Here are 9 tips for writing a book proposal that will get attention.

1. The Sell Before the Sale
2. Writing a Good Book Proposal: Introduction
3. Pitching Your Book
   
4. Knowing Your Competition
5. Manuscript Details
6. Writing Great Author Biographies
7. Writing Great Book Outlines
8. Understanding Your Book’s Audience
9. 5 (Sarcastic) Ways to Get Me to Reject Your Book Proposal

(Photo credit jm3)

There also seems to be a general consensus that publishers want to shut authors out of the marketing process, and I could not disagree more with this perspective. While the publisher certainly controls the budget and ultimately the marketing plan, I absolutely want the author involved in the marketing process, and I certainly want their input of the types of things we can do to promote the book to readers.

One way we get authors involved in the process is through the use of a questionnaire, and I thought I would share a few of the questions we ask, so you can consider them for your own books or perhaps other products. The Author’s Questionnaire helps you help us sell your book. It is used by Sales and Marketing to position the book in the marketplace and to create the book’s promotions. While we are marketing professionals, we probably don’t have the knowledge that you as the expert in this subject area bring to the table. What you write in the questionnaire is very important and definitely influences how we market and sell your book.

This is not the complete list, but these hit some of the highlights. If your publisher does not involve you in this part of the process ask them why.

• What are the top 10 Blogs we need to tell about your book? Be sure to include a contact and an email address or phone number where possible, and a brief description of who the Blog author is and why it’s important for your book. Don’t forget the blogs of the software development team, or product managers where applicable. (If you come up with more than 10 strong candidates list them all, but try to rank them for priority.)
• What search terms would readers use at Amazon.com to find your book? We may be able to include these keywords when Amazon.com indexes your book. Please be specific and separate terms by commas.
• If you could advertise your book on 10 websites, blogs, or podcasts/video podcasts which ones would they be (ranked in order of importance?) Try to stay focused on the highest impact sites for potential readers – the answer is probably not Yahoo!, The New York Times, or Oprah Winfrey.
• We are always interested in new and interesting ways to market and promote our books. In this section, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for sites like Facebook, and You Tube, contests or other unique angles to promote your book.
• “It would be great if so-and-so reviewed the book and talked about it.” Here’s your chance to get your book into the hands of other influencers not listed above. These can be journalists, professors, company executives or anyone else who you feel can have a direct impact on your book’s sales by influencing others to buy it.

Again, this is far from the whole list, but I hope it gives you a feel for the kind of input we want from our authors. What other ways can you help your publisher promote your book?

(Image Credit: drachmann)

Writers often work with a variety of people during the publishing process, but the real nuts and bolts of your work is done in collaboration with your editor. I asked Wiley Senior Development Editor Kevin Kent to share his tips for working effectively with your editor.

Working with an editor is too often seen as an adversarial process. The common perception seems to be that an editor is like that most hated English teacher you once had, the one who gleefully marked your writing with red ink and showed you everything wrong with your writing.

That is truly not the case. Working with an editor is meant to be a collaborative process, with you and the editor both interested in working taking your raw manuscript and turning it into the best and most profitable book possible.

To that end, when you work with your editor, keep these points in mind for successful collaboration:

• Editorial feedback is offered non-judgmentally. You’re not being graded. Your editor is not looking to mark things “wrong.” Everyone involved in the process of handling your book wants it to succeed, and all edits are being offered in that spirit. Consider what the editor says, answer the questions that the editor asks, and if a change the editor is asking for doesn’t make sense to you, talk it over with your editor.

• Don’t sweat the small stuff. Make no mistake—changes will be made to your text. A lot of these changes will be small or sentence-level edits. When they do this, editors are often conforming the manuscript to in-house style conventions or trying to make sure the manuscript maintains a consistent tone. In most cases the best course of action is just to accept these changes. You will be queried about the larger changes—suggested changes in organization, requests for clarification or for additional material, possible deletions from the text—and it’s these changes that most benefit from your work and attention. If you let your editor worry about the stuff like whether to use the third person (“We are going to do this”) or second person (“You are going to do this”) as a consistent pronoun choice, then you will find yourself with more time to focus on the real content of your manuscript.

• Make every effort to submit you work on time per your schedule. Once again, make no mistake—your editor will consistently remind you of your due dates and ask for your submissions. He or she won’t be doing this to bug you or add to your stress, but because so much in the book process relies on timely submission. Editors rely heavily on a book’s submission schedule to manage not only the workflow of your book, but also the workflow of all the books the editor is managing. Very rarely will an editor be working solely on your book. Additionally, your own book will be worked on by multiple editors during the course of the publishing process (acquisitions editors, development editors, and copy editors, among others), and that’s not even taking into consideration the layout artists, graphic artists, indexers, and assorted other workers who will handle your book. All of these folks are working on multiple books at the same time, and they all rely to a certain extent on your schedule. So always keep in mind the cascade effect missing a due date can have on the whole process.

• When you submit, submit complete work. When one of your due dates comes up (whether it’s for one chapter, several chapters, or even an entire manuscript), remember that due date is for a complete version of that submission. Don’t turn in partially finished chapters or incomplete work. A key role of the editor is to help build the raw manuscript into a unified book. That involves looking at the book as holistically as possible to plan for unifying features that will run throughout the book and to watch for redundancies and other organizational issues. At the very least, turning in partial work will slow the editorial process down and delay the book. At the most, incomplete submissions may be rejected simply because the editorial staff can’t work with the limited material they were given.

When you work with an editor, you’re actually gaining access to whole group of book-building professionals, collaborators who are ready to work with you, answer your questions, and address the concerns you might have. They are there to help you turn that idea you had for a book into a reality.