Going From Self-Published to Major Publisher
Last week, I signed a contract with John Wiley & Sons to do a book based largely on my 2003 self-published book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.
Some people think this is every self-publisher’s dream. Well, having been a big-publisher author (Simon & Schuster, 1993) and being married to one (D. Dina Friedman: Simon & Schuster AND Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, both in 2006), I can tell you that both methods have their advantages.
For me, every book is different, and for each book, there are reasons to do it one way or another. I chose to self-publish Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First because I wanted absolute control; the ideas were pretty revolutionary at the time, and I didn’t want anyone watering it down. I also wanted to seize a moment that I wasn’t sure would still hold in the two years before my work would see the light of day with a big publisher. But I always hoped the day would come when I could resell that book to someone else.
Another book I’m circulating a proposal for needs a big publisher and a large advance. It will take far too much research time to do on my own, and the people I need to interview hide behind a lot of gatekeepers. Those gates swing open a lot more easily if a big publisher has backed the project. If I don’t sell that book, I simply won’t write it.
A project I just managed for a client went to the printer last week. Speed was essential, because the story is very relevant to a major movie being released in January. We only started working together in June, and most of the work took place after September. A big publisher simply wouldn’t do that for anyone other than a superstar celebrity. I found a copy editor, cover and interior designers, and a printer, and the book will be out in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, I wrote a letter that the client used to build a relationship with people at Paramount Pictures, and wonderful things might happen.
Also, that book hadn’t been in shape to be taken seriously by the publishing world. It needed cleanup and rethinking, and most big-house editors these days aren’t willing to put that kind of effort into a book unless they know they’re going to sell many thousands of copies.
Which leads me to the key point: the big houses no longer buy many manuscripts on the basis of their merits, but on the author’s strengths as a marketer. They will take a mediocre or adequate book with a superstar marketing platform any day over a fabulous book with no platform.
The reason I got to sign this contract with Wiley is because out of 32 pages (not counting sample chapters) in the proposal, 27 of them deal specifically with marketing and the market for the book, including changes to make the book more user-friendly and marketable, involvement of a celebrity co-author, a market analysis, recognition the book has already received (awards, endorsements, foreign republications, etc.)—and six entire pages about my platform: my speaking, writing, e-zines, media interviews, social networking communities, and perhaps most important, a credible and substantiated argument that I can reasonably expect to use pre-existing relationships with various newsletter publishers (relationships I’ve carefully cultivated over the years) to reach about five million people with news about its publication, when the time comes.
Is this the only way to get a big-publisher contract? Certainly not. But it did propel a self-published book with relatively modest sales into a book that the New York publishing world is taking seriously.
Given that, here’s a homework assignment: Over the next month, write down every useful connection you’ve established, every credential you’ve earned–and then, if you ever want to pursue a big publisher, you’ll have something to work into a marketable proposal.
