In an ideal imaginary world, a book is finished only when the author is fully satisfied that every word and comma is perfect. In the real world, that doesn’t work. The only way books ever get finished is with the imposition of a deadline — sometimes from the author him or her self, but most often from a publisher.

This is a good thing. The deadline requires much focused work to drive the book into a completed state. It is one of my fears about online publishing that books will never be finished — that they will exist forever in some slippery amorphous state, forever demanding that they be twiddled and tweaked, enslaving the author in a never-ending cycle of continual revision.

The finality of publication is ultimately liberating. The author is given permission to let go, but more importantly, to move on. This book must be finished and left to live on its own because there are many other books that need to be written.

You probably won’t get it right the first time.

I’m not trying to be negative here, so hear me out. Every once in a while I get a proposal where the author just absolutely nails it, but the majority of the time the first draft outline is a great start that needs some fine tuning to get it ready for the shelf.

I look at the book proposal process as a collaborative effort with the author. If I believe in your book idea and you as an author, then I am going to take the time to help you develop your ideas into something that I think has the best chance of success.

An exercise I like to suggest to authors who are bogged down in the outline is to forget that it’s a book. We will worry about turning it into a book a little later, but for now imagine you are creating something other than a book outline. How would you think about your outline differently if I told you were:

• Drafting a presentation for SxSW, Microsoft TechEd or TED (insert the most appropriate conference here)
• Writing the script or talking points for a podcast or video
• Preparing a series of blog posts on a subject

Sometimes thinking about content as just a book is limiting. As publishers move to providing content in a variety of formats – not just books – I think it’s important to open our thinking up a bit during the proposal process. Not everything will necessarily end up in the book per se, but the ideas that don’t may make for great supporting materials, or interesting marketing and promotional angles.

Thinking beyond the book allows you to be a bit more creative with your ideas. Couple that with an editor who is willing to work with you to develop those ideas into a great book is a winning combination.

(Photo credit: Massdistraction)

Books sold to most resellers – stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders for example – are returnable.  That is, if the book stores don’t sell them all, they can send them back to the publisher for credit.  Publishers don’t always know when (or if ) these returns will occur.

Because the publisher credits authors with these sales as they leave the warehouse and head to the store, it is possible that some of the books we have paid an author for will eventually come back to us.  To account for this fact, publishers often hold back a percentage of payments due to an author to account for the possibility of returns.  In the case of my publishing program that amount is 20% and is listed on the royalty statement as Reserve for Returns.

If the books don’t come back the reserved amounts are released to the author.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

At first glance it seems that they are looking to take on sites like Wikipedia, and Squidoo, which they likely are but I wonder if there isnt an opportunity here for authors to leverage knol as an instant part of their author platform. Google says they want to use Knol to highlight the author as an authority on the subject.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

“But I already have a blog,” you say. Yes, I hope so, but knol may be another part of your author platform, and more importantly perhaps knol content will be featured on Google searches in the same way YouTube results, News results and other Google properties are featured. Google has not said this – it is pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely to me.

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

So, perhaps this is a new addition to your platform and a chance for you as an author to increase your recognition as an authority on your subject. It’s still very early, so a lot remains to be seen as to how knol will work and how it will be received by the public, but I’d say knol is a tool you must review when it’s available.

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)

A recent post discusses authors using socia applications to promote their books – a great way to build the author platform we publishers often talk so much about.

Our Facebook Group is now approaching 250 members. Many thanks to everyone who has joined, contributed, posted links, images, and discussions. It’s come as no surprise to me that the most active members of this group are authors. This supports a little theory I’ve had for a while:

Authors are doing more with social media than publishers.

Well, that may be true but it’s not for lack of trying. I suppose sheer numbers might indicate there are more authors in social applications than publishers, but that stands to reason. Many of us are pushing into this space and although it is too slow for my taste. For example, our For Dummies brand is experimenting in Facebook, our Wrox imprint has a Facebook Group and a Twitter Stream. But for now these efforts are currently the work of a few ambitious individuals.

When I worked in publishing houses, the main complaint from authors – rightly or wrongly – was usually to do with marketing. Usually an accusation of a lack of marketing when a book didn’t sell. Which may have been for any number of reasons – possibly including poor marketing, but possibly also including unrealistic sales expectations, and simply publishing in a niche with a small readership, or in an area that was already crowded with competing titles.

Given the volume of titles produced, and finite resources, people and time, publishers must also prioritize. But authors have always had a role to play in marketing their own book, and the more successful ones are proactive about it.

However, from time to time I do get proposals that look like very little effort was put into them. Always remember the book proposal is the first indication of your knowledge, commitment and ability. Here are 5 ways to not get my attention:

1. Don’t do any research. Be sure you have no idea about the books we have already published on your topic or related topics, or books we have announced. Never check Amazon.com, and certainly don’t come to our website. I actually had someone pitch me recently on a “…beginner’s book on using a computer. You guys should do a For Dummies book like that.” Why didn’t we think of that?
2. Tell me there is no competition for your book. Yes there is – it might not be a book. See also Know Your Competition.
3. Tell me you don’t have any ideas for interesting ways to market or promote your book. Really, you don’t have any suggestions? Authors should want to be involved in the promotion and marketing of their book.
4. Send me a poorly written proposal. Be sure you leave several sections blank, or give me 1-2 word answers to the proposal questions. Typos and misspelled words are a bonus.
5. Be sure the outline is a mess. I am going to help you develop your outline, but you need to give me something to work with.

If you are going to submit a book proposal, you may find my series on the topic useful.

(Image credit: WhatDaveSees)

If your blog is only relevant to a few close friends, and your website is only a big advertisement for your writing, why should strangers bother visiting either, let alone link to you? Your main goal, if you want people to discover you, is to entertain and inform them. Your Internet presence isn’t about what you have to sell. It’s what you have to offer, usually for free.

What are you offering? What on your website will make a surfer stay for longer than ten minutes? What on your blog will make it relevant in five years? Just being a published writer isn’t enough. Nobody cares that you’re published. Nobody cares that you have a book for sale.

Knorath makes the point that writing a book is only the first of many steps to success, and goes on to give some very practical advice on promoting yourself as a brand, and building the increasingly important absolutely critical Author Platform we publishers keep talking about.

Guess what? Your three sample chapters and two paragraph author bio aren’t enough to keep the average surfer interested for more than a few minutes, if they even find your site.

The article wraps with great advice on spreading your brand online and in real life.  This is a recommended read for current writers and aspiring authors.

Photo credit Xave Ignacio

1. Can blog content be put right into a book? Should it?

I’m probably going to answer this one the long way around. With more than nearly 200,000 books published each year, getting a book noticed is becoming harder than ever. Publishers only have so much money and resources set aside for publicity and marketing, so increasingly we rely on author platform. In my opinion, a blog is the foundation for any author platform and therefore can provide a good basis for supporting a book.

Having said that, not every blog makes for a great book.

As a publisher, I am going to ask a few questions of my own before decide if a blog should be the basis for a book:

• How niche is the blog? Does it provide content that is unique? Niche is a good thing.
• What is the current readership of the blog? What is my built-in market?
• How active is the readership? Are they engaged – will they talk about your book?
• Is the blog part of a larger network – are there other blogs that can be leveraged for marketing and promotion?

Now to more directly answer the question about content – yes, I believe there are situations where blog content can be poured directly into a book. For certain types of blogs, having a more portable printed version makes a lot of sense. However, I don’t think that is necessarily the best model. (See question #3)

2. Are there rights issues? Legal issues between who owns what content?

The publisher is going to need to secure certain rights to help sell your book in a variety of channels and formats. As part of the contract, you warrant that the rights are yours to grant, so you had better be sure you actually own them. If you are a blogger for hire, or you write for someone else’s blog or blog network you may not own the rights to your work – so you may need to research your agreements to be sure.

In addition, if you publish your blog under certain Creative Commons licenses, you may not own the exclusive rights to your blog content. Seth Godin found this out the hard way when a publisher legally published a paper version of one of his ebooks.

If you plan to publish reader comments as part of your book, be sure you own the rights to those as well. IANAL, but this issue has come up with a book project recently and we felt the area was a bit to gray to include them as part of this blog-based book.

All of these situations can complicate the contract process, but your publisher should be willing to work with you to write a publishing agreement that secures the necessary rights to publish the book, while respecting the nature of the content on your blog. Often the answer lies in the publisher acquiring non-exclusive rights for content that is previously published on your blog.

In addition, be aware of other contract issues like the non-compete that may hamper your ability to continue blogging if they are not written properly.

3. Do publishers want to see unique content in a book, and if so, how much?

Yes, we do. And here is where I think the real value lies. My personal opinion is the best situation is to publish a book based on a blog – but to provide unique content in the book that you won’t find on the blog. That provides additional reasons for readers of your blog to buy the book.

However, books can get stale quickly, while your blog is alive. Tie the content of your book back to your blog to help minimize the stale factor. Make each a part of the other.

I hope these thoughts prove insightful and add to the discussion. I’d love to hear from more BlogHer attendees and prospective authors, so feel free to contact me.

Wiley colleague Jim Minatel also provides his thoughts on these questions.

Photo credit smiling_da_vinci