not just “lucky.” Luck has nothing to do with it. I’ve just discovered some resources and principles that have made all the difference–especially when used together.

I teach many of the principles in my Author Success Plan course. If you don’t have it, by all means get it.

I will be sharing more of what I’ve discovered in the coming days and weeks.

As for the resources,  I’ll just tell you about one of the key tools that has made a difference to me. It’s absolutely the place to start.

If you don’t already have a website that:

• people can find easily because it gets high search engine ranking
• is easy to set up and maintain, and doesn’t involve all kinds of plugins and updating as blogs do
• does not require a webmaster to keep going
• allows you to add fresh content at will
• is secure from hackers (without having to take a course on how to, as I did for my blog)

… then you might want to check out the software I’ve been using for 9 years that’s as easy to use as MS Word.

This material will shave YEARS off of the learning curve as well as time and money you would invest in any other way of getting your website up and running smoothly.

Believe me, I know. I have both Wordpress blogs and this software, and hands down I prefer this. The only advantages to a blog are that people can comment, and if you want a membership site, you can use Wishlist Member software to convert it.

Otherwise, stick with Paul Smithson’s course and software. Both are absolutely topnotch. One of the best products I’ve ever invested in. And it was truly an investment, paying me back many times over.

Not only is this award-winning software for an extremely good price, but the customer service is great. Within the first 90 days, they will help you with anything you need to know to get your site up and running–within 24 hours– at no extra cost.

For me, customer service is a big indicator of the true quality of a company and product. I’m happy to report that the service has been excellent in the 5 years I’ve been using the product. First, I’ve hardly had to contact them. Second, when I have, the response has been speedy and the service excellent.

There is also an extremely extensive course on how to build a profitable website that’s top-notch. To see what the course has to offer, go here.

To see the features of the software, go here.

Hang on to hope.  I’ll do my best to make it a “bamboo year” for you as an author. That’s my pledge!

While I’m always wary of corporations controlling things, seems like the security of DRM is a good thing for authors. I’m ALWAYS for protecting intellectual property rights. We authors get so little as it is, and it’s still too easy to rip us off.

Digital books are here to stay. So are printed books. I’m encouraged by the comments that some people read more than ever because of E-book readers. As an author, I want my book out in as many formats as possible.

What’s your take? Comment below.

You can see the marketing problem of every business just by glancing at the plight of the typical author.

Once a year, once every other year, he has to come out of his university office/hovel/apartment/rural enclave and go on the road. He has to do Leonard Lopate and the Today show, a spate of blogs, book readings, Tedx appearances and sleep on whatever couch he can find, use whatever media will have him.

Why?

To reach strangers. To reach people who, if they only knew about the book, would gladly buy it, read it, share it, listen to it, download it.

Selling a book to friends is a totally different story. You send an email to your fans and you’re done. You blog it on your blog or tweet about it once or twice and you’re done.

Selling [a book] to strangers… that’s getting harder and harder and less effective every day.

The old model of marketing books is what Seth describes. Still, mainstream publishers are doing it–though less and less often.

It truly IS easier to sell to friends. So, where should you put your book marketing efforts?

(Hint: It’s one word, and something else I learned from Seth Godin, that I mention here.)

Here’s what I answered:

Author 101 University is excellent. I’ve been to some of Rick’s sessions and heard many of the speakers  over the years. They are all excellent.

If you want to be on the “career author” path, it’s especially worthwhile. (Listen to my “Find Your Publishing Path” teleseminar sometime to discern which path is best for you.)

Rick and many of the other speakers have been around for years. They have the benefit of experience YET they are also on the cutting edge of publishing today.

Check out the speakers and sign up:  www.allaboutgettingpublished.com. NOTE: You can bring a friend for free, so you split the cost. Plus it’s much nicer to have another author buddy to compare notes with, spur each other on, etc. Just the sort of offer I’d expect from Rick Frishman.

“How’s it gong?” I asked the other day.

“Oh, publishers want to know how many followers I already have. They’re basically suggesting I self-publish and if I’m successful, they’ll take another look.”

“Yes, and then you won’t need them,” I observed.

Publishers care about how many followers you have. They call that your “platform.”

So how do you get a platform?

First, keep in mind that it’s not an overnight endeavor. Apparent “overnight successes” are usually the result of years of an author plugging away until he or she reached a “tipping point” of some sort.

Social media is an obvious place to start.  So let’s take a look at one of the most fun (to me anyway) of the social media platforms, Twitter.

According to Twitter’s site, as of September 14, 2010, there were 175 million users who tweet 95 million times a day.  Even the President is using Twitter to hold “town meetings.” It’s ubiquitous.

Tips on Using Twitter Well

1. Identify your ideal follower. Whom do you want to reach and what is your message? Know the “theme” of your “story” from the start. This is how you “brand” yourself in the minds of your followers and even search engines.

2. Create your Twitter profile with photo and bio. Get more details in my free Ebook, Mastering Twitter in 10 Minutes or Less.

3. Customize your Twitter profile. Here’s a free tool  to create a distinctive background for your Twitter profile.

4. Use a free tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to send out your tweets and also to schedule them.

5. Locate Twitter Leaders in your area at Twellow. Follow those leaders and learn from their tweets.

6. Use a tool like TweetAdder to automate your twitter process of gaining followers. You can add more than 100 followers a day to your Twitter account.

Your tweets need to be interesting, so  point to articles,
give good content and free resources. Its a soft sell approach that works on Twitter. With millions of people on Twitter and using some (or all) of these techniques, you as an author can begin to build that all-important platform or tribe of followers  via Twitter.

1. Writing a book (or publishing or promoting it)  will take a chunk of time and energy.

2. Your life is already full, and you have no extra time.

Given these two facts of life for most people nowadays, how can you make the time to write the book you have inside your head, the book that’s been calling to you to write for months or even years?

1. First, get in touch with that deep desire within you to write and publish a book. Envision as clearly as you can what it will be like to have a finished, published book in your hands. The title encapsulates just what you want the world to know. You name is on that book. It is bound, with a beautiful cover, and a publisher’s name on the spine, along with your own.

You’re a published author. What is this going to do for you? Win you the respect and admiration of friends, colleagues, and family? Increase your business by your new position as expert? Allow you to approach people you never could before, by sending them your book? Enable you to name a much higher fee the next time you’re asked to speak, and to have something to sell in the back of the room?

Whatever you want from your book, imagine it vividly. Then write it down. This is a most important pre-writing exercise. This desire is what will fuel your ability to keep on going even when the going gets tough. Review this document any time you feel your motivation sagging. Or, better yet, review it every day.

2. Prune and prioritize. You may have to make some tough decisions. If your life is already full, what will you cut out in order to harvest the time and energy to write your book?

Look at the chores you already do that take up chunks of time. Can you hire someone to clean your house or do your yard work so you can spend that time writing instead? How much television do you watch? Can you forego that time to write your book? Or to go to bed earlier and get up earlier and write before you go off to work? Can you set a timer to limit your online activities and use that time to write?

3. Set a time and stick to it. A regular habit of writing, even if it’s only for 20 minutes, can do wonders. Learn to write in smaller chunks. (For more help with this, see www.writingsecretsrevealed.com). Remember my motto: ” A little is better than nothing.” Steady progress is the goal!

For more help on time management, I have a free 7-day minicourse. Sign up to the right.  You might also want to check out my favorite piece of software, the Action Machine, at www.authortimetips.com. It’s a fun tool, but it also really helps me be productive and stay on track.

Awhile back, I wrote a book titled Boosting Your Pet Self-Esteem. It’s a humorous satire of the self-help movement that my wife, Sarah, enlivened with forty of her cartoon illustrations. Sans agent, I approached Macmillan Publishing because they had recently published another best-selling cultural satire, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

The editor at Macmillan liked my concept, but ultimately sent the manuscript to one of the company’s affiliates, Howell Book House, which specializes in the pet market. When Howell offered to publish my book, I was so excited that I immediately accepted.

Many cats suffer from catatonia. They’re so laid back, they can’t be up front.

Then reality set in. One month into the project, the marketing manager assigned to my book left and was replaced by someone short on experience. A short time later, this replacement left and for quite a while was replaced by no one. When a new marketing manager finally came on board, a few weeks before my book was due to come out, I visited with her while I was in New York City. To my dismay, I learned that my book had virtually no marketing plan or marketing budget. “If it starts to sell once it’s in the book stores, we’ll put some money behind it,” she told me.

Upon publication, Howell shipped copies of Boosting Your Pet Self-Esteem to its usual pet store accounts, where ..you guessed it…they sat on the shelves. We should have realized that people go to pet stores to buy dog food, not cultural satires. Our primary market was not people who drive minivans and have pets, but people who listen to NPR and have therapists.

Howell also placed a few hundred copies with two national bookstore chains, where again they…you guessed it .. .sat on the shelves among thousands of other titles. With only a ¼” spine exposed to view and no marketing and promotion, most shoppers didn’t know my book existed. Six months later, these bookstores returned most of their copies to the publisher for credit. (Return privileges are standard in the industry. Big publishers are happy to grant them to bookstores, because they make it hard for small publishers to compete.)

Tail wagging is what pet psychologists call a coping mechanism. Insecure dogs inappropriately use it to attract attention.

Not to be deterred, I sent out scores of review copies to various media outlets at my own expense. I also put considerable effort into getting on talk radio shows across the country. My spiel was well received – one pet-show host said our interview was one of the funniest he had ever had, and humorist Michael Feldman gave away copies of my book on his Saturday morning National Public Radio show – but it resulted in few sales.

Less than two years after publication, Howell took my book out of print. About two years and many hassles later, I got the rights back. All I earned for my efforts was a $2,500 advance on royalties.

My story is not unusual. These days traditional publishers devote much less time and money to editing and marketing than they did, say, thirty years ago. With the advent of the Internet and the revolution in printing technology, more and more authors are deciding to self-publish.

That’s not to say that traditional publishers don’t offer some advantages over self-publishing. They cover all production costs (cover design, interior layout, printing, etc.), which is not an insignificant benefit. Also, a traditional publisher’s name can add credibility to a title, which can be important in certain markets. And their established distribution channels can boost sales.

However, traditional publishing has at least five major drawbacks compared to self-publishing:

1. Traditional publishing is a lengthy process. First, it can take quite a bit of time and effort to find a traditional publisher who will accept your manuscript. After you find a publisher, the publication process can take two years or more. In contrast, the self-publishing process typically requires about nine months from commencement of writing to printed book in hand.

1. A traditional publisher will require that you give up considerable control over your book. And if the publisher fails to perform, you may have to expend lots of effort over an extended period to recover the rights.

1. Traditional publishers generally pay royalties of 10% of their net sales. That means if your book retails for $12.00, you would typically earn a maximum of $ .60 per copy (10% of the wholesale price of $6.00). On the other hand, if the same book was self-published and the printing cost was $2.00 per copy, you would earn as much as $4.00 on each book sold. And for every book you sell at the retail price of $12.00 – for example, by selling it on your own website or at speaking engagements – you would earn about $10.00 per copy.

1. Traditional publishing is a rather unattractive option if you plan to personally sell or give away a significant number of books, because you will have to buy books from the publisher at considerably more than the printing cost.

1. Unless you have significant name recognition within the book’s target market (in the industry this is called a “platform”), you may have difficulty finding a traditional publisher anyway. After expending considerable time and effort looking for a publisher, you could still come up empty handed.

Traditional publishing is terrific, but it’s not always better than self-publishing or subsidy publishing. Next month I’ll tell you about these two alternatives.

Note: If Mike’s book interests you, you can get a free copy by telling other people about his newsletter at http://www.michaeljdowling.com/newsletter.html. Subscribe yourself, tell your friend about his newsletter, and send Mike an email saying you passed on the word. He’ll send you an autographed copy.  It’s really funny.

Here are his questions, from his blog post at The Domino Project:

Are you publishing for your fans? If so, do you have enough to justify the effort? Do you have a way of reaching them? Is there a better vehicle than a book for reaching your goal?

Are you publishing so your fans will have something to recommend to their friends? Is it in a form that they’ll happily recommend? What’s the half-life of this cycle–will friends recommend to friends and to friends to infinity? If not, how big an audience do you imagine reaching?

Are you publishing for strangers? How will they discover you? Or are you playing the lottery, figuring someone has to come out of nowhere with a big bestseller, it might as well be you…

Or are you publishing to make a point, to wave your book in front of a particular audience like a red flag in front of a bull?

Are you publishing to win an award or become a critic’s darling? Good luck with that.

Are you publishing for your clients, with the intent of mailing the book directly to them? This is both easy and effective, but it isn’t publishing, it’s mailing them a book.

Are you publishing this book to make a living? Good luck with that. (Less than 3% of newly published authors make enough in royalties and advances to be happy to live on).

What you write is directly related to who you are writing for, and deciding to publish has nothing at all to do with deciding to write. Publishing is a business decision, a financial risk and a marketing project. If your goal is to generate reach, to share your gifts and your point of view, you can skip all of those and just give your work away.

There are people who should publish, who I hope will publish and who will create books we can’t wait to read. And there are important books still unwritten, books that should be created and shared. Too often, though, we seek to follow a path where there isn’t a sensible business model, and all that happens is nothing. Go, write. But think twice (or three times or six) about publishing the traditional way.

These are very important questions. I beg you, take some time to do some soul searching. before you look for a publisher or, worse, get hooked into one of the self-publishing scams out there. (There are legitimate ways to self-publish, but too many people spend thousands of dollars to get published and regret it afterward.)

I suggest 12 crucial questions (in addition the ones above) in Write Your Book Right: 12 Questions Successful Authors Always Answer. In addition, I invite you to listen to the teleseminar I did on finding your publishing path. Learn which of the three publishing paths is best for you.

I was so angry I was tempted to close down my account completely. Then a friend told me that you can’t really do that. That probably accounts for why I have two FB accounts. A few years ago, FB shut me down, inexplicably. Or so I thought. I opened a new account, then discovered the old one was somehow apparently resurrected. Not the kind of resurrection I celebrated yesterday!)

My friend also said the hacker likely can still use my account. How scary is that? (That’s it for my Facebook rant. I promise you, I won’t go further. I’ve done that before.)

What I do want to remind you of is to be careful in this digital age. Be very mindful of what you’re doing, and why. Why have a Facebook account? If you don’t need it, don’t do it. My son just wrote a paper on cyberbullying of young people, but it doesn’t just happen to young people. My mom told me of how someone used FB to spread vicious rumors about her sister. These women are in their 70s!

Laying that aside, another fact of this digital age is passwords. We need passwords for everything, don’t we? And to be really secure, you should have at least slightly different, sort of random passwords for everything. Using he same password for everything is really dangerous. If someone hacks one account, they can perhaps hack a lot of others.

The only resource that keeps me sane in this world is Roboform. It’s a computer program that allows you to save your login information and get to it quickly. I looked for this for years and was so grateful when I finally found it.

There is a no-cost form that allows you to save a small number of passwords but the full version is not expensive. It’s definitely worth it to me to save my sanity and a lot of time. Try Roboform. Everyone I know who has it says, “I can’t live without it!” (More accurately, I don’t want to be online without it.)

Speaking of time, one of my favorite new software programs, The Action Machine, has just released a new improved version. This inexpensive software is a lot of FUN to use, and it really helps me be productive. It is very easy to learn, has timers, reminders to take breaks, and tracks what you do in savable reports. I really like the guy who created it, too-he does things the old-fashioned way–offers a great product at a reasonable price, with truly valuable helps without the hppe.

Find the Action Machine info here.