If you want to be in this position *before* you publish your book, follow the lead of Christopher Greenslate and his partner, Kerri Leonard, who teach English and social justice in a southern California high school.

Teachers Christopher Greenslate and Kerri Leonard got a book deal after they ate on just a dollar a day.

One day, while they were discussing their extremely high grocery bill, they thought about people in third world countries who lived on just a dollar a day. Then they asked themselves a question that would literally change their lives: What would it be like to eat on a budget like that?

They decided to conduct an experiment to find out. Greenslate and Leonard would subsist on a one dollar a day diet.

When they told their friends and relatives about their idea, several suggested that they start a blog, so everyone would be able to keep up with how they were surviving this crazy experiment.

You can see the results at http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/.

They blogged about the rules they created, what they bought, and shared their recipes as well as how they were faring. (In just thirty days, Christopher wound up losing 13 pounds and Kerri lost 5.)

Not too many people knew about their Web site, but word spread.  And spread, and spread and spread. Around the time of the end of their experiment, their blog had been viewed by 700,000 readers. As of this writing they’ve reached a total of 1.2 million people.

The news media also found them. They were written about in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor. People magazine called. So did an Oprah producer.

With that kind of attention, literary agents called, too. They eventually signed with Lynn Johnston at Lynn Johnston Literary. Johnston sold their book to Hyperion on March 17^th, 2009, less than six months finished their thirty day challenge. It’s called On a Dollar a Day: One Couple’s Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America. Look for it in January.

(This is unusually fast turnaround only happens under extraordinary circumstances. Most books take about 18 months after a publishing deal is signed to reach the bookshelves. It probably means they’re scheduled to appear on Oprah.)

There are a few takeaways from this:

1) The dollar a day diet was a great publicity stunt.

Though Greenslate and Leonard were guileless in their intention, they created an attention getting event that captured the imagination of more than a million people. (If you want to create a P.R. stunt, check out Peter Shankman’s book,Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work–And Why Your Company Needs Them. Shankman, by the way, is the creator of HelpaReporter.com, the site where you can subscribe to a list of reporters looking for people to interview for their stories.)

2) Their stunt related to current events.

The plight of hungry people around the world is, unfortunately, a news story that won’t go away.

3) They added a charitable aspect to their experiment.

Greenslate and Leonard asked their blog readers to sponsor them. Their goal was to raise $1,000. They were to donate the money to t, Community Resource Center, a local organization that provides food for the hungry. They succeeded in reaching their target.

4) Their publicity stunt had a clear tie-in to their message of social justice.

This is an essential component of a successful promotion. There’s a huge difference between getting attention and getting meaningful attention. (If you watch the bad, crazy-costumed auditions on American Idol, you know what I mean.)

5) They created something viral.

Greenslate and Leonard’s experiment was something worth mentioning to friends. Plus it was easy to describe: “I found this really cool blog. These two teachers are eating on a dollar a day for a month.”

A publicity stunt may not be right for every project, but if you can find one that works, it can take you all the way to Oprah, and possibly even the bestseller list.

Technorati Tags: BBT, book agent, book marketing, book promotion, book publicity, get published, literary agency, literary agents, Oprah Winfrey, publish a book, publishers, write a book

If you want a literary agent, mine the humor in your life story, like Carrie Fisher does in "Wishful Drinking."

In my interviews with publishing professionals, one thing has come across loud and clear: You can make literary agents and editors take a chance on you if you’re funny.

So even if you’re writing a serious account about your life, you have to mine the humor in it. There’s always something funny.

Carrie Fisher’s new book, Wishful Drinking, is about recollecting the memories she lost through electroshock therapy, which she went through voluntarily to beat depression.

Nonetheless, she had me laughing so loudly in just the first chapter, they almost kicked me out of Borders.

When one of my clients read me her pitch for her screenplay and her novel, it came across,it came across as too sanctimonious.

Though her book is about a very difficult personal challenge, some of the relationships in it reminded me of Driving Miss Daisy. Plus there were elements to her story that reminded me of Three Men and a Baby.

So I asked her to look at her pitch again. This time, though, I told her to imagine the people  in her life story as being played by Dwayne  “The Rock” Johnson, Brendan Fraser, and Bette Midler.

She immediately understood how her pitch could be more light-hearted.

Just because something’s serious doesn’t mean there isn’t comedy in it.

I was once in an acting class where a guy was doing a monologue from a play called The Strongest Man in the World. He read every line like the toughest guy you can find.

The teacher asked him to recite the monologue again, only this time, to say the line as though he was the queeniest gay guy in San Francisco.

He did it, and it was brilliant, because he found all the humor and  sarcasm that he had missed the first time.  After that reading, he took what he discovered and blended  into his original interpretation.

So whatever you’re writing, particularly if it’s serious, sit back and imagine that the people in it are played in it are played by whoever makes you laugh. For me, that’s Adam Sandler, Jack Black, Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Aniston.

I guarantee you’ll see your work in a whole new light.

Technorati Tags: autobiography, book agent, book proposal, get published, life story, literary agent, literary agents, memoir, publish a book, publishers, write a book

Vote on Rick Warren's next book cover.

Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life,  which has sold 30 million copies, has done something unusual for the cover of his next book, The Hope You Need (From the Lord’s Prayer). He is holding a design competition at 99designs.com where hundreds of designers are competing for $5000 and the chance to have their artwork seen by millions of people.

Trust me, this will be a huge coup for whomever wins.

It’s also an educational opportunity for authors. How often do you see a ton of designs for one project?

For me, from just the first page, there was one cover that stood out from the rest. (It may not be on the first page by the time you look.) This cover was a clear winner.

But one person’s opinion is a very small sample size.

So here’s what I’d like: I don’t think you can actually vote at 99designs.com.

Instead, vote on this blog– and I will announce the winner both here and to my email list.

Go to http://budurl.com/l87r and look at the cover designs.

Then make a comment on my blog as to your favorite design– ideally both the number and a little about the design itself and why you like it best.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Oh, and one last thing: I read about this on Yahoo Finance. I’m writing about it, as I’m sure others are. This was a masterful stroke on Warren’s part to get early publicity for his book. If you are clever, virtually everything about your book can help you get the word out.

Technorati Tags: BBT, book marketing, book promotion, book publicity, get published, publish a book, publishers, Rick Warren, The Hope You Need, The Purpose-Driven Life

I’m finding some great ebooks, podcasts, teleseminars and videos that people are giving away. These items are extremely useful for authors, so I’m enjoying passing them on.

There’s always somebody who is suspicious– in one email
I was asked, “You have got to be kidding nothing is free,
what is the bottom line?”

The truth is, because you’re competing with a simple
Google search, if you want to sell anything, you have
to give a decent amount of content for free. Otherwise,
it’s too hard to land a customer.

A lot of the time the free stuff that’s available on the net is behind a “squeeze page”
where a prospective customer is required to give up their
name and email address in order to get the material
they were promised.

But Ryan Deiss has created a new model where
he gives away the first part, which in his case is a
video, without asking for anything. Then, once you like
part one and you want parts 2,3,4, and 5, you’ll
need to *pay* by giving him your contact information,
which  allows him to pitch you
his products.

You can see an example of how he does this on his Million Dollar Napkin page.

Get a literary agent by building a fanbase. Start by giving away free information.

Chris Anderson, whose last book, “The Long Tail”
created a phrase that became a standard part of
current business vernacular, has a new book out
called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. In it
he describes how several offline businesses are profiting
from giveaways. Think cell phones– they are being sold
or given away for free in order to get your subscription.
Publishers Weekly mentions  a surprising example in their review of Anderson’s book:

” . . . In China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption—to the delight of
artists and labels, who profit off free publicity through concerts and merchandising.”

Anderson gave away more than 210,000 copies of his book over a 5 week period. You can still get the first fourteen pages.

And Amazon.com has a twenty minute podcast of Anderson.

Of course, in the book business, there are dozens of stories
about people giving away books for free in order
to develop a following. Seth Godin is the most famous
example in the US. He allowed several hundred thousand
people to download his book, Unleashing the Ideavirus
for free, and then offered the book in hardback for $30.
He sold 40,000 copies–and grossed a neat $1.2 million
dollars. (It may have been 30,000 copies at $40 apiece,
I never remember. But the total value was the same.)

Paulo Coelho, a much richer author, was disturbed that
his books weren’t selling in Russia. He used the same
model–and a million copies were downloaded. He ultimately
wound up selling more than 10 million books in Russia–
and we’re talking novels, not non-fiction.

So if you want to build a fanbase, in today’s market, you have to give things away for free. Everybody’s doing it. Why? Because it works.

And if you want access to my Author Freebie of the Week, plus  a list of top literary agents seeking authors, fill out the form to the right.

Hey, I practice what I preach.

Technorati Tags: BBT, book agent, book marketing, book promotion, book proposal, book publicity, Chris Anderson's new book, get published, literary agent, publish a book, publishers, write a book

Sounds like a fairy tale? It kind of is– with both a happy ending and a moral.

The first tale involves  literary agent Carol Susan Roth. I hate to call her the sour one, since we had a very pleasant lunch a while back. But for fairy tale purposes, she was.

Literary Agent Carol Susan Roth sold "The Infertility Cure" at auction

Randine Lewis, author of The Infertility Cure, had two agents who were interested in her work. The first was ready to send out her book proposal as it was, right away. The second was Carol, who said that Lewis’s book proposal wasn’t ready for prime time yet. Lewis went with the first agent, who sent it out to three publishers, resulting in three rejections.

So Lewis went back to Roth: “ . . .She introduced me to a wonderful ghostwriter who totally revamped my proposal. Carol sent it out and after an auction with six of the major publishers, it was sold to Little, Brown & Co. for a very big advance!”

Pair number two involves a novel.  It has basically the same setup. The “sour” literary agent was interested in  the work based on the author’s query letter. But after she read the manuscript, she said to the author that their work had merit, but  just wasn’t ready yet. This literary agent suggested that the author  improve it, and that she would be happy to provide commentary on subsequent drafts until it was a salable book.

But there was a sweet literary agent who was willing to take the work on as is, right away. The sweet agent submitted the novel to dozens editors at a wide variety of publishing houses—and they all turned the manuscript down. They rejected this novel for the same reason that sour literary agent had declined to take it on in the first place.

So the author decided to go back to the sour literary agent—who agreed to work with her to improve the manuscript—even though it’s next to impossible to get an editor to re-consider a manuscript he’s already rejected.

The sour agent twisted some arms and sold the book. But that’s an unusual outcome. Rejected books are almost never resurrected. And because an agent sent this manuscript out before it was ready, it almost didn’t get published.

So both these tales had happy endings. The moral of the story reminds me of some lines from one of my favoirte Rumi poems, Borrow the Beloved’s Eyes. The translation, as you  might expect, is from Coleman Barks:

“Worry about the others, who give you

delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.

Friends are enemies sometimes,

and enemies Friends.”

So when you have a choice between a sweet literary agent who wants to represent you right away, and a sour one who wants  you to wait and improve your work, it’s usually wiser to choose the sour literary agent.

Technorati Tags: book agent, book proposal, get published, literary agency, literary agent, literary agents, publish a book, publishers, query letter, write a book

Literary Agent Andy Ross

It really helps if you’re writing about something unusual. Andy Ross (www.AndyRossAgency.com) says that publishers are pretty tired of personal memoirs about everyday life and dysfunctional families. He says they call them “me-moirs.”

But when he was pitched a book proposal by a young man who a month after his twenty-first birthday, moved to Ujae (population: 450), a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 2000 miles from the closest continent to teach English, Andy knew he had something worth pitching. It helped that the author,Peter Rudiak-Gould,  is laugh-out-loud hilarious pages. It also helped that, unfortunately, Ujae may be one of global warming’s first casualties, so there was a current events factor.

But most important of all, the story is  engaging and extremely well-written. Every one of the testimonials on Amazon from eight other published authors mentions that it’s funny or moving.

The result? Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island will be coming out on Union Square Press at the beginning of November.

Another twentysomething, Jesse Saperstein, approached Deborah Levine Herman, of the Jeff Herman Literary

Literary Agent Deborah Herman

Agency after he was turned down by lots of other agents. Deborah says she loved the project. ” . . . He has Asperger Syndrome [a form of autism]and he walked the Appalachian Trail to raise money for Juvenile AIDS and he also has written a book that was his, it came from his inner voice and it was just a very unique voice.”

She didn’t accept Saperstein right away:  “I made this guy rewrite his book over two years. And because he just was very grateful and I think people need to be grateful every day for everything, he had a sense that what he was receiving was going to help him reach his goal. And so he was able to make whatever changes he was told to make.”

Herman was eventually satisfied with her young client’s writing, and was ready to represent him. She found an editor, Marian Lizzi, at Perigee Books who “got” his book,  a heartfelt and  humorous collection of essays revealing Saperstein’s unique perspective on growing up different, managing his quirks, his Appalachian adventure and even venturing into the world of online dating called Atypical: Life with Apsperger’s in 23 1/3 Chapters. It’s due out in April of 2010.

Saperstein was undoubtedly helped by the massive success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, which is narrated by a lead character who is autistic, and to a lesser degree (because they’re not current), Donna William’s memoirs Nobody, Nowhere and Somebody, Somewhere. When you write a book proposal, it helps to be able to compare your books to recent bestsellers.  That tells publishers, and ultimately bookstores, that there is a verifiable market for your book.

I doubt that Marian Lizzi, no matter how much she liked Saperstein’s book, could have gotten this book through her editorial board if Haddon’s book hadn’t been such a big hit. I imagine the sales and marketing people would have had a fit! “How could we possibly know if this book is going to sell since there’s nothing else like it.”

If you want to know how the editorial board at publishers work, check out my Inside the Editorial Boardroom interview with with David Nelson, a former VP of Sales who sat on these boards at both Penguin and Harcourt. You’ll get the inside scoop on  what goes on once an editor likes your book, including how publishers decide how much to pay authors for their books. It’s an extra bonus with my Agent University program, a six CD set I’m giving away for just the cost of shipping and handling.

And if you want to get published without being famous, do something unusual, then write about it superbly– and preferably with a great deal of humor, and you really can land a literary agent.

Technorati Tags: book agent, book proposal, get published, literary agency, literary agent, publish a book, query letter, write a book

A platform takes time to build. But certain strategies can help you land a literary agent and get published even if you’re not already well-known to tens of thousands of people.

First off, timing is everything. Literary agent Grace Freedson says you can sell a book without a platform “if it’s a topic that a publisher … feels if I had a book on this I know I could sell it.”

Even if publishers don’t realize they want a book on a particular topic, but yours covers a trend that affects lots of people, you can get published without a big platform.

Here’s an example:

In today’s economy, millions of people are losing their homes to foreclosure, going bankrupt, and missing credit card payments. How do you do things like rent an apartment, get a job, buy a car, get a credit card and start a new business after your credit is shot? Chris Balish and Geoff Williams answer that question with their book LIVING WELL WITH BAD CREDIT, which literary agent Laurie Abkemeier of DeFiore and Company sold to publisher HCI.

If you’re a book publisher, publishing this book is a no-brainer. It’s filled with timely information that the media will be happy to talk and write about. A morning talk show like the Today Show could literally do a week-long series on living with bad credit. Each day they could show you how to overcome one of the problems the book solves.

So if you come up with something timely that’s already on everybody’s minds, or if you happen onto a topic that publishers think is hot, you can attract a lot of attention from book publishers and literary agents.

Technorati Tags: book agent, get published, literary agency, literary agent, literary agents, publish a book, publishers, write a book