Sadly, it’s probably true that I’d do better spending a few hours a day boosting my audience on Facebook and Twitter, if I want a book contract, than I would spending that same amount of time thinking about ideas for a good book.
If you can’t promote your book before it makes you famous, your book is going to be self-published.
Ignore this guy. You already have a plenty big platform and name recognition and publishing cred to get an agent and sell a book.
But of course that depends on the book.
You are more optimistic than I am.
For nonfiction, maybe. Fiction is different. But I’m not sure there ever was a thriving market for “a collection of linked essays about poets and poetry, published in online journals.” Unless, back in the day, you got those linked essays published in very much non-online journals, with gatekeepers far fiercer than literary agents.
One way around this is to convince someone with a platform to write the Foreword, or even to ‘co-author’ the book with you.
Seconding this. Fiction works very differently. For that matter, different kinds of fiction work quite differently from each other, and likewise nonfiction. This is one of the reasons agents specialize. One of the things people outside of publishing often don’t get is that it’s not one industry, it’s a good dozen or more separate industries linked loosely by the shape of the end product.
Or maybe you need to write opinion pieces about how not to get published. What does the New Republic pay per word? Well, count the words and figure it up.
Then realize that this guy is plugging two books on Amazon.
One is ranked at #1,766,585.
And the other is ranked at #3,015,713.
I wonder how many copies that translates to.
These days in political writing it seems that the trick is to get yourself underwritten by someone who has an axe to grind and a large slush fund to put your book in every library in America. And then use those sales to bootstrap it into a best seller. And the books don’t have to be that good. Or read much. Of course the folks with that kind of money generally prefer conservative authors, but George Soros might be available with the right pitch.
the people that would read your book actually want a good idea on paper.
I’m just sayin’.
Well, feel free to add me to the pre-publishing list.