Your summer publishing questions answered, Round 5

Verifying there's a market for your book proposal, must you start a newsletter, querying the same agent for two genres, why I'm remiss to talk about hiring independent publicists and more!

Good morning, and happy Friday.

Will I get through all your summer publishing questions before the leaves fall? I don’t know! But I’m going to try. Without further ado, let’s get to Q and A-ing. (Remember that the text of each question is repeated in the footnotes if you have images disabled or have difficulty reading the text-in-images.)

Question 1: How do I know if there is a market for my book proposal before it feels too late?

This is such a great question, Elizabeth.¹ I’ve got seven recommendations to help writers sort out whether there’s a market for a project before they’re too far down the road to turn around. Forgive number one and two being self promotional, but helping people write book proposals is something that I’m big on!

1. Listen to a long-form podcast interview I did with Brad Listi on preparing book proposals. In it, I get into the why and how of book proposals from both the editor and the writer’s point of view, and a few of the case studies I mention might illuminate what makes a project market-ready or not.

2. My online book proposal writing class has four homework assignments that should make it glaringly obvious whether or not there is a market for your book. That class can be purchased at a special discount here.

3. Understand what “a market for something” means in publishing. There are tons of ways to think about a “market” and lots of ways to describe the market, too. But in order to make sense of publishing madness, I encourage you to equate “the market” with one faceless person standing in a bookshop. That person is a woman aged between 30-45 years old. She has some discretionary income, but not a lot. She mostly reads books that are recommended to her by either friends or outlets that she trusts (like People magazine or The Today Show). She doesn’t know you. She doesn’t live in the town or state where you live. You share no friends in common. She hasn’t personally experienced the thing that you are writing about in your book. So why would this total stranger spend thirty-six dollars for your hardcover?²

That’s the million dollar question when it comes to discerning (and determining) whether there’s a market for your nonfiction. Often, memoirists will say that they know their audience: they are in forums with their readers or in recovery groups with them, they have interacted with them at subject-specific conferences. These people have connections to you personally and/or a vested interest in your book, but unless you are a celebrity or have a massive platform, to the gatekeepers, that group is not a real “market” and it’s considered limited.

For example: let’s say you have penned a memoir on birth trauma. You are in birth trauma groups and participate in a bunch of online forums— you are dialoguing with many women (maybe even hundreds) on this topic each week. To you, your “market” is full of faces and shared stories and women (or other readers) ready to champion your book. Unfortunately though, many editors and agents will see this as a limited group of people to market your book to. “Only people who have experienced birth trauma will be able to resonate with this story, and that’s too small a group,” they’ll think. I don’t agree with this approach (which itself is limiting!) but that’s something I see and hear happening all the time with memoir and nonfiction. This is why it’s crucial to come up with a double timeline in your creative nonfiction: one timeline that is personal and specific to your experience and one that is universal and can be appreciated by many. (This double timeline approach is something I teach in my online memoir class if any readers want to learn more about it!)

4. Brainstorm comp titles for your project before you start on any other section of your book proposal. (I had a post on writing comp titles for book proposals this past Wednesday if you missed it!) Understanding the competitive lay of the land for your book will help you determine whether your proposal has the chops to make it through the fiery rings of agent, editor and book deal, or whether self-publishing or hybrid-publishing would be a more rewarding path for you. And while we’re on this topic— I have worked with a lot of women recently who have sold between 2K-5K copies of their self published books their first year on pub. Those sales numbers are commensurate with a lot of the debut titles coming out from Big Five publishers, and they are not to be trifled with! Self-publishing can be a fruitful and empowered route to bookshelves, especially if you know exactly who your audience is and you know how to reach them (and agents/editors keep telling you that they don’t know what the audience for the book is, nor how to reach those people).

5. Identify your book’s Amazon categories and research other books in those sections. These categories come under the Best Sellers Rank in the Product Details section of Amazon. (For example: Glenn Doyle’s “Untamed” is under “Women's Biographies and Memoirs” and “Happiness.”) Scan through which books are in the top ten of your respective categories, and then determine why they have bestselling placement. Then look at the bottom of the category: which books aren’t breaking through? Try to sort out why their sales are sluggish, then hold these answers up against your own project to sort out where yours might land.

6. Get into a bookstore and spend quality time in the section where you think your book would sit. What books are there and who blurbed them? What is the opening chapter of the book like? Which books in that section are you prepared to buy, and which ones would you never buy for what reason? It’s important, in addition to doing comparative research in the form of a comp title section in a book proposal, to also do a comparative audit of real books on real bookshelves. You can also do some real time market research by talking to librarians and booksellers about what people are buying. Just be sure to purchase books (or take out books or make a donation if you’re at a library) as a way of acknowledging people’s time.

7. Consider that “the market” is code for something else. Sometimes gatekeepers say “we’re not sure there’s market for this” when what they really mean is “the writing isn’t there yet” and/or “this needs a ton of editing that we don't have time to partner with you on.” There’s no definitive way of knowing whether agents and editors really mean what they have written in their rejection or whether it’s code for something else, but generally, if you can come up with a good argument for why a total stranger would spend extremely hard earned money on your book, then there is a market for it, and the next step is about making sure the writing is polished and concise enough in the proposal to demonstrate that.

Question 2: Do I need to have a newsletter?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Carol’s question is one that is coming up more and more for writers.³ First things first, I have an article dedicated to this subject that answers much of the above. Accordingly, I’m going to answer Carol’s second question (which came in after she read the post I linked to): Is it worth it to do a seasonal newsletter, like one that only comes out 3-4 times a year?

To my mind, there is a difference between having an email list and running a newsletter. An email list is a spreadsheet of contacts who have opted into your writing in one way or another, either because they are related to you, married to you, went to an MFA program/college with you, or have in some way made it clear that they like you and what you write. This list of people (it can be a long list or a short one) would most likely be delighted to hear from you on a seasonal basis to learn what you are up to and what book events or classes of yours they can attend. For sporadic updates like these, platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact still make the most sense. Most offer free plans if you have a limited amount of subscribers, and their drag and drop templates make it super easy to create something that looks polished. And for people with limited time, there isn’t a community to be a part of with these platforms. You pay to share your content instead of the other way around, so you don’t owe people frequent posts, or anything at all really. It’s just a way to stay in touch from time to time.

With platforms like Substack, where people have the option to pay for your content, the people who thrive here consider it a job. We participate in Notes, we correspond with readers, we read other Substacks and invite those creators into our own content in the form of interviews and re-stacks. I’ll speak for myself here: Substack isn’t something that I do casually. I content plan. I brainstorm. I think about my Substack all the time. Accordingly (and I think that Carol already knows this in her heart of hearts) I don’t believe that Substack is a good place for people who know they’ll post infrequently. But Mailchimp’s a great fit!

Good luck with whatever path you choose and please, Carol, trust your gut! Remember that the name of the game is starting and maintaining a dialogue with your readers, and while that can happen via a newsletter, it can also happen in person, it can happen by starting something like a reading series or storytelling series, it can transpire via a silly TikTok that sees you dancing in the kitchen— there are so many ways to connect with readers, if the idea of a newsletter fills you with dread, don’t do it! Life is truly short. Choose something that is pleasurable that you can commit to without dread. Otherwise, there won’t be a benefit on either end. Readers can tell when you’re phoning it in, and you’ll hate the process. And nobody wins from that!

Question 3: Should I hire an independent publicist and also can I query both fiction and nonfiction to the same agent?

I have had plans to address this publicist question well before Nina asked about it, but I have been avoiding writing about it because it calls up very dark feelings for me.⁴ I hired an independent publicist for my third novel COSTALEGRE and it was a tremendous waste of money. I got a lot of press for that book, and all of it came from my independent publicist at my indie press—not one hit came from the independent publicist that I paid for. SO. I am going to answer this question but in a dedicated post on the topic when I’m not breaking out into hives just remembering my lost money. So in the meantime, let me answer Nina’s second question: can she query agents with both a nonfiction book proposal and a finished novel?

Not at the query level, no. Once you actually have an agent, that’s when you spill all the beans: that’s when you admit that you also have a cookbook and plans for a sci-fi trilogy and a poetry collection and a short story collection, and whatever else you have put away in banker’s boxes⁵. But when you are querying, it’s ultra important that you stick to selling one thing to one person. You want the person on the other end of the query to feel like this unique project has taken all the energy of your one and wild heart, that you are ready to go to bat for it (sell it, edit it, promote it, promote it again in paperback) over the next four years, that this book is your mate for life.

Here’s a fun story. One time, I was dating someone whose brain I found interesting, but with whom I didn’t have a lot of chemistry. After meeting at my best friend’s college, we fell for each other over Hotmail (this was in the 90s) and at the end of the summer, he invited me to join his family on a three-week tour of Italy. (His family was loaded.) Long story short, on the airplane he announced that over the summer he’d decided (he’d been leading a backpacking trip for troubled rich kids, and had been off the grid for 6 weeks) that he was no longer into touching or intimacy of any kind. So what the hell was I doing reaching cruising altitude with this dude and his family?

After a few nights of it being proven that this young man absolutely did not want to be touched or touch people (me) any more, I admitted to his family that things were on the rocks and I wasn’t sure if I should continue on their Great Italian Tour. This conversation happened in a church in Sienna between me and this boy’s stepmother. “Ugh, that’s so annoying,” the stepmother said to me. “You chose the wrong son! My son is much better, you should have dated him.”

The way that made me feel—like these men were interchangeable—is how I would feel as an agent or editor if someone queried me saying “If you don’t like my novel, you might like my nonfiction book proposal!” Don’t do that in a query letter, and don’t do that in a church in Italy. Especially if your projects are in different genres, you should query one at a time.

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On that note, I will leave you. Have a great weekend— I’m traveling to Chicago as you read this for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association conference where I’m teaching two classes.

Thanks for being there if you are joining me, and thanks for being here!

1. Elizabeth’s question: Hi Courtney! Thanks for this opportunity. When I queried my last nonfiction proposal, I kept getting the feedback that it was well-written but there wasn't a market for it. As I get ready to start a second proposal, I'm trying to figure out how to assess the market _before_ I invest the time and energy into it. Thanks!

2. That’s right. Thirty-six dollars. The price of hardcovers is going up.

3. Carol’s question: Hi Courtney - I have a burning question about newsletters, and I know you've got a successful one, you convinced me-of-little-funds to subscribe to your paid service because I love you. I am a small fry author on the fence about starting a newsletter. On one hand, I can see the benefit of offering content via email to readers not on social media, and I did bite the bullet and hire a publicist (who was willing to work with my puny budget), and this is a service they offer and recommend. On the other hand, it irritates me that authors are constantly having to write for free. I don't think I have the bandwidth to keep up social media and write my next book and do events and write articles and start a newsletter. My website designer and agent both say they haven't seen evidence that newsletters are worth it. But publicists say they are. What say you, great and all mighty Maum? / Thank you, Courtney! I had not read this -- helpful! And I appreciate you sending the link and giving of your time. Can a newsletter still be effective if you're only posting seasonally, as in four times a year?

4. Nina’s question: Hi Courtney! I have two questions. What is your take on authors spending their own money on independent publicists alongside debut book publication? When does doing so make sense? I would also be interested to know what you'd assume if an agent or editor encourage an author to do so.

Could you comment on how to approach querying agents if you have a non-fiction book proposal as well as a finished novel manuscript? Should these be bundled somehow, or does picking one and once agented, mentioning the second make sense? (These two books are on wildly different subject matter.) Thank you!

5. Cause you read that Lauren Groff NYT profile, right?‘