Sean,

PM DeePower. She and her partner, Brian, have a ton of info on this, IIRC.

Dee's the real deal. Been at the game for a long time. I'll vouch for her. And she's a class act.


Paul

Your best bet is to find a literary agent. They have working relationships with publishing houses and are a trusted source for marketable talent.

They will take a percentage cut of your earnings, but are well versed in the negotiation process to secure a better deal for you both.

The process to finding a good literary agent is much the same as sending off an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher. You don't need to send off the entire manuscript, a chapter will do. The most important parts of your submission are an outline of your novel, chapter by chapter and your assessment of the target audience. Are there other successful titles in your genre? Who is your readership? What do they buy?

Agents and publishers like to work with professionals, demonstrating that you have a detailed understanding of your market will set you head and shoulders above most submissions they receive. It shows that you understand that your book will need to sell and that you will have to do some promoting for that to happen.

If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.

Cheers,
Sissy

First, you need to determine the genre of your book
Comedy, Drama, Horror, etc....

Then you need to think about what books it is similar to
...and find publishers who have had GREAT successes with those books.
They know how to market them, those successful books yours is similar to.

Then you need to learn the FORMAT in which to present to the,
- do they want a shelf-ready softcover with art?
- do they want bound loose-leaf?
- do they have a minimum/max page count?
- do they require a certain font? ( I'm serious - try to sell a script not in courier 12pt )

Then ... you need to ask yourself:

- Do you have a protagonist that people will like? - or at least is INTERESTING?
- What changes does he/she go through? this is ARC
- without Character and Story ARCS , you will NOT sell your book. PERIOD.
- Are the challenges he/she faces SIGNIFICANT?
- Are the STAKES high enough? What happens if he does not succeed?

Nobody wants to read a book about a guy who kinda sorta is trying to get back
together with a woman he does not much like and who makes his life miserable
..... of course if he is interesting and perhaps she is carrying his child, then we
have challenge, stakes ( may never see the kid or worse he may be raised without
a father - or a bad step-father ...etc )

Know the answer to these question - it's the one a publisher will ask ...

Who would want to read your book ...what reward does that offer them?

Then they will ask .... "Ok ... can you send me a 10 page treatment?"

That is your book report full of the opening scene, plot points, introduction of characters, notable lines/dialogue, and it shuld describe the character and
story arcs. If it doesn't. they won't read your book more than likely.

Best

Most unsolicited manuscripts hit the dumpster without being read. Seriously, follow Paul's advice and learn what you can from the resource he named (I don't know them, but Paul's advice is always good), and follow Sissy76's advice and start looking around for a literary agent.

A literary agent can be invaluable in telling you how to prepare, plus they act as a screener for the publishers, weeding out low quality material and sending them good material. Publishers will pay a lot more attention to manuscripts coming from agents than unsolicited material.

Alrighty, I've been looking up literary agents, and I think I may have found some. They say I need a query letter to go with the first thousand words or so of my manuscript.

Query letter anything like a cover letter? OR am I being naive?

And for that matter, should I treat this like a job, and send out to more than one literary agent?

-Sean

Sean,

Here's a good explanation of query letters. Personally, I would send the query out to a handful of agents and see what kind of response you get. Then based on that, you may have a line on an agent or you will hopefully have some good feedback on how to improve either your query letter, your book, or both. Then go from there.

Try to find an agent that deals in your kind of book. For example, if the agent specializes in technology books sending a query for a fiction book probably won't get a positive response.

Thanks for all your help Dennis!

I'll definitely be following up on these leads here. I'd love to have this book published, and have all my friends here at the forum have it, and not know it was me who wrote it! Bwahahha!

Good moods are contagious everyone, spread them around.

-Sean

Head over here:

www.absolutewrite.com

You may even see me on there now and again.

Sheesh Caliban, you could have warned me there was a blizzard going on over there. It's below zero here and my office window overlooks a 4 foot snow drift, don't need no stinking blizzard on my screen!

Another thing you might think about (I'm writing this as conjecture or theory, not from personal experience):

Write a book or write the book that you want to get picked up by a publisher, build as big of a list as you can, and then promote it to that list at a good price.

That way - if you want to approach a larger publisher, at least you can show that it's commercially viable, and you can show them your conversion metrics, etc. Like - I had 1,000 people on my mailing list and 200 people ordered my book.

I self publish my own stuff but I have no idea about the "big" publishing industry, but that would be a tactic I would try and use if I were trying to get it picked up.

Another thing which works that I actually DO have experience with is building up a big list, publishing the books myself (I usually go for a pro-level distribution package so it's available at most big and even indy retailers), and give the people on my list a PDF version and some extra material for free - then ask them to write a review on amazon.com . . .

If people will do that, then I offer some more of the best free stuff I can come up with, and mail the list the ISBN number, and relevant details and which retail outlets can order it (barnes & noble, borders, whatever) and after I've loaded cool stuff on them I ask them to do me a favor and make 1 phone call to 1 local bookstore and ask them to carry that book.

This has worked out REALLY well for me personally. The people get the free PDF and a pretty high percent end up buying the hard copy book anyway because I price it nearly at cost or with zero markup and let them know that I'm doing that as a favor to them because I believe in the book/project/whatever.

I also put marketing material in my loss leader/no profit books. For example I have about 20 books which I don't make ANY profit off of, but each of them has a full page, professionally written sales letter in the back promoting my membership program.

In my autoresponder sequence I offer a new, high quality book at no profit almost once a week. Usually stuff that's available elsewhere but not under copyright, but undercut the entire market so that I can get a physical sales letter in people hand, a book with my photo on it in their hand, engineer some reciprocity, etc.

Then I just ask. Please call your local borders or barnes & noble and ask them to carry this book (or one of my other "for profit" books) if you appreciate the hookup.

It's a win-win-win scenario I think. The people on the list get books they want to buy anyway for lower costs than the market has available, I get increased branding, a sales physical sales letter in the book, and some of them (not a lot but some) will return the favor and ask for my money makers to be ordered by their local bookstore.

Mainly I make money on my monthly membership program, and try not to get greedy with the books, etc. and just run those as loss leaders.

That's just a random unsolicited suggestion, but - as far as what you're asking about - I would try to self publish initially, build a big list, price it as affordably as you can (for the first x amount of buyers, etc.) and then you have concrete data to take to publishers about how well your book converts with people who haven't even seen or held a physical copy.

ZhaoAnXin made several good suggestions. When I mentioned that a literary agent could be invaluable in telling you how to prepare, one of the things I was alluding to was they'll want you to tell the publisher how you plan on promoting the book.

It's not as glamorous as most people think, for traditional publishers you have to work at promoting your book. I really like the idea ZhaoAnXin offered about giving a free PDF copy to your readers and having them review it on Amazon. I didn't do that, but I can't help but wondering what would have happened if I had.

I have sold 4 screenplays since 2006.

1 Drama - Major
2 Comedy - One Major, One Large Indy
1 Thriller - Small Indy

Whe I first began, there was not a literary agent who would touch me
because I was not a "writer". I was a person who had written a script.
Generally, you will find the same barriers as a novelist, probably.

But you will also find the same evaluation criteria for books, I would guess,
as you do for film.

Having said that, if you evaluate your own book with the short guide above
that will save you a lot of heatache because each place will only read it once. lol

Make it a KILLER before you send it.

Don't let your friends read it. They'll say "Ya, it's good"
They dont want you to succeed and also don't have the skills to
evaluate the book for commercial success.

There are so-called professional "readers" who will provide service
for $75 - $500 ...but if they don' work for THE company you want
to have buy your book, they don't know what they are looking for!

Please seek out forums with other authors and let them read you book

BUT

first JOIN the writers guild and DEPOSIT your book in pdf format
( Cost about $50 - you can also do it as a non-member but most publishers
won't look at you without being a member - they won't tell you that but you
are more diffucult to promote as a non-member and lack the wga internat advantages)
Writers Guild of America, West
so that you have protection. MOST agents and publishers will
not actually accept your work without that reg number.

Here's a neat little blog I enjoy reading:

Query Shark

This agent rips apart novel queries in her free time. Great fun to read, and quite educational too.

Cheers,
Becky