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Misconceptions About Book Publishing
Adapted from Chapter 7 of The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn To Every Time by Ken Lizotte (McGraw Hill). Click here to order your copy.
Newsflash! Signing a contract with a commercial book publisher, even a well-known one, will typically not be the equivalent of landing in paradise! Though it might seem very exciting at first, winning over a publisher will usually not translate into a hefty advance so you can take time to work on your book, nor will tons of help marketing and selling your book occur, nor will a high-level promotion campaign be set up just for you and your project. Though such benefits accrue automatically to celebrity authors and writers with a best-seller track record, you (instead) will be relegated to the bottom of the heap.
Thus, before you jump into a dreamy, romantic quest to capture a big-name commercial book publisher, take note of the following misconceptions that most people naively assume to be fact. Knowing what a publisher can and/or will do (and not do) for you is critical to your understanding of how book-publishing really works:
Misconception 1
A book publisher will aggressively promote me and my book, ensuring my book the widest possible visibility.
Well, in an ideal world, all publishers would like to provide this, but in the real world, the scarcity of their own resources typically prevents it. Usually whatever advertising money, PR personnel, direct-mail campaign capability, and so on a commercial publisher has available is likely to be directed toward those books that the publisher considers most likely to succeed, such as a book by a celebrity author, a book on a subject that is currently hot in the news, or a book by an author whose previous books have sold very well.
As a result, your publisher will probably not be sending you off on a book tour, nor will it be setting you up for bookstore signings, speaking engagements, or even radio or TV appearances. Instead, your publisher’s decision to offer you a deal in the first place probably had more to do with its perception that you would be willing and able to orchestrate such things on your own.
I often quip (but not entirely jokingly) that the two most important features of any proposal to a publisher are (1) the book idea itself, and (2) what the author plans to do to promote and sell the book—and the second may be more important than the first! This is often literally true when a publisher signs a celebrity to write a book, say Donald Trump, for instance. At this point, The Donald can pretty much write about any business topic he wants; his name is a sure-fire guarantee that sales will be at least pretty good simply because of who he is rather than what specifically he is writing about.
So consider the following promotional factors when preparing to pose a book idea. The more of them you can answer yes to, the more attractive your book idea will be to a commercial publisher. Your chances of landing a publisher go way up if most or all of these factors are already in place:
Are you a public speaker who stands before 50 to 100 audiences every year, preferably audiences that average more than 500 attendees?
Do you have lots of media contacts who have already interviewed you or quoted you on topics relating to your book idea, and who you can say with confidence will consider interviewing you again when your book comes out?
Do you have client companies that are willing to purchase bulk copies of your new book?
Do you have deep pockets of your own that can translate into a personal commitment to purchase 1,000 copies of your book for your use? How about 2,000 copies? 5,000 copies? 10,000 copies?
These are the kinds of author promotional and selling capabilities that will grab a publisher’s attention.
Misconception 2
A publisher will make sure my book gets on the shelves of all the nation’s bookstores, especially the largest ones.
With thousands upon thousands of books coming out each year and with hundreds upon hundreds of publishers out there pushing them, the best a commercial publisher can do here is try. Even the biggest publishing houses with the largest sales forces can only get the bookstore chains to agree to shelve a percentage of their new books, so you just can’t be certain how well they will do with yours.
I have been in and around book publishing for over three decades now, and the most widespread author’s lament that I have heard constantly throughout all that time and experience is: “I can’t find my book in the bookstores.” And it doesn’t matter who the author’s publishing house is, large or small. Though your publisher will attempt with gusto to get your book into the stores, no one can predict how successful that effort will be.
As with Misconception 1, publishers badly need their authors’ help here. In fact, by understanding the truth about Misconception 1, i.e., by personally promoting their books and making them well known, authors can provide this help. If a bookstore’s customers keep coming in and asking for a certain book, that store will be sure to stock it.
Misconception 3
A publisher will endorse, print, and communicate my ideas the way I conceive them and arrange them .
Maybe, but you have to keep in mind that if a publisher is willing to invest in you, it is also going to want to have some say not only in how the book will look physically (title, cover design, interior format, size, number of pages, hardcover vs. softcover, price), but also in what it’s actually going to say. This shouldn’t worry you too much, as most publishers do understand that you are the expert here, and thus will be amenable to your leading the way contentwise. But they will assign an editor to your project whose job it will be to review your content as well as your writing style, making suggestions even for content changes all along the way.
You need to view a commercial publisher as a business partner rather than as your personal printer. Expect to make book content decisions jointly, even though this can sometimes lead to a publisher’s insistence that something that you value highly be taken out or radically redone. When you accept a publisher’s offer to publish your book, you are no longer going it alone. Your final product could end up looking very different from the way you originally conceived of it.
Misconception 4
A publisher will provide me with a sizable monetary advance, allowing me to take time off from my regular work so that I can focus exclusively on the book.
Now let’s go back to Misconception 1. The facts about the limited resources a publisher will have for promoting your book are equally true for any pot of gold you might wish for in the form of a monetary advance. We’ve all read about the three million bucks Jay Leno got for his autobiography or the eight million someone gave Bill Clinton—and the eleven million Hillary got a year later! After all that largess, there’s not much left over for the 95 percent of authors remaining on a publisher's book list.
Besides, commercial publishers have got you pegged. They realize that as a first-time author, you will accept little or no advance in return for the opportunity to be published. They also recognize that your motivation to be published has nothing to do with a desire to change your career and become a full-time book writer; instead, your book represents a marvelous marketing tool for expanding the visibility of your career or business. Since the vast majority of books published each year fail to make a profit, publishers must find ways to minimize their risks as much as possible. One obvious strategy is to keep their advance to you under, say, $5,000 (most are typically much less). They’d prefer to keep financial support of your lifestyle, as you work on your book, out of the equation.
Misconception 5
A publisher will keep my book in circulation long enough for it to find its audience and build a following.
Calvin Trillin, a popular New Yorker writer who has written many bestselling books over the last few decades, once described the typical shelf life of a book as “somewhere between milk and yogurt.” Trillin made this comment to Johnny Carson on the Tonight show back in the 1970s, but, if anything, book shelf lives have shrunk even tighter in the years since.
Like movies and TV programs, books don’t last long if they don’t start selling right away. Within the first few months, your book’s sales had better show some progress or your publisher will start making plans while the presses are still cooling to condemn it to “remainders.” This means that your book is already on its last legs. The only place you and the public will be seeing it soon is in a bargain bin priced at just a buck or two, the publisher’s not-so-subtle way of saying, “Good riddance!”
So you’d better get hopping and promote and sell your own book but fast! After a brief honeymoon of a month or so, your publisher will want to see some results. If it doesn’t, it’ll start directing its attention to other books, and yours will soon be history.
Misconception 6
A publisher will keep the book updated by coming out with revised editions.
Well, for the reasons cited in Misconceptions 1 and 4, commercial publishers are loath to invest further funds in a book, even when they should. Even when a paradigm-shifting event takes place, such as September 11 or the Berlin Wall crashing down, or when a trend that is just as momentous sets in (the rise of e-mail, online shopping, or iPods), your publisher will still resist spending any money to revise or update your book for as long as possible. This typically means a year or two, maybe even three.
Instead, your publisher might prefer that you keep promoting your book as is, wringing out every possible last nickel from the current edition, until a revised edition can be put off no longer. You can’t really blame the publisher for this. Profit is an elusive prize for commercial book publishers, and yet they are indeed dependent on making a profit (why do you think they are called “commercial” publishers?), so keeping their costs down figures high on the list of tactics for winning their bottom-line wars.
Beyond these misconceptions, all of them negative realities for authors, if your goal is to use your book as a tool to leverage your business, there are two other options for you to consider. But before we review these options, let’s look further at the question of what you want your book to accomplish. Your answer will dictate which option is the right one for you.
When business leaders and entrepreneurs sense the need for a book, they typically do so for a couple of reasons. The first is credibility: they feel that the time has come for them to be seen as a true thoughtleader, rightly perceiving that a book will get them there.
Second, in marketing their business, a book will serve them well as a business development tool, increasing their visibility and attracting prospects that they wouldn't otherwise know were out there.
These are certainly great reasons ways for wanting to publish a book. But what’s often misunderstood is how those goals can clash with the very different goals of a book publisher. If an author wants to use his or her book primarily to drive up sales and increase business, a publisher has only a passing interest in having that happen. While your publisher will want you to be happy with the business development value you can extract from your book, its own self-interest has to lie in something else: selling a lot of books. If this, in turn, helps you in your business development efforts, that’s fine. But if your business suffers because you had to take time off to get out and promote and sell books, the end result of that process in terms of selling books is what your publisher really needs to care about.
Again, you can’t blame publishers for this, as it’s a simple requisite of their own bottom line. In fact, you as an author may even have been selected because of a perception that you and/or your book concept would result in the selling of loads and loads of books. (Recall Misconception 1 here.) So as a new author, you need to be OK with making a commitment to basically taking a three-month working sabbatical so that you can spend nearly all your time just trying to sell books.
If this is not OK—if you’ve reservations about doing this because you’d rather not spend the time or the energy—two other options, both involving self-publishing, will probably make far more sense.
Now before you go running off as I drop a bomb with the words self-publishing, please listen up. Self-publishing today is a very different animal from what it used to be, and thus a far different animal from what you probably assume it to be. Although there are plenty of valid reasons for recoiling from the suggestion that you self-publish, your gut reaction is probably based on a very uninformed gut. In other words, things have changed.
To learn how “things have changed,” read the remainder of this chapter in The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn To Every Time by Ken Lizotte (McGraw Hill). Click here to order your copy now.Read other Thought Blogs