Go It Alone or Getting Advice

I have been speaking about a book of sermons that I worked on with a minister. When you self-publish, you don't have the benefit of an editor to tell you that your book won't sell and this can hurt your sales in the long run.

In traditional publishing, you send your query letter (and sometimes manuscript) to a publishing house and it is frequently rejected. Rinse. Repeat. Until that day when you hopefully get that letter of recognition. For some, they send the first query and get accepted. That is the rare happening, not the normal.

If your manuscript is rejected, you have no way of finding out whether or not it was "good." Out of all my traditional rejections for one of my books, only one kind editor sent me a note stating: "I really liked this and would have accepted it if our publishing house wouldn't be currently booked for two years with manuscripts we are publishing."

Because of this, many authors are often left in the dark about what is wrong with their books and few who self-publish have the money to get professional advice. People who self-publish and do attempt to get outside help, either by paying someone or using beta readers, can run into the vanity press trap: when you pay someone to read your book, they tend to be lax on good advice and heavy on praise. Even beta readers might not want to hurt the author's feelings or may not know what is wrong with the book.

Vanity presses are the worst about this. That is part of the reason why they are nicknamed "vanity" presses. The have the viewpoint that the author is the person who knows best what to do with his or her work. No matter how unsalable you want to make your book, they will gladly print it for you... for a fee, of course, and if you agree to buy those books once they are printed.

It is very important for authors to find a professional to give them good, unbiased advice about their books. This means, as a real author, you must have thick enough skin to know that some people are not going to like your book, and you need to understand when those people are giving you good advice about changes or when those people are stating their opinions and just might not be the right audience for your book.

I can think of one example. One person, we will call him Mr. Big, hired me many years ago to review his "screenplay." He thought it was great and hired about ten other cheap freelancers to also review it. When I bid on and accepted the job, he passed it off as a professionally written, well-edited screenplay in which one production company already had interest and in my freelancing youth, I believed wholly and bid equally low, thinking it would only take a couple of hours to read and review.

The author called me and spent an hour talking about how great his manuscript was and how he was getting it produced by the Navy. This should have made me nervous about the truth of his previous claims. The Navy does not produce movies beyond basic training movies, and Mr. Big had written a feature film. During the course of this conversation, Mr. Big stated that he would be willing to pay me much more if I found something that needed to be fixed, and it took me a little more time to explain.

As might be expected, when I got the screenplay it was a mess. It was mostly formatted correctly, but it had serious issues from typos, to plot inconsistencies, to illogical characters, to rapid cuts that visually would have left any viewer dizzy. Halfway through the film, it changed plots entirely and followed a new set of characters. Most of the characters, despite having different backgrounds, all spoke with the same slang and accent, and most of the dialogue was characters talking about what was happening (i.e. "I have to walk over here right now to pick up these papers on my desk").

The guy had paid me to write a couple paragraphs about the film, but he also seemed deeply concerned that he get the story right. So, I gave an in-depth analysis of what changes needed to be made, puzzled at why none of his numerous other reviewers had pointed these things out.

Needless to say, he called me and cussed me out on the phone. He told me I had no clue what I was talking about. All the other reviewers said his movie was perfect, the character I criticized was another reviewer's favorite, even though I had a theater degree I had no clue what I was doing. He then proceeded to tell me again that the movie was about to be produced by the Navy, and basically that I would eat my words once I saw it advertised on the big screen.

It has been almost ten years since I had this learning experience. I have never seen this movie produced on the big screen or even the small screen. Even if the author eventually took my advice, the script would have needed a serious rewrite by a talented screenwriter.

Basically, this person wanted to pay people to tell him how great he was and how great his screenplay was--sadly that is what most people did. Even traditionally published authors take advice from their editors and make changes for them. It is important to have some input if you want to create a good book.

Niche: Why are you publishing a book?

As expected, the author of the book I talked about in my Target Audience post did want to simply publish his sermons, as is, for other ministers. This brings up another important topic when it comes to book publishing: What need will your book fill?

In fiction, this becomes tricky-there are millions of Romeo and Juliet stories, why is yours unique? It uses vampires? Sorry, that's been done. You want to tell it from the nurses point of view? Yep, done. The question is "Can you do it better?"

In non-fiction, it is imperative that you not only do it better, but it also has to have some uniqueness to it. If you are publishing a book of sermons about marriage (which is not the real topic of the book on which I am working, but that is the topic I am going to use for this blog post), you are one of hundreds of other books on marriage that is available. Couple that with other things this author wants (publishing a series of sermons on the same topic makes it impossible for ministers to use one in a pinch, publishing a full sermon instead of an outline makes it difficult for a minister to adapt it to his congregation's needs, etc.) and again, he is hurting his ability to sell his book.

Marketing, in my opinion, is by far the most difficult part of being an author. If you think otherwise, I really suggest you consider a career in marketing instead of writing. (Marketers still get to write, by the way, they just do it to help sell something.) You need to make sure your book is marketable before you put it in print by not only making sure there is an audience for it, but also by making sure your book will fill a need of the audience.

In this ministers case, he has an audience that is already asking him for a book. People who have listened to his sermons have come up to him and told him they wish they could get their friends to hear the sermon but the friend was turned off to that because of other churches that approached the subject poorly. From these statements, the minister is trying to get his sermons to other ministers so they won't turn people off to religion. The problem is that if he published a book that directly spoke to the people, it would be easier for the friend to pass it along than it would be for them to bring the resistant person to church to hear any minister give a sermon.

The minister clearly saw a need and identified a niche, but his book is not targeting that niche. The niche is providing unchurched people with a guide to a healthy marriage based on Biblical principles. In order to reach that niche, he should publish a book directly for the target audience in that niche. Instead, he is publishing a book in that niche but has misidentified the target audience for that niche.The competition would, of course, be greater if he published a direct marriage book (there are millions of them), but he would have a better chance of marketing it because he already has people willing to buy it. Although there are fewer books (in general) published containing marriage sermons specifically, he has not done sermon outlines but instead chosen to publish full sermons, there is no additional material (such as workbooks) to hand out to audiences interested in this topic and make it worth the investment, and to the best of my knowledge, he does not have ministers asking him for a book on this topic.

In this case, the minister has recognized there is a need for his book. (It fills a niche.) However, he has not properly identified the target audience and the result is that he is not filling that niche with his book any longer.

When you have identified a niche, it is important you fill that niche. Many times authors write what they know instead of finding someone to help them write what they need to write. In this case, not getting advice will hurt this minister's sales.

Target Audience: Why are you publishing a book?

Many people want to publish their own book. In the old days, few were selected. You had to petition a potential publisher after much research into which publishing house was the best fit. You had to craft an enticing letter to convince said publisher to read even a small portion of what you had written. And it helped if you knew someone. After several rejections, if you still were adamant about publishing, you could go to a vanity press and pay them to publish your book. If you took the second route, you would only have a stack of books in your closet to show for it. Marketing is the sole reason to target a traditional publisher, and it is a very good reason. However, marketing is expensive and so traditional publishing companies are necessarily selective.

Today, you can simply go on Amazon and upload anything and call it a book. You can even give digital versions away for free and claim that you wrote a best seller because of all the free downloads. The problem is that if I buy a tiara and scepter and call myself a queen, that doesn't make me one.

There are many things to consider before you publish a book. Here I want to focus on your target audience. {Please note, the details in the following example have been altered to prevent anyone from identifying a specific individual}. One job I had involved a minister (as a Christian, I prefer writing for other Christians). This man wanted his sermon series published as a book. I eagerly approached the subject, converting each sermon into a readable chapter. Unfortunately, this man was a minister and not a writer.

Each sermon had an opening and closing prayer. I had deleted this because they didn't really work at the beginning and end of all 30 chapters. You would read the prayer at the end of the first chapter and then move on to the prayer at the beginning of the next chapter. In many cases, the opening prayers were almost identical. Instead, I placed one prayer in the prologue, and the end of each chapter had reflection questions that reflected what he was saying in his closing prayer.

In some cases, the minister wandered off topic during his sermons. He even talked about things he would later mention in detail in another sermon. Needless to say, I deleted these or moved them to the correct chapter. There was also a lot of repetition that I deleted. There is nothing wrong with these things in a sermon, but for a book, all of this was bogging it down and making it boring to read.

When I presented him with my first chapter he rejected it. He didn't want me to turn his sermons into a book; he wanted me to put his sermons in a book.

Here is where target audience is important. It was my opinion that the minister was targeting the audience that would be listening to his sermons: average lay church goers who might want to take time and ponder what he had told them on Sunday morning. This type of book would appeal to a wide range of people and therefore have the biggest audience.

However, if he just wanted his sermons in book form, he immediately limited his audience. The primary audience would be one person- himself. Now, some of you may protest--what about other ministers who might want to use his sermons? The problems are as follows:

(1) This is a huge sermon series. No one wants to cart around a 750 some page book to preach a sermon from. In fact, I don't think any minister would want someone to know he was using another person's sermon.

(2) Most sermon books are outlines. This allows your target audience to be from most denominations. His sermons were basically transcripts of his sermons. That means they were very specific and would need to be changed if they were to appeal to ministers outside of his denomination.

(3) Sermon books come with random sermons. This is so if the minister is in a pinch- say he had to perform a funeral for a person he was close to and just couldn't focus on creating something original that week- all he has to do is use a sermon outline from a book to preach. This, however, was a sermon series. That means that no one could simply take a sermon out of the book and preach it without preaching the entire series.

When you write a book, you want it to appeal to the largest market available. My husband and I self-published my magnum opus. It is a literary tome similar to the Lord of the Rings and is in need of us to finish the next books that complete the series. It is huge. It uses ancient languages. It is based in a pre-flood steampunk world. Few will ever buy it especially since we don't have a good marketing department behind us. But it was worth publishing because I feel it has exceptional literary value and if some time in the future my other books ever become popular, that is the one that I will always hold as my greatest. Art for art's sake, if you will.

Should everyone choose to do this? No. Everyone can write something, but not everyone is an author. My book has a very small audience-and that audience could potentially grow if my other books do well. In many cases, people do just want to publish the book for themselves. These should not be offered on a public market for free because they simply bog down the market for the few good authors who have not yet been discovered or who, like me, choose not to go through the traditional publishing route.

Think about your audience. Think about who you want to reach. Then write for them. In this case, my opinion is that the minister should choose the church audience. However, I have a feeling he will choose the smallest audience (other ministers) and then attempt to get his Church audience to buy it. This is probably the worst thing he could do sales-wise. Why? Because he will waste all his time marketing to an audience that isn't interested in a book of sermons.