Okay, for a couple of posts now I’ve been promising some information on marketing the nonfiction manuscript. Even if you don’t have an agent yet, you should be thinking about your marketing strategy. Brainstorm: what can YOU do to sell your book?

Why must you consider this question? Ted Weinstein, nonfiction agent, answered that questions succinctly: assume your publisher will do NOTHING for you. Nothing. I attended a presentation that Mr. Weinstein made at the University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute and, although I was sobered by what he said, I recognized the truth in his presentation. It’s up to us, the writers, to make a success of our work.

So what goes into a marketing plan? I’d recommend checking out Mr. Weinstein’s website at www.twliterary.com. He lists several different types of marketing you should address in your formal marketing plan. They include:
1) Your comprehensive strategy
2) Blurbs (or, Who Do You Know?)
3) Media and Speaking Appearances
4) Serialization
5) Anything Else You Can Think Of.

There are a couple of really good books on marketing, too. Both of the ones I’ve listed here have strategies for writing a good marketing plan as well as ideas for nontraditional ways of marketing your nonfiction (and fiction) work. Check these out when you get a chance. Also please note that there are likely newer editions of these books than the ones I’ve listed:

• JUMP START YOUR BOOK SALES: A MONEY-MAKING GUIDE FOR AUTHORS, INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS AND SMALL PRESSES, Marilyn & Tom Ross, Communication Creativity: Buena Vista, Colorado, 1999.
• PUBLICIZE YOUR BOOK!, Jacqueline Deval, Perigree Books, Berkeley Publishing Group: New York, NY, 2003.

It’s intimidating to think about assuming responsibility for your book’s success. You have little or no experience (unless you graduated from college with a degree in marketing). But think of it this way: you know your subject better than anybody. You’ve dedicated a significant chunk of time to thinking about your subject, outlining it, culling the unnecessary and adding what you’d forgotten so that your chapter outline is as thorough as it can be. You’ve polished your sample chapters until they’ll blind the agent reading them. Who better than you to make the sale? You can do it. You’re the man ( or woman, so to speak)!

PS Hey, you spammers out there, stop sending porn. Pirated software I can stand, also illicit pharmaceutical sales. I don’t read steamy romance because it’s hard to get the sex right without being boring or cliched. What makes you think YOU can get it right? Most of you don’t even speak English as a first language….

About ten years ago I took a guided sea kayak trip to the Apostle Islands, which cluster along the south shore of Lake Superior off the coast of Wisconsin. We paddled for several days between islands, visited a lighthouse, hiked several islands and generally had a great time. Later, at home, I decided to write about the experience. Eventually I sold the resulting travel article to both Marco Polo Magazine and Minnesota Memories.

What to do, though, when you want to write a whole book instead of just an article? At the University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute earlier this month, I went to a presentation by nonfiction agent Ted Weinstein, entitled “Book Proposal Boot Camp.” I asked about a full-length travel memoir and got the bad news: If your book is a story about your trip rather than a travel guide that lists sights, restaurants and hotels—you know the type—you must finish the entire manuscript before you submit it to an agent, just like you would a novel. Ditto for a memoir.

But, if you’re truly writing nonfiction [and you’ve already built your “platform” (see my blog post from a couple of days ago)], you must submit a “book proposal” to any agent who might take you on as a client. According to Weinstein, it must contain:
1) An overview of your book. Use a couple of paragraphs to describe your work, and make it read like the teaser on the back cover of a paperback. Market your book!
2) Give a sense of who your target audience will be, both the immediate audience and possible wider ones. For instance, if you’re writing about diabetes, your core audience would be people who suffer from the disease, but the wider audience would be people whose friends and/or family have diabetes, teachers whose students have it, etc.
3) Explain why you’re qualified to write about this subject; describe your platform, and do it in detail.
4) Who are you competing against? What titles are out there on the same subject, and why is your book different from each of them? Why is it better?
5) Add a detailed Table of Contents, and include a summary of each chapter. Be sure to give it some meat! The agent should be able to see the entire shape and scope of your book from this section.
6) Include at least two sample chapters, ones that have significant substance to them. The agent will use these to judge the quality of both your writing and your research/knowledge.

Now here’s the bad news. One of the most important sections of your book proposal is this: The Marketing Plan. Yessir, you’re going to sell your own book, and sell it well. The agent wants to see that not only have you built and developed your platform, but that you’ve considered how best to get your book into the hands of readers.

More on the nonfiction marketing plan tomorrow….

I got back last night from the University of Wisconsin’s annual Writers’ Institute. After nearly fourteen hours in the car, it took my a while to get out, much less stretch the kinks out, but the long drive, the expense and the time were more than worth it.
Let me begin by saying that this was a conference for writers, not a convention for fans to meet writers who sit on panels and discuss their published work. We were there to learn – about the craft of writing, about changes in the publishing industry, about generating ideas, and about how to most effectively market our work once it’s been honed and polished, published or not. This conference helped with all of that and more.
Practically speaking, if you think your work is ready to market, conferences like this one can help you get your foot in the door. There were several highly respected agents taking pitches, some for fiction and others for nonfiction. They were frank, too, about conferences: it’s a much better way to find an agent than a cold query. Meet us, they said. Even if you don’t have something ready to pitch, meet us. Tell us about your work. What can it hurt? If it’s a great new concept, a new voice, if you have a fabulous platform, we’ll give you a card and perhaps eventually ask for a manuscript.
If your work, like mine, is still in process, this type of conference can help in a number of ways. I went to a very useful workshop on revision entitled “Ten Things Every Novel Needs.” That one helped me pinpoint where my manuscript is weak and gave me some ideas on how to fix it – though the fixing won’t be easy. Another session, “Cooking with Poetry,” helped me to understand imagery and figurative language much more clearly, and the examples the instructor gave showed how the use of simile and metaphor can enhance your writing. I also found that, even though the course title said, “poetry,” the use of figurative language applied just as much to prose. Both of these sessions, and others, will better my writing. And now, courtesy another session, I also know how to host a “plotting party.”
Several years ago a friend told me that, when I go to conferences like this one, I shouldn’t just stick to what I already know (or think I know); I should go to sessions on things I know little or nothing about, and it will make me a more well-rounded writer. I’m not sure that’s actually true (about me, I mean), but I did go to a great presentation entitled, “Book Proposal Bootcamp,” with nonfiction agent Ted Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein, like many of the instructors at the conference, was articulate and engaging as he delivered a sobering message: you must build a “platform,” and there’s no time like the present to start. If nobody considers you an expert in the subject about which you’re writing, you’re pretty much SOL. (More on that in tomorrow’s blog.)
I’m currently the president of the local Black Hills Writers Group. I’ll be bringing much of this information back to all of them, and I’ll be posting more on the conference, session by session, in future blogs. I’m glad I made the trip and, once I’ve shared with all of you out there what I’ve learned, I hope you’ll be glad I did, too.