Welcome to Episode 70 of Published. Today we’ll be looking back at our episodes over 2022 and bringing forward the insight our guests have shared. Our mission on Published is to demystify the publishing industry for authors, and over the past year, we’ve pulled back the veil on becoming a bestseller, getting book reviews, writing a beautiful manuscript, and so much more.

00:47 – Welcome back to Published! In this episode, we’re recapping the past year of the Published podcast and highlighting some of the best advice for authors.

• This year we covered a wide range of topics on the publishing industry, from how to begin your very first draft all the way to distributing and marketing tips for your book launch. Today, we’ll revisit our experts’ advice for every stage of the publishing process and share the most valuable bits of wisdom from each conversation.

01:13 – Writing a manuscript is intimidating, especially when every book, every author, and every process is a little different. We asked several experts last year to share their best tips on the writing process. In two episodes, Greenleaf’s own executive editor Erin Brown explained how she helps busy authors find the time to write, and her best practices for outlining a first draft.

• About 90% of our authors, if not more, are in this position. The ideal writing conditions will never arrive. I think the biggest trap for all writers is when you say “I'll start writing when…” because it typically never happens.
• One of the greatest challenges that you have to overcome is finding the time to write so that it takes a year to write your novel or book instead of ten years. Overall, that writing and editing phase can be about a year, I think, when you're talking about writing consistently.
• You know, we always recommend that writers devote consistent time every day to write if possible. For instance, if you're most creative in the mornings, you might need to get up an hour early or two hours early. If you only have time on weekends, because you're too busy running a company, for instance, as we spoke about, commit to working for a consistent block each weekend. You can also do it in smaller sessions. Like I mentioned, it doesn't have to be in huge blocks.
• I think a lot of writers especially who are busy get very intimidated. I don't have a two-hour block to write, so I just won't do it. But you know, you can have a voice recorder, you can do it on your phone while you're puttering around, you can speak into it, even if it's only a couple thousand words, or an intro, or your thoughts. So smaller writing spurts are okay when you're short on time as well.
• There's lots of apps that you can use to keep track of your writing time. So, if you start logging how much you've written, and when you've written it, you can start to see a pattern. And then you can figure out when you're more productive.
• I think it's important to talk to your family and co-workers and tell them you're not to be disturbed when you're writing. And that can be hard to do to hold those boundaries. But officially blocking out that time in your schedule, your Google Calendar, I think is really helpful because it's harder to ignore.

• A lot of authors are really intimidated by the word outline, so they don't know where to start. I think automatically, we kind of go back to high school and panic. And we think about roman numerals and how to format them and indent them properly. Give yourself the freedom to write badly at this point. So just start the outline, just get in there, do it. And you can always change, you can adjust, you can format later and do those indentations and make it look pretty.
• I always recommend to my authors, just start by writing a short summary of your book, just a paragraph, pretend that you're writing almost cover copy or giving an elevator pitch to someone. So, you want to include your theme, your unique hook, what makes it different than what else is out there. The problem you're trying to solve for the reader, the main points, and reader takeaways. So, this can all be in a short paragraph.
• Next, you want to write summaries of your chapters, brief paragraphs of the topics you want to cover. Then you can play around with the order. So, you can mix and match. A lot of people like using post-it’s so you can easily move them on a on a board if you want. And this is when you're really creating the table of contents. And you're figuring out where the material will be strongest.
• Tanya: It can also help you understand where you're a little thin on material. And so, it can kind of send you back to do some research in areas where you've got to strengthen that content for your reader.
• I work with so many authors during the manuscript development stage. And a lot of times authors come to us with great ideas and a little bit of material, and we help them shape it into a rough draft. And that almost always starts with an outline. Because this is the best time at the ground level to really map out what makes your book unique, what your theme is, what your structure is, what is going to make it the strongest for the reader.
• If you've written the whole thing, it's a little hard to come back and go, oh, that's right, I should have thought about what makes this unique, I should have thought about the best way to lay this out. So really, this first stage is the best time to get a fresh set of eyes to take a look at it, to help suss out your distinctive angle, especially someone who has experience in the genre and has worked on so many of these books, they know what works, what doesn't.
• Tanya: And there's a lot to be said, for the efficiency of not having to do, like you said, a rewrite, because you were working in a vacuum, and you thought you'd wait until the end to get feedback. And then an editor says, well, actually…
• I know and so many others have that fear, I don't want to show anybody, I want to keep it. But you know, editors are not judgmental, they're there to help. They're there to collaborate. And so, when you get someone in there that really is going to give you that expertise and that help, I think authors realize, oh, why didn't I do this earlier? You can. Do it at the beginning.

06:10 – On the subject of getting started with a book, every genre is a little different. If you have an interesting life story, you may thought about writing a book, but been unsure how to convert your story into a narrative arc. We asked our Executive Editor, Lee Zarnikau, how she guides authors to write a unique and engaging memoir.

• Remember that this is not an autobiography, meaning it's not a step-by-step chronology of your life necessarily, even if we end up telling it in chronological order. A memoir, you have something to share, you have a message that you think will help someone else. And so, you're going to cherry pick from the parts of your life that help convey that message. I like to think of it more as a series of anecdotes that support that key theme or key message, rather than every single thing that's happened in your life.
• A lot of times when I'm working with any author, whether it's on memoir, or any genre, we work on what is that message and I have them put it someplace where they're writing, so that they remember that this is my goal here to tell this message.
• Then I would encourage people to kind of look at all those different anecdotes you want to include and evaluate them. Does this support the message I'm trying to give?
• I often actually would encourage people that they could write their vignettes, their anecdotes out of order. And that might help break that need to put in all these and then I did this and then I did that, that doesn't really serve the message.
• Think about when you go to a movie, or even better to a play. And the director and the screenwriters have made choices about what they show you because they only have so much time. And with the play they only have so much set to work with and so many characters. They have been very discerning, they've curated the story to just what you need to know to serve, what needs to be delivered for your experience. And kind of think of it that way.
• If you're going to take the director's fingers and look at the different anecdotes in your life and say yes, this is the one that really frames what I'm trying to say. So, think like a director.
• In memoir, authors can learn a lot from fiction authors. They have often have to do the same thing with creating compelling, engaging stories, showing rather than telling, and finding their voice. So, you can use a lot of the same tools that are written for fiction authors, if you look at that.
• Some of those include, first of all, finding a place or time to write where you can really be authentic. And for me, when I do my personal writing, my family cannot be in the house—they just can't. They're lovely. They totally support me, but I cannot really go deep while I'm listening to and worrying about what's going on with the family.
• Another technique that a lot of fiction writers use that would work well for memoir authors would be to free write, meaning you just sit down and force yourself to write for a certain amount of time. And you don't worry about what you're saying. Don't pick a topic that’s necessarily even in your book, just pick something that you feel like you can sit down and write about. Set it aside, come back to it maybe a week later. And read it with fresh eyes and highlight what you like, what really sings to you what sounds like you, and you'll start to see what your voice is there.
• So this is kind of my in between approach as to how people can get started. And one is to come up with that premise. It doesn't have to be perfect, and doesn't have to be pretty, but you have to know where you want to go.
• And so, I almost have people fill out a sentence like this. My [fill in type of reader] will find my book [inspiring, intriguing, enlightening, reassuring; pick your word there] because I can [pick a word; show, entertain, something else] about [again, pick your word; slice of life, situation, experience, background]. So, kind of create a sentence like that. This is what my book is going to do for a reader because I can show this.
• And then maybe brainstorm a list of anecdotes from your life that support that theme. Don't worry about the order. Don't worry about judging them yet to start brainstorming that list, write about each of those anecdotes, again in the order that speaks to you, and that is most connected to that theme, not necessarily in chronological order. Then read it over and see what's taking shape. And that's, again, where a good developmental editor or some good friends can help you start seeing that arc if you need it.
• Tanya: And I love the way you've described the premise, because as I'm listening to you, it sounds like a mission statement. You know, for business, we would talk about a mission statement being the thing that is your North Star that guides all of your decisions and your strategy, and so forth. And that's really what this premise is, in terms of the promise to the reader that our author is working toward.

10:50 – Some authors may think their job ends once the book is written, but in reality, their work is only beginning. Promotion is vital for a book to succeed, especially now with thousands of books being released every day. Last March, we welcomed Mimi Chan, a senior marketing director at Goodreads, to teach us how to use the platform effectively, how to get reviews, and why reviews are so important for authors.

• What's unique about Goodreads is that everyone that comes there is truly looking for a book. That's what we're strong at, helping readers discover that next book that they're going to love. We're also a wonderful site for publishers and authors to connect with those readers.
• We’ve created tools and profile pages that are uniquely for the author, ways in which they can talk to readers or promote their books that you probably wouldn’t find anywhere else.
• I wish that authors would come on the site before their book was published. I wish authors would come and just join Goodreads as a member, start establishing those relationships. Maybe it’s in a group and a genre that they’re writing in.
• Start reviewing and reading books, especially in your own genre, so that you start becoming a book tastemaker, somebody known for having good writing skills and the ability to talk smartly about those books that you love.
• And then, once you have a book titled, get your book on the site. Get on there right away, as soon as you can, that way people who hear about you, hear about your book, can start adding it to their shelves, kind of bookmarking it and sharing about it. It's a place where they can kind of put it on hold, almost like if you're putting a book on hold at the library. You can do that on Goodreads. And then what we'll do on the site is we'll remind those readers that they are interested in that book.
• Start to engage with readers and asking readers to follow you in every place that you like write a review or have content, or when you open an “ask the author” for readers to ask you questions. In all those different places. If you run a giveaway, ask readers to follow you. Ask readers to follow you outside of the site. Again, that gets the flywheel kicked off and started on the site for you.
• Find a good 15-minute window once a week, preferably in the morning and on like a Monday through Thursday, because that's when we see highest traffic on the site and do just a couple of these things. if you do that consistently overtime you will build a strong following and you will build a great engagement platform for readers for yourself.
• It doesn't make sense to ask somebody who maybe is just okay with your book or maybe the book wasn't quite right for them, that always happens for even the best books. You don't want to try to convert those people into being fans, that's not going to be the best use of your time.
• Focus on those people who really love your books, look at your book page, look at those reviews where people are giving you five stars. Those are the people you want to engage with. Say thank you to those people. Encourage those people. Say, hey you know would you be willing to write a review? Hey, would you like to get an early copy of my next book? And would you be willing to share what you think about it? Those are the people that you want to engage with and that's where you're going to find a lot of goodness.
• We find that reviews on the site are largely positive. 92% of the reviews on the site have three stars or higher, many times even five stars. And that makes sense when you think about it. Why would you spend your time putting a review in there, putting a rating in there? You generally tend to want to do that when you love something.
• What we see in our research is that when a book on the site has a mix of reviews, both one star all the way up to five stars, that's when other readers really start to trust the reviews and the ratings for that book. You want a large range of reviews, predominantly, of course, in the four-, five-star range, but even a three-star review is considered good on the site. You want some of those lower ones because it gives validity to your book and makes it feel that the reviews are trustworthy.
• We found one of the best ways to get reviews on Goodreads was simply by adding a link at the end of the book, whether it's a Kindle book, or some other eBook, or some other place.
• Tanya: The easier you make it, if it's right there, and they went all that way to finish the book, that's probably the best time to get it.
• Think about that review space on your own book. It's one of the few places where you can control some of the content and engage with readers directly on your book page. Don't use that review space to write a review of your own book. Use that as a space to write about things that are exciting about the book, maybe promotional information about your book, maybe have a special offer on your book. This is one of the few places I recommend writing something promotional.
• Once you have enough followers and what’s enough? I would say maybe 1000 followers on the site. Then, I would consider writing Kindle notes and highlights.
• So, annotations on top passages in your Kindle book. Go to your Kindle, look at your book, see what the most popular highlights are, and then just add special insider knowledge that only you as an author has on those passages. Since these are the most popular highlights, you'd know for sure it's going to resonate with your readers. And then when you share those on Goodreads, through our automated system we will send a notification as well as an email to every reader who follows you or who added that book to their ‘want to read’ shelf.
• Now you're engaging those readers with special content, unique content. It's content that you can use not just on Goodreads, but you can use that in your social, you can put that in your newsletter, you've created something that you can use to market overall.
• On your author profile page, you have the ability to turn on questions and answers. There's so much here that you learn about how readers think about your book or what questions they’re asking about your book. It helps you understand what their needs are, what gets them excited. You can use a lot of that information, including the review information on your book page, to help refine how you describe and market your book, that synopses that you write.
• Pick up on those cues, like words that every reader is saying about your book. You should think about, okay how do I use that word in my marketing? How do I use that phrasing and how it gets them excited, in the description of my book?
• Look for top reviewers where you like their style of review and what they read and start engaging with them on books that they're reading.
• Then, once you have a relationship you could then message them because now your friends on the site or you're following each other, and you can message them and say, hey I have a new book coming out I'd love to offer you a copy, would you be interested at all?
• There's a part of our site where you can look at those people. So, at the top navigation it says community and you pull down it says people, click on that and you can sort by who has written the most reviews, who has the most people following them, so on and so forth. You'll see that some of our top reviewers are actually authors. I hope that’ll become one of you.

17:46 – Another platform indispensable to promoting new authors is Amazon, though it can be as daunting as it is far-reaching due to the search algorithm changing so frequently. Scott James, a publishing guide and book launch coach, also shared his expertise on how to optimize your book’s Amazon listing, and tips on how to reach the elusive status of Amazon bestseller.

• The number one benefit is not actually being the number one book, the number one benefit of sort of doing a bestseller run is being a top ranked book in one or more categories that your target audience is shopping in or browsing or pays attention to.
• And a big reason for this is because when you're able to get your book highly ranked, Amazon will take notice if you can maintain that ranking over time, and they'll start to do things on your behalf because Amazon is an e-commerce store.
• They noticed that you're selling, they want to help you because they see that people are buying your book and it becomes a virtuous cycle. If you sell well, consistently, for days, weeks, months, Amazon will start to recommend your book to other people who shop in those categories. Sometimes people will be following a category on Amazon, and you might be included in like a hot new release email, you might be in those carousels further down the page.
• All of those are the really big meaty benefits because they put you in front of an audience that isn't yours. You know, these are not your friends and family going to buy a book on launch day. This is people who are looking for a book on leadership or people who are looking for a fiction book in your genre.
• You want to first position your book in the right categories. And the secret there is that each book gets uploaded automatically to two categories, when it's added to Amazon. But if you know who to talk to, and how to find them, you can discover up to eight more categories that you can personally, or your publisher can, add your book to. And I'm always surprised to find out that a lot of people don't know this, including marketing people at other publishing companies.
• Tanya: So, what is the “right category?” Is it the most accurate category for my content, or is there a way to assess a category in terms of relative competition within the category?
• 20:14: Yeah, it's definitely a balance. Like I say, you get to add up to eight more categories. So, the way I think about it is you're working with up to 10 categories. And you can take a couple of them, one or two, and basically look for where do I have a really good shot at hitting number one, and then take the other six, or three or four of the other ones and say, where's there really high traffic? Maybe I won't be selling 300 books a day, like some of the books in that category. But based on what I can learn, and just derive from the rankings of the book in that category, I can probably be in the top 50, pretty consistently. That means that if people are going into that category, buying other books, in really high numbers, you're going to have a pretty high likelihood being in their recommendation.

• If you have zero sales, and then suddenly you have 200 sales that's looked upon less favorably then if it's slightly more gradual, even if it's over a couple of days. You don't want to go so far that it's so gradual that it's spread out over like a month or two months, where you're not getting a volume of sales in a day.
• But sometimes I'll work with folks, and they'll want to have everybody go buy the book at four o'clock on a Tuesday. And that advice is out there. And that's not necessarily a great idea. But having like a 72-hour push over your launch day, for example, is good, as opposed to a three-month drawn out, preorder campaign.
• I'm going to call it a mistake I see people make is over emphasizing pre-orders. S if you are sending people for two months to go buy your book, you do get all those sales, you get the royalties, etc. But if you're selling, 10 books a day for two months, and you sell 250 books, you're going to rank in your categories, wherever selling 10 books ranks you for those two months, as opposed to if you compress that preorder period even to one week, or if you sort of use your preorder time, not to drive sales, but to get people excited, and then unleash all these people who are wanting your book during the launch week, then you're going to do a more concentrated volume of those 250 sales. And that's going to give you a lot more visibility right at launch.
• After your launch period there's always this question of like, what do you do? Well, try to get 100 reviews on Amazon, because 100 reviews is super noticeable if you can get to that in a year. You're going to be doing a lot of this just sort of on the ground, grassroots work to get your book out there. And you're going to learn a lot about what people respond to, to try to hit that number.
• Tanya: It's not instinctive, to turn around and ask your friends to write a review when they tell you that they enjoyed your book or even a perfect stranger. And you have to develop your own cadence for this and have it just become an automatic response even if you're slightly uncomfortable. I'll do it now. I have strangers who reach out on LinkedIn, and they say I picked up your book, it came into my life at the right time, thank you so much. And my knee jerk reaction would just be to say, well, thank you so much for taking the time to write me a note. And I'm glad you enjoyed it. But I have to add, would you mind, please, leaving a review on Amazon if you enjoyed it? And they always are like, oh, of course. It just doesn't occur to them very often. So, you've got to ask.

24:04 – One of the biggest unknowns for new authors is how books get distributed and what options they have to get their books out into the world. That’s why we made an episode dedicated entirely to the ins and outs of the distribution world, where I answered the most commonly asked questions.

• If we were to just draw a couple lines in the sand between wholesalers and distributors, one would be a distributor usually has some exclusivity. The books that they distribute are exclusively theirs to distribute versus a wholesaler has a warehouse full of a little bit of everything that they sell to their end retail users.
• The other line in the sand that I would say makes them different is that traditionally, a distributor has a proactive sales force that is championing the books it represents. And that might mean that you have people in house that are calling upon what we call house accounts. Or that might mean they have sales reps out in the field, driving their Subarus from independent bookstore to independent bookstore and trying to get those books blanketed across the country. Probably at some combination of those two things. But there are people working to get those books onto shelves.
• A wholesaler really makes books available. So, they may have an online catalog that the book is a part of. And that's where I think authors get confused, like my book is available on Baker and Taylor and it’s available on Ingram, but there's nobody out there pitching it or championing it and trying to get it into the accounts.
• So, where it gets even more confusing is when we start talking about Ingram which is largely regarded and I think their bigger capacity is as a wholesaler, however, they have a distribution arm. So, it's possible that if you're working with Ingram Publishing Services, they are actually your distributor. And they're also a wholesaler.
• I would ask the question of do you have somebody, a real human being, not just a database? Do you have somebody actively championing and pitching your books? If so, then that's probably a distributor.
• David: Tanya, here's a question that we get a lot, I certainly hear it all the time. What is the likelihood of getting a distributor to pick up their book for further distribution after it's been published elsewhere?
• It depends on how it performed in terms of the sales performance in the retail market. We use a tool called Nielsen's BookScan, which is the same company that does sound scan for the recording industry, and they do their TV ratings. They are our best barometer of sales, making it all the way to the end consumer.
• So, if the book, when we look it up in that system, performed pretty well, even if it was just in certain markets, then a distributor might look at that and say, okay, it had a limited release, because it didn't have a distributor, and performed well, in the author's hometown, we think we can widen it, and there's still some opportunity to be realized. In that case, you might have a good shot, especially if you still have a lot of marketing lined up to support it.
• There are two sales when we're talking about book selling. It's a curious industry because everything is sold returnable. 99.9% of things are sold returnable. There are always exceptions. But this is a practice that goes way back to the Depression, and it's just never been flipped.
• So, unlike let's say if you're selling apparel into some retailer and they don't sell it, well, they would put it on sale and eventually clearance and get rid of it and then it wouldn't come back to you. In the bookselling industry, the publisher sends 1000 or however many copies out into Barnes and Noble and that's the first sale. If the second sale of the consumer coming in and buying it off the shelf doesn't happen, then the books get returned to the publisher. And that undoes the sale for everybody.
• So, when we talk about two sales, that's what we mean. And when we beat this drum constantly, like we do about the need for the author to create demand, that's why.
• We can do our job and get tons of books out into the supply chain but there's no reason to if the author isn't creating demand, and they're all going to come right back. And worse, it starts to burn us and our reputation.
• We're cautious in that way as any good publisher would be. And always making sure that we're collaborating with our authors to button up that demand side of marketing their books and creating the pool that has to happen to make that second sale work.
• I tend to advise authors, if they can, to err on the side of a smaller print run. And that way, as long as we have sufficient time to reprint, we have a little bit of flexibility should they get some major award or make a best sellers list, or some awesome review or endorsement comes in right after the book comes out. We can update it more easily on that second printing. Versus if we've got a warehouse of 15,000 units, which might have made sense at the time, because the cost per unit comes down with higher quantities, we can't update it as soon as we could with the obviously smaller print runs.
• Six months from pub date, we need to go to them with a pretty clear picture of what this book is. They don't like to go down the imagination road. So, we need to show them a cover design, we need to have a really solid representation of the content itself, marketing plans as buttoned up as we can get them that far in advance, and anything else that's persuasive and compelling to our pitch.
• It's frustrating to authors, because we have that meeting, and then there's radio silence for like six months before the book comes out. But those are their buying timelines. And when we're hitting them at that six-month mark, they have the largest available budget to bring in product. So, we always want to be pitching them when they have the most money in their wallet. And they can then program or model in the widest distribution for the titles that we're pitching.

30:08 – Another way to reach book lovers which continues to rise in popularity is through audiobooks. Madi Mullen, a product manager at the audiobook company Libro.fm joined us to explain everything you've wondered about the world of audiobooks and how they impact authors.

• You always want to make sure that your book is as widely available as possible, and audiobooks are a way to do that.
• Tanya: Yeah, I often speak with authors about this very question of why produce the audiobook and one thing I think that’s important for them to remember is that with any additional format, but especially for audio, there is a halo effect on the print book, because you can see that as people increasingly adopt the audiobook version, it's just human nature, they like it, they tell a friend, they leave a review, and it helps the print books. So, that's another thing for authors to consider.
• 30:58: It's $150 to $250, often per finished hour. So, for a 10-hour audiobook, you're looking at $1,500 to $2,500. And that's expensive. I think as far as things that are being done to combat that, one of the big things that's being talked about right now in the audiobook space is AI narrated audiobooks, and that technology is getting better. And it's being used to combat you know, the higher cost of hiring the narrator.
• At Libro.fm, we believe that AI isn't a match for human narration, but we realize how important it is for accessibility. And really, at the end of the day, if the choice is a book doesn't get made into an audiobook at all, or a book is made into an audiobook, but it's narrated by AI, it's, I think, always better to have an audiobook out there.
• Also looking at sort of the ROI question. With audiobooks, I think it's important to make sure that you're looking beyond just the revenue it's producing, because there are opportunities that it affords that aren't directly correlated to maybe the revenue that you're seeing from an audiobook.
• A good example is, like I mentioned our Bookseller ALC program, if you're reaching a couple of booksellers, who then champion, not just your audiobook, but your print book, that makes a huge difference.
• And it's a great way to market the print book, you can share, you know, audio clips on social media, or on YouTube. And you'll reach readers through platforms that you wouldn't otherwise connect with.
• Backlist titles actually account for a lot of the income. Most publishers make more than half their income from backlist. So, the tail of audiobooks can be really long when there's so much focus on the first couple of weeks of a book coming out. It's sort of a nice reminder that people continue buying often for a really long time.
• Make sure that whatever platform or service you choose to use to distribute the audiobook that the audiobook is going to be available widely. ACX, the audiobook publishing service for Audible is one that I think a lot of people turn to because it's easy, but the distribution there is very limited. So, when you go that route, you know your book isn't available via Libro.fm, or even in libraries via Overdrive and Libby. One that we get books from is Author's Republic.
• And another little tidbit, and this is again from the APA data for 2021, is just that people are continuing to prefer audiobooks that are read by a professional narrator versus an author. So, I think this is something that can be really tempting. It's like, I'll just save money to narrate my own audiobook. Yes, that will save money. But also, it's been shown that professional narrators are for sure professional for a reason. It's a craft, it's an art. If you've listened to any number of audiobooks, you know that it makes a huge difference. That might be a good spot to put budget towards getting someone who's going to just read your book beautifully.

33:41 – Being an author means putting yourself out there, every step of the way. This includes opening yourself up to criticism, so we had our Director of Marketing, Jen Rios, and Executive Editor, Lee Zarnikau, back on to discuss how to take rejection with grace, and how to grow from a “beautiful no.”

• Jen: Oh, rejection is such a sad thing to talk about. But there can be a variety of things on the marketing side that can lead to that sort of answer that you don't want to hear, that 'no.' One of the big things is really the author and just not having a really strong network or platform to tap into.
• These days, authors are really being encouraged to be an active part of that promotion of their book. And if an author comes to a publisher, and they really haven't taken that time to sort of cultivate that network, or build their platform, what's ultimately going to happen is they're going to have a really hard time getting the word out about that book. And that's going to be one of those things that can lead to a publisher being a bit reluctant to want to move forward with that project.
• There are definitely some things that can be done, when you get that really awful line that your book is not marketable. Take a minute and sort of let that absorb and think about it. But don't take too long. Because really, it's now the time for you to just refocus and regroup on what this project is and what it can be.
• Think about your subject matter. Is it timely? Is it relevant? Is it something that's in the news right now that can sort of ping someone's interest? If you're writing a book, in a crowded genre, which is often the case sometimes when they say the book is not marketable, sometimes I think about, you know, fiction books, or even leadership or business books, think of ways to make your book stand out. How can I differentiate my book from the others that are in the market right now? Is there a new technique you can introduce? Is there a new method? Is there a way to make that content, like I said earlier, more timely, or more relevant?
• And then one really important thing is just thinking about who your target reader is, who is your reader, who's the person that you want to buy this book? That's so important. And what would you want to read if you were that person? And really thinking about how you can frame that. So, make that book something that is more of a project with mass appeal.
• From a marketing standpoint, if we see an author who's motivated and wants to go hand in hand with us to help get out there and get the word out about a book that's really going to help us to make that book a success. So, in the beginning, when they're pitching, it is nice to see that an author is willing and ready and able to jump in and do what was required to make the book success with us.
• Lee: And I have a lovely collection of both form letter rejections, and then also what I call "beautiful nos." And those beautiful nos are when that agent or editor took the time to step away from their insanely busy schedule and really actually told me what they loved about my work, why they're not the right fit, and the advice they had for me.
• So, I sent this out to other agents. And I got two beautiful no’s that gave me similar advice. Great, I can work with that. when it comes down to actually improving your work, if there's things that people said needs fixing, then I took a step back and say, can I fix that myself? If no, then if you have the budget, to get some professional assistance from an editor, that's a great way to go.
• If you have a small budget, but not a big one, you can do something I've done before, which is ask for some different editors to look at pieces and say, here's the feedback I've gotten. Here's a scene or chapter and can you give me just a little bit of feedback and tell me what you're seeing about what this person that sent me the rejection saw. And that can be incredibly valuable to help set you up to work on the entire rest of the manuscript.
• I think from the content side, people can tell when they read your work, if it's coming from a place of authenticity, if you have something original to say and if you have the commitment to truly make this a fantastic reader experience, they can tell that just from the care that you've taken with the work that you've delivered, and the query letter, or the pitch if that matches up with what the expectations are in that area.
• The green flag is that you are being you, and that the work that you've done, either on your own or letting people help you that you have used, shines by removing any other distractions, it’s really putting you a step above. Because if you let people help you remove distractions of either unpolished writing, or that kind of just scratches the surface writing that doesn't go deep enough, then people can say, yes, you care enough to get to the heart of what you want to say. And to do so in a way that it's going to really sing for this reader.

38:39 – That’s it for our episode today. We hope you enjoyed this look back at some of our favorite bits of publishing advice from the past year, and we look forward to bringing you another year of industry insight ahead. For notes and resources from today’s show, go to greenleafbookgroup.com/episode70.

You can also find advice for writing, publishing and promoting your work in my book, Ideas, Influence and Income, which you can learn more about at ideasinfluenceandincome.com. If you've enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever it is you listen to your podcasts. It means a lot to have your feedback and helps us make sure we're answering your publishing questions. A big thank you to Eleanor Fishbourne and Madison Johnson, who produce the Published podcast, and we will be back next month with another new episode.