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You should already know that nonfiction is sold based on a proposal...
and first novels on an entire manuscript. At first, that seems like a huge difference, but it's not. Not really. Even with a novel, the agent is going to be thinking about the marketing, where this manuscript could be positioned, how it will be sold, what the competing titles are: in short, everything that would be covered in a nonfiction proposal. There are two keys to convincing an agent that your work will sell. - Exactly the same but different
- A platform and readership.
Let me remind you that you're the one who decided to go the big New York publisher route. That means you need to play by the rules (with that caveat about brilliance again, and quit thinking that you fall into that category.)The entire food chain of publishing would love to have the next bestseller. And what it thinks has the best chance of being a bestseller is whatever was a bestseller before.
But you can't publish exactly the same manuscript every year and expect it to be a fresh new bestseller. Readers are fickle that way:they want new stuff. This drives editors and publishers nuts, much in the way that agents go nuts when writers take 85% of the agent's advances. So that's what every agent, editor and publisher wants. Exactly the same. But different. This principle is the reason you get so many folks telling newbies to pitch their books by analogizing to popular movies. You've heard that nonsense. It's like I Love Lucy meets The Perfect Storm, but in prison.That's just a way to prove that the work is exactly-the-same-but-different. (Actually, if you think about it, it's exactly the same in two ways, which makes it different.) It's Field of Dreams meets The Simpsons. (Shuddering a bit over this one.) You'll also hear advice about framing it by referring to a successful premise, but with one element changed. It's The Firm but it's the Devil instead of the Mafia. But that X meets Y system is really sort of silly. Okay, it's shorthand, but your life experience ought to tell you that two good things don't always make one great thing. Take chocolate and pepperoni, for instance.
What's important to realize about all these clever pitch systems is that they're about demonstrating sales knowledge. With nonfiction proposals, this is done explicitly in the marketing section of the proposal. That's where you lay out the market, the demographics and, most importantly, the competing titles. Every book on writing nonfiction proposals shows you how to do this.
It's equally important for fiction writers. Sometimes you can shorthand it, as in Tom Clancy but a female Naval officer. Other times you need to spell it out. âAccording to the National Sports Manufacturers Association, karate is the thirteenth fastest growing sport overall, the single fastest growing in the solo athletics category.â âThere are ten million people who own rescued Greyhounds.â (Iâm making this stuff up but you get the picture.) Even in fiction, we demonstrate the market. If youâve got that sort of data at your fingertips and youâve got a platform for reaching those particular demographics, your odds of getting published just ratcheted up the Richter scale.  So what sorts of platforms? Well, do you blog? Have a website? Are you President of a national organization? Maintain a mailing list of four thousand people who have Greyhounds? End up mentioned regularly in the news for your charitable works?  Do you see the point? Have you developed a readership you can bring to the table along with your book? Now, some of you probably think thatâs not your job. That if youâre going to have to do all that work, you might as well go with a smaller publisher or self-publish.  The fact is that as an unknown writer, youâre going to have to do all that whether youâre with a large publisher, a small publisher or even running off copies on your laser printer. Going to a large publisher is not going to relieve you of that burden. It may maximize your bang per buck by doing what big publishers do very wellâgetting lots of copies on shelvesâbut itâs not going to get you out of it.  The upside to all this is that if you come to your agentâs table with these principles in mind and with your readership and sales platform already up and functioning, youâve got a much better chance of being the A release or the B release. That means more work from the publisher, better presales and higher advances. And you do realize that if the publisherâs paid a higher advance, itâs going to try to earn that money back through more sales, yes? (At least in theory. One wonders sometimes.) Go back and reread the very first section on whether you really want a large New York publisher. Â
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