Dream, Build, Sell, Write, Launch
Nonfiction book publishing in a nutshell
As I mentioned in my introduction post, publishing is an opaque industry. I forget this all the time in conversation, cluelessly throwing around terms like “closing,” “subrights,” and “advance” when what authors really want to know is “What can I expect if I decide to write a nonfiction book? In other words: What is going to happen to me?” In an attempt to remedy my past failures, let’s tackle that now.
What is going to happen to me?
In a nutshell, here’s what is going to happen when you decide to write a nonfiction book: you are going to dream it, build it, sell it, write it, and launch it. I hope you’re sitting down, because we’re about to wade through 1,000 of the most exhausting words you’ve ever read. (Don’t worry too much about absorbing all this at once! We’ll be going through all of this in a lot more detail in the weeks to come.)
Dream it.
You may already be doing this—if so, kudos! To write a nonfiction book, you need to have a book idea. And not just any book idea: you need to have an original, marketable idea that is perfectly suited to your talents, expertise, and background. And you’re not done there, not by a long shot: if you want to attract publishers (especially big commercial publishers), you need to build a tantalizing platform that is also perfectly suited to you and the book idea, to give the dream the support it is going to need.
Build it.
Next up, it’s time to build a book proposal. A book proposal is a document that includes a pitch for the idea, a proposed chapter outline, an author bio, a rundown of the potential readership and potential competitors for the book idea, and a full sample chapter. (FYI: the book proposal is a highly variable document depending on which literary agents or publishers you are approaching—what I’ve just described is my template.) If that sounds like a meaty document, it absolutely is—the most recent book proposal I worked on with an author was ~17,000 words. Once you’ve got that polished proposal in hand (so easy to say, so incredibly hard to do), you can either write to literary agents to convince them to represent you and go get a fair and hopefully tasty deal from a reputable publisher, or to publishers directly. If you go the agent route, you will then likely field substantial feedback from the agent on how to improve the book proposal and idea. Then it’s time for the finished proposal to go out to editors everywhere!
Sell it.
What happens once the book proposal is with editors? As with any process involving humans, it’s mostly chaos. Some will be supremely disinterested. Some will think it’s OK but not for them. Some will love it, but fail to get their colleagues interested. Ideally, some will love it and get their colleagues interested, at which point you will field Offers to Publish Your Book! What do these offers look like? Usually, they consist of an advance (money they will pay you to write the book), a set of rights (the right to publish the book in print, ebook, audio; the right to publish excerpts from the book; and a host of other subsidiary rights), a territory in which they have those rights exclusively (e.g. North America, UK & Commonwealth, or even the whole world in rare cases), and a payout schedule (how they propose to pay you the advance over several installments). If you accept one of these offers (you don’t have to by the way; even if your agent has set up an auction, and a publisher “wins” that auction, you can still walk away from all the offers if it doesn’t seem worth it), you or your agent will then receive a draft contract from the publisher, and the magical process of negotiating a contract will begin. We’ll dive into the contract in more detail later on—for now, I’ll just mention that the finalized contract you sign will include two details that will now consume your life: the estimated word count and promised delivery date for the manuscript.
Write it.
There are numerous marvelous newsletters/podcasts out there that cover the frustrating, fulfilling, exhausting process of writing A Whole F*cking Book. Here are a few that I particularly like, right here on Substack:
For the sake of this nutshell description let’s skip ahead to the moment that you deliver an unbelievable manuscript to your grateful editor. They will praise you to the skies, say they can’t wait to read it—and then do what they were put on this Earth to do: find your manuscript’s weakest spots, shine a huge spotlight on them, and team up with you to either strengthen them or tearfully send them to the Grey Havens.
After weeks or months of revision and feedback, your editor will finally accept that you are a genius, and will officially submit your manuscript to the publisher’s production and design departments. These folks will copyedit and proofread the manuscript, design an interior layout and book cover, and generally perform the arcane alchemy that turns an unpolished text document into the glorious paper-and-cardboard cuboid that we’ve enjoyed for millennia.
Launch it.
In an ideal scenario, after turning in your finished manuscript you’ll have maybe three months of relative peace (aside from reviewing things like copyedits, page proofs, the book cover, the index) before your book drifts into radar range of the publisher’s publicity and marketing departments. If you have an attentive publisher and editor, this stage will be kicked off via an introductory call with your assigned publicist and marketer. Together you will spend six months hatching genius ideas about landing reviews of the book in national media, writing op-eds or articles, offering giveaways, doing bajillions of interviews and appearances on TV, radio, podcasts, and in print, building social-media buzz, and gratefully accepting every book award ever. (Except the Booker Prize, of course.)
You and your publicity/marketing experts will execute all of those ideas flawlessly, climaxing in an avalanche of coverage and sales during the first week after publication of the book. From there you will continue to opportunistically grab attention for the book whenever possible going forward.
Take a spa day.
Along the way, I heartily recommend you take real breaks from the book when you can. Writing and publishing a book is a truly herculean effort all by itself, but when you add in the stress that comes with sharing your work in public (Will reviewers hate it? Will people buy it? Will I miss an embarrassing typo?), the prospect of burnout is not only real—it’s inevitable. Your book will forever be a part of your life from here on out—especially when it comes to nonfiction, where your book could well be drawn from your day-to-day work and core expertise—so make sure the effort and attention you devote to the book is sustainable for the long-haul (aside from those frenetic weeks around publication).
There it is: nonfiction publishing in about 1,000 words. I have been laughably shallow in this post, but I wanted to write this up front to give you all the entire map before we lace up our boots and start walking. Let me know in the comments if any part of the map is still shrouded in fog.
Next week I’ll be at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so I won’t have the time to put together a full post, but I’ll send out a note from the fair—like a little electronic postcard, except instead of a photo of the beach it’s an exhibition hall with fluorescent lights and folding tables. But in two weeks we’ll start right back at the trailhead of the hook-to-book journey: shaping your book idea.