Why Did You Write Your Book Manuscript?
Remnant Review
You have made a mistake. You have written a book manuscript. Now you are trying to find a publisher for the manuscript.
I made that decision back in 1967. I was 25 years old. I wrote a book manuscript on Karl Marx. Fortunately, my father-in-law had a publisher. In the past, he had brought manuscripts written by other authors to the publisher. One of them became the first bestseller the publisher ever had: The Genesis Flood. The only reason he was able to publish the manuscript is that the manuscript had been rejected by Moody Press, which had previously published one of the books by the co-author of the manuscript. Moody had rejected the book for theological reasons: it did not say kind things about theistic evolution. So, the co-authors were stuck. They heard that my father-in-law might be able to get the book published, and he did.
So, I was able to get my book published because of intervention by somebody who had already published half a dozen books through a particular publisher. My book appeared in 1968. It went through one printing. That's about all in the book ever goes through. I still give it away in the 1988 updated version. You can download it here: http://bit.ly/gnmror. For a 25-year-old graduate student, it was a pretty good book, but it had very little direct impact.
That was back in 1968. The book publishing world in 1968 has little resemblance to the book publishing world today. The book publishing world today is steadily going bankrupt. The World Wide Web is killing it.
BOOK PUBLISHING TODAY
You have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of book publishers. I know this, because you have a book manuscript. You're a first-time author, and you are looking for a publisher. The publisher is not looking for you.
Book publishers are not interested in manuscripts from someone who has never before had a book published by anybody. They are looking for manuscripts from well-established authors, for which there is a ready market. They do not want to take any risks. The traditional book publishing industry is dying, in exactly the same way that the traditional record industry is dying, and for exactly the same reasons.
The book publisher is willing to consider a manuscript that has been submitted by a book agent. The book agent probably should be a book agent with whom a particular publisher has dealt in the past. The agent has provided manuscripts, and the manuscripts have at least broken even. If he has supplied half a dozen manuscripts, maybe one of them turned into a book that was popular enough to go into a second printing. So, book publishers are completely uninterested in first-time manuscripts written by first-time authors who do not have a large following. The book publisher is buying audiences. He no longer knows how to develop new audiences. His entire business model has been defunct for 15 years, and it is getting more defunct every day.
So, unless you have a large audience, he is not interested in your manuscript. If you have a large audience, you should not be interested in the book publisher. You should publish the book yourself. Order 3,000 copies for a couple of dollars each, and then sell the book at $19.95 or $29.95 (hardback) to your list of readers. That way, you will gain the lion's share of the money. You'll get the book out the door for about five dollars, and you will cash a check for $19.95, plus postage and handling, or $29.95, plus postage and handling. In other words, you should become your own book publisher. Maximize your income this way.
The main reason why you are interested in trying to get some publisher to publish your manuscript is that you do not have a following. You do not have a mailing list. You probably do not have a YouTube channel. You do not have a blog site. You do not have your own domain name. You do not have an email list based on an automated email subscription program. All you have is a manuscript. Well, that's not quite true. You also have a dream of the equivalent of Cinderella's fairy godmother. If you offered to send the manuscript to me, then you have a dream that I am your fairy godmother.
I have not published a printed book of my own through my own companies ever since 1997. I saw that the World Wide Web was going to destroy the market for printed books, and I decided I would never write another book manuscript to be published in printed form. I can publish a book manuscript online in about 60 seconds. I can pay to have it typeset for a couple of thousand dollars, and then I can publish it online in 60 seconds. Anybody can read it for free. It can be searched by Google or Bing or Yahoo, and people who are interested in the book or anything in the book will be able to find the book. Why would I want to publish a book in printed format, unless I was doing it for money?
If you have written a book in the hope that you will make any money from royalties, you have made a huge mistake. Instead of publishing a book this way, use a print-on-demand service: one at a time -- no inventory to pay for. That way, if you sell the book for about $20, you will get maybe two dollars back as a fee. That is what you would get if you found a third-party publisher to publish your book. So, you do not need a third-party publisher to publish your book. You can put the book offer online, make it available through print on demand, and the company that publishes your book will take most of the money, but it will cost you virtually nothing to get the book available to the general public. You will be paid as much by the company that publishes the book on demand as you will be paid from a traditional book publisher.
So, if you are not doing it for the money, and you are not doing it to meet the demand of an existing mailing list of your own, why are you doing it? More to the point, why did you do it? Why did you go to all the trouble of writing a book, when you have not investigated the conditions of book publishing today? Why would you write something for which there was no known demand, which takes a lot of hours and a lot of effort? What was your motivation? More to the point, what were you thinking of?
Let's go through some of the motivations.
WHY WRITE A MANUSCRIPT?
You had a dream that you could send your manuscript to a legitimate book publisher, and the publisher would want to spend the time and money to hire a professional book reader to read your manuscript, sent unsolicited. Why did you do this? Book publishers have not done this for two generations. They don't want unsolicited manuscripts. A generation ago, such manuscripts were called transom manuscripts. They were "sent over the transom." Nobody asked for them. Nobody knew the authors. The authors thought somebody wanted to read the manuscript, but the only person who at best might read the manuscript is some low-level employee who is just starting out in the industry. This is considered a low-level job for someone who does not have a precise eye, and who cannot work as a proofreader. The proofreader is really valuable. The person reading the unsolicited manuscripts is not valuable. In all likelihood, the person will send back the manuscript, or maybe just have some low-level secretary in the department send back the automatic rejection letter. You may not even get back the manuscript. It costs a lot of money to send back manuscripts. It is easier just to send a computerized rejection letter.
You should have outlined the book, and sent one chapter to the publisher. That way, the book publisher could get some idea of whether or not you can write. He would also have some idea of the book. Along with the sample chapter in the outline there should be a description of exactly who the book is written for, what the market is for the book, what your background is as an author, do you have a mailing list, and do you have a radio show, local television show, or any other way to advise your followers that you have just had a book published. If you don't have these things, the publishing house is not interested in you. It is not interested in your manuscript.
Let's go to the next possibility. You are somebody trying to get a foothold in your career field. The book is going to serve you as a kind of bona fides to prove that you are not what you really are, which is basically an unknown person in your industry, trying desperately to gain a reputation within the industry. This is certainly a legitimate reason to want to get a book published. But it does not do any a good to get a book published by an unknown publisher. You want to get the book published by a major publisher, preferably one located in New York. Now you're back to the basic problem: everybody wants to get his manuscript published through one of these companies.
Next, you might select a publishing house that specializes in business books. Have you done this? Have you gone through the steps to see if that publisher is interested in your manuscript? Probably, you have not. Probably, you do not know what books are published by which publishers, and which publishers specialize in business books, or books in your particular field. You are not an expert in the publishing market of your field. This is the first thing that you must become familiar with. You must master the basics of the publishing industry as it relates to your field.
Once you understand this, then you choose a topic which might be acceptable to a book publisher in your field. At that point, you create the outline, write one chapter, and send the chapter to the book publisher. Better yet, post that chapter on your website or blog site. Then you simply send a link, preferably a short link created by TinyURL or bit.ly.com, to a publisher. This means that you at least have a website or blog site. The publisher can use Alexa.com or some other service to find out what ranking your website has. It probably has no ranking. It probably will be rated around 20 million on Alexa.com. But at least he can find out. At least he can know that you know enough to set up a blog site, and you have published articles on the site.
If you are sending this out in a shotgun process to any old publisher, then you are in desperation mode. You don't understand the book publishing industry. You don't understand what it takes to gain the reputation in the industry. You don't understand that book publishers are not interested in first-time manuscripts written by people with no reputations in a particular field -- people who are trying to use the book publisher as a way to gain a reputation in the field. The book publisher is in it to make money; he is not in it to help you gain a reputation in your field. He wants to see you as providing an audience that may buy the book, and also the author of a manuscript that is thoroughly prepared and ready to be sent to a proofreader. He wants to know if you can write. One chapter will show him. An outline of the book will show him. If you cannot write well, he is not interested in you. He is actually not interested in you even if you can write well, but at least if you cannot write, he has a good reason for having a secretary send you a boilerplate rejection letter.
Maybe you are a pastor. You have never had a book published. You want to get a book published. You are not sure why you want to get a book published. You don't have your sermons online on your own website. You don't have your sermons as YouTube documents, with links back to your church's webpage, or maybe your own personal webpage. You just want to get a book out. You don't really know why. If you don't know why, the book publisher does not know why.
So, we are back to the original question: why did you write the manuscript? Why would you involve yourself in a project for which you did not have a specific agenda? You did not have a specific audience in mind. You did not have a publisher in mind. You did not have a plan to get word about your book to a specific audience, an audience that has money and is ready to buy your book.
Books do not make most authors royalty money worth talking about. You will never get back in royalty money the value of the time you invested in writing the manuscript. That is a foregone conclusion. You should have figured that out before you started writing the manuscript.
You get ideas across these days with a two-minute YouTube video. If it goes viral, you have made your mark. But it probably won't go viral. Hardly anybody will ever visit it. But that means that hardly anybody would have read your book. If you do not have the skill to get a YouTube video to go viral, then you probably do not have the skill to write a book that is going to sell enough copies to be worth enough money to you in royalties to spend the time writing the book.
Do you have a newsletter? Do you have a website? All of these are ways to get your ideas out to people. If you do not have a YouTube channel, a blog site, and a regular email letter, then you are not really interested in communicating your ideas to the people of this generation. You need a Facebook page. You need to be actively involved with a Facebook page. Are you? Do you put in two or three hours a week on a Facebook page? Do you produce at least one video a week? Do you produce at least one article a day for your website? If you don't do these things, you are not interested in communicating ideas to this generation. You are operating in terms of a world that existed frrom the middle of the mid-15th century until the development of the World Wide Web in 1995. That world is fading in importance.
WHERE TO BEGIN
The correct strategy for any would-be author of a book is to create an audience for the book. This takes years of work. It takes dedication. It takes a regular writing. It takes videos. It takes the development of an e-letter of some kind. It then takes extensive research into the segment of the book publishing industry for which the would be manuscript might possibly be valuable. In other words, it takes years of effort as a writer and as a public speaker to develop the skills necessary to make a first-time manuscript sufficiently alluring to a publisher to be worth publishing. The publisher would probably rather see that the book has been published in a print-on-demand for, and has sold least 3,000 copies. This way, the publisher knows that there is a market for the book. He can pick up the book, get you to stop publishing it as a print-on-demand book, and release it into the market that you have already proven exists. You are then not a pig in a poke.
I'm basically saying that you have made a mistake. If you put four or five years into rectifying this mistake, you may be able to find a publisher for your book. You put the cart before the horse. You wrote the manuscript before you investigated the market, and before you developed several thousand potential buyers of your book. You must do the marketing. You must do the research.
A third-party publisher is not interested in doing your research for you. He is barely staying in business. He wants the latest Stephen King manuscript. That might save him. Or he wants the latest manuscript by some television evangelist with a huge audience. That might save him. But your manuscript will not save him. He is just barely getting by, and he just does not have the resources to read your book, evaluate your book, proofread your book, typeset your book, and publish your book.
Here's the rule: create the market for your book, and then self-publish your book. Start here: