How to become a published author

Dear Bob …

I am new to the business of publishing books and I was hoping to run a question by you.  What happens first?  Does an author sell an idea to you and you work with him/her to develop the manuscript?  Or does an author come to you with a completed manuscript and he/she “sells” it to you for general publication?

I am writing a “novel” that focuses on a very large, business-critical IT project in hopes of being entertaining and equally educational – for project managers, business analysts, business sponsors etc. I’m hoping it could become a discussion tool for IT and business leaders that face similar challenges – perhaps in both the corporate setting as well as academia.  I do, however, hope that it’s entertaining enough for non-IT (or business) people to enjoy.

What would you recommend as a logical course of action for me to get my manuscript published?

– Budding author

Dear Flower …

First of all, I hope you understand that IS Survivor Publishing isn’t a candidate publisher for you. From our perspective, right now I only use it to publish and sell books I personally author; from yours, we have effectively no distribution beyond the KJR subscriber list.

In general, for a trade book, you want to start with a proposal, not a finished manuscript, and even though you’re talking about a novel I think it would be categorized as a trade book rather than as fiction. Were you writing a novel for general distribution, I’m told you’d be better off starting with a finished manuscript.

The proposal should include the title, a brief description, an explanation of the book’s likely marketplace and appeal, how you’ll lead the marketing effort (never for a minute imagine that the publisher will drive the marketing effort), and a chapter outline.

In describing the book’s appeal, you have a dual challenge: Describing similar books that have been successful, and showing how your book is different enough to deserve publication alongside the others.

In your particular case, you have an extra challenge, in that what you describe sounds very similar to Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management. If I were in the business I’d want to know why anyone would buy your book instead of one that’s so similar, that pre-dated it, and that was written by an established author.

Understand that the quality of the product itself is secondary to the publisher’s ability to sell it. Publishers invest quite a bit into each book they publish. The good ones especially invest the time of editors, fact checkers, indexers, layout specialists, and cover artists, and the cost of the initial printing (figure roughly a quarter of the cover price times at least 3,000 copies). To persuade one, your goal is to explain how it is that their risks will be lower than any other project they might take on, and how the potential sales will be higher.

As with all selling efforts, this means being able to see the world through your prospect’s eyes – in this case, the publisher – rather than your own.

– Bob