It has never been easy to have your creative writing output accepted by traditional publishing houses.

Witness these famous masters of fiction who were all obliged to take the route of shelling out hard cash to have their debut novels printed.

Alexandre Dumas
D.H. Lawrence
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Rice Burroughs
George Bernard Shaw
Gertrude Stein
James Joyce
John Grisham
Mark Twain
Mary Baker Eddy
Rudyard Kipling
Stephen Crane
Upton Sinclair
Virginia Woolf
Walt Whitman
William Blake
Zane Grey

John Grisham, incidentally, sold copies of his first novel “A Time to Kill” out of the boot of a car which at the outset was his sole ‘vehicle’ for distribution?

And it is getting tougher all the time – even for established authors.

It can be doubly frustrating when you’ve written something that you are desperate to see in print; something you want other people to read.

There is always recourse to the expensive vanity publishing houses but I wouldn’t take that route come what may.

Would you?

Imagine my surprise then when I stumbled across the perfect solution for publishing creative output that you cannot place elsewhere.

I have a string of traditionally published titles currently selling in bookstores world wide but I have an almost equal string that I have never been able to get into print.

That is until now?

The little known but highly reputable POD (print on demand) source I have discovered requires an initial membership fee that covers UNLIMITED titles – perfect bound with ISBN and free shipping to customers

In a nutshell: Instead of requiring you to place an initial order for 10 to 100 books, this innovative publisher provides the first copy of your book free of charge and then prints-on-demand and ships when they receive subsequent orders from you and your customers.

This website featured in the resource box below is well worth a visit especially if you are still struggling to get your first book into print. You could have your own personal library up and running in next to no time.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a best-selling book?

I’ll tell you the secret, having written 12 books that have collectively sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

In a word, to make a book a best-seller, you need SALES!

Yes, this is obvious, but it’s also profound.

A potential best-seller has to be put into a sales channel, promoted vigorously, reprinted often, and shepherded along its way to ultimate success.

Secondly, it helps if it has a catchy title, is well written, and it pertains to a topic or has a plot in which readers are interested.

But the latter characteristics are not essential.

With a great sales effort you can make an average book a hit.

How do I know this?

I started my book career by selling them, for Time-Life, and having succeeded, I became a sales manager with them. Literally, our division sold millions of books, making them genuine best-sellers, yet they never appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list.

How could these monster successes be overlooked?

They were sold by phone, in kiosks at malls, by mail, and through various retail displays that are not tracked by best-seller list compilers.

Ask any contemporary New York book publisher whether they’re pleased with selling works through bookstores, and you won’t hear the end of their lamentations.

This is why so many editors try to get today’s authors to sell their own stuff, at the back of seminar rooms and to their own customer and client lists. There are many more effective sales channels than the large retail book chains.

So, if you want to write a genuine best-seller, spend more time worrying about the sales and marketing end, and less about the actual craft of writing.

If you can figure out how to sell large numbers of books, believe me, every big publisher will think you’re a literary genius!

Popularity: 18% [?]

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Every book was once a mere snippet of a notion with a pencil (or a computer keyboard) dangling off the end of it. The difference between an author and someone daydreaming out the window is that, finding the pencil or keyboard attached to a notion, the writer continues drawing, writing, pulling, prodding, and scratching at the notion until it becomes a book. But how does that book become wonderful? There lies the real mystery. No one really knows. . . but I have observed that Wonderful Books often emerge after the writer contacts a resonant event. Is it important that the event actually took place? Not so very. What Is Important is that the event (whether remembered or imagined) spontaneously emits for the writer the qualities of wonder and delight. The late poet Donald Justice wrote a brilliant biographical essay in which he recounts a childhood memory of a party where he encountered – wonder of wonders! – a plate of small sandwiches. The way he describes closing his hands around one of them would not be nearly so satisfying and evocative if he had not – as he did so well – first tell us that those little sandwiches were BLUE. Immediately we, his readers, join him at age 6 ( or 7, or . . . ). Our own sense of delight and amazement picks up his cue. One moment we’re reading along quietly minding our own beeswax when suddenly, with a secretive wink, our youthful spirit grabs a blue sandwich right off the page and we are jolted fully awake. For a moment we stand in awe, suffused with the light of creativity. We are inspired, and we didn’t even try.

A Writing Exercise
Go to a favorite book – preferably fiction or poetry – and plunge into a passage, any passage. Read until something strikes you, and then PING! Let yourself be stricken!

Enjoy and delight in feeling silly with amazement, or wonder, or . . . or . . . a desire to eat something blue that’s cut into the shape of a triangle. Allow this feeling to grow. At a certain point you will feel as if you can stand it no longer. This is not boredom – oh, no. Rather, it’s that sense of urgency all authors recognize as Time to Write. Go to the page, to the paper or the computer keyboard, and begin. Doing this again and again, with great love, with wild abandon, and with only the vaguest notion of How It’ll All Turn Out – that’s how the simplest book (or a life) becomes a wonder.

Oops! Your exuberance is showing! Enjoy.

Popularity: 12% [?]

The first rejection is always a shock. How could a publisher reject you after you worked so hard, printed the manuscript or burned a CD, wrote a proposal, and paid for shipping? Rejection is always painful, yet you may grow from it.

Give yourself time to process the rejection. Put the letter away for a week. Then, setting your emotions aside, read it again for content. Does the letter contain any helpful suggestions? If the editor took the time to include suggestions he or she thinks your work has merit.

See the manuscript from the publisher’s view. Did you follow their editorial guidelines? Did you format the manuscript properly? If you’re a nonfiction writer, are your sources credible? Ignoring these standards will guarantee rejection. Meeting these standards will increase your chances of a sale.

Evaluate your resume. Your resume should be clear and factual. Tempted as you may be to hype your resume, don’t yield to this temptation. Publishers can check a resume in minutes and nothing is more of a turn-off than hype. List volunteer efforts if you’re a beginning writer.

Re-check your market resources. Did you send your work to the right publisher? Jenna Glatzer, in her www.Writers.Break.com article, “Why You Get Form Rejection Letters,” says writers often send their work to the wrong publishers. A writer and editor herself, Glatzer says her rejection letters basically say, “Thanks, but this isn’t for us.”

Check competing works on store shelves. This takes courage because you’ll come across stuff you wish you had written or similar to what you have written. Your work should be of similar quality. Can you improve the quality? Does your work fill a hole in the market?

Get more information. The publishing industry is extremely competitive and a publisher may shift its focus to fit market trends. Fairview Press in Minneapolis, for example, used to bill itself as a family publisher. Now it is publishing special resources for in-house use within the Fairview medical system.

Revise your query letter. Writing a query letter can be harder than writing the manuscript because you have to sell the work and yourself on one page. (Editors don’t like long query letters.) It takes more time to “write short” than to
“write long.” See if your query letter can be improved in any way.

Make your proposal appealing. Writing a proposal is similar to writing a thesis. Your proposal should be concise, easy to follow (bold or colored headings), and grab the reader. Write too much and the editor is turned off. Write too little and the editor is turned off. Your goal is somewhere in the middle.

Does your proposal have a platform? Katharine Sands, agent, writer, and speaker with The Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency in New York City, thinks “every proposal needs a platform section.” The platform includes your credentials, professional organizations, credibility, authority, reviews, media experience, and marketing connections. According to Sands, publishers are more apt to accept work from authors who have strong platforms.

See what’s selling. Your top-notch writing and a sharp book proposal may not be strong enough to buck market trends. Talk with book store managers, read book catalogs, and check Amazon to see what’s selling. Health and fitness are exploding markets right now and you may be able to tap these markets.

Revise your work. (I heard the groan.) Yes, this is discouraging, but once you get into it the process isn’t bad. Find ways to make your work more appealing. You may index the book, for example, or write the back cover copy. Anything you can do to save the publisher money is a plus for you.

Finally, keep writing and submitting your work. You never know, the market may shift and the manuscript that wasn’t saleable last year may be snatched up this year. Practice your craft, believe in yourself, and dream of seeing your name in print. It will happen.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Are you a fiction writer and never been published? Do you write fiction and self publish your own books? Have you found that fiction is not what the books stores are stocking on their shelves now? If the answer is yes, read on.

I am the author of a children’s fiction book and I have been trying to market my book. The easy part was writing my book. The hard part is the marketing.

Since my book is an adventure, mystery that is geared for children’s imagination and enjoyment of reading it is not what the retail people are buying.

The publishers and retail stores want non-fiction or historical novels even for children’s books.

Yes I loved to write my book and all my children’s books that are still unpublished and I am very sorry that I don’t feel the criteria for non-fiction – historical books.

I am afraid for all the children in this world today who find reading boring and time consuming. Who spend all there free time playing electronic games which is definitely more exciting than reading a book. What kind of adults will these children become in this complicated world?

So I say to you the retail people of America. Give the new authors a break. Try to find it in your heart as parents, grandparents let fiction live again and let’s start children reading again.

Thank you for reading my article. Please feel free to read my other articles.

Copyright 2006 Linda E. Meckler

Popularity: 11% [?]