The Road to Publishing

By Robert Bruce Woodcox

There are several choices or stages to consider on your road to becoming a published author. This article is not a judgment of which path to take; it is simply a road map to the options available to you to becoming a published author. 

The first choice is whether to write a book yourself (fiction or non-fiction) or to retain a professional ghostwriter to do most of the heavy lifting (writing and research, and collaboration with you).

Writing your own book is free (with the exception of your time). Retaining a ghostwriter will cost you both time and money. Since the other stages on the road to publishing are the same regardless of whether you hire a ghost or not, for purposes of this blog, we’ll assume you want to collaborate with a ghost.

Stage two.

Ghostwriters specialize in many different areas. Some only write non-fiction, others write fiction. Some write both. All ghostwriters have their own process in terms of how the work will progress, legal issues, how long the project will take, the costs, etc., whether they will help you get published, or only do the writing.

Again with respect to brevity in all writing, this blog will assume you have reached an agreement to cover all the particulars with your new writing “partner,” a ghostwriter. If you haven't and you have further questions, visit my website at: http://www.theghostwriter.net

Let’s further assume you and your ghost have put together a well written book be that a memoir, novel, or business book. It appears to have a great deal of curb appeal to your core audience. It's a “real page turner” as they say about good stories. It has been fully edited, copyrighted and the manuscript is waiting to be sold—but to whom and how? 

Stage three: Getting published. You now have two new choices to make: self publish, or go mainstream with some traditional firm such as Random House, Hay House, Simon and Schuster, Penguin Books or any number of other respected publishing houses.

Further assuming your brother or best friend doesn’t work for a traditional publishing house and will read your manuscript, (publishers do NOT read unsolicited manuscripts), you will have to go through a process to reach them with your manuscript. There are many valid reasons why publishers don’t accept manuscripts directly from the public--for now, just know they don’t. 

Instead, most traditional publishers rely on the world of literary agents to bring them the “cream of the crop” in terms of new work. This means work that falls in that publisher’s “wheel house,” or, if  outside their own specialties, something so spectacular, unique and spellbinding that they are fairly certain it will turn a profit. This profit will pay for your advance, royalties on the sales, your portion of movie rights (if those are forthcoming), other promotional revenues, and all their costs to edit, print, bind and market the book to the world as well as turning a profit for the house.

Stage four: Finding a literary agent. Since publishers won’t read your manuscript unsolicited, you need to find an agent who can solicit various publishers for you. That’s their job and how they earn a living. There are approximately 1,000 viable literary agents in this country. Each of them (individuals or companies) specialize in various genres be that memoirs, fiction, cooking books, self-help tomes, children's books, or combinations of the above. The trick is finding those that “might” be interested in representing your work (regardless of whether you wrote it or a ghostwriter helped you). 

Stage five: There is a process to this process as well. You don’t simply look up literary agents' phone numbers and/or addresses and call or write asking the agent to represent you. You must create a "special" message called, a query letter to each of them (same letter will do, but they should all be personalized to each agent). A query letter is truly a creative effort. It is a well written request (appeal) for an agent to review your manuscript and your book proposal (more on the proposal in a minute). When I say “well written,” I mean an incredibly "compelling" synopsis of your work, what it’s about, why it’s important, why it will sell many, many books, who you are, why you are qualified to write this book, and other important information. 

And, you must somehow do all this in a one page letter, (two at the absolute most). Brevity and creativity are the starter's gun in the race to publishing. This query letter is also known as a "Direct Response" vehicle. You are trying to make you book sound enticing, a sort of paper-based movie trailer that grabs that agent by the cerebral cortex and compels them to pick up the phone and call you, or to email you and ask to see your book proposal and manuscript for consideration.

So, preferably, before you send out these queries, it is advisable to have your book proposal ready. A book proposal is a sort of business plan that defines what the book is about, who the audience is, who you are, why you are qualified to write it (background, experience, any audience you may already have (Facebook Likes, thousands of Twitter followers, etc.), comparisons to the competition and other important marketing information.

You will need to include at least three sample chapters from the book as a teaser and as proof that it is well written, and hopefully even marketable in today’s very competitive and difficult publishing environment—and more. A book proposal can range from about 20 pages to well over 40.

If you get this far, you cross your fingers and wait…and wait…and wait, sometimes weeks or months even. If you’re lucky and all the stars have aligned to this point, and your proposal was truly compelling, you’ll hear from one or more interested agents in a matter of a couple of weeks. The rest of the replies will be what are known as "rejection letters." Most of the replies will be of this nature. These are usually form letters or post cards that contain a canned, but polite, "no thank you," response.

Stage six. Assuming an agent takes you on and you’ve signed a contract (see next blog), the agent will now, free of charge minus some postage for mailing your manuscript to publishers, and minus some copying charges, begin to shop your work to his or her stable of publishers and also those outside his or her normal channels. (See next blog on contracts, royalties, movie rights, what an agent gets, etc.).

An agent does not receive any compensation for all this "upfront" work until you have signed a publishing contract, have received an advance and/or are getting royalty checks, which is a good thing, and highly unusual in the business world.

Stage seven. You sign a publishing contract and wait for your advance and your royalty checks to start coming in. All is good in the world.

Having reviewed one path to publishing, here is the other.

Self publishing. In self publishing you cut out all the middle men including the agents. You find a self publishing house that will edit, print, bind and market your book. Unlike the previous route, you pay all the bills for getting your book to market including the above printing, binding, shipping, inventorying, marketing promotion, PR, etc. However, when the book sells in the public domain, you retain all the rights to every dollar of net profit, which is usually somewhere around 60% of the total revenue after companies like Amazon, B&N, etc. take their cuts and you’ve paid all your self publishing company’s bills. This 60% is in comparison to the 15-20% you will receive from mainstream publishing for royalties. (A simplified explanation.)

One of the drawbacks to self publishing however, is that most of these houses truly understand or excel at promotion and marketing the book after it's printed.

I said in the beginning that I wouldn’t judge any of these options or steps and I won’t. You can read the pluses and minuses of each route in the next blog. There are benefits and draw backs to both. Your choice will depend upon your time, budget, goals for sales, etc. 

If you are like most writers (no offense intended), you aren’t a book publisher (self publishing), nor are you an advertising veteran, nor are you a book publicist, promoter or marketing genius. In fact, you’re not really good at accounting either, but you are one hell of a good writer and that’s what you want to do—write and get it published.

Re-enter the ghostwriter…

Let’s say you have decided to retain a ghost to help you. However, since most ghostwriters aren’t marketing people either, and you don’t want to pay to have a dynamite book written with and for you and then have to go through Steps five through seven above yourself, you would find it incredibly advantageous to find one of those unique individuals that can both ghostwrite and find you an agent; a professional who has decades of marketing, publishing and ghostwriting experience, who knows how to put together the entire package and help ensure you get published with a good mainstream publisher, one who knows what agents and publishers are looking for and knows how to tickle their money bones with a great query and book proposal and then act as your advocate throughout the entire process.

Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Such individuals do exist, but they are as rare as pink unicorns.

One caveat: It is possible to engage someone to write a query for you as well as the book proposal and to use that in a process to help obtain an agent for you BEFORE you pay that person to write the entire book. However, I do not recommend that option unless you are a celebrity (entertainment, sports, politics, robbed the Federal Reserve and got away with it, etc.). In other words, someone with an enormous name drawing potential for book sales and therefore would get immediate attention without having to write the entire book. 

This would seem the obvious way to go at first blush. Why would you pay a ghostwriter, let's say, $75,000 to write your book, when you could pay someone $20,000 let's say, to write a query and proposal and then do all the work to find you an agent who could then bring you a check for a big fat advance? Continue reading.

Many people ask me to do this kind of work, meaning they ask me to write the proposal first. I only do that occasionally and again, it is usually only for individuals with name recognition who have a built in immediate audience for their book, a situation where I feel comfortable that the book will be picked up.

First time authors rarely receive big advances if any advance at all. Most importantly though, if you did obtain a publishing contract, you would still have to have your ghostwriter write the entire book. So now you would have the $20,000 expense (minus some amount of money for the already written sample pages), plus the $75,000 to write the book. Caveat: It is important to note that an "advance" is not a gift or a grant to you. You must pay this back out of your royalties. Usually, this amount is deducted from each royalty check until that advance is repaid. In some rare cases, if your contract is written correctly and you have enough clout to demand it because your book looks like it will be a blockbuster, you can get out of some or all of this repayment. That is a rare occurrence though for first time writers.

Instead, I encourage writers to first write the book, but have the cost of a query letter and a book proposal built into that contract at a discount for doing the entire job thus saving you thousands of dollars.

You see, when writing the proposal, a ghost must know your entire story or at least enough to write three good sample chapters from the pending book. This means you pay for that interview time, writing, editing, which while not as intensive as writing the entire book, is a considerable cost to you. There is also the marketing information that must be included in the proposal along with your background information. Then a great query must also be written (this is an art form in itself). Then the process of sending that query out and responding to, sorting, archiving those respondents, talking to interested agents over the phone and through emails, connecting you to that agent, acting as your advocate through that process and holding your hand until you’ve signed a lucrative publishing contract.

The time and cost of all this might as well be wrapped into the ghostwriting contract because any good agent is going to want to see the entire manuscript post haste, meaning as quickly as possible after you've promised you'd send the book proposal AND the book (manuscript). So now, you must get your ghostwriter cracking on finishing your book, which means you'll also have to pay him or her for the rest of the writing on top of what you paid him to write the proposal and query and do all the search work for an agent.

The point is, and this IS my single judgment. Hire a great ghostwriter with all of the above qualifications. Work with him or her for six months to produce what you have in you that is yearning and burning to get out and entertain and inform and maybe even inspire the world. When your manuscript is nearly complete, as part of your original contract with the ghost, have him or her write that query and book proposal and make him do all that heavy lifting of finding you a top notch literary agent. You’ll never regret you did it the right way. The proposal and query and search functions will cost you less this way instead of trying to do it in two different sections.

Of course, as I said, finding a great ghostwriter who also has years of business, publishing and marketing background is not easy. If you cannot find this individual, at least hire a ghost to help you write the book. Worry about the literary agent when you have a dynamite manuscript in hand. 

Make sure you read my next blog. I will finish this involved, sometimes complicated conversation and leave you with less thinking to have to do decide that one way or another, you are going to write a book and get it published.

Robert Bruce Woodcox

On the art of writing and publishing

For further discussion, visit my main website at: 
http://www.theghostwriter.net