You know the old saw, “if you want to learn something, teach it”?
I’ve got deep, dark nefarious plans to write a book.
But I don’t know a thing about the publishing industry. Agents, proposals, negotiating, and advances are a sexy mystery to me.
So I asked around. I asked
Gretchen Rubin – The Happiness Project, Power Money Fame Sex, Forty Ways to Look At Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at JFK, Profane Waste (with Dana Hoey)
Leo Babauta – The Power of Less
Danielle LaPorte – Style Statement
Erin Doland – Unclutter Your Life in One Week
Josh Hanagarne - I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you…but watch him. A book is coming…ok I can’t keep a secret. Read the piece.
Chris Guillebeau – The Art of Non-Conformity (in stores Fall 2010)
I asked them: how’d you get a book deal, baby? (With variations on that theme.)
And they told me. And it was goooooood.
(You can read my interviews with Erin Doland and Chris Guillebeau, here. I’ll run the interview with Leo Babauta, tomorrow.)
The first two (of four) parts of this mammoth essay (3500+ words!) appeared at Write To Done, as
Here’s the piece, in its entirety.
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How to Get a Book Deal. An Evolutionary, Biblical Approach. (This Is Why I am a Writer And Not a Scientist.)
Want a book deal? Think your magnetic, compelling, ninja talent for the written word is all it takes?
Think again.
Now, says author/blogger/truth-telling goddess Danielle LaPorte, “two-thirds of a publisher’s decision is based on your platform”.
In other words, your blog. How famous are you? How big does your audience and ‘platform’ need to be?
“Pretty fucking huge, apparently…” continues LaPorte, who was in New York last September pimping her latest book proposal to agents and publishers, “because I just got told I’m not famous enough.”
Publishing. It is Ancient History so Study the Scrolls.
Danielle LaPorte knows a lil’ something about the publishing racket.
In a former life, LaPorte was freelance book publicist for publishing houses like Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins. Now she has a juju personal development site called White Hot Truth, a rockin’ inspirational speaking career, and a new TV gig. And that’s not all: four years ago, she and a co-author wrote Style Statement and sold it to the prestigious Little Brown and Company for a $150,000 advance.
Back then, she didn’t even have a blog. True story.
Bestselling author Gretchen Rubin didn’t have a blog, either, when she pitched her Happiness Project book proposal to publishers. An established, best-selling author of four books, her read on the blog/book deal relationship is a little less go-blog-go.
In publishing circles, says Rubin, “there is some skepticism about bloggers. Books and blogs are very different mediums. Can a blogger write a book that hangs together as a narrative?”
Still, Rubin’s agent encouraged her to start a blog.
“She planted seeds,” says Rubin, “and I was resistant…” Eventually, though, she started her blog, The Happiness Project, to test her thesis that novelty (new medium, the blog) and consistency (maintaining the blog and writing new content daily) are essential components of happiness.
Now, Rubin has been told that “your blog is more important than your book. Never forget that.”
Those stories – legends of non-fiction book deals signed only three to four years ago and captured without carefully cultivated venus-blog-traps – might be ancient history.
Printasauras Rex? Meet Twitter. It Will Eat You Alive. Play Nice.
It was about a two-and-a-half year process from securing an agent to it [the book] coming off the presses. Painfully long. It is totally jurassic. The publishing industry is antiquated.
Publishers have not seen the future. There are a few who are admitting that things have to change and that they are Jurassic and that the future is social media. The future is multimedia expressions of all forms of literature. – Danielle LaPorte
The publishing industry might be prehistoric, Jurassic and slow-moving, but it will follow the scent of food. Or cash.
You’ve got a blog and an email list and an RSS feed of devoted readers to whom you can announce – and pre-sell – your book? Yes, please.
Gary Vaynerchuk knows this. He also knows his worth. Vaynerchuk worked 5 days a week for seventeen months to create his cult/platform and estimates the audience for Wine Library TV at 90,000 people per episode. He has 850,480 followers on Twitter. When he mentions a wine, it sells.
Craig Haseroty, the owner Sojourn Cellars, a small winery in California, told the New York Times that “nothing has put more people on our database and sold more wine than Wine Library TV.” Vaynerchuk mentioned their wine and their switchboard lit up. In 24 hours, Sojourn Cellars answered 500 phone calls and e-mails. They sold a lot of wine.
That’s the power of suggestion. Vaynerchuk’s followers are vayniacs.
Somewhere out there, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan are smiling, knowingly.
With this kind of clout, the wine-spitting social media maestro Vaynerchuk was not likely to say “book deal? Really, ME? Really REALLY? Oh THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”
Legend has it that Harper Studio is publishing 2.0. They’ve heard of this little thing the kids call a ‘platform’ and are willing to share the profits – and also the pain and price of promotion – with authors.
And President Bob Miller apparently doesn’t pay a penny over $100K for an advance.
What is a Vaynerchuk with a legion of devoted, possibly tipsy vayniacs to do with a price ceiling?
Blow it up.
Vaynerchuk set up shop in the Harper office. Tweeted about The 26th Story, the Harper Studio blog. Watched, in real time, as that blog suddenly drowned in traffic.
His point: my people like me. They like my suggestions. They WILL buy my book and make all of us rich and pfooey! I throw down my handkerchief in a faux snit and laugh at your measly $100K!
(This is not a direct quote.)
The result? Gary Vaynerchuk – who casually admits that he doesn’t read books – signed a seven figure (translation for the math challenged: at least a million dollars), ten book deal with Harper Studio. His first book, Crush It, debuted in September 2009, and yeah, it did make the New York Times’ bestseller list.
And he’s not even a writer.
I know. I just died a little, inside, too.
The moral of the story? (And, I argue, the moral is not just a story because it is based on a very comprehensive, validated sample of at least three published authors, which makes it a scientific fact.)
Get a blog, rock it out, and then go get yourself a book deal.
Need a Book Deal? Get Thee A Blog, and a Big One
Newbie authors and big deal bloggers Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta and Erin Doland accidentally and accidentally-on-purpose hacked their way through the publishing jungle with their brain children/addictions – Art of Non-Conformity, Zen Habits and The Unclutterer – firmly in tow.
If Chris Guillebeau was forced to identify his favourite child, he’d waffle: ”I really love them both.”
But I’m going to kill them both if you don’t choose.
“I guess if I had to choose, I’d choose the blog since it allows me to reach more people…”.
Even so, Guillebeau started his blog with a book deal in mind. “It was one of the primary goals of starting my blog,” he says, “I felt like I had a message to share and wanted to write a book.” He knew that it would be “hard to break into the publishing world without a strong online presence” and so along came ”the blog and everything else I did online for nearly a full year prior to getting the book deal.”
Guillebeau has now signed a deal worth more than a handful of m&ms but less than $100K, and “in terms of the time commitment, probably reflective of minimum wage.” What the hell, Chris? “That’s OK with me, though – I feel very grateful that I can do what I love to do”. Well, okay then. You’ve got a book deal and we don’t. Thanks for rubbing it in.
Guillebeau is probably writing that book right now – likely while sitting in a plane or an airport terminal, poor baby – and expects his book The Art of Non-Conformity to be in stores September 2010.
Like Chris Guillebeau, Leo Babauta also loves his first-born best. His blog “is my baby, and will always hold a special place deep within my heart” but publishing a book was “a fantasy come true,” thanks to his blog:
As my blog took off, publishers and agents approached me. My blog had 26,000 subscribers within the first year, so it was obvious my writing was connecting with a lot of people — people who responded enthusiastically…
It was essential that I built up my audience with my blog before I tried to sell the book. Publishers get a million requests per second (about the same as the number of Google searches done per second), and you need to stand out. If you have a successful blog that has shown your potential as a writer and marketer, you have a good shot at least. If you don’t, you’d better have an AMAZING proposal.
Leo Babauta knows what he’s talking about. He has to. He has six kids to feed which is why I’m so glad his publisher advanced him $80,000 for his 2008 book, The Power of Less.
I digress.
Unlike Guillebeau and Babauta, Erin Doland doesn’t talk about her blog and her book in parental terms, but that is because she has a problem. She is “obsessed with reading and writing books the way druggies pursue their next high.”
In fact, before Doland signed her book deal, she would lie in bed at night and “stare at the ceiling and feel like I had failed to achieve one of my purposes in life.” And then, during the day, she’d bitch about it. “I wasn’t quiet about this failure…Everyone I know was well aware of my feelings of inadequacy over not yet having written a book.”
Thank goodness for her wildly popular blog, The Unclutterer, because “if it weren’t for my posts on Unclutterer.com there wouldn’t be Unclutter Your Life in One Week. My agent and editor both were fans of my writing on the website, and they wouldn’t have had a clue whom I was if it weren’t for the site.”
But they did and they do and Unclutter Your Life in One Week came out November 3, 2009. Bulging garages and strung-out attics everywhere are detoxing as we speak.
Get Thee an Agent
Josh Hanagarne has some serious blog juju.
World’s Strongest Librarian is less than a year old, but traffic doubles each month; writing furiously helps Hanagarne muscle through Tourette’s Syndrome; ‘his people’ are icky-sticky passionate; and oh yes Seth Godin e-mailed him to say thanks but no thanks to Hanagarne’s offer to guest post.
Why was Godin’s rejection magic?
Because in Godin’s humble, genius-marketing opinion, Hanagarne’s story should be a book, not a guest post, and so he should talk to Godin’s literary agent RIGHT NOW. Seth Godin hooked Josh Hanagarne up.
This is a blogger’s wet field-of-dream. If you write it (blog it!), they will come.
The magical baseball/blogging/cornfield of publishing dreams worked for Leo Babauta, Erin Doland and Josh Hanagarne. But what if your imaginary agent doesn’t hear your frantic law-of-attraction affirmations “I will get an agent and a book deal and a sick, sick advance, I will get an agent and a book deal and a sick, sick advance” and magically appear?
Simple: Go get yourself an agent.
“This is the hardest part”, says Gretchen Rubin, who kicked it old school and knocked on doors.
So did Chris Guillebeau. Yes, even social media savvy and internet famous Chris Guillebeau had to get out there and actively seek representation.
Before his blog waged war on Alexa, Guillebeau “approached everyone I could think of and more. I knocked on doors, posted on my blog that I was looking for an agent, and asked a couple of hundred people for referrals. Some people wrote back, some didn’t, but that’s just how it works.”
Now that Guillebeau’s campaign for world domination is firmly underway, “the tables have turned and I get approached all the time. I’ve been fortunate to receive a lot of good media coverage – New York Times, CNN, Business Week, etc. – and out of that experience, a number of other people have made contact to pitch me on things.”
Recruiting representation worked for Rubin, who oozes kind words about her agent, and it worked for Chris Guillebeau. Guillebeau is utterly, completely, passionately sold on his agent, David Fugate with LaunchBooks. “He’s fantastic,” says Guillebeau, “and the book would not have sold so quickly without his great work. He also spent a great deal of time refining the proposal to make it both more marketable (which I expected) and also much better in terms of content (which I didn’t expect but greatly appreciated)”.
Danielle LaPorte would approve. When choosing an agent, she advises writers to “hold out for the love,” because, after all, “it is a potentially life-changing relationship. Your agent will be your greatest advocate. They will want to get you the most money, because, you know, they’re getting 10-15% of it, so they will want to get you the exposure.” Not only that, but “the right agent will actually work with you to craft that book. They could be hugely influential in the finished product. They will go to the mat to you in the end on everything from price point to pub date to cover design. It is really important.”
And the writer/agent chemistry doesn’t have to be interpersonal-clicky-butterflies love.
“It may sound contradictory,” admits LaPorte, “but you and your agent don’t need to see eye to eye on the material. You need to have free reign with your voice. An agent can be philosophical opposition and still go get you a good deal and help bolster your career.”
How did she find her agent for Style Statement?
The answer makes for a great story. Malcolm Gladwell (yes! Malcolm Gladwell! Poet-wooing, point-tipping, intellectual whodunit-spinning, best-selling, Malcolm Gladwell!) makes an appearance.
Like doorknockers Chris Guillebeau and Gretchen Rubin, Danielle LaPorte found an agent it an old-fashioned way. She read books.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell “profusely, adoringly thanked his agent” whom, he argued, should be the “next president of the United States or at the very least the CEO of Microsoft.” LaPorte thought, “she’ll do” and e-mailed Malcolm Gladwell.
(Duh! Who wouldn’t?)
LaPorte put on her charming pants and danced. She wrote, “I’m Canadian. You’re Canadian. You’re from Etobicoke. I know how to pronounce Eh-toe-bih-ko. You’re half-black. I have dreadlocks. Here’s my concept. Help me get to your agent.”
He replied within two days, writing, “You’re so charming. How could I refuse?”
To recap: kissing best-selling Godin/Gladwell ass can land you an agent. If that fails, your blog is your baseball/cornfield and if you build it they will come. If that fails, try calling around, knocking on doors, writing letters (and maybe even reading books!) and asking for one directly.
But by all means, by whatever means necessary, get an agent, and a good one, and one you like (even love), because a good agent will help you write and sell a great proposal.
And that’s what you sell, when you hawk a non-fiction book: a proposal. So the agent/author/proposal triangle is important. Get all the angles right.
Write a Divine Book Proposal
Ah yes, the book proposal. If you’re writing non-fiction, you sell a proposal, not a finished manuscript.
What is a book proposal? It is a hook, a map of the book (the table of contents), your bio, market research (ie where does this fit? Who will read it?), marketing (how will you and the publisher sell the pants off it?) and oh yes, some sample chapters to show that you really can write more than a proposal.
And now, apparently, a book proposal needs to include the weight of your platform. Who are you? How big are you? Who is talking about you? How do you talk back? How much does Alexa and Google love you?
Need help licking the proposal beast? It is easily available online and in the bookstores. Leo Babauta “found a few examples of proposals on the web and picked out the parts I liked best, merging them into one kick-ass document.” Danielle LaPorte used a template created by Linda Severson and then “when it felt right to go out of the box, I did. I am not Times New Roman. I am not double-spaced”.
Even with all the resources easily available, every single author I spoke to (LaPorte, Rubin, Babauta, Doland, Guillebeau) said that when it came time to cook up a proposal, their agent was in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, apron strings tied, stirring the pot. Agents are helpful critters. That’s why you should get a good one.
Josh Hanagarne found oodles of helpful proposal writing books. He would read how-to-write-a-proposal book, revise his proposal, read another book, revise the proposal, and did that, several times, until his agent said “I want you to stop reading those books.”
So, if you’re stuck, what about a proposal coach?
I put the question to our intrepid authors.
Q. Proposal Coach. Did you use or consider using one?
The answers could be characterized as follows:
A1. What is this mythical creature of which you speak?
Erin Doland: No. I didn’t even know there were such things as proposal coaches.
A2. That sounds like a scam.
Leo Babauta: I didn’t know they existed. If they do, they are probably scammers. The info you need to write a proposal is available free online. A proposal coach would make money on the insecurities of writers, which are notoriously large and numerous.
A3. Your agent is your proposal coach.
Chris Guillebeau: I thought that was the role of a good agent. The problem I see with a proposal coach is that they aren’t the ones who will pitch your project to publishers. I suppose if you’re having a hard time getting a concept together, then such a person could help, but realize that you’d likely end up doing it all over again with a good agent.
A4. Might not be a bad idea.
Gretchen Rubin: That might not be a bad idea.
So there you have it. It might not be a bad idea to get a proposal coach, if that’s your thing, but it is probably a better idea to just get a great agent who will help you write a killer proposal.
The Deal. Negotiating. You Need a Meat-Eater for This.
Back in the day, Oprah had a shark of an agent. Sort of. He’s actually an entertainment lawyer, has been called “the little-known power behind the media queen’s throne”, and Oprah herself says he’s “a piranha.”
Oprah’s piranha/entertainment lawyer is Jeff Jacobs and they met when she was looking for contract advice in 1984. Jacobs advised her to build a brand and create an empire rather selling herself as talent-for-hire. Then he helped her create Harpo.
That worked out fairly well for her.
If Oprah has a piranha, you need a shark. We’re talking about media now, not publishing, but the lesson holds.
The lesson is this: get the right agent. Then, when you’re approaching publishers, “Don’t go with your begging bowl”, cautions Danielle LaPorte, because “for an author, a book is a huge upfront investment”. (Penelope Trunk blogs that writing a book is a ‘time sink’.)
In other words: don’t be afraid to walk away.
And don’t lose sight of your art. That’s why you have an agent. Your job is the content. Do you want to write a book, or any book, or do you want to write your book?
Josh Hanagarne, for example, doesn’t want to write about Tourette’s. He wants to write a memoir of his abusive, dysfunctional relationship with Tourette’s. He wants to “write on a nerve”.
Danielle LaPorte wants to “go back hold my baby a little while longer”, and while she does that, she wonders, “if there were no agents, no publishers,” (heresy! blasphemer!) ”no twitter followers, is this the book you would want to write?”
Are Angels Singing and Monks Chanting? A little?
Is this the book you want to write? Is your agent the shiz? Did you rock out the proposal? Did the proposal-writing process make your manuscript into the book you didn’t even know you could write? Did your publisher present your agent – who is of course the shiz and a negotiating shark (or piranha) of paleolithic proportions and origins – with a huge oversized cheque with your name written all over it? Or just an adequate cheque? Adequate is fine. Cash may be king but books are divine.
The writers in this story may be online gurus and entrepreneurs and daily micro-publishers (what is a blog, after all?), but at heart they are bookies. As in book-lovers, not loan sharks.
Chris Guillebeau – straight up – admits that his goal, from the drop, was a book deal. Erin Doland suspects that her “friends are happier than I am now that I have a book under my belt simply because they no longer have to listen to me talk about it”. Gretchen Rubin was already a best-selling author when she reluctantly started a blog that happily took over the world. Leo Babatua was so happy to get a book deal that he stopped and dropped it like it was hot. “I’m big on booty moves”, says the Zen Habits, simple-living guru, simply.
So there you have it. Want a book deal? Get a blog. A big one. And rock it out.
I know. The (snobbish, print-loving) writer in me just died a little, too. Again.
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Here’s a list of all the pieces in the accidentally epic how-to-get-a-book deal series (with from advice from published authors to a wannabe (that’s me):
The How To Get A Book Deal Interviews, with:
* I also did phone-interviews with Josh Hanagarne and Gretchen Rubin but get very, very sad when I think about doing more transcription
**My phone interview with Gretchen Rubin – in which she gave me some personal advice that really landed with me – inspired me to be a little nicer, online. Gretchen Rubin is my Jiminy Cricket.
Guest Posts at Write To Done (that triggered this whole series):
Guest Post at Write to Done: How to Get a Book Deal: Part 1 – Printasauraus Rex Vs. The Blog: Publishing 2.0
Get Thee A Blog, and A Big One: Guest Post At Write to Done
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