How to Publish a Book Readers,

How is your writing going so far in 2009? Have you been productive? Have you been sending out query letters?

This past Sunday, I travelled down to Wilmington, North Carolina to lead a discussion at Pomegranate Books titled "To Self Publish or Not to Self Publish, and the State of Book Publishing in 2009." In essence, I tried to sum up all of my thoughts on book publishing in one 60-minute discussion and Q&A. As you might imagine, this is not an easy thing to do.

In the following video (taken from the event), I make several claims regarding the state of book publishing in 2009, self publishing, and the pathway for new writers entering the profession.

The biggest change over the past year regards how I query literary agents. In 2008, I queried agents regarding my books by sending an actual printed letter in an envelope to the literary agents' postal address. Generally, I start by contacting the handful of agents I've met or who have requested material from me via writers' conferences.

This usually is less than ten literary agents. If all ten say they are not interested, I generally start querying agents with a standard one-page query letter. For The Colorado Sequence, for example, I queried over 450 agents before deciding to self publish. With CLAWS, I found an agent after querying about 70, but she was unable to sell the novel to a major publisher. Subsequently, I queried an additional 300 literary agents and about 75 book editors. After everyone responded negatively, I decided to self publish.

In 2009, I have begun querying for a new novel of mine titled THE PROFILER'S WIFE. For this novel, I have only sent out email queries. So far, the response rate has been significantly positive with nearly 80% of the agents requesting sample chapters.

By email querying, I save on postage and time, and only one of the agents has requested the material be sent to her by mail. The remainder simply asked to see my book via email attachment.

It's important to note that I don't send sample material unless asked by the literary agent. I simply send a one-page query letter, written first in Word, and copy-and-pasted into the body of the email. I've found the literary agents' email addresses via agentquery.com

In Wilmington on Sunday, I discussed this process and handed out sample query letters. Following this, I really dug into talking about how to publish a book, self publishing, and recent trends that I've seen developing while both working for a traditional publisher (Bedford) and a non-traditional self publisher (Lulu.com).

Basically, I posit that book publishing is moving increasingly toward digitization. Furthermore, I encourage aspiring writers (myself very much included) to embrace digital technologies like YouTube, Podiobooks.com, Social Networking sites like FaceBook and Meetup.com in an entrepenuerial spirit.

No longer can we as writers afford to simply write books and expect them to publish and sell on their own. In fact, I'd say the more assertive you are the better. You really have to take control of your own career and make people take notice.

This is best done when built from a knowledge base of how to publish a book and how book publishing actually works.

Finally, I make a claim towards the end of the discussion that authors in 2009 would be well advised to embrace self publishing as a way to build a base of knowledge. The truth is that we may very well have a book or story that is good enough or better than books or novels that are currently being published by a major book publisher, but if we don't understand how book publishing, marketing, distribution, and sales works, the publisher would be at a disadvantage in publishing us.

That said, I encourage all aspiring writers to develop a solid base of knowledge regarding how to publish a book, how to market a book, how books are bought, sold, and distributed, and how to position yourself in the marketplace and how to create name recognition in the public at large before wading into the waters of major traditional publishing. 

Enjoy the video, and feel free to send me your thoughts and comments via the "Contact Us" page.

Take care, folks, and thanks so much for visiting the site.

Stacey

How to Publish a Book Readers,

Well Happy New Years, everyone! I've got a great how to publish a book video to start off 2009 for you. The following panel discussion on How to Publish a Book: Literary Agents & Book Editors took place back in October 2008 and features Algonquin Books Executive Editor Chuck Adams and literary agent Sally Hill McMillan.

If you've ever wanted to know how an editor thinks or how a literary agent acquires new writers, you should watch this video. I sometimes get comments from folks through this site that indicate they want a fundamental basic "How to Publish a Book" video or content. You know, four steps to get my book published.

The difficulty with answering a question like that is that literally everyone who publishes a book does it in a slightly different way. This is why James Patterson sells more books than say T. Jefferson Parker; the choices these writers make are different and the consequence of their choices affects sales, distribution, first print run numbers, movie rights, all of the aspects that I consider to be how to publish a book issues. My goal with this How to Publish a Book site is to illustrate that and to illuminate the motivations that factor into how a book is published.

If you're visiting the site for the first time and you want the fundamental steps regarding how to publish a book. Those steps are as follows:

1. For fiction, finish the book first. You must have a completed manuscript in order to sell your first novel.
2. Once the book is written, begin researching literary agents and book publishers at your local library (or online).
3. To publish your book traditionally, you'll most likely need a literary agent. To contact literary agents, generally the best way is to send them a one-page query letter.
4. Once you find a literary agent to represent you, the agent will sell the rights to publish your book to a major book publisher.

Those are the fundamental steps. The trouble is that there are about a hundred things you need to do to reach each of these steps, and it's these myriad steps that the How to Publish a Book site is dedicated to.

For example, when deciding how to publish a book, you first need to decide is your work fiction or non-fiction. The steps change, and certain literary agents only represent one or the other. The pre-publication steps at a publishing house are different for fiction than they are for non-fiction, and non-fiction can often be sold on a proposal and sample chapter alone.

Another fork in the road regarding how to publish a book is whether to self-publish or to publish the so-called "traditional" way. Generally when I get a question from a writer through the site, that's the first thing I try to encourage the writer to think about. Do you want to publish your book the traditional route, or would you prefer to self-publish your book mostly for family and friends and maybe a couple hundred other people?

Perhaps you want to publish an audio book or an online iPod type download of your book... or an Amazon Kindle version. That, too, is a different process with different legal rights and steps to take.

I think generally everybody gets that there is no one-size-fits-all path regarding how to publish a book. I know I learn through every interview I do, every writer I meet, every experience I invest myself in regarding how to publish a book that there literally are an infinite number of choices that a writer can make when deciding how to publish a book. It is these infinite choices that seperate writers along the spectrum from the bestselling writer in the world, to the writer who never quite cracks the NYT bestseller list but manages to traditionally publish ten novels, to the writer who self publishes her non-fiction book that goes on to sell 10,000 copies, to the twenty-year-old in his college dorm room sitting down to write his first novel-length story.

It is these choices that we celebrate and highlight here at How to Publish a Book. And with that, I give you Chuck Adams and Sally Hill McMillan.

Here's wishing you the best in 2009!

Stacey