My husband wrote over on his blog about how to build a platform to get your first book deal. You can read it here: http://nathanjendrick.com/?p=142 and check out his other stuff as well, or below.
Building a Platform
www.nathanjendrick.com
A lot of people tell us, “I have a great idea for a sports/fitness/health book! It’s about [insert awesome idea]! How do I get it published?” Well, it takes more than an idea. It takes a platform. You have to ask yourself the question: What would make people want to take my word for it? Further, why are you the person people should listen to on that topic? To give yourself a worthwhile answer, you have to build a platform. You also have to dispell the notion that books sell themselves. It just doesn’t happen. And with the decline of bookstores, midlist titles are falling out of favor due to a lesser and lesser amount of foot traffic. You have to sell yourself before and after the deal. Let’s great this down piece by piece.
First the question becomes, how do I build a platform so I can get a book published?
There are multiple answers to this:
1. Be a celebrity of some sort.
2. Earn a degree in the field and put it to successful use.
3. Build a history of success pertaining to your topic.
For a lot of people, options 1 and 2 aren’t really feasible. You can’t just up and become a movie star and degrees take time. But you want your book deal now, right? Remember that now is relative. Even after the deal, you’re looking at a year before it hits shelves (virtual, physical or otherwise). In any case, you want it as quickly as possible. So if we use our real life example of wanting to get a health/fitness/sports title published, how can you build that platform that can enable you to get the deal?
The easiest way is to pitch articles to publications about the topic. Newspapers, magazines, trade journals, it all depends on your subject matter, but there are numerous options out there. Find a bunch, craft a query, and pitch it time and time again. The barrier for entry into writing an article for a magazine isn’t necessarily that high, depending on where you go. For example, I read a study a dozen years ago about the effect of women in the gym on a man’s testosterone level. I tracked down a magazine (American Health & Fitness), then contacted the lead researcher and asked if I were to write an article, if he would speak to me about it. He said of course (they love the publicity) and then I pitched it. Two weeks later (that’s a fast response) I had a deal and one week after that, the magazine had it’s article. Of course, it took about four months after that for me to get paid, but that’s another story.
So what’s the moral of that little tale? Go out and find your platform. Start small and build it up. Piggy-back on people (like researchers, study authors, etc.) and form relationships. You’re doing something mutually beneficial if you’re promoting the work of someone else while earning yourself work. It’s win-win.
You can also try and find work doing interviews for a magazine, photos, anything that earns you a by-line. It helps when you pitch a book and can say, “I’ve written over 30 articles for nine publications,” or whatever the case may be.
Another avenue is doing presentations. Find clubs or groups or even a library where you can do a presentation or something in conjunction with your topic. Let’s say you’re a baseball coach and want to write a book about a better way to train athletes. Obviously that’s pretty niche, so you may be thinking small publisher. But they still need to know why you’re the guy. So let’s say you started coaching T-ball, then softball, now you’re a D-II coach. Very good progression. Add in that you’ve written technique articles for magazines, interviewed rising stars at the D-I level for your local paper, done presentations to high school teams, etc. and you have yourself a much better pitch on your own name than just saying, “I can write a technique book because I coach.”
You also need to think outside of the box. In the baseball coach example I just gave, what else could he do? He could, for instance, earn a personal training certification and a certificate from a community college in strength training. Suddenly he’s an authority on physical training now, and now he can couple his technique advice with a new facet. It all builds. Little by little, it builds. It gets your name out there, and it gets your the deal.
Now, at the beginning I mentioned having to sell yourself after the deal. Why would you have to do that, you ask? Well, because the book, as I said, won’t sell itself. Once the publication date comes around you need to be out there working even harder to sell copies. One bad book can put your career in the gutter, so you want to hustle and get your name out there to create buzz and make people want to read your work.
There’s plenty more out there, but this blog post is already quite long, so I’ll cover more in the future. Good luck!