What's the Best Way to Get a Book Deal?
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
I have been listening to Guy Raz’s podcast, How I Built This, through much of the pandemic. There are amazing stories of entrepreneurial innovation and resilience, and I find them to be both inspiring and instructive. The more I coach writers, the more I believe that we need to adopt core lessons from business in order to do our best work. It’s one of the reasons I love teaching book coaches about business because the more they know about business, the more they can help writers consider the reader and the marketplace, which leads to better books.
(If you are intrigued about Guy Raz, go listen to the How I Built This episode about the founding of Goodreads; it’s core to our industry and a riveting story. Also, go listen to the FAQ episode where Raz talks about how much research and fact-checking he and his team do for each episode; that kind of dedication and preparation should be inspiring to anyone who creates content of any kind.)
At the end of each episode, Raz asks his guests the same question: How much of your success do you attribute to luck and how much do you attribute to hard work?
I have been thinking about this question because in the last few weeks, I helped two writers — one of whom lost a book deal in a flash and the other of whom landed a book deal in a flash. These experiences feel like they capture the instability of publishing right now as the industry continues to undergo changes that none of us can predict.
Books Can Be Lost and Found In a Flash
The person who lost the book deal has been working for years to learn how to write a novel and for a year to write this particular book. She had signed with an agent last year who was supportive and interested in her work, waiting for it, invested in the outcome — but the moment the agent read the first pages and saw a particular theme, they instantly decided it was not for them. (I am intentionally being vague to protect the parties.) Suddenly, the writer was back to square one. It was a stroke of bad luck.
The person who landed the book deal came up with their book idea about a week before she got the offer. She was at a social event with a publisher and in the course of their conversation, said something that caught the publisher’s attention. “That should be a book!” the publisher said. The writer whipped up a short proposal, secured an agent, and signed the book deal. It was a stroke of fairy-godmother-level good luck.
These two parallel realities were a shocking reminder that so much that happens in publishing is a roll of the dice – in other words, it is not in our control.
The Truth About Luck
But it’s also a reminder that you can’t roll the dice if you haven’t done hard work. Obviously, this is not an original thought. I Googled “famous quotes about luck and hard work” and this is some of what I found:
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” —Seneca
“I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” —Thomas Jefferson
“Luck is not chance, it’s toil; fortune’s expensive smile is earned.” —Emily Dickinson
“I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.” —Brian Tracy
The last quote about taking more chances, being more active, and showing up more often applies to both these situations.
The person who got the “instant” book deal has been creating things and making things and doing public-facing work for many years. She’d already written one book. She hosts a podcast on the topic of the book she proposed. She has had a hundred conversations and thought deeply about the idea – she just hadn’t put anything on the page yet. But she was active, she showed up, she took chances in her work all the time.
And the person who lost the book deal did not even spend 30 minutes feeling sorry for herself. She loves the book she wrote and believes in it and will do what she can to get it into readers’ hands. Thirty minutes after the dissolution of the agent contract, she was out querying again.
Will she get an agent and a book deal? Maybe. Maybe not. No one knows.
And in the midst of trying, she may decide that another path to publishing is a better path for her project. She may decide to pitch a small press, or work with a hybrid publisher, or bring the book out herself. In recent days, we’ve seen a writer with his own publishing company make $30 million in a Kickstarter campaign — so truly anything is possible!
But she is doing the only things she can control. These are, in my estimation, the best ways to get a book deal and also the best way to make anything good happen for your writing:
1. Take more chances
Maybe for you, taking a chance means deciding to write about a topic or in a genre that scares you. Maybe it means deciding to start pitching a book you’ve been trying to perfect the entire pandemic. Maybe it means asking for help from a friend or an acquaintance. Maybe it means hiring a book coach to help you get across the finish line. Maybe it means becoming a book coach — a surprisingly effective training for learning how to be a better writer. Maybe it means signing up for a writing retreat or a writing conference or working with a book coach.
2. Be more active
Do your work and engage with other people doing the work, too. Find writers, book coaches, agents, and editors you admire and follow them on social media. Review their books, subscribe to their podcasts, say hello to them, and thank them for what they do. It’s what leads to having a network and to being part of the writing community. (If you don’t already follow me, pick me! I’m on Instagram at @jennienashbookcoach and on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at @jennienash. I promise I’ll say hi back!)
3. Show up more often
Show up for yourself and your writing. Show up when it’s hard, show up when you don’t want to, show up when you would rather flop on the couch and watch Netflix. The only difference between people who publish books and those who don’t is that the people who publish keep showing up and keep on writing.
