It should be easy. Write them a quick note, package up your manuscript and send it away – or simply email it. Unfortunately, most publishers (and most agents) don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. They want you to query first.

Fine, you think. You can do it that way. So you read enough query guidelines that you can summarize the similarities between them without pausing for breath, and fire off a few queries.

All you get in response is one rejection letter after another.

What’s going wrong? It can’t be anything to do with your book, because none of the publishers – or agents – you’ve approached has even seen it. Have you misunderstood the query guidelines? Is there something you missed? Is the tone not quite right? Or what?

There have been entire books written on the art of approaching a publisher, but in essence, it boils down to one simple reality: publishers (and agents) are in business to make money.

The purpose of your query letter is therefore to convince them that they can make money from your manuscript.

It’s about persuasion, or sales. You have to give the publisher confidence in you and your book. You have to give the publisher no reason to doubt.

This means yes, do pay attention to the query guidelines. Don’t waste either the publisher’s time or your own by submitting a genre they don’t deal with. (You’d be surprised how many poetry and short story submissions we get at Nimblewords Books – even though the website quite clearly states we’re a specialist non-fiction publisher only. Even if it’s the best poetry the world has ever seen, from a business perspective we just don’t care. All it’ll get from us is a quick, impersonal rejection letter.)

Do make sure you spell the Editor’s name correctly, if they’ve mentioned this as a criterion. Do check your query for spelling and grammatical errors – because if you get it wrong in the query, the implication is that you’ll get it wrong in your manuscript as well.

Most importantly, though, focus on what the publisher is interested in: the market for your book.

That market isn’t “everyone”. That’ll get you nowhere. Do some research, and be specific. For example, if you’ve written a novel, what is the market for that type of novel? Is it a growing or shrinking market? What differentiates your book from others in the genre? In other words, how would your publisher market you?

If you’ve written a non-fiction book, is there an existing organization with a special interest in the topic? How big is that organization? Are you a member? What specific need prompted you to write the book? What are you competing against? If you can provide actual statistics that show a specific market for your book, and what the competition for your book might be, that would get any publisher’s attention; it would certainly get mine.

The other side of the equation is nearly as important. Who are you? What writing experience do you have? In other words, let the publisher know that asking for the manuscript is going to be worth their while. Ok, so there are books out there that look as if they’ve been written by a dyslexic chimpanzee, but the reality is that they are the exception. In general, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. List whatever writing credentials you have. And make sure whatever you submit is in the best shape it can possibly be.

And that’s about it.

That’s what happened to me the first time I got a book published. I must have sold almost a hundred copies during those five years. I made hardly enough in royalties for a decent meal, let alone a living.

At the time, I figured that’s just what happened with e-books, but that’s only one business model. It can work for the publishers if they keep their costs down, because they can publish hundreds of books and live on the accumulated profits. Authors trying to establish themselves this way just end up slowly starving.

The Better eBook Strategy

If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve probably stumbled across it already without even knowing. Done well, with the right product and marketing, a single e-book can generate tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Let’s say that again. Tens of thousands of dollars per year. Sometimes even more.

The problem is that it can only reliably be done with a certain type of book. Not with fiction, or poetry, or anything that you’ve written with the intention of changing the world. It can only be done with non-fiction written to solve a problem.

It doesn’t matter what that problem is, as long as your book offers a solution, and there is a sufficient number of individuals in the world looking for that solution. If your book fits this criterion, you’ve got a known market. From there, all you need to do is tap into that market.

Tapping Into The Market

To tap into that market, you need to:

• build a simple website
• write compelling sales copy for that website
• integrate that simple website with a payment system
• integrate that simple website with a way to both protect and deliver your e-book, and
• drive relevant traffic to your site.

Basically, it’s all about the web. The information on how to do all of this is freely availably, if you look hard enough.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. You’ve really got to know what you’re doing. If your site doesn’t look professional or work the way it should, it won’t generate the results you’re after. Nor are these skills the type of thing you can perfect overnight. My advice is that if you don’t have the skills yourself, pay someone to do it for you.

eBook Marketing Difficulties

That’s where the business model starts to fall down. If you can’t do it yourself, it can cost. Even if you can, it can soak up a lot of time. Because it isn’t just the initial building of the site and making it functional that we’re talking about. It’s that last point as well: driving relevant traffic to your site.

This type of site is almost never going to rank highly enough for people to stumble across it by themselves. Instead, most of these sites rely on pay-per-click advertising.

Pay-per-click advertising can be a huge trap for the unwary. You’ve got to get the balance right. How much is a sale worth to you?

To work that out, you have to know what your conversion rate is once qualified buyers reach your page. You’ve also got to know what the return rate of your product is. And yes, you do have to offer a proper no-questions-asked return policy, or people simply won’t buy.

Once you know these things, you have to know what sort of margin you will accept, and adjust your advertising to suit.

It isn’t a set-and-forget process. To get the type of results we’ve discussed, you need to tweak everything. Advertising placement. Advertising copy. Website copy. Colors, book cover design. Price.

It’s about optimization, and it never stops. It can take hours of your time.

Nimblewords Books

Or you could try a publisher like Nimblewords Books. There may be other publishers with a similar business model, but Nimblewords Books would be my choice. But then, I’m biased. After all, I do work for them.