If you are a writer, you must have thought of penning a novel and publishing it. While writing and completing an entire book is an achievement in itself, getting to know the right people is something else altogether! If you are a beginner, the first thing you need to do is attract the right people to help with the book publishing process.
There are many publishing options available today, which can be quite overwhelming when choosing a single one. In this article, we have offered some tips that can help you connect with the right individuals so that you can easily publish your books with minimum hassles.
How Can You Attract the Right People to Help When You Are Publishing a Book?
Here are some simple strategies that can help you attract the right people when you are publishing a book:
1. Check How Your Book Will Fit In The Publishing Industry
If you can follow this, the rest of the steps mentioned in this article will be much more effective. Even before you can identify potential agents or write your query, you need to understand the genre and style of your book.
For instance, if you are writing a book related to murder, you need to classify whether the book belongs to the noir, comfortable mystery, or thriller genre. Of course, you do not have to stick with these – you can also include genres like literary fiction, commercial fiction, or historical fiction.
Of course, following marketing strategies can be quite a frustrating experience. However, it is important that you follow them so that you can find the right people to represent your book as you want.
When you get clear about the genre of your book, you will be able to select the right agents. Judging by the books they have sold, you can then understand how well they can sell your product.
2. Find People Who Are Looking For Books Like Yours
While there are literally thousands of agents worldwide, you will have to understand that most of these people will not be interested in the genre of your book, or at least will not be able to sell your book. To do this, you can make use of a specialist search service.
If you want to increase your chances, you need to look into a targeted list of 30-35 people who will be interested and can sell your book instead of 100 agents who are not interested.
When we are talking about books, some other things you need to look into apart from the genre are the style, theme, and tone. For instance, you can notice that while Sue Grafton and Nina Revoyr have both written the best crime novels, they are very different from one another.
When you are looking for people, you need to pitch it to agents only after looking at their profiles, interviews, webpages, and sales records. For example, if you have an inspirational or funny book, you need to avoid people whose list is filled with political or dark novels.
3. Keep Refining The List Of Agents
Similar to all fields of research, you will have to refine your list of agents capable of helping you publish your book. Yes, this method can take a lot of time and effort – however, you also need to understand that the agent will put in a lot of effort and time to publish your book.
4. Personalize The Query Letters
It will be good for you if you can let your agents know what you are about to pitch and why you think they will particularly like your book. Apart from promoting your book, this is also an opportunity for you to present yourself as a professional.
Of course, certain agents think personalizing the queries is not a good idea. They see this method as a fluke. However, you need to respect their thought process.
When we look into the basics of marketing, the more you customize the offering, the more likely the concerned party will buy it. As we can see, marketers work very hard to understand what their customers are looking for, get their research done, and tailor the ads accordingly. Additionally, these marketers also invest a lot of money to personalize the ads, which is why they can target millions around the world.
Once you create a final list of agents that you think are more likely to respond to your book, you need to put in all your hard work to find the one agent that will maximize your chances of getting published.
5. Sending The Query Letters
In this step, you need to try to send at least 15 queries for each batch. Sending one at a time is a very slow and cumbersome process unless you already have someone who is asking for multiple exclusive submissions.
If you have sent the first batch and do not receive any request for partials in the next six weeks, it probably means that your query has not been drafted right. On the other hand, if you do receive the requests for the partials, but you do not receive a request for the entire manuscript, your query is fine, but the opening chapters may require some work.
It is important to get feedback from editors. After you work on the feedback, you can start sending the query letters again. While you can ask for some help from critique groups and editors, you will ultimately have to formulate your own words.
6. Remember The Follow-Up
If everything is right, you should receive a follow-up from the agents immediately. However, you should not be surprised if you may have to nudge them occasionally. However, you should never stop asking for a follow-up, even though it may seem pushy.
While the agent may not be able to respond, it does not necessarily mean no. There are many reasons why you should follow up with the agents. For instance, there may have been many instances in your life when you have received a no the first time, but have received a yes on following up the second time.
Alternatively, there might be a situation when you have been reminded to do something by someone. These are simply some examples where you did something only after following up. Overall, you need to understand the types of agent follow-ups whose silence does not mean any.
7. Get Reviews
Apart from the agents, getting some reviews from established reviewers is equally important. One of the best ways to get reviews for your book is to approach these reviewers, simply by providing them with a free copy and requesting them politely.
If you are a first-timer, it is suggested that you look for reviewers on top platforms like Amazon and start shortlisting the ones that have reviewed books based on your genre.
Sadly, Amazon does not support reviews for pre-order books. However, one way to deal with this issue is to release a paperback version of your book and link it to your unreleased e-book. All the reviews that you will receive for the paperback version will be attached to your e-book. Once done, you will have social proof that your book has been reviewed by esteemed reviewers.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, attracting the right people to publish your book works exactly the same as any email marketing strategy. You need to be outspoken about your book and sell it so that people would want to know more. With the help of the steps mentioned above, you should be able to capture the attention of the right people from book publishing.
