What Book Publishers Really Want

Filed under Get Published.

Book publishers are a strange and secretive breed. As a writer looking to get published it is your job to try and work out just what book publishers are looking for when taking on new books. The good news is that book publishers are also simple folk and this guide will help you understand the workings of their minds.

The first thing book publishers want your book to be:

Well Written – Books get rejected by book publishers for many reasons but the most common is simply that they are not well written enough. It is true that a book publisher will work with a writer to improve their book but the text has to be of the highest standard at the start. If a book publisher thinks a book needs too much work it will be rejected.

The second thing book publishers want your book to be:

Appropriate – I am not talking about appropriate language here, instead that your book needs to be appropriate to the book publisher’s business model. Book publishers and their imprints all have a different focus. Angry Robot publishes ‘the best in brand new genre fiction’, whilst Northern Eye Books publish ‘walking, scrambling and outdoors books for Wales and Northwest England.’ Clearly pitching a SF novel to Northern Eye books is a waste of time. This is a clear example but sometimes a book publisher’s specialist interest is not so easy to spot. Book publishers are ONLY interested in books that fit their publishing mandate. It is your job as a writer to find the book publisher that fits your book.

The third thing book publishers want your book to be:

Commercial - Here I am not talking best seller, but I am saying your book needs to have a large enough market to cover the expense needed to get the book on the book shelves. Book publishers will have different expectations for the number of books they expect a title to sell and will fit their budget around these estimates. Book publishers will only take on books they think will sell enough books to at least break even.

The fourth thing book publishers want your book to be:

Differently different – Book publishers are looking for books that are different enough from their current list to be interesting to readers, book sellers, marketing departments and sales teams. The trick is to pitch your book so it falls firmly within an established genre, yet is differently different enough to generate a buzz. Not easy…

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  • http://mopedronin.tumblr.com Made in DNA

    You could do that, but at what price? BE YOU! WRITE THE BOOK YOU WANT! WRITE FOR YOU AND ONLY YOU! Then publish it yourself. This is the model I have successfully followed.

  • http://chrisroutledge.co.uk Chris Routledge

    I think as long as you are realistic and understand that your book may never have an audience, writing what you want is fine. Unfortunately a lot of wannabe writers write the book they want to write and then expect commercial publishers to fall over themselves to get hold of it. Commercial publishing–and thus being read by people who are not family members–is all about compromise; usually, it has to be said, on the part of the writer.

  • http://notenoughwords.wordpress.com Merrilee

    What Chris said, with bells on.

    And as an addendum to Mr DNA – surely you can write what you want and still find a publisher to suit. The breadth of stories available and the variety of imprints and sub-genres says to me that there will be a match for everyone.

    If you’re writing for a limited audience, certainly consider self-publishing. But also be aware that you can BE yourself, write what you want and find a niche in the bookstore.

  • http://notenoughwords.wordpress.com Merrilee

    Also, thank you Gary for a well thought out post.

  • http://twitter.com/Jeff__Emmerson Jeff Emmerson

    Cheers to Indie Publishing: The way of the future!

    - Jeff Emmerson

  • http://twitter.com/Jeff__Emmerson Jeff Emmerson

    Cheers to Indie Publishing: The way of the future!- Jeff Emmerson

  • Mike Riles

    Greetings:I hope this missive finds you in good health. I am the author of numerous books that can be viewed on line (Google Books by Michael Riles and A Marriage of Convenience by Robert O’Shea). The enclosed file contains the works I’ve written and which were published along with their links to some of the websites that market the stories.    The final edit is being performed for my current book entitled The Great Recession – The Making and the Breaking of a Patriot. I’ve enclosed a synopsis of the story below. It scans a lengthy period of time in the life of Michael Sims, a boy not meant to be, yet one who, in spite of the hurdles heaved at him, manages to eke out a rather interesting and somewhat stellar life growing up in the 1950′s and 1960′s in Chicago. He comes of age in the 1970′s as he confronts the smarmy side of corporate America with each and every job he is hired to perform after finishing college. The exception is a software firm headed by Brahmans, good and spiritual people from India. But his big break comes at age 59 when, in the height of the Great Recession, a major German firm makes him an offer to leave a tapped out America, both financially and morally. The offer comes just in time for him and his family as his income sinks to half of what it was before the 2008 economic crash. The Great Recession is rooted in actual events based on the author’s life experiences. It is a simple story of struggle and fidelity coupled with an amazing ability to endure the profane and the putrid that invests American institutions unable to handle the duplicity they, in effect, create. Towards the end the reader encounters some expected diatribes but the writer holds no punches. Everybody is complicit in some way be they liberal, conservative, left, right or moderate. Michael Sims is the kind of individual the “users” see coming “a mile away”, a man endowed with a solid work ethic only to be used by both employers and his government. Everybody is complicit in the downturn that catapults America into an abyss it has not seen since the Civil War. But the “end” comes as the Sims family leaves an America in total chaos.    I am curious if you are looking for a story that ends with a normal American family being put through the proverbial “ringer” in his own country only to be offered a new life, in the new “old world” where a new “Mayflower” makes its debut – only this time the Ark of Redemption bears the word “Lufthansa”.   I should have this work ready for a publisher’s review by the end of September. Let me know if you would like to see it. The screenplay is done and is being reviewed by some agents and producers.  All the books I’ve published are controversial, this one especially. Some are coming up for contract renewal should I so chose.  If any of them interest you let me know and I will email the manuscript to you. Sincerely,Michael Riles983 Fox Valley trailStone Mountain, Ga 30088770-879-7527770-722-0487riles.mike@gmail.com    The Great RecessionBook and Screenplay by Michael RilesAs a kid Mike Sims parents succumbed to alcoholism at their own hand forcing him to find mentors in a church and Boy Scouting. He manages to survive via Russian families that look after him along with a church minister that gives him a place to live. He works his way through college, meets a girl he knew in high school, shacks up with her and comes home to the empty apartment and the “Dear John” letter taped to the door, this after graduating from college just in time for 1973 Yom Kippur War and the subsequent recession after the Arab oil embargo. He does find a job but it is with an Attila the Hun manager who berates him for leaving the office to render first aid to a man after a horrible auto accident outside.   Many of the families Mike grew up with were from the USSR, immigrants who took him in. He learns the language as a kid and, at age 25, goes in to the Army in 1977 with that language proclivity. He’s recruited by the NSA in need of cheap talent and posted in what was West Berlin, Germany where he falls in “lust” with an RAF Op. who works with him in a top secret NSA-MI 5 snoop facility. But the affair ends when their commands split them up since they are both “foreign nationals” cleared for Top Secret information. Dejected, Michael takes leave in Vienna, Austria where he meets the girl of his dreams, an American visiting her sister who is stationed with her husband near Frankfurt. She is a mainstream woman who just wants to be a wife and mother, a good and virtuous girl who barely made it out of high school. They marry and have a son in Germany, a land where Michael wants to remain given his fear of an America riddled with crime and corruption, pettiness, coveting and greed.   But Michael returns to the States at his wife’s insistence since she doesn’t want to be an “auslander” (foreigner) the rest of her life. They go to her hometown in San Antonio, Texas. He finds a job at a local TV station that needs a “multi-tasker” who can do it all given the number of women who became single moms by choice and take copious time off. Many are Hispanic. Management does nothing since Michael is there to fill in. That allows Michael the ability to learn more than one skill set. The family rents a duplex from a white trash land lord but leave for Chicago after a fight with a some Mexican illegals. Also his father, Jesse Sims, contracts emphysema at his own hand. They return to  Chicago in 1983 after a job offer by a television representative firm is presented to him.  In Chicago he must once again multi-task for the single mom’s by choice. He must also endure ridicule after the daughter of a media mogul, who has her eyes on him as both “hubby” and “daddy” material, is shunned after numerous attempts to draw him away from what they consider his “worthless stay-at-home wife and mother”. Again Michael contemplates a new career move after a chance letter from the CIA has him interviewing with the notorious, and very real, Aldrich Ames, the double agent that sold the nation out to the KGB for twenty years.        After his father dies in 1987 Michael and the family transfer to the company’s Atlanta office. He is promoted to head a sales effort that nets the office an extra 11% in revenue. The goal was 6%. Instead of cash commission he is offered free diners. Having been at the top of his game in TV spot advertising he is let go in 2005 as the others take his accounts. His must sign a waiver vowing to not sue for age discrimination if he wants the full eight month severance. Michael Sims will flounder from one dead end job to another. He starts out working for a great firm made up of good and spiritual people from India, but that one succumbs to the 2008 economic downturn due to the governments inane policy of giving anyone with a pulse a mortgage, a necessary move given the dearth of births to educated women since 1970. From there he works at an Australian firm with a flawed product (a factor management fails to convey to sales), an online University where they cater to wealthy Arabs desperate for a visa to the west (and are lied to by being told they can get one if they take a course with the school), a call center for a junior college  (where African American students threaten his life if he does not remove disciplinary blemishes from their high school records),  a marketing firm where he is nearly shot to death after being forced to enter a business with a “no soliciting sign” posted on the door, and another on-line university where he deals with the self inflicted proletariat of American society in need of inexpensive distance learning for high school diplomas where it’s not about salesmanship but “robotics” as Mike lines up business for undisclosed “sales closers” that have “child support issues”. They “snake” his leads since he is a better salesman then them. Mike approves of the school’s mission which is to get the drop out class back to school. But at a paltry $11 an hour and a rigged system where he cannot garner commission, it’s impossible to break even.       Mike Mills hangs on until he gets a call from a German firm he applied to years ago while in Germany. They need someone versed in English and Russian to do marketing and writing and translation during trips to clients in Russia. They offer him $100,000 Euros a year or $86,000 US. He is making $22,800 at the school with a VPR commission structure that’s rigged; a necessary evil to stay afloat. Some of the “associates” approach Mike begging him to bring in a union organizer. He declines to be their “Spartacus” since Georgia, at this time, has a 10.2% unemployment rate.“Like the Communists of yore son,” he tells one beleaguered worker, “they can do what they want. It’s not our business. It’s the owner’s business – his capital. But I’ll take this to a gulag or a firing squad any day.” Michael puts the blame for the recession squarely on those who refused to marry and have children since there was no baby boom from 1970 to 1983. He also blames it on state welfare polices that encourage family dysfunction, an abomination that breeds a sizable generation of disaffected youths who continue the cycle of poverty with the illegitimate children they sire. There’s less indigenous Americans being born and consuming here. Firms have no choice but to out-source. The onslaught of illegal peasants for south of the border is tolerated since they out populate other groups, but they refuse to assimilate while many accept cash under the table from the supposedly conservative business community that rails against illegals.      Michael and his family take the position that’s offered which is in Berlin, Germany, a city where he lived for four years and where his life began when he met his wife and where they had their son thirty years ago.  The day he learns of the offer his son, Adam, tells them that his German company (he is a mechanical engineer) wants him in Berlin as well. The school where Mike works offers him a bump from $11 to $13 an hour to reconsider. ”And we’ll give you a little office where you can turn on a radio and listen to that Brahms stuff you like,” the coach pleas. They do panic over this opportunity that allows Michael to walks away from a hopeless America sinking in it’s own duplicity.   Michael just shakes his head and leaves just in time as the country he loved and served implodes within itself due to its government’s chicanery and lack of foresight, a rampant corporate duplicity coupled with short-sighted mindsets, an aversion to innovation, chicanery, pettiness, immorality, horrific crime and, in some places, maniacal greed. Others follow suit. The “geese” that lay those “golden eggs” begin their pursuit of overseas posts since many of those nations have a sever dearth of population, a veritable Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged revisited as the truly productive that were fed upon by both groups of “leaches” (conservative and liberal) leave for a livelihood elsewhere – the new pilgrims – to the “new” new worlds that were once old.       The new Mayflowers bear words like Lufthansa, Qantas, Swiss Air, Air Canada and others.   The Sims leave realizing they are not leaving America. America left them. They prosper in a Europe that vows not to be like the new America.

  • Gary Smailes

    Self publishing is certainly an option for any writer. However, I wanted this article to try and dispel some of the myths that surround the publishing world. Many writers dream of being picked up by a publishing house.

  • Gary Smailes

    Thanks Chris – wise words.

  • Gary Smailes

    It comes from bitter experience and many years of pitching and talking to publishers. Just hoping I can stop writers making some ‘silly’ mistakes.