Speaker 1: Does your book idea have what it takes to get published by the biggest 5 publishers on the planet? Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers, Hatchet Book Group, Penguin Random House, or Macmillan and their various imprints? You're about to find out. Hi, I'm Joshua Lysak. I'm the world's only award-winning, celebrity-recommended, number one international, best-selling, certified professional ghostwriter. While most of my authors want to go an independent publishing route, I have several who've successfully navigated the traditional publishing path. In fact, I've compared the pros and cons of both of my authors' sets of experiences for the Nonfiction Authors Association. And I can tell you that if you want to get published by one of the biggest publishers, that means you're looking for clout. Being published by a traditional publisher gives you that. If you want mainstream access, if you want to be on the Today Show, if you want to be on television, if you want to be interviewed by the press and get speaking engagements at the Fortune 500, you need a traditional book deal. So how do you get published exactly by the big publishers in the world? If you go to their websites, you'll find the same thing every time. No unsolicited submissions, no unsolicited submissions, no unsolicited submissions. That basically means you can't just reach out to them and say, hey, I've got this great book idea, check out my manuscript, what do you think? They will only talk to you if you have a literary agent. A literary agent is someone who is going to negotiate with publishers on your behalf. Basically they'll give your book idea an audience. To find a literary agent who's interested in talking to an author such as yourself, I recommend going to Agent Query. Agent Query is a free source that lists agents for various book categories. Maybe you have an incredible story, you're working on a memoir. Go over to Agent Query, type in memoir or autobiography or even biography and see what literary agents actually want to talk to you right now. What does it mean to talk to a literary agent? How do you actually get one? Do you have to have the manuscript done? In order to get that book deal, get your book into bookstores and have your face plastered all over the media, you need a book proposal. This is the rule within the publishing industry for non-fiction authors. So yes, you need an agent, yes you want to get a book deal, which the agent can help you secure where you're paid in advance. They can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dollars, even seven figures. For first time authors, it's happened before, it'll happen again. Think of a book proposal as a business plan for your book. These things can run 75 pages. They are a combination of an overview of the book, basically a sales letter. If I open your book proposal, the first thing that I need to know as a literary agent or as an acquisitions editor at a publishing house is what is this thing about? How is your book idea going to fill a gap in the marketplace that hasn't been filled before? What is your advantage of your book idea over everything else that's out there? How is it more marketable? What is the viral word of mouth marketing potential? How is your book going to be more useful, cover more ground, or even go deeper than other books have? What impact is your book going to have on the marketplace? In the opening section of your book proposal, the overview talks exactly that. After you give the overview inside of your book proposal, you have to talk about the market that your book is for. Within the book publishing industry, there are called BISACs. BISACs are the classification system. The libraries have the Dewey Decimal System, publishers have BISACs. So what is your book category? How are you going to write your book, structure your book, even market your book so that it's going to reach that specific category's audience? Because the fact is, every existing category out there already has thousands of books and they have loyal readers. For example, if you're working on a sales and selling book, there is in fact a BISAC, a book category for sales and selling books. How is your book going to appeal to those people? Even to the point of the keywords you're going to target inside of your book to let search engines from Google to Amazon, how are you going to game those algorithms, so to speak, in order to have your book show up at the top of search results for books in that category? That's what you talk about in the market. Other sections of your book proposal include competition, which is how you compare and contrast your book with bestsellers, with perennial titles already in your category, showing how yours has advantages over them. Also you're going to talk about yourself, your bio. This is more than a LinkedIn profile. This is how you are a smart, credible, new, exciting voice for your category. Once you demonstrate your credibility in the bio section, you need to talk about your plan to sell as many copies of your book as possible. Imagine you were not going to have a publishing house backing you. What would you do to sell the book? Where would you give interviews at? Where would you speak? Would you run advertisements? What are some of the smart marketing tactics that you would use? It's okay if you don't know this right now because a lot of first-time authors who want a publishing contract will reach out to an industry professional such as myself for guidance. If you have questions about putting together your book proposal, deciding how you would market your book, and pitching that to an agent and then to a publisher, just click the link in the comments below and we'll book a free profitable book roadmap with me. In that session, we'll actually talk about what you need to put inside of your book proposal, how to reshape your book idea so that it's hot, enticing, and frankly, sexy for the traditional publishing industry to get that attention. Going back to the book proposal, after you talk about how you're going to promote this You know what you need? A table of contents for the entire book. Now, this is more than just a chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. You need to give an overview of what each chapter is going to deliver. It's not what each chapter is about, kind of like a Wikipedia entry for the chapter. It's saying, here's what people get. Here's what I cover and the impact it's going to have on readers. After your table of contents, where you more so explore each of the chapters in the book, you need to have the first three chapters of the book. The sample chapters are critical to include with your proposal. Now, the only thing that's different about fiction, about memoirs, is if you have the manuscript. You need the manuscript. If you're going to send a book proposal for your fiction story, for your novel, you need to have the entire manuscript ready to go. So that's the difference between fiction and nonfiction. If you want a nonfiction book deal, you need to have your book proposal, which includes the first three finished chapters, in a plan for the rest of the book. If you're a fiction author, if you're a novelist who wants your novel published, you need to have the entire manuscript written, edited, and proofread to perfection. That's how you get a book deal. Those are the essentials. Once you've got a book proposal, you need to query the agents. Remember you found them over on Agent Query? Query is simply a letter that says, hey, I've got this great book idea. Here's what it's about. Here's why I'm the best person to write about this. Would you like to see my book proposal? Real simple, real easy, real brief. There's a joke within the publishing industry that the best time to send a query is 2.30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Agents are busy people. They are salespeople. If they're not selling manuscripts to publishers, they're not making any money. The thing is, you need to approach the publishing industry with commercial viability in the forefront on your mind. How can you sell your book idea to an agent? Make it easy for them to sell it to a publisher. That's where publishing inside industry knowledge is going to be critical for you to navigate the traditional publishing industry and get a book deal. I've helped authors secure book deals. I've helped them navigate the path to traditional publishing success, even to the point of selling rights to their book after it's self-published to traditional publishers. Yes, you can actually take a self-published book, as long as it's commercially successful, and sell it to a traditional publisher, and then get that mainstream credibility that you're looking for. If you'd like to talk about how to navigate the publishing industry to secure a book deal and get your book on store shelves by a real publisher, reach out to me at the link below. Book your profitable book roadmap session, and you will come away with a plan for crafting a credible, exciting book idea, as well as a book proposal, and then even identifying who the literary agents are who are the right fit for you. I'll see you in the session.