By Lou Schuler

By Lou Schuler

How to Get Published, Part 4

2

Every now and then someone will ask me how many books I’ve written. The question stumps me every time. It’s not because of my math skills (although that’s not a bad guess). It’s the meaning of “written.” The list of books with my name as principal author or coauthor is fairly short. (Five in the New Rules of Lifting series, along with Testosterone Advantage Plan, Home Workout Bible, and Book of Muscle.) But I’m not sure how to count all the books I edited, ghost wrote, rewrote, or collaborated on. And that was all before the definition of “books” became so blurry and subjective. Are we talking about books produced and distributed by conventional publishing companies, like Penguin and Rodale? Or should we include self-‐published books, or those that are a hybrid between conventional and DIY? Most of my work so far is in conventional publishing. That’s because I’m among the shrinking group of authors who still make a living the old-‐fashioned way. But my experiences with conventional publishers haven’t always been conventional, and the weirdness promises to accelerate as the industry adapts to new technologies and business models. So even though I don’t have a lot of experience in DIY publishing, what I do know should be enough to help you understand the business you’re entering, and how to use it to your greatest advantage. The parts of publishing that truly matter—the quality of your ideas and execution—apply no matter which model you use.


3

The Idea In Part 1 I explained that a good idea will have three parts:

1. It describes a specific problem, or set of related problems, that your target readers will have.

2. It offers a specific solution to that problem.

3. It promises a specific biological benefit, or series of benefits, that will

result from the solution you’re about to present.

You can probably think of some popular fitness and diet books that did a good job with all three parts: Body for Life, The Zone, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, Core Performance. In all cases, they took what readers thought they knew about training and/or nutrition, and either turned it upside down or tweaked it a bit. I’ve done this with my own books, to a lesser extent (and when I say “lesser,” I mean “we didn’t sell nearly as many copies”). The New Rules of Lifting took a stand against using machines and doing exercises that attempt to isolate smaller muscles. The New Rules of Lifting for Women argued that serious strength training would give female lifters the benefits they thought they’d get from cardio and “toning” exercises. NROL for Abs was the anti-‐crunch book, and NROL for Life, the fourth in the series, combined all those messages for older lifters, or those with limitations caused by injury or excess weight. The New Rules of Lifting started out as a book for beginners that we planned to call Basic Training. The original publisher wanted to move away from that title for a number of reasons (including the fact another book with that name was scheduled to come out before ours), and Alwyn and I are happy that we did. At a time when the market was crowded with books making promises of big results, our title allowed us to offer a process benefit. We were promising a better system to get the results everyone wants from a strength-‐training program. Another type of fitness and nutrition book that sells is one that provides an encyclopedia of methods and options. The classic is The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Dobbins. It’s 800 pages of exercises, explanation, history, and big pictures of men and women flexing.


4

More recent (and more concise) examples include Adam Campbell’s The Big Book of Exercises and two books with my name on them: Home Workout Bible and The Book of Muscle. The encyclopedic book is very hard to pull off without a big publishing company behind you, although there are some success stories from small or medium-‐sized publishers: Strength Training Anatomy, by author/illustrator Frederic Delavier (Human Kinetics), and the Body Sculpting Bible series, by James Villepique and Hugo Rivera (Hatherleigh Press). But for every one of those, you’ll find dozens of imitators (often with nearly identical titles) that came and went without gaining any traction in the marketplace. That’s why I advise first-‐time authors to wait until you have a killer idea before you launch this big a project. Your book should offer readers at least one important element they haven’t seen before. Most of the new books I see fail this innovation test. Your innovation can come from any of the aforementioned areas:

• A new concept, something that flips what readers thought they knew about nutrition or training. Body for Life, for example, convinced millions of people to focus on anaerobic exercise—strength and interval training—for dramatic body transformation.

• A new process or method, showing readers how to improve their performance in something they want to do anyway.

• A new organizing principle, giving readers a different way to look at something, or a more complete collection of recipes or exercises or systems.

That said, even the best idea can go down in flames if you can’t execute, or if you aren’t the right person to execute your own idea.


5

The Five Questions You Must Ask Before You Begin 1. Is there an audience for this book? 2. Is it an audience that buys books? The answer to the first question should give you confidence. But if the second question doesn’t keep you awake at night in the weeks or even months before publication, you’re made of better stuff than I am. In general, women buy about two-‐thirds of all books, although men are more likely to buy ebooks. Until recently, my generation—the baby boomers—accounted for about 30% of all book purchases in the U.S. But now they’ve been passed by Generation Y, those born between 1979 and 1989. (Boomers still buy about a quarter of all books.) This shift is interesting because the younger members of that generation grew up with the idea that information should be free. That they’re now spending more money on books than middle-‐aged people like me is encouraging for anyone who writes books for a living, or aspires to. 3. Can you reach this audience? In publishing, the first question an editor asks before she considers a project is, “Does this author have a platform?” How many people do you reach through your blog, Facebook, Twitter, email list, and other social-‐media outlets? We aren’t just talking about gross numbers of Facebook fans or clicks on your links. A book demands more from a reader than her momentary attention. It requires (usually) a purchase, followed by hours of reading, followed by a concerted effort to implement your program. That leads to the final question. 4. Does this audience want you to write a book for them? Let’s say your goal is to be a fitness model, and you want to reach the top of the profession: billboards, magazine covers, TV commercials, product endorsements—the whole block of cheese. So you get photos taken, send them out to the top modeling agencies, and … nothing happens. Not even an inappropriate solicitation.


6

You come to me and ask what you’re doing wrong. My first question to you would be, “Has anyone ever said, ‘You know, you should be a model’?” People who are models spend their lives being told they should be models. I admit this is a strained analogy, even by my standards, but there is a point. A book is a really hard thing to plan, write, produce, and market. I’ve been writing and editing books since 2000, and there are plenty of days when I wonder if I’m ever going to figure it out. Fortunately, I know I have an audience willing to give me a chance. Almost every day, in one way or another, they tell me they want another book, one that addresses something I haven’t yet covered in any of my previous books. Now ask yourself: Is your audience asking you to write a book for them? If you’ve never written one, the answer is probably no. But that’s not necessarily a bad omen. There are other ways to tell if your audience is deeply engaged with your message. How many comments do you get on your blog posts? How many people share your ideas with their network—their own readers, clients, and fans? I’m not talking about the easy stuff, like inspirational videos of wounded soldiers learning to walk again. I’m talking about your work, your ideas, the articles and posts that require readers’ undivided attention. Do readers send you private messages asking for detailed advice? Have you created a need for the information you provide? A high level of trust with your readers? A reputation among your peers for innovation and integrity? 5. Does this idea have breakout potential? Let’s say you pass all the hurdles I’ve mentioned. You have a growing and increasingly passionate audience. You’re a credible expert in your area. And now you have an idea for a book. You can go a couple of different directions. If, in your judgment, it’s a medium-‐hot idea, you can knock out an ebook in a few weeks and launch it with a circle of affiliates in a matter of months. You can make pretty good money. You suspect, however, that your idea is bigger than that. Maybe you describe it to a couple of friends you trust, and their reaction is more enthusiastic than you expected. Now what? Two ways to know if your idea has that kind of potential:


7

1. You can describe it in 25 words or less, and the person to whom you’re describing it understands exactly what it is. The pitch for my first book, Testosterone Advantage Plan, might’ve gone something like this: “Readers think cardio and a low-‐fat diet will give them the body they want. What they really need is strength training and a higher-‐protein diet.”

2. It calls into question something people believe to be true. Remember what I said in Part 1, quoting Mark Bricklin: “Information is only as good as its converse.” In 2000, when my coauthors and I started working on Testosterone Advantage Plan, our ideas were both controversial and counterintuitive. They’re widely accepted today, but back then even my own colleagues at Rodale thought the ideas were so outrageous that a couple of them tried to get the book killed.

I don’t know what the next breakout idea will be. I never would’ve guessed that barefoot running would take off the way it did, with Chris McDougall’s Born to Run dominating bestseller lists in 2009 and 2010. But if you have something that’s in the right ballpark, you need to make sure you give it a shot. That’s when the real work begins.

Quick Aside: The Three-Year Rule Seth Godin, an author and marketing guru, is perhaps the most widely read and most often quoted publishing expert. (Plus, he’s bald, which some of us consider a sign of intelligence and serious intent.) Godin believes that it takes at least three years to build a big enough audience and establish enough credibility to make it worth your time to write a book. That doesn’t mean, “I’ve been a trainer with a blog for three years. Time to cash in!” It means there were at least three years in which you were both an expert practitioner in your field and someone building an audience for a book launch. Only you can know how many years it takes to become an expert in your specialty. Of course you can do the two things simultaneously. It’s probably the best way to do it today; your audience grows with you, and by the time you have that one great idea for a book, you have a core audience that’s invested in your work. I’ve found over the years that the audience can lead you to an idea that redefines your career. Listen, and they’ll tell you what they want.


8

Don’t Think About Money … Yet I know what you’re thinking: breakout idea + brilliant execution + dogged determination = $$$$. No. It doesn’t. A company called Bowker, which compiles extensive data on books, estimated that 316,000 new titles and editions would be published in the U.S. in 2010. That includes about 7,000 in the “sports and recreation” category. Those are just the traditionally published books, the kind I produce once a year, on average. Add in the nontraditional books, and the total rises to more than 3 million. I can’t tell you if you that category captures all or even most of the self-‐published ebooks. I’m also not sure it matters, because these numbers alone suggest we’re perilously close to having more writers than readers in twenty-‐first-‐century America. Still, someone gets those traditional publishing deals, and if your idea is good enough, and your presentation strong enough, and your platform promising enough, that someone can be you.

A Decent Proposal Conventional publishing begins with a book proposal. It’s a miniature version of your actual book, as well as a marketing tool. Your first goal is to impress an agent, who will be your conduit to the editors who are the proposal’s real audience. The quality of the proposal will help the editor determine if it’s worth her time, energy, and future compensation to commission and publish your book. It’s also the blueprint you’ll follow after you get a deal and you sit down to write the manuscript. A proposal typically has six parts: 1. Overview Here’s your chance to grab the attention of an editor. You aren’t describing your idea here so much as showing the passion behind the idea. Or, as the cool kids in marketing used to say, this is the part where you sell the sizzle. You’ll describe the steak once you have the reader’s full attention.


9

The following example is from my proposal for The New Rules of Lifting. These are the actual opening paragraphs from the actual proposal, which had multiple publishers interested before my agent finally sold the book to Avery (a division of Penguin, which itself is a division of Pearson, the largest book publisher in the world).

Guy walks into a gym. He’s never been in one before, and, much as it pains him to say it, he admits this to the buff young man behind the desk. The gym membership comes with a “free” personal-‐training session, and in no time at all the young bodybuilder has set up the novice with a program that uses every workout station in the gym—and is so hopelessly complicated that the newbie has no choice but to hire the gym employee to act as his personal trainer. The kid has never trained anyone but himself, but hey, everyone has to start somewhere. And, as the novice lifter soon learns, few things in a gym are as dangerous as a bad trainer. Another guy walks into another gym. This guy has been lifting since he was 12. He knows the difference between a squat rack and a Smith machine. But he doesn’t know the difference between a good workout and the one he’s been doing for the past 27 years. This lifter has a bad back, swollen knees, sore elbows, and a shoulder that clicks a distress signal in Morse code every time he does a behind-‐the-‐neck barbell shoulder press. And yet, four times a week, he still straps on his lifting belt and pumps out set after set of the very exercises that led to his string of mangled joints and membership in the Ibuprofen Hall of Fame. Yet another guy walks into yet another gym—well, he doesn’t call it a gym. It’s a “health club” to him, or maybe even a “spa.” He starts with 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer to get his heart rate up. Then he “does the machines,” a circuit of exercises that varies only when management rearranges the equipment to put down new carpet. This guy hasn’t gotten an actual result in five years—in fact, if he were to submit to a comprehensive fitness analysis, he’d learn that he actually has less muscle and more fat than he did three years ago. But still, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he does the elliptical and he does the machines, and if you ask him why, he’ll say it’s because he “doesn’t want to get too bulky.” These guys aren’t stupid, and they aren’t even particularly uninformed. At least two of the three probably read a fitness


10

magazine on a semi-‐regular basis. But what all three have in common is this: They don’t know the New Rules of Lifting. What are the New Rules? These are the facts, techniques, and debunked fallacies of resistance training that have been developed by the best strength coaches in the world, in conjunction with researchers publishing in the top peer-‐reviewed scientific journals. And unless someone knows these strength coaches personally, or attends professional conferences, or reads the scientific literature, he has no way of knowing that the best minds in the field are preaching a completely different approach than the bodybuilding magazines and gym-‐based personal trainers. In other words, only an insider would know that weight lifting has changed dramatically in the past several years. You can’t read about these changes in popular magazines—only a few, such as Men’s Fitness, are keeping pace. And while a few books, such as Core Performance and my own Book of Muscle, have covered some of this new ground, no book has yet rounded up all of it. Until now. A little background: Strength training has never been more popular. According to American Sports Data, more than 39 million Americans now belong to health clubs. That’s well over 10 percent of the adult population. More than 50 million trained with free weights, in some fashion, in 2003, and that’s up 25 percent since 1998. And yet, you can walk into any gym in America and see that the popularity of strength training runs far ahead of the average lifter’s knowledge and competence. Some people invite injury, which is completely unnecessary. Strength training, done correctly, should prevent injuries, not cause them. But the bigger issue—and the reason I’m writing this book—is results. Most people don’t get a fraction of the benefits they should achieve from weight lifting, given the time, effort, and expense they devote to it.

You have three major goals in these opening paragraphs:

1. Identify the need for this book


11

2. Identify the audience that needs it

3. Show whoever’s reading the proposal that you have the talent and know-

how to write this book for that audience

The rest of the Overview section highlights some of the important features of your book. If it’s a workout book, you’ll describe the workouts in a way that’s specific but not mind-‐numbingly so. You’ll say how long the workouts take, how often they’re performed, and how long the reader needs to do the workouts to get the promised results. If you have a nutrition section, or if you have a particularly unique or effective approach to motivating your readers, you want to highlight that here. But you want to avoid bogging down the editor in the details of those features. It’s important to keep in mind that the person reading your proposal may not know much about the subject. Editors and agents, by necessity, are generalists. If they’re reading a proposal for your fitness book, chances are good they’ve worked with fitness books in the past—the agent has sold some, and the editor has published some. The editor may actually specialize in fitness books. But don’t kid yourself: No matter how many fitness books the editor has published or the agent has sold, neither one is an expert on fitness. They know how to sell, edit, and position these books in the marketplace, but they have no background in your field. They don’t know what you know, and they aren’t particularly interested in learning. What they want from your proposal—and what you have to deliver in these opening pages—is confidence that you know your field, that you’re an expert, and that your expertise will translate into a successful book. 2. Marketing Once you’ve accomplished the three imperatives of your Overview section—you’ve shown the need for this book, described the potential audience, and demonstrated why you’re the person who can deliver it—you have to convince the editor that your book has money-‐making potential. This is how I described the target audience for NROL:


12

My target audience for this book is men from their 20s to their 50s. There’s nothing in here that women wouldn’t be able to use, but the book’s voice and tone are more in tune with the audience I’ve built over the past 12 ½ years in Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness. Likewise, this would be a fine book for teens, but they might be more interested in learning the old rules of lifting before they venture toward the new ones.

You’ll see that I actually made a huge mistake when I said women wouldn’t be interested. A few dozen angry emails convinced me to start working on a proposal for a new book, which eventually became The New Rules of Lifting for Women. It came out two years later and quickly outpaced the sales of NROL. Nobody expects you to be clairvoyant, but they do expect you to meet the standards I listed above: you’re targeting a substantial audience, one that has a history of buying books in your genre. The rest of the Marketing section describes how you’ll get the attention of this audience. A few years ago I would’ve told you that editors won’t be impressed by your online networks. They’ll want to know about offline contacts. Can you get an excerpt in a major magazine? Can you get on TV and radio? Do you have speaking engagements where you can sell books by the dozens, if not hundreds? Those things are still important (especially TV). But editors today understand the growing importance of online connections, and the free-‐falling impact of traditional media. If you have an email list of 10,000 or more, and a network of fellow professionals who have lists that big or bigger, you have access to an audience the publisher can’t reach on its own. Remember that editors will Google you, check out your Facebook page, look at your Twitter feed, and may also analyze website data. They’ll read your posts. I don’t know how deeply they’ll look into all these things, because today’s editors are more squeezed for time than ever. Just remember that your entire body of work is in play. That last point explains why I can continue to publish books without having the sort of social-‐media presence that many of you have. I have a body of work that’s easily tracked and measured. 3. Competition Now you’re going to compare your proposed book to others that have already been published. This is the part where editors can figure out whether or not you’re delusional. If you compare your book to The 4-Hour Body, it had better be with tongue in cheek, or at least with the acknowledgement that you aren’t Tim Ferriss and your book isn’t likely to sell millions of copies.


13

The goal is to find three or four books that are genuinely comparable to yours—you’re addressing the same problems for the same target audience. For me, there’s a fine line to walk here: My instinct is to say snarky things about the competing books. After all, I wouldn’t be proposing a competitive book if I didn’t think the existing books missed the mark and left the audience worse off than they were before they picked them. But the person reading the proposal might be the editor of one of those books, or a friend of the author, so you have to be kind and complimentary to the books you’ve chosen while still making the case that this slice of the market needs your book more than ever. Here’s an example from my proposal for The New Rules of Lifting for Women. Reading between the lines, I think you can see how I struggled to keep from crossing the line into outright ridicule:

Lean, Long & Strong, by Wini Linguvic I was curious about this one because a) it used the word “strong” in the title (vs. the myriad titles with “sculpting” or “shaping”); and b) it was the only one with a five-‐star Amazon review from the author’s mother. It has terrific design and a friendly, straightforward authorial voice. There’s one kind of interesting innovation in the program design: Wini has readers mix stretches in with strength exercises. But the problems begin with its one innovation. Stretching between sets is a terrible idea; a study published a year ago in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that stretching before lifting reduces muscle endurance dramatically. That means you can do less work, which means you get less out of the programs. I have other problems with the book—the workouts are of such low volume and intensity that they seem unlikely to work particularly well, and the diet is far too low in calories (I’ll explain the problems with low-‐calorie diets later in this proposal)—but I’ll note that it helped me in one major way: It offered the final confirmation that women are terribly underserved by the exercise and diet books currently in the market.

4. The authors Write a few nice paragraphs about yourself here, along with a short bio of your coauthors. This section won’t do a lot to sell the book to the editor, but a poorly written or obviously delusional biography (“Joe Smith is considered one of the


14

greatest coaches in the history of the universe …”) might convince an editor to quit reading. Editors know bullshit when they see it. Don’t test their B.S. detectors. I’ll repeat something here that I first mentioned in Part 1: You have to eliminate all online-‐fitness-‐world clichés, and eliminate them with extreme prejudice. Unless you’ve actually trained soldiers while standing in trenches, don’t assume editors are going to be impressed by your claim to have worked “in the trenches.” The same goes for silly boasts about being a “world-‐renowned presenter” (because you once gave a talk in Iceland) or an “acclaimed physique-‐transformation coach” (because someone identified only by her initials said so in your own marketing materials). They wouldn’t be reading your proposal if they didn’t already assume you were a veteran fitness professional with unique and valuable knowledge. If you aren’t those things, there is absolutely no reason for them to publish your book, and all you’re doing with your proposal is wasting everyone’s valuable time. 5. Contents Here you’ll write a detailed description of the content of each chapter. If you do this right, by the time you’re finished you’ll feel as if you’ve written the entire book. Your goal is to leave nothing to the editor’s imagination. She should understand exactly what the contents of your book will include. 6. Sample chapter(s) Two or three sample chapters, if they’re good, will go a long way toward convincing an editor not just that you have a great idea, but that you’re capable of writing a terrific book. The more convinced the editor is, the more money you’ll be offered for your book. But here’s fair warning: A bad sample chapter has the opposite effect. When I was a book editor at Rodale, I’d look at proposals from well-‐known, veteran fitness-‐book authors and cringe not just at the lazy effort, not just at the sloppiness of thought behind the effort, not just at the mediocrity of the idea itself, but at the very idea that the author thought someone like me would be so impressed with his or her name that I’d make an offer based on a proposal that wouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a freshman composition class. Sean emphasized this in Part 3, and I’ll repeat it here: If you want to succeed in publishing, you must follow the rules of publishing. The first rule is to act like a professional. Turning in a poorly conceived and poorly written proposal, no matter how big a name you have in the fitness industry, will turn off publishing professionals.


15

Agent of Change You don’t absolutely have to have an agent. If, for example, a publishing company is offering you what appears to be a straightforward gig—write a book about a specific topic, within clear parameters—and there’s no room to maneuver, an agent won’t be able to do much for you. (Although you still want to have a lawyer look at the contract.) However, those deals are rare, and there’s often more wiggle room than the publisher wants to acknowledge. People in the publishing business can be as ruthless, venal, predatory, and dishonest as people in any other business. Sometimes an editor or executive will look you right in the eye and tell you things that aren’t true, with the goal of getting you to accept a sucker deal—one that’s good for them, but bad for you. An experienced agent will know the tricks, and know which individuals and companies are more or less trustworthy. He can negotiate on your behalf without forcing you into an argument with people you subsequently must work with to produce the book. That’s why some companies will try to persuade first-‐time authors to take their initial offer, telling them an agent will just take 15 percent of the money without providing anything of value. It might be true, but it probably isn’t. Like I said, even in the genteel world of publishing, you’ll find some hardball tactics and deceptive dealings. So how do you find an agent? The best way is through a referral—your friend or colleague is a published author who recommends you to his or her agent. I say that with trepidation, knowing that some of you reading this will come to me asking for a referral to my own agent, and I’ll turn you down. Why? For starters, a recommendation is a highly personal transaction. I’m vouching for you. If I don’t know you, I won’t take the risk. But even if I know you, I may not think your idea is worthy of the agent’s time. Most likely, you’ll have to approach an agent cold. The best way to do this is to find an agent who works for authors who are most like you, and who has represented books that are most like yours. You can find them through online research, or by looking at the Acknowledgments page of books in your area of interest. Before you contact the agent, do your homework. At minimum, make sure he’s still alive and in business. Look at his website and see who else the agent represents. See


16

how the agent prefers to be contacted. Some accept email queries, while others want you to print out your pitch and mail it. Make your best pitch, and keep it succinct: two or three paragraphs to describe the idea, bracketed by a couple of sentences to introduce and describe yourself. Ask if the agent would like to see the full proposal. After that, you might hear back immediately, never, or anything in between. If an agent asks to see the proposal and then agrees to work with you, understand that he’ll probably ask you to revise it. My agent always wants me to provide a longer, deeper, more detailed proposal. He sees a direct correlation between the amount of work you do up front and the amount of money you get in return. I can’t tell you if that’s the norm; I just know it’s his strategy, and it’s worked well for me. How you work with the agent from there will vary from situation to situation. The agent may become your friend, or he may be someone you rarely see or hear from. Remember, his job is to sell books. When he’s not selling yours, he’s selling someone else’s. You have to respect his time, and remember that an agent who isn’t busy probably isn’t worth having as your representative.

Now It’s Time to Talk About Money A traditional publishing deal typically includes three or four payments, which collectively are called an “advance.” The first payment comes “on signing”—that is, when the contract is signed. This part always takes longer than any reasonable person thinks it should. You cannot depend on this money to pay your bills while you write the book. On several occasions I received this payment within weeks of the deadline, and once I didn’t get paid until after. (We withheld the book until they finished the contract and wrote the check.) The second is on “delivery and acceptance.” In theory, this means that you submitted the manuscript and supporting materials (including photos and other graphic elements) on time, and that you provided the editor with whatever revisions she requested. (An editor will always ask you to revise something. If she doesn’t, she’s not doing her job.) In reality, it means whatever the publisher wants it to mean. The third payment comes “on publication,” and for most of my career this meant when the book actually came off the printer. But in my latest contracts it’s been revised to mean when the book is on sale and the author has done everything he reasonably can to promote it. So, like “on signing” and “delivery and acceptance,” “on publication” now means whatever the people who write the check want it to mean.


17

If there is a fourth payment, it will come 12 months after the book’s initial publication or upon release of the paperback edition, if it started as a hardcover. This one, like the others, now arrives somewhat later than I’ve come to expect. Since I’m talking about three or four payments, you’d assume I’m talking about a lot of money. I’m not. The average advance is about $30,000. The average time from start to publication is about two years. The risk is all yours until the moment a publisher decides to invest in your book. And even then, the risk is mostly yours. Let’s say that your deal is for $50,000—a little better than average. Your payments will probably be staggered, so the first is the biggest, and the fourth is the smallest. So let’s say your contract calls for $20,000 upon signing, $15,000 upon delivery and acceptance, $10,000 upon publication, and $5,000 12 months later. Of that, 85 percent is yours, and 15 percent goes to your agent. The publisher pays the agent, and the agent pays you. So the first check is for $17,000. But with that first check, you have to pay your own expenses. A photo shoot for one of the New Rules of Lifting books costs between $9,000 and $10,000. That includes the photographer, his assistant(s), the models, their transportation and lodging, and all meals. It can certainly be done for less, especially if you’re a trainer with your own facility in a city where there are plenty of good photographers, and you demonstrate the exercises yourself. Then again, it could cost a lot more, if you have to rent a studio in a place like New York or L.A. Photos are my only major expense, but you might have others, like the cost of a ghostwriter or editor, or travel, or research. (Some journals will charge $30 or more to download a single study.) So what’s the payoff for all this work, and all these expenses?

How to Make Money in Traditional Publishing My first book, Testosterone Advantage Plan, was a work-‐for-‐hire job. I think the total writing budget was a little over $50,000, and as I recall I got paid about half of it, and my coauthors got the other half. Work for hire means you get a freelance fee, and the publisher owns all rights. They can publish it in any format or any language as many times as they want. They can break it up into smaller bits and republish those in still more formats and languages.


18

Work for hire is almost always a bad deal for writers. You don’t have control over anything, including the way your name is or isn’t used. In my case, the book was successful and gave me a career as an author that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I would love to have collected royalties on all those sales, but that was never on the table. My two choices were: 1) write the book for hire, and hope for the best; 2) walk away and wait for a better deal. I worked for the company at that time, and they were going to produce the book no matter what I decided. So door #1 made the most sense. The consequences of writing a successful book for my employer, good and bad, caught me by surprise. My name was taken off one book I wrote (The Belly-Off Program) and put onto another that I mostly edited and supervised (Home Workout Bible). So there was a lot of baggage associated with The Book of Muscle, my next book for the company. My coauthor and I were paid a very small advance, just $30,000 for the two of us. The book came out in the fall of 2003, and I’ve made more than 10 times my advance in royalties since then. That makes it a good deal, right? Frankly, it was a terrible deal, and it’s the reason I’ve used an agent for all my subsequent books. If the agent is doing his job, his 15 percent commission should be a bargain. It should pay for itself several times over. First, he should get you a better deal than you could ever get for yourself. That means more money up front, and a better chance to make money down the road. Best-‐case scenario (which, to be honest, almost never occurs), the agent gets you so much money up front that you don’t have to worry about royalties. For The New Rules of Lifting, my agent got several publishers to bid against each other, and Alwyn and I ended up with a terrific deal. Our four subsequent books have been with the same editor at Avery, and we couldn’t be happier with the partnership. Let’s return to royalties. Technically, your advance is an “advance against royalties,” meaning that the publisher invests capital in your book, and the proceeds from sales repay the advance. If your book comes out in hardcover, the royalty rate typically starts at 10 percent of the book’s cover price and with higher sales increases to 15 percent. You’ll probably get 7.5 percent of the cover price for a paperback. Your $50,000 advance can be repaid fast if the book comes out in hardcover and sells well. I’ll use some nice round numbers to make the math easy (for my benefit as much as yours): We’ll say in this example that your book comes out January 1, with a cover price of $25. Your contract calls for a 10 percent royalty rate on the first 5,000 sales


19

($12,500), 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 ($15,625) and 15 percent on everything beyond 10,000 sales. If you sell 15,000 books the first year, your royalty account shows $46,875. Let’s say you sell just enough e-‐books, virtually all of them on Kindle, to earn another $3,125. Congratulations! You’ve paid back your advance your first year in print! The book comes out in paperback on January 1, 12 months after the hardcover. Your royalty rate is 7.5 percent of the paperback’s $15 cover price. But your sales go up initially, especially if the publisher invests some of its credit (known as co-‐op) with Barnes & Noble and buys space for the book on the tables at the front of the store. If you sell 2,000 books in January, you’ve just put $2,250 in your royalty account. You also have 100 hardcover sales (people don’t stop buying the hardcover when a paperback comes out), giving you another $375. For good measure, let’s throw in some more Kindle sales, enough to give you $200 more in royalties. (I don’t get specific about ebook prices and royalty rates because the math makes my brain hurt.) That’s $2,825, free and clear, for January alone. Woohoo! Don’t sit by your mailbox waiting for it. Publishers pay royalties twice a year. We’ll say your publisher has a simple fiscal year: the first royalty period is January 1 to June 30, and the second is July 1 to December 31. The contract allows them to take 90 days from the end of the royalty period to calculate your royalties and cut a check. That means you get paid on September 30 for the books you sold on January 1. But even then, the check goes to your agent first, who deposits it in his account and then writes you a check on his own schedule. (My agency expedites this, but they don’t have to.) The $2,825 you earned in January arrives in your mailbox sometime in mid-‐October, and it’s actually $2,400, since your agent gets 15 percent. Then again, you also get paid for February, March, April, May, and June sales, so your first royalty check in this example should be in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $7,000, depending on how your sales hold up beyond January. The real money, though, will come with your next book deal. Selling 15,000 hardcovers in 12 months your first time out is pretty good. Because your advance was a bargain for the publisher, which started earning a profit on the book long before you started collecting royalties, your editor will want to see your next proposal. This proposal won’t have to be as elaborate as the first one. You don’t have to worry about sample chapters, for one thing. For another, you’re not selling you, the author, so much as you’re selling your new book.


20

You still need a great idea, and you still need to show that there’s a substantial audience out there waiting for you to bring it to them. But this time around, the editor will have every incentive to work with you again. And although her bosses will pressure her to keep your next advance as low as possible, your agent wants to drive it as high as he can. You’ve earned it, for one thing. For another, his livelihood and professional reputation depend on him getting the best possible deals for his clients.

Your Book Doesn’t Sell Itself. You Sell the Book, and It Sells You. We’ve covered the two most direct ways you can make money in traditional publishing:

1. The advance, which, in this example, will be more substantial for your second book than your first

2. Royalties, which are really a consolation prize, since they prove that everyone undervalued your idea and underestimated your ability to sell it

Yes, you sell the book. The publisher will do some things, which if you’re lucky will include buying co-‐op to make the book more visible in stores, and arranging for TV, radio, and print interviews. But if your book takes off, it’s because you did a solid job building your credibility with an audience that was willing to risk their time and money to buy and use your product. If it continues selling beyond the first few weeks, it’s because your readers have now become your adjunct sales force, evangelizing your message and your product to their friends and associates. You now have credibility. Yes, you were credible before, but only to a closed circle of enthusiasts and fellow pros. It may be a big circle, and it may overlap with the circles of the other pros in your network, but the universe beyond your constellation of fans and allies didn’t know you existed, or care. A successful book changes that. You now have a calling card that the gatekeepers of the traditional media understand and appreciate. You’ve been vetted and found to be legitimate by your agent, editor, and publisher, as well as your audience. You’ll be


21

quoted as an expert on your topic in newspapers and magazines. The easiest way for a reporter to convey your authority to his or her readers is to describe you as “author of …” But none of this happens unless you make it happen. Some authors are really good at building on their credibility, and others aren’t. Your first priority is to make sure anyone who’s interested can find out about your growing reputation. Your book should be prominently featured on your website. Each time you’re interviewed by a publication, you should highlight it on your blog, blast it out to your email list, and note it in your marketing materials. For example, if you go to Eric Cressey’s website, right up top you see “As featured in,” followed by a list of the media outlets in which he’s been quoted as an expert: Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, ESPN, Baseball America, and Yahoo Sports. You may wonder what a niche publication like Baseball America is doing in the middle of those international brands. Since Eric specializes in training young baseball players, it’s the media outlet that most directly projects his expertise. You have to decide what’s most important to your business, and pursue it.

• If most of your revenue comes from your gym or face-‐to-‐face treatments or consultations, then your biggest boost could come from local media—TV, radio, newspaper, city or regional magazine.

• If your business is mainly online, having your name in Women’s Health or Men’s Fitness would serve you better than being quoted in the local paper.

• If you specialize in bowlers or MMA fighters or high-‐net-‐worth clients, then you want to use your legitimacy as a published author to build a presence in media that reach that audience.

For lack of a better term, we can call those inroads “presence multipliers.” The payoff is indirect, and still depends on you promoting yourself as someone who’s taken seriously by media gatekeepers. You might make some money writing articles for those publications, but that’s just a bonus. The goal is to build a foundation of refereed legitimacy. A more direct payoff could come from public speaking, a topic that could fill a chapter if I thought I knew enough that was worth sharing. All I know is that corporations pay speakers to motivate or inform their employees on a variety of topics. Somebody gets those gigs. Why not you?


22

DIY Publishing The path I’ve just described is difficult, frustrating, and ultimately available to a small subset of fitness and nutrition pros. That’s by design. If it were easy and straightforward, anyone could get a traditional publishing deal, and there’d be no real benefit to you. It wouldn’t confer any legitimacy or separate you from your peers. Even those who succeed may decide it wasn’t worth the effort and personal expense. The increasingly popular alternative is self-‐publishing, which can be a better and faster way to make money from your work. Some of you reading this know more about DIY publishing than I do. Many of you have created online programs, written ebooks or manuals, produced DVDs, and developed networks of affiliates to help you sell them. What I’m talking about is similar, but much narrower: self-‐publishing a book through platforms like Kindle, Nook, and whatever else comes along by the time you read this. First, let’s look at the numbers. Say you write a proposal as described earlier, and the book doesn’t sell. You still believe in the idea, so you decide to write it anyway (Your detailed outline and sample chapters give you a good head start.) It won’t need to be as long as a printed book, and if you include photos they won’t need to be the same quality. You probably want to spend some money for a copyeditor to clean up your manuscript, and if you aren’t technically adroit you’ll need to hire someone to format it for Kindle. Now you can publish it whenever you want, and charge whatever you think readers will pay. To research strategies, I would start with Joe Konrath’s blog (jakonrath.blogspot.com). Konrath is a mystery novelist who was among the first authors to profit from Kindle self-‐publishing. He’s not an expert in our area of nonfiction, but he knows and shares more information about DIY publishing in general than anyone I’m aware of. He has lots of posts on sales strategies. What works for him may not work for you or me, but it gives you a starting point. For now, let’s say that you price your Kindle book at a constant $5.99. With a royalty rate of 70 percent (minus a few pennies Amazon will deduct for its “delivery cost”), you net $4.15 per book, and it’s yours free and clear from first month to last. Sell 15,000 books and your take is $62,250. On the plus side:


23

• You can write and self-publish a book in a few months (the time it takes me to write a good proposal), vs. the average of two years it takes for one of my books to appear in print.

• You can keep expenses down. Your biggest expense should be the editor you hire to clean up your manuscript and make it appear more professional.

• You get paid every month, with a straightforward accounting system. (Royalty statements in conventional publishing are nearly indecipherable.)

• You don’t have to give an agent 15 percent. Unless you have a coauthor, the money is all yours.

• If you want to sell a paper version of your book, you can always use a print-on-demand service, which produces books to order. Some also handle fulfillment. Revenue splits will vary, and I suspect print and paper quality will vary as well. But it’s a generally painless way to make your book available to those who choose paper over plastic.

On the other hand:

• There’s a reason why the traditional publishing process takes so long. There’s a lot of time to review and revise.

• No matter how well you write, or how skillful your hired editor may be, it probably won’t look or read exactly like a book from a mainstream publisher.

• You aren’t likely to sell a lot of books unless you have a tremendous online presence and network. My publisher discourages ebook sales—the Kindle version of one of my books is currently priced at $14.99, which is almost 20 percent more than Amazon charges for the paperback—but when I looked at its sales rank just now, I saw it was in the top 20,000 books in the paid Kindle store. For comparison, I looked at my friends’ self-‐published Kindle books, including fiction and nonfiction. Not one was ranked in the top 100,000, despite prices ranging from $4.99 to just 99 cents.

That last point doesn’t matter if traditional publishing isn’t an option. It’s only when you have a choice that you have to take all this into consideration. For all the self-‐publishing evangelism you’ll find online (and there’s a lot), there aren’t many writers who turn down traditional book deals so they can take their chances on their own.


24

Back in December 2010 I attended an all-‐day ebook summit in New York. At the time I was in kind of a panic over the future of my profession. My goal was to learn all I could about the DIY future. To my surprise, all the authors who’d been paid to speak at the summit admitted that they still published their books the old-‐fashioned way, same as me. They marveled at how inefficient the system is, and how crazy it is to finish a book and then wait a year or more before readers can actually buy it. But they still used that system because of what it does for them that they can’t do for themselves. My advice, for what it’s worth: If you think you have a breakout idea for a book, at least explore traditional options before self-‐publishing. Write the proposal, and look for an agent. If you have contacts in publishing, pitch one or more of them the idea to get a sense of its commercial possibilities. You never know; one of them may offer to publish your book without making you go through an agent (although it’s still a good idea to have an agent represent you before you sign anything). The worst that can happen is you spend a few months in limbo. Your great idea will still be a great idea, and you can spend the time writing more of it. If after all that you end up self-‐publishing anyway, you’ll still have a book you can promote and sell with pride. And it will still take less time than a traditional book would have. Best-‐case scenario, you get a deal to publish your book that includes money up front. It won’t be as much as you’d hoped, or arrive as fast as you think it should, but it’s still money that someone else is investing in your project.

Date post:	03-Nov-2021
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	4 times
Download:	0 times

By Lou Schuler

Documents