Customer Reviews

Publishing Confidential: The Insider's Guide to What It Really Takes to Land a Nonfiction Book Deal

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Maybe books should be subjected to truth in advertising laws. Most other books that tell you how to be published, happily or otherwise, concentrate on how to write. I know how to write. (I think.) What I need is help getting published. This helps. A lot.

With insight and irreverence Paul Brown lays it all out for aspiring writers. He takes you from book proposal to agent to publisher to promotion.

That's all that a would-be nonfiction author could want. He'll tell you things you don't want to hear, but must know in order to make your foray into writing a success.

Brown has endured book ideas that were rejected and books that didn't sell, along with a perennial best-seller Customers For Life.

If nothing else Brown knows his trade when it comes to publishing nonfiction books.

I'd like to point out errors in his 'Nontraditional Approaches' but from my observations, Brown is correct more than I'd like to say.

And, when he has a question, he knows where to go to find the answers, which, of course, he shares with readers.

If you don't like the idea of pitching book ideas to publishers, then maybe being an author isn't for you.

If you don't like the idea of a 40 to 50 page book proposal, Brown will explain why it's in your best interest to get through it, or scrap your idea of a nonfiction book deal.

If you want a bigger advance - and why you should try to get the most you can (besides the obvious reason) - are nailed by Brown in Publishing Confidential.

If your idea is to write a nonfiction best seller, then Brown's book will save you a lot of time, and serve as your tour guide.

You may not write the next top selling business book, it's not a guarantee, but Brown's book will help you get through it with his `insider's guide to what it really takes to land a nonfiction book deal.'

Brown delivers.

I loved this book. The author's honest, forthright style and sense of humor made it a quick and easy read. He not only tells us how to get a book deal through his knowledge and experience in the subject matter, he also SHOWS how with numerous anecdotes and real-world examples, including a complete proposal that was actually bought by someone. Even better, he also goes through all of the myriad other things you need to do not just to publish a book but to make it successful (marketing, pr, sales, interviews, etc.)

I bought this book last Friday afternoon, and had read it entirely by the late evening - I could not put it down.

Not only is it filled with information to help get your first non-fiction book published, it is written in a thouroughly approachable and enjoyable style.

That "memo" is mentioned in the appendix about how this particular book came to be, and I thought it was cool to title a review like that.

Not mentioned in the above little summary is the "snide editorial comments by Ellen Kadin" (on the cover) which are dispersed throughout the book. Ellen Kadin is AMACOM's editor, an independent (and funny) voice to let you know how accurate Paul B. Brown really is. Most, but not all of them are affirmations...but they are all funny. If someone (like me) got the book from a library right next to all those traditional Chapter 6-1/2 books, you might want to skip the her annotations if you are actually reading it _in_ the libary, because you are likely to make enough noise (laughing, cussing, or both) to get dragged out by security...fortunately, I am good friends with my library's security.

I have no doubt that writing a book will be hard. (That's why I was looking for how-to-write-a-book books.) But this one is at least not painful to read. In fact, it is flat out funny and sometimes insprirational.

I still don't know if I am going to try to write a book, but this one made the process seem accessible.

What does it take to land a nonfiction book deal? Plenty of titles tell how to write a nonfiction book, but Paul B. Brown's Publishing Confidential: The Insider's Guide to What It Really Takes to Land a Nonfiction Book Deal expertly addresses the nuts and bolts of editorial decision-making processes. Brown supplements his own wry humor and insights from his own experience with notes from his editor Ellen Kadin, who blends his text with her own editorial comments and observations. The result is a writer's guide to publisher decision-making processes.

[This review is intended to be self-contained. Therefore, it is not necessary to read the book to understand the review.]

If I publish a book, I will be an instant millionaire, and the world will want me--this is a make-believe fantasy of a novice writer. The veteran of writing business, Paul B. Brown (a former reporter and editor for Business Week, Forbes, Financial World, and Inc. magazines) performs a litmus test of the novice's fantasy in his book--Publishing Confidential: The Insider's Guide to What It Really Takes to Land a Nonfiction Book Deal. To perform the litmus test or market test, he provides a myriad of his real world experiences that he gained from the last two decades. Market testing is the core idea of his book. Market decides the ultimate survival or demise of an idea contained in the book. Mr. Brown presents to the audience a very detailed reality show of how to deal with the market forces, plow the problems, and get the idea--i.e. book--published.

Mr. Brown's book demonstrates how to successfully play a game in the publishing business, in which the components of the game are time, tricks, efforts, and negotiation. How to write a book is not the discussion of Mr. Brown's book. The discussion is about how to get a book published, assuming that the ideas contained in any given book is not less than stellar. Well, I am not saying that only stellar ideas will sell.

For any writer, it will be disheartening to hear that the book that took months or even years of his or her time in drafting actually ended up in a trash bin. Unfortunately, this happens very frequently. In average, only 3 or 4 books out of 1200 book requests that a book agent gets in a year are published. This shows that the chances of getting a book published is 0.33% at best. How can this time be saved or a heart-attack may be prevented? Now, this game will demand a balance of trick, effort, and negotiation.

Plunging into the game of drafting an entire manuscript as a result of emotion or ego is outright stupidity. Why would somebody want to stay broke, or not enjoy a vacation instead, by spending months or even years of time in drafting a book manuscript that may eventually end up in a trash bin? Before letting the emotion rule the motion, it is essential for the writer to play the trick and to let himself or herself not become an emotional victim by falling into the love for his or her creative ideas. Writers are in love with their ideas, and this love will turn them into emotional victims who may end up getting nothing in hand for their hard work. Are you writing a book, by spending months or years, for getting nothing in hand? If that is the case, the discussion in this review will be irreverent.

How is the trick played? The answer is, do not write a full blown manuscript before performing a litmus test of how strong your ideas are in surviving the market resistance. The market resistance has nothing to do with the merits of your ideas for your book. Many great ideas of past had met an instant death. Therefore, it will be too emotional to say that your ideas are great and so you will survive the market resistance, regardless.

Playing the trick is just like playing a game, and you can play as hard as you like. You may be able to enjoy the game, or it may be a nightmare to you, depending on how seasoned of a player you are. Writers beware, do not write an entire manuscript, and send it to a random publishing agent. If you do such a fatal mistake, you will be one of the 1200 victims mentioned above. A random book agent will not care about your ideas. How will you know if the agent will be interested in your topic: science fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction, or whatsoever? There will be no way to know unless you do your homework. The homework does not mean looking at a local yellow page and finding local agents or publishers. Information in a yellow page may be outdated. The people who work in publishing business change jobs so fast that your attempted telephone call may never be returned. The trick here is to get an agent or publisher interested in your book idea. How can you make it happen? Please read below.

How can you get an agent or publisher interested in your book idea? The game is not less than trying to tame a devil. One good way of browsing for a right agent or publisher is by looking at the competition. Find competing books that share similar ideas with what you have in your mind, and look for the names of the agents and the publishers that are printed in the first few pages of the books (see who that author thanks as his or her agent). Bingo! Write to those agents or publishers. When you write to them after doing some homework about the agents or the publishers, chances are that you will get their attention. Mention in the letter or email that you are interested to write a book that is similar in nature with what they published before. Show them the distinct merits of your book idea, and market potential as well. If any agent or publisher shows interests, draft a short query-letter.

A query-letter should explain briefly the ideas of your book, your experiences, problems and solutions for the matters at question, target customers and market size for sales, and the table of contents. If you happen to be lucky to get a response back from the agent, and if further interest is demonstrated, then you start drafting a formal proposal. A proposal could be a two-page letter or a 75-page opus filled with charts and diagrams of highly technical nature. A good proposal is about 30 to 40 pages in length. The first half should explain the basic premise of the book, and the second part should discuss marketing and competition. Remember, agents and publishers do not have time to read the entire book manuscript. Therefore, the proposal is the only weapon to get them interested. Many novice writers fall into the trap of false belief that when a book manuscript arrives to a publisher's desk, the publisher would drop all his works to feel romanticized with the manuscript. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen in the real world.

Hold on to control. Let's hope that the proposal is accepted--and this is also a great achievement, but the crown is still too far away. The bulk of the writing has not rolled yet. Now, the game gets even more interesting--what the publisher wants you to write, how they (the publishing team) plan on selling what you write, and how they will pay you. Do not think that after the proposal is accepted, the publisher would fully agree to the contents and the ideas of what you want to write. The editors might want to change your point of view, tweak your ideas, and change the book title or even the chapters. Bottom line, if the publisher is not happy with what you write, in a correct vernacular, you are screwed. A substantial re-write of the original draft may be requested, and you may not find a way to avoid it.

The negotiation for payment or royalty is a fun part. An initial offer from the publisher for the book contract will be fairly low or balanced at best. As a writer, you should try to get an advance payment as big as possible. An advance payment could be anywhere from $25,000 to $1 million+. The royalty rate is usually set around 10% and is increased as high as 15% of sales, subject to different thresholds of sales volume.

In average, it takes about 9 months for the book to show up in bookstores after the final manuscript is submitted to the publisher and is accepted. A substantial editing and re-writing is a part of the publication process, in which the publisher may or may not take much part. Therefore, you as a writer should proactively work towards perfecting the manuscript.

Let's hope, after almost a year long wait, your long-felt and unsolved desire of seeing your book at a local bookstore now suddenly becomes true. But wait, the vacation time has really not started. After the book is published, your work does not stop there. Face the brutality: If sales are down, the writer will suffer the royalty money, and the printing of the book may be discontinued for the lack of demand for the book. Marketing is an essential ingredient to make the writer's idea long lived. Unfortunately, a publishing house is traditionally very poor in marketing. The writer may recruit his or her own marketing firm to promote the book, at the expense of $10K+ in fees every month. The writer's marketing efforts may also invite a conflict of interest with the publisher's own marketing staffs. There may not be too much the writer can do to promote the book.

Hey, but relax! The world is not ending if no publisher shows any love to you. You have the option to say, "Screw the publishers and their dramas. I am going my own way." Self-publishing is a way to avoid the aforementioned problems with publishers, but it has its own slew of pros and cons. A self publisher needs to do everything--really everything--on his or her own total responsibility, such as, printing, marketing, sales, stocking, shipping, fund transfer, and so forth. The main advantages are, speed of publication, control over the ideas in the book, and not to forget, the opportunity to pocket all the money or sales revenue. However, the dark side is that a self published book may never see the light of day because the book may never reach to the public at large. A self-published book will severely lack the convenience of the distribution channel and supply chain management that a mega publisher may inherently have.

A self-published book may remain substandard because it may not pass the checks and balances of a publisher. In other words, the wheat may not be separated from the chaff. However, in certain instances, self publishing is a good way; such as when the writer's interest may be different, for example, marketing the book to a niche group. Marketing a book to a niche group is easier; and therefore, sales and profits may be guaranteed even with a relatively small personal and end-to-end effort.

A smart, fast read, but also practical and frank. Usable advice on query letters, proposals, networking, when to self-publlish and how to negotiate.

Brown lays out a clearheaded method that will totally turn around your notions of how to get published. The book is a good read with a lot of personality coming through the narrative. Really pulls the curtain back on the publishing world, and shows you how to be a part of it.