The Author's Handbook

4. How to Approach a Publisher with Your Book

4 How to Approach a Publisher with Your Book WE’VE HEARD DOZENS OF SECRETS AND SURE-FIRE FORmulas for how to sell book ideas to editors: make up a great title, know the editor personally, appear absolutely gorgeous (whether male or female ), get a big-name literary agent, adopt a personal trademark such as always wearing a white Panama suit. We’ve never been told that the casting-couch technique helped sell a book—but if we heard it we wouldn’t be surprised. What all these legendary formulas have in common is their simplistic nature . Each applies in a limited case or two. All overlook the one factor common to the vast majority of book sales: persistence. Before an editor will buy your book idea (or, in the case of a fiction or scholarly publisher, your in-the-works manuscript), she has to think it’s interesting , believe there’s a market for it, trust in your ability to finish the book, persuade the company’s executives to take a chance on you, and make many other totally subjective conclusions peculiar to the book business. Obviously, the odds are very high against all elements being present to any one editor’s satisfaction as she reviews your proposal. You have to present your idea to the maximum possible number of editors in order to stand the best chance of ending up holding a full house. That takes persistence. If you’ve done your homework and identified the market for your project, persistence will get it published even if you can’t find an agent who’ll submit it for you. To demonstrate our point, take Frank’s book How to Fix Damn Near Everything, which still produces a royalty check every six months. It went to twenty-four different publishers, all of whom said, “No thanks.” But the twentyfifth said yes and it proved to be a steady money-maker for both Frank and Prentice-Hall, having sold more than a million copies since 1977. Each of the twenty-four turndowns was for a very good reason. A number of publishers thought six hundred or so bound pages on the subject seemed just too long. For many, the book’s numerous photos, drawings and diagrams were prohibitively expensive to reproduce. Several already had fix-it books in their lines that were still selling nicely, even if the information wasn’t as upto -date as Frank’s. Some of the editors couldn’t put their fingers on any reason for nixing the book—it was gut reaction, pure and simple. (The reasons editors 35 give for saying no, we’ve discovered, are rarely universal and not generally helpful .) What is important is that publisher number twenty-five did buy the book. Novelist Mary Higgins Clark told us that one of her earlier stories didn’t sell until her fortieth submission. If she had become bored and discouraged enough to stop taking her package back to the post office, she might never have found her work on best-seller lists. Experiences like Frank’s and Mary’s are the ones to remember as you set out to find a publisher. If you have a short memory, treat yourself to a copy of the book Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson and André Bernard. There’s nothing like it for solace. Tools for Nurturing Persistence Throughout most of the twentieth century, one procedure resulted most often in publication. It was to find the specific name and address of every possible editor who published books similar to the one you wanted to write, to send every one of them, in sequence, your proposal—and if that failed to work, to send it to every one of them again. This technique can still work if you’re lucky, even if your idea is for a novel, textbook or scholarly work. The biggest trick is to line up all the correct names and addresses to send your ideas to. Here’s where you can find those names and addresses.   If your idea is for anything other than a textbook, your first stop ought to be Publishers Weekly magazine, the publishing industry’s bible. Each August an inch-thick issue heralds the autumn lines of the most significant publishers; in January an equally heavy volume announces their spring releases. Throughout the year special issues are devoted to religious books, children’s books and other specific areas of interest. Most libraries...