Tag: Mike Nappa (Page 19 of 23)

Reason #64: You Have Unrealistic Expectations About Your Publishing Potential

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

I always laugh when I watch a movie about writers. Inevitably in film, the very first book a writer creates gets immediately published and becomes an instant bestseller regardless of whether it’s a silly pop-up book (Throw Mama from the Train) a self-help psychology book (What about Bob?) or anything else thrust on the public in that fictional world.

Well, I’ve got bad news for you: Life ain’t like the talkies. Sorry.

If you come to me with an inflated ego and sky-high expectations, regardless of the quality of your book, I’m going to reject you. (Hey, my ego is bigger than yours anyway, right?)

A few years ago I got a proposal from a small college professor that I really liked. It was for a niche audience, but I figured it was still strong enough that a publisher in that category would be able to sell at least 8,000-10,000 copies. That would be a strong beginning for this first-time author, so I started talking with him about possibilities. I asked one of my standard questions, “What are your expectations with this book?”

With a straight face, he answered, “Well, Rick Warren sold several million copies of The Purpose-Driven Life, so I expect my book to sell at least that.”

My jaw dropped.

First time author…publishing in a niche category…and he expected me to turn his writing debut into a book that would compete for the title of bestselling hardcover nonfiction title in publishing history? Whaa?

The truth is, there over a million books published each year, and only about 250 manage to make it onto one of the New York Times bestseller lists during that time. That means the odds of his book hitting a NYT list were, at best, 4200 to one. He’s 20 times more likely to marry a millionaire (odds at about 215 to 1) than to write a bestselling book—let alone make publishing sales history.

I tried to explain to this author the mathematical realities of publishing in his category—and to point out the huge differences between him and Rick Warren, but he would have nothing to do with it. Finally I just gave up and walked away. To my knowledge, his book has never been published.

The lesson for you is this: if you want to publish your book, you must be realistic about its potential. Don’t assume that you are entitled to the same success as some other popular publishing phenomenon out there, or demand to be treated like a New York Times bestseller before you’ve become a New York Times bestseller. All that does is show people like me that you are an egotistical rube who knows nothing about the realities of a writing career. And that means my rejection letter will soon land in your email box.

What You Can Do About It

1. Don’t let your ego define you.

Honestly, I know that anyone who aspires to a career in publishing must have a rather significant ego. Let’s face it, it takes a certain, hefty amount of narcissism to assume that thousands, if not millions, of people should read your words like precious pearls—paying you for the privilege to do so.

That said, it’s a mistake to let your ego define you, or to let your ambitions be the sole motivation for your actions. Arrogance is never attractive, and unearned arrogance is always opposed. So, when it comes time to move into a paying career as a writer, be careful not to let your ego be the thing that defines you in the eyes of an editor or agent.

Take pride in the quality of your work, not in the as-yet-unseen outcome of your publishing endeavor. Then you’ll be successful regardless of how many copies your book sells.

2. Choose your benchmarks wisely.

Tom Brady is arguably the best NFL quarterbacks of all time. He’s won seven Super Bowls (at the time of this writing), and seems to be in the hunt for more championship rings just about every season. Plus, he’s married to one of the most beautiful women in the world.

Now, if you’ve never played pro sports, is it realistic for you to expect that you can step onto any football field and immediately experience the same kind of success that Tom Brady has? Of course not! Heck, Peyton Manning (of the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos) is every bit as skilled as Tom Brady—yet Peyton only managed two championships before retiring while Mr. Brady kept winning more.

The lesson here is one of benchmarking. Yes, it’s good to seek inspiration in your career from others who have achieved extreme success. At the same time, it’s unwise to assume that because someone else has reached the pinnacle that you are next in line. You simply can’t compare yourself to J.K. Rowling or Rick Warren or Kitty Kelley until you’ve achieved success similar to Rowling, Warren, Kelley, or anyone.

So choose your benchmarks wisely. Find where you might fit on the ladder of publishing in your present circumstance, and aim for there to start. Once you achieve that success, aim for the next rung, and keep climbing one rung at a time until you reach the top. Then other people will waste time comparing themselves to you.

3. Treat yourself like someone else.

One of my gifts is the ability to assess a manuscript with a cold, critical eye. If I couldn’t do that, I certainly wouldn’t succeed as an agent or a writer. Imagine if I only used that gift on other people’s manuscripts…There’s no way I would have stuck around in this business for the past 20+ years!

Even with this very book, I must periodically stop and evaluate it against the standards of the industry. The way I do that is to first divorce myself from my past successes, from my hopes for the future, from anything except the words in front of my face. After all, that’s all you’re going to know of me when you read this book.

In short, I must treat myself like I’d treat someone else—with a cold, critical assessment that demands excellence without insisting on the rewards I hope will come with it. I’m going to be honest, I don’t always achieve that goal. But as long as I’m trying, my work will stand out from the crowd. Unless, of course, you do the same thing too. Then I’ll probably have some stiff competition…

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #65: You Don’t Know Why People Buy Books

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Here’s a pop quiz for you: Consumer behavior experts identify 14 “justifiers” that people use to convince themselves that it’s OK to buy something. How many of those can you name?

Ready…Go.

Done so soon?

Here are the correct answers, based on Pamela Danziger’s consumer buying research through Unity Marketing:

Quality of Life
Pleasure
Beautify Home
Education
Relaxation
Entertainment
Planned Purchase
Emotional Satisfaction
Replace an Existing Item
Stress Relief
Hobby
Gift for Self
Bought on Impulse
Status

How many justifiers did you come up with? All 14? 10? Five? One?

Chances are, even if you got some right, you simply guessed at what they were. Chances are also good that my Sales VP is intimately acquainted with the majority of the items on this list. She has to be, because those justifiers are keys to her getting people to buy your book.

Hm. There are 14 primary reasons people use when deciding whether or not to buy your book. And my Sales VP is very interested in how those reasons are displayed in your book. And you want both my Sales VP and the eventual reader to be very interested in buying your book….

So, class, what does that mean, in practical terms, for the aspiring author who wants to avoid rejection? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The obvious answer is twofold.

First, you should make sure your book offers something that makes spending money on it justifiable to a reader.
Second, you should make sure your proposal shows my Sales VP why she’s justified in spending money to contract your book.

Sounds easy, right? Well, that dear reader, is your next test…

What You Can Do About It

1. Grade your book in all 14 areas.

After your manuscript is ready, but before you’ve written the full proposal section for it, take the list of 14 “justifiers” above and rate your book in each category. Does your book clearly, and emphatically help a reader improve her quality of life? Give yourself an A+ in that category. Does your book miss out on helping a reader beautify his home? Be honest, give yourself an F in that category.

Go through all 14 justifiers to see where your book’s strengths lie—and remember it’s OK for your book to miss out on several justifiers. The important thing is to find at least three or four A+ ratings on your list. Those then become part of the “Reader Benefits” statements that you’ll include in your proposal (see Reason #34 for more on benefits). When you highlight those benefits of your book in terms of how they motivate readers to buy, you’ll get the attention of my Sales VP (and my Marketing VP as well!).

2. Keep track of why you buy.

For the next three months, keep a record of every book or magazine you buy. Write down the title that you bought, and then in a column next to it, write down one specific reason why you bought it. If it seems to fit into one of the 14 justifiers categories, fine. If not, write down in your own words what motivated you enough to spend your hard-earned money on it.

After three months, organize your list to reflect which justifiers were most influential on your book-buying decisions. Then ask yourself, “What can I learn about book-buyer motivation from what I see in my own buying habits? And how can I use that information to help me convince others to buy my book?”

3. Read a few good books on consumer behavior.

Sure, this seems like a lot of homework for you when all you really want to do is write a great novel or the next awesome business book, but trust me, it’s worth it. Just keep a consumer behavior book on the back of the toilet at home and get that education a few minutes each day. The investment will pay off. If you understand why people buy, you can help explain to a publisher why they’ll buy your book.

There are many good books on this topic available today, but two that I’d recommend are (obviously) Why People Buy Things They Don’t Need by Pamela N. Danziger and Buyology by Martin Lindstrom.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #66: Other Books We’ve Done Similar To Yours Didn’t Sell According To Expectations

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

In my first acquisitions editor job, I quickly learned the importance of internal comparisons when presenting at a publishing board meeting. Regardless of what type of book I was advocating, somebody on my sales team would always ask, “What have we done in the past that’s like this book? And how did it sell?”

If I was able to make a favorable comparison (“This is like our XYZ book, which sold about 28,000 copies last year”) then I was in good shape. Ah, but if somebody was able to make an unfavorable comparison (“This sounds a lot like our QRS book, and we just got 2200 copies of that book returned from bookstores last month!”) I knew I was in trouble.

Believe it or not, this has to do with biology as much as it has to do with psychology. According to neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer, the amygdala is “a brain region that, when excited, evokes negative feelings. Whenever a person thinks about losing something, the amygdala is automatically activated. That’s why people hate losses so much.”

If your book evokes comparisons to, and memories of, the losses my company incurred on previous books, that excites the amygdala in the mind of my Sales VP. After all, he’s had to count up those losses—and explain to his boss why we’re having to write off that author advance and all those marketing expenses because his sales team didn’t sell enough copies of that book.

And so, this is another case where you are (possibly unfairly) judged by the fact that someone you don’t know, who came before you at my publishing house, caused our company to lose money on a previous book.

Yeah, some people screw things up for everybody, don’t they?

What You Can Do About It

1. Pay attention to what my company sells well.

If you’re already done your homework in the areas of market competition and differentiation (see Reasons 45, 46, & 47), then this should be easy for you. You should already know what my company sells that’s related to what you’re trying to get us to buy. So use that knowledge to point our attention toward the books we’ve been successful with, and to let us know we should expect a similar kind of success with your book.

For instance, you could say, “After seeing the success you and your sales team were able to create with ABC book, I am enthusiastic about working with you to repeat that kind of outcome with my new book as well.”

2. Make positive comparisons with popular books outside my company.

First, let me be clear on this point: DON’T compare your book’s content to the content of a previously successful book. That’s simply copycatting someone else’s ideas. If you say, “Freakonomics was about unique economic theories, and so is mine!” that just tells me you don’t have original ideas. (Yawn.)

When making positive comparisons, what you want to do is show why the audience that bought a previous book will also want to buy yours. “Freakonomics created a thirst for more accessible, interesting information about economics. My book delivers five unexpected principles that will satisfy that thirst in readers of all ages.” You see the difference?

3. Be an artist.

It’s been said that an author is simply an artist who paints with words. If that’s true, a lot of writers are still using crayons.

One way to overcome a negative comparison to a previously unsuccessful book is to make your writing such a work of art that people have a hard time saying yours is like anything else that came before it. This goes back to issues of quality and excellence (see Reason #1), but if you can create a work of art in words, that’ll go a long way toward erasing the memory of past losses in the mind of my Sales VP. As Seth Godin says, “Consumers say that all they want are cheap commodities. Given the choice, though, most of us, most of the time, seek out art.”

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #67: You Can’t Identify Specific Sales Channels Through Which Your Book Will Sell

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Let me ask you a question: How do you get “there” from “here”?

If you’re like most people, you map out a route that will, hopefully, get you from point A to point B in the shortest, straightest way.

Well, in the world of my Sales VP, point A is your book, and point B is the buyer who will pay cash money (or credit) for it. And the map my VP uses to get to point B is filled with what we call “sales channels”—the roads of commerce we’ll travel to get some coin for your great book.

You’re probably already familiar with the superhighways on this map—you know, the Sam’s Clubs and Barnes & Noble chain stores. And you probably know those retail roads are clogged with the traffic of all the books trying cram into those places. Your best bet for success, then, is being able to show my Sales VP a few other, potentially profitable avenues to take when selling your book.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Previously I mentioned to you my friend, Mikal Keefer. Well Mikal once wrote a children’s book about a disabled child playing wheelchair basketball. As part of his research for the book, he contacted a wheelchair manufacturer and learned all about the distinctive engineering required to make a child’s wheelchair basketball-worthy. At the same time, they learned about his cool new, affordable kids book.

Fast-forward a bit, and next thing you know, copies of Mikal’s children’s book were being included in the pocket of every wheelchair this company rolled off the assembly line. As Mikal told me later, “I had a very happy publisher.”

So what about your book? How will it get from point A to point B? Do you know? Have you given it any thought at all? If you’re like most writers, you’ll just leave that part of the equation to my sales team and hope for the best.

But then again, if you’re like most writers, you’ll also get rejected.

What You Can Do About It

1. Be aware of typical sales channels—and show how your book will succeed in selling through them.

Here are some of the most common sales channels that my sales team are working with every day:

“Big Box” retailers like Sam’s Club, Target, and Costco;
National Chain retailers like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Half Price Books, and so on;
Independents (locally-owned bookstores);
Rack Jobbers (independent wholesalers that manage the inventory of other retailers, such as grocery stores or drugstores);
Library Associations;
Internet retailers (including Amazon) and wholesalers;
Book Clubs;
School Associations;
Business Associations;
Charity groups,
Direct to Consumer; and
any niche channels on their radar (like the aforementioned wheelchair manufacturer).

Which of these channels will your book sell through? When it’s time to predict the future sales of your book, my Sales VP will contact his key salespeople working in each of these channels. He’ll ask how many copies they can sell in their channels, then he’ll add up their numbers to get a total first-year projection in unit sales for your book.

The more channels in which your book can travel, the better it looks in the eyes of my Sales VP. And if you can add-on brand new sales channels my VP hasn’t thought of yet? Well, that’s even better yet.

2. Interview a retail book buyer.

Yes, this is homework. But it should be fun and it will broaden your understanding of the book industry immensely.

First, create a list of questions that are both sincere and not stupid. For instance, “What does a book buyer do during a typical workday?” is a sincere question. “Why doesn’t your company stock my book?” is a stupid one. Limit your questions to between 5-8 total, so that you can conduct your interview in about 15 minutes max.

Next, call the headquarters of your favorite bookstore chain and ask to speak to a secretary in the book buyers’ department. Tell the secretary you’re doing research for an article for your website or for a report for your writer’s group, and ask if one of their buyers would be available for a 15-minute interview about his or her job. Then conduct the interview—and apply what you learn!

3. Brainstorm unexpected sales channels for your book.

Of course, in order to be successful in publishing, you’re going to have to figure out how to succeed in the traditional sales channels above. However, you can add-on success by exploiting unexpected sales channels. So gather a few friends and brainstorm where those channels might be. Is yours a gift book on marriage? Maybe it’d sell in all the wedding chapels in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Is yours a medieval thriller novel? Maybe it would sell on a medieval fair circuit that thrives during the summer months. You get the idea.

If your non-traditional sales channel can generate 1,000 copies or more in sales, that’s something my VP will notice—and may reward.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #68: Your Book Costs Too Much To Make

/ Mike Nappa

A Sales Team reason for rejection

Try this little experiment.

Go to Amazon.com and search in the books category for “greatest song lyrics of today.” Are you surprised by the results (or lack of them)? By the fact that Amazon can’t even recommend similar searches to find a full book of today’s great song lyrics?

I’m not.

Here’s why: If you were to publish a book of, say, lyrics of the top 100 songs in the past 10 years, it’d cost you a fortune. You’d have to pay a print license fee (akin to a royalty) for every single song for every single copy of the book you printed—whether the book actually sold or not. That kind of project would not only be a pain to compile, it’d cost so much to make that it simply wouldn’t be worth the investment.

Similarly, let’s say you wanted to publish a 3-D pop-up book with paper glasses attached. Sure, a remarkable few publishers could afford to do that kind of special format book (Disney comes to mind), but for most publishing houses the costs of design and printing would simply be prohibitive. I remember talking with an editor at Simon & Schuster once about a kids’ book that had fold-out pages (to create a panorama) instead of bind-in pages. She loved the concept and the author’s creative story to go with it…until the printing estimates came in. The book was a great idea, but it simply cost too much to make. Rejection.

What about your book? Does it have particularly expensive content? Does it require special illustrations or tricky design and significant investment in reprint permissions? Does it have to have special format printing or some other unique, but pricey element?

If it does, that’s probably a pretty cool book—and it probably will be rejected. Yes, some of those kinds of books do get published—but they are rare. Especially for a writer early in his or her career.

For you, then, a cool-but-pricey production or content concept will probably result in a lot of effort that generates just another rejection letter.

What You Can Do About It

1. Strip away the bells and whistles.

I know one publishing CEO whose mantra is, “People will read content on a napkin, as long as that content is compelling.” And he’s right. If your content is superb, people will read it regardless of the vehicle attached to it. So if you’re creating a cool new project and thinking to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if this book also did…”, then stop and think twice.

As they say, the only thing required is what’s required. So stick with creating excellent content first, and after you’ve made yourself into a successful author, you can try adding the bells and whistles later.

2. Be more than a gimmick.

Related to suggestion 1 above, this suggestion is for those of you who are more excited about a movie’s special effects than you are about its story.

What you want your book to do is generate repeat readings, to keep bringing people back to your pages time and again. Even the most novel of innovations becomes mundane after awhile. (Remember how cool—and pricey—the DVD player was when it first came out in force? Now it’s a forgotten relic found mostly in pawn shops and thrift stores.) So don’t rely on a gimmick to sell your book idea. Gimmicks always get old, especially to a publishing pro who’s seen a lot better than what your gimmick can do.

Instead, plant your hopes firmly in the garden of your inescapable content and you should do just fine.

3. Be aware of cost-increasers associated with your book.

Full-color art always costs significantly more than two-color or single-color printing, and it practically dictates printing presses from overseas—which increases shipping and warehousing costs as well. Excessive reprint permission fees (for song lyrics or maps or graphics or excerpts from other authors’ works) can add up pretty quickly. Special formats for a book (unusual trim size or shape, out-of-the-ordinary binding) also jack up the printing costs for a book.

Pay attention to these kinds of things when shaping your new book product. If you can, eliminate any cost-increasing features that are required to produce the final product of your book. Doing that also eliminates what may later become an obstacle when my Sales VP is judging the ROI (return in investment) for your book.

Looking for more? Check out these links: