From Nathan Bransford:
Let’s say you are thinking about writing a book of nonfiction and want to have it published by a major publisher.
The first thing you need to do is assume that every single person in the entire world wants to write a book (which isn’t really an assumption, it’s basically true).
The second thing you need to do is ask yourself if you are the most qualified person in the entire world to write and promote that book. This applies to virtually all nonfiction.
- If you want to write a cookbook, are you a nationally recognized chef or on the Food Network?
- If you want to write about terrorism, are you one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism?
- If you want to write about an actual event that happened, are you a decorated journalist?
- Heck, if you want to write a book about extraterrestrial encounters, are you an internationally recognized expert on extraterrestrial encounters?
If the answer to that question is no, then sorry, chances are you’re not going to get your book published by a major publisher. If you can imagine someone out there who is more qualified than you to write a book, then that person probably already has their proposal in front of publishers as we speak.
In the publishing industry, this is called “platform” — publishers want to know that you are the best person in the entire world to be writing and marketing that book.
Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford
Fiction, by its very definition, is made up. A product of the imagination.
How do you require credentials for that?
The only question I see here is which is more foolish; the “first thing to ask yourself” or the “second”.
BS. Especially for a 2007 OP. When I pitched my non-fic digital printing book in 2003, I had a fair amount of knowledge about the subject and a small following, but that’s all. The publisher bought it because he saw that I was on the cusp of a new phenomenon and thought it could be the right book at the right time. It was. I earned out my advance in two weeks.
I became the “internationally recognized expert” and “the world’s foremost authority” *because* of the book and the research it took to write it. The book came first, the platform came later.
But that was then and this is now, so who knows?
In some ways, non-fiction is a lot easier than fiction because readers come to the /author/ looking for answers to niche questions. As for expertise, knowledge alone is not enough. A professor who can’t communicate at the level of his/her reader will have less success than a layperson who can.
“The first thing you need to do is assume that every single person in the entire world wants to write a book (which isn’t really an assumption, it’s basically true).”
This just shows what an insular life he leads. I know lots of people who have zero interest in writing a book.
It’s like the publication curse in academia. You have to publish to get tenure. But some presses don’t really want your book unless you are a well-known professor, and you have tenure. (Or unless you provide grant money for a publishing subvention and cover at least part of the cost. Gee, this sounds like *drops voice to whisper* vanity publishing.)
What Shawna says. The problem arose when agents and editors extrapolated this nonfic concept into fiction writing. When I was asked this question once, I DID say, “Because I’m the one who wrote it.” The implication being, “If I were someone else, I’d have written a different book.”
There are many, many successful and well-regarded fiction writers out there, in lit-fic and the genres, who did it all without a platform. And there will continue to be.
When I was still looking for an agent, one agent I queried wanted the query to include the answer to the question, “Why are you the person to write this book?” Now, we’re talking about fiction here. I was able to come up with an answer that apparently satisfied her (she requested a partial), but the real answer to that question is, “Because I’m the one who had the idea and decided to write this book.”
I can see how it’s different for nonfiction–as as reader, depending on the topic, I’d want to know the person really knew what they were talking about. OTOH, the big publishers still publish a lot of nonfiction by people who, IMO, don’t have adequate credentials just because they are famous and a lot of people have been fooled into thinking they have the credentials.
But as Felix says, if you’re publishing it yourself, you don’t have to do that analysis. You can put the book out there and let the readers decide if you’re enough of an expert to talk about whatever the book’s about.
I flipped that around once. “Why should you be on the panel?” My answer was, “Because I wrote the book on [topic.]” And I did, the only non-fiction monograph on the topic. The meeting organizers opted to take the panel in a different direction and so I wasn’t included, but it was a bit fun to reverse the question.
That didn’t pass the 2017 smell test. So I went to orig article and there were comments from 2009. Oh, PG, you’ve done it again 🙂
Regardless of year written, the author incorrectly initially defines platform as supreme expertise and then expands def (2017 update?) to include what we today consider an “author’s platform.” I’ve monitored live case studies where indie authors make 6- and 7-figures annually with no “platform” to speak of and no professional expertise.
Sorry, Jake, I saw the date (and update) of the OP as 8/26/17 and was fooled.
Sorry — didn’t mean to mislead anyone, I’ve been doing a lot of updates to older posts after my redesign and experimented with updating/republishing this one. But I can see how maybe doing that was more confusing than it was worth. I’ll update with the original pub date.
FWIW this post is more intended for non-fiction traditional publishing than self-publishing. (Thought I made that clear in the opener).
Of course, if you are the publisher, the only people you need to convince are the readers. And you can build you build the platform post-facto by writing.
It’s a whole new ballgame now.
Good writing is the key now, but it also doesn’t hurt to build a platform by inventing an online persona to attract the right readers.
For example, since my books are targeted to sci-fi geeks, I invented a fictious persona where I am a short, kind of dumpy tech consultant with a big nose who likes Dunkin Donuts and lives in Burbank. I figure that will appeal to the right geeky fan base. In real life, I’m a tall, charming, very handsome and well build man who travels the world on a yacht. But since Hugh Howey already had that covered, I figured I had to so something different to stand out.
I’ve been reading science fiction since, most likely, before you were born. And you know what? I’m not interested in your persona. Or you. Either write a great book that I want to read or go back under your rock.
100% agree. I think One of the curses of the modern world, social media, has made a lot of celebrities or creative types or both feel that the couple hundred people that constantly praise on them on their Facebook page are representative of the world at large.
The truth of the matter is, people care about actors, writers, Artists and musicians in so much as the last work they produced satisfied them.
Absent that, posting pics of your dog on facebook interests mr about as much as what I had for breakfast interests you.
Also, I think just the existence of social media, and the amount of time people spend with it, sets up an implicit demand that you make yourself available. There is a subset of readers who are quite comfortable with a persona that someone like Mackay Bell sets up; in fact they’re the ones that create, or at least reinforce the implicit demand. The rest of us just want to read a good book, and if the author can produce more than one, that’s a good enough reason to keep tagging after him.
Thanks for the chuckle, Mackay Bell. 😀
I thought it was funny too. There seems to be a lot of sarcasm-deafness going on in the comments lately.
-waves hand while snortling- So funny!
Giggles, Mackay Bell. Well said!