I have a completed manuscript for a non-fiction book - it’s in the general vicinity of books like this and these. The book is fully professionally designed and laid out, and only lacks a publisher and a distributor - whether that is the same organisation or not I don’t care.
But as best I can gather, large publishing houses don’t have slush piles any more and only take submissions from agents, agents only take clients with a track record and then pretty much only in fiction, and small publishers tend to specialise in particular areas and again don’t take unsolicited submissions.
So how is a first-time non-fiction author to get published? Advice on how to get a foot in the door gratefully appreciated.
Get “Writer’s Market” a book, now with supplementary website, where you can find out which agents and publishing houses take unsolicited manuscripts or non-fiction proposals.
It can be found in nearly every moderately sized bookstore and library in America.
I’m not published, but I used to read a lot of Writer’s Digest.
Usually, it’s nearly impossible to get a major publisher to even look at an unsolicited manuscript. So, the first step is to get an agent. Writer’s Digest Publications puts out a list of agents yearly. They also give advice about finding an agent that is right for you and your genre. Make sure you follow the agent’s submission guidelines. Writer’s Digest magazine is also helpful in how to approach agents, write cover letters, etc.
However, if your manuscript is non-fiction, it is normal to submit it to a publisher first. Go directly to the publisher and find their submission guidelines.
But, it also sounds like you don’t mind going the self-publishing route either. There are many on-line companies that will print short runs of your book for a fee.
Or, if you want to just get a taste of how your book will be received, you can go to one of the pay to read sites. I’m not too familiar with these, but you simply put a preview of your manuscript on-line and if people like it, they pay to read the whole thing.
First thing – forget about layout. Publishers handle that. Put the manuscript into standard format.
Next, contact agents. Look for those that handle nonfiction. They are looking for projects and yours might interest them. A track record is not essential.
You will have to write a good cover letter. Tell them in a single page what the book is about. Make it interesting: e.g., “My book, ‘The Superior Person’s Book of Words,’ is a tongue-in-cheek guide to using big words to show your superiority.”
Be sure to tell them you have a manuscript finished and ready to send them if they want to take a look.
Send the query to multiple agents (it’s allowed). When you get one request for the full manuscript, send it off. Other requests can be quietly put on hold.
If you can find a publisher that takes queries and seems to publish similar books, then send them a query. The only difference is that you contact publishers one at a time (though you can be contacting agents at the same time).
Self-publishing is usually a bad idea unless you’re writing a nonfiction book with a very specialized audience (for instance, my brother had success self-publishing a book on Harmony Guitars – not a lot, though he had made money). No one takes self-published books seriously and the average sale is around 75 copies, usually to friends, family, and yourself. Bookstores won’t stock them.
Print on demand sounds nice – just print what you need – but that means you need to print copies for yourself; if you try to sell the book, you will need to be able to hand something to the potential purchaser. Otherwise they’ll go home and forget about buying.
I doubt the pay-to-read sites would be useful, either. That model has never worked for the author.
I just got back from a writers’ workshop and the nearly universal advice is to get an agent.
Unfortunately, your layout work is probably wasted time, except perhaps for specific drawings or photos to illustrate parts of the text. But for any you can’t document exactly where it came from, it won’t be able to be used either because of rights issues.
The other way you can make use of your own layout work is to self-publish, which is pretty high risk.
There is a new option that was very briefly touched on – publishing an e-book without ever publishing a paper version. Then your most likely gatekeeper is Amazon, and you should still go the agent route.
Writer’s Market is probably not the best source. Their online source may be better, but the old print version had lots of very old information. Find a library, ask a librarian for a good source book for nonfiction houses. Something like Literary Marketplace.
It’s somewhat easier for an unagented writer to get a contract with a publishing house with nonfiction than with fiction, or so I’ve heard. And some kinds of nonfiction lend themselves much more to self-publishing than fiction, in general. Two examples: I know a guy who published a book of quotations for all occasions (like, “what to write in the office birthday card”). He had a somewhat different twist than a lot of quotation books, and he was a corporate trainer who did a lot of sort of motivational speaking all over the country, so he had a platform for recommending his quotation book. And he always had some with him.
Second example: Husband & wife had a self-defense school, and they wanted to do books with drawings. Husband did drawings, wife wrote text. They didn’t want a traditional publisher because they were pretty sure the publisher would insist on different pictures. They also had a built-in market.
What a potential agent (or publisher) wants to see is:
A platform (i.e., a really good way to promote the book). A great platform is if you are a former US president, a celebrity, or someone known to be at the top of the field you’re writing about.
A compelling subject. (True whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.)
Good writing.
What they’d like is two out of three, if not three out of three. Their whole business plan is selling books, so make sure your proposal tells them how they’re going to sell books! But without seeming like that’s what you’re telling them! (I.e., don’t make assumptions about the market for your book; don’t tell them it’s going to be a best-seller.)
Most agents and publishers have guidelines on their website that will tell you how to submit. Different agents want different things–for nonfiction, most of them will want an outline of all the book’s chapters, plus a couple of sample chapters. But others will just want the outline, or just the chapters.
I just wanted to note that, although people are telling you to get an agent, I couldn’t get an agent to look at my book. I still got it published by a major publisher by sending it in myself. But I found a publisher with a reputation for publishing original works by unpublished authors. so it can be done.
Thanks all for the considered responses! I’ll try to cover all the points you good folks have brought up:
Well yes, that’s what I was trying to say: publishers (or at least their websites) all state that they do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, making no mention of a distinction for non-fiction…
I’d thought of it. A friend of my partner’s did that, and hied herself from bookshop to bookshop around the country for a year, before giving up and engaging a distributor. She did OK on the sales side, but it wasn’t practical - there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everywhere often enough. I have a full-time job and I hardly anticipate my little book will free me from that! But I suppose funding the printing myself and just engaging a distributor is an option, I hadn’t really though of that.
Well my partner is a professional book designer, so I got that done for nothing And it looks good now! I paid for a professional illustrator to draw nice and fun cartoon-y illos for the cover and a number of items in the book, and they improve the “reading experience” of the book greatly, ISTM.
Right, I’m going to have to focus on that, I think.
As mentioned above, I do know someone who managed to achieve that (specialised audience was gardening). But I agree it’s not ideal or even practical.
There’s a theme emerging here OK, I need to concentrate on finding an agent who will represent me energetically, despite what I’ve read about their reluctance to pick up unknown non-fiction authors.
All original and paid for; my partner does this for a living so those bases are covered.
As with my reply to CalMeacham below, I’d love to hear more - I’ve not found this.
Hopefully I fulfil 2 and 3; I have a long track record in getting letters published in a major daily newspaper but I doubt that counts as your 1.
I haven’t found this t be so for publishers, but I hadn’t considered finding agents directly online; I’ll give that a try next I think! Thanks for that idea.
I’d love to hear - here or privately - how you found such a publisher! I went to dozens of their websites and every one without exception said they only accepted work from first-time authors from agents.
And it looks good now! I paid for a professional illustrator to draw nice and fun cartoon-y illos for the cover and a number of items in the book, and they improve the “reading experience” of the book greatly, ISTM.