You’ve done it! You’ve written a book – now what? The steps to getting a book published can seem overwhelming or confusing; read on to learn how to navigate them with success.
Get Your Story Perfect
The biggest, most important thing you can do before you start talking to publishers is getting your story perfect. It’s not enough to just finish the book – though that is an accomplishment you should be proud of. You only get one shot to impress a publisher, so you need to make sure your book is everything you want it to be before you send it.
Once you finish your story, set it down for a few weeks and then go back and read it again. Edit it, rewrite everything, kill your darlings, and make it as good as you can. Send it through some sort of a critique group if you can, and then edit it again – and again and again and again.
Hire a Copy Editor
Once your book is exactly what you want it to be, it’s time to bring in a copy editor. These gurus know everything you don’t want to learn about grammar and punctuation. They know where the commas need to go and where they don’t, and they can fix all your dangling participles.
Hiring a copy editor is a huge part of preparing for the publishing process. Publishers aren’t going to be impressed by a manuscript that’s riddled with grammatical errors. Find a good copy editor and pay them to get your manuscript in good grammatical shape.
Define Your Audience
Defining your audience is perhaps the most challenging part of the pre-publishing process. You have to fall in love with your book while you’re writing and editing it, and this is when you fall back out of love with it again.
You need to sit down and think about who’s going to buy your book, and the answer cannot be “everybody.” In fact, most publishers like to hear that you have a specific group of potential readers in mind; it makes it easier to market to them. Think long and hard about who will be interested in paying $25 to read your book and focus on them as your audience.
Get Your Story Perfect
The biggest, most important thing you can do before you start talking to publishers is getting your story perfect. It’s not enough to just finish the book – though that is an accomplishment you should be proud of. You only get one shot to impress a publisher, so you need to make sure your book is everything you want it to be before you send it.
Once you finish your story, set it down for a few weeks and then go back and read it again. Edit it, rewrite everything, kill your darlings, and make it as good as you can. Send it through some sort of a critique group if you can, and then edit it again – and again and again and again.
Hire a Copy Editor
Once your book is exactly what you want it to be, it’s time to bring in a copy editor. These gurus know everything you don’t want to learn about grammar and punctuation. They know where the commas need to go and where they don’t, and they can fix all your dangling participles.
Hiring a copy editor is a huge part of preparing for the publishing process. Publishers aren’t going to be impressed by a manuscript that’s riddled with grammatical errors. Find a good copy editor and pay them to get your manuscript in good grammatical shape.
Define Your Audience
Defining your audience is perhaps the most challenging part of the pre-publishing process. You have to fall in love with your book while you’re writing and editing it, and this is when you fall back out of love with it again.
You need to sit down and think about who’s going to buy your book, and the answer cannot be “everybody.” In fact, most publishers like to hear that you have a specific group of potential readers in mind; it makes it easier to market to them. Think long and hard about who will be interested in paying $25 to read your book and focus on them as your audience.
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