I have always found it extremely difficult to write a pitch / proposal / etc for my own work. This gives me a sense of how to approach it with more fun and creativity. But I wonder what thoughts are on hiring someone to write a good book proposal for you. Definitely you might miss out on the learning process mentioned here ... but you'd also get the perspective of how a reader might see the work. Thoughts?
I get that it can be a challenge to do this yourself! I have been hired to write book proposals but I always tell clients it'll be so much better if they do it, then hire me or someone else to edit it. One solution might be coaching--it's more collaborative. You get to bounce your story off of someone else and put two brains to work on how best to encapsulate it all in proposal form.
It feels rather futile to me to write a memoir because publishers tend only to be interested in publishing memoirs of well-known people.
I attended a nonfiction publishing presentation by a book agent who said that, although publishers, editors and agents generally deny that it is true, there's an unspoken "rule" that most publishers only will consider manuscripts by authors who have a minimum of 20,000 followers on any given social media platform. She said that this applies regardless of a person's writing ability, the value of their content or story, or their expertise. She suggested that before writing a memoir especially, any aspiring memoirist should focus first on building an online following, and she said that Instagram is the preferred platform for book publishers.
I found a community and a following of about 13,000 people on TikTok over the past year—and TikTok is going to be banned within five days, so there goes that.
While publishing is obviously a business with the goal of making profits, it's discouraging that the value of any author today is equivalent to their online celebrity status, and that online following generally has to be built on platforms owned by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have weaponized their social media platforms against democratic values and against LGBT people.
That is depressing. The publishing industry is definitely in flux. Not everyone can be an "influencer" obvs, and those numbers often don't translate to book sales anyway. But I don't think this "rule" is true for all publishers. All publishers want an author with some kind of platform but a mid-sized indie will see literary publications and bylines as platform, too. I know writers who have sold memoirs in recent years without being famous, but each had at least a few previous publications to their names.
I have always found it extremely difficult to write a pitch / proposal / etc for my own work. This gives me a sense of how to approach it with more fun and creativity. But I wonder what thoughts are on hiring someone to write a good book proposal for you. Definitely you might miss out on the learning process mentioned here ... but you'd also get the perspective of how a reader might see the work. Thoughts?
I get that it can be a challenge to do this yourself! I have been hired to write book proposals but I always tell clients it'll be so much better if they do it, then hire me or someone else to edit it. One solution might be coaching--it's more collaborative. You get to bounce your story off of someone else and put two brains to work on how best to encapsulate it all in proposal form.
That idea makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the thoughts.
I’m in the process of writing a book proposal for my memoir. I couldn’t agree more with what Kenney says here.
It feels rather futile to me to write a memoir because publishers tend only to be interested in publishing memoirs of well-known people.
I attended a nonfiction publishing presentation by a book agent who said that, although publishers, editors and agents generally deny that it is true, there's an unspoken "rule" that most publishers only will consider manuscripts by authors who have a minimum of 20,000 followers on any given social media platform. She said that this applies regardless of a person's writing ability, the value of their content or story, or their expertise. She suggested that before writing a memoir especially, any aspiring memoirist should focus first on building an online following, and she said that Instagram is the preferred platform for book publishers.
I found a community and a following of about 13,000 people on TikTok over the past year—and TikTok is going to be banned within five days, so there goes that.
While publishing is obviously a business with the goal of making profits, it's discouraging that the value of any author today is equivalent to their online celebrity status, and that online following generally has to be built on platforms owned by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have weaponized their social media platforms against democratic values and against LGBT people.
That is depressing. The publishing industry is definitely in flux. Not everyone can be an "influencer" obvs, and those numbers often don't translate to book sales anyway. But I don't think this "rule" is true for all publishers. All publishers want an author with some kind of platform but a mid-sized indie will see literary publications and bylines as platform, too. I know writers who have sold memoirs in recent years without being famous, but each had at least a few previous publications to their names.