Tips on getting your book published

There is no clear, single path to getting published. While I haven't yet reached a level of commercial success, I have climbed the mountain a couple times. Here are a few basic lessons I’ve learned on the journey:

1) Compelling content. You’ve got to have something really important or entertaining to share. A guy I know sold five times more books on repairing small engines than I sold in two page-turning novels. He went deep into a sliver of a niche while I surfed a part of the ocean.
2) Write it out. Unless you have $30,000 or so to pay some pro to write your story, you’ve got to write it yourself, and it better be dadgum good.
3) Find good editors. Harder than it sounds. You need people to give you feedback on content (plot, flow, tension), copy (grammar, punctuation) and most important, that it’s altogether worth continuing. Sugarcoated feedback from friends is a counterproductive tease.
4) Find a publisher. You can always pay $600 or so to self publish (print on demand), but if you do, the hundreds of hours you have invested so far are just a start. Buy a copy of “Writer’s Market” at Barnes & Noble or Amazon for a full listing of publishers for your genre and send them a proposal, or query letter.
5) Marketing. So you have a book. Except for a few dozen sales to friends and family, who’s going to know it exists? Local book stores won’t carry self published books unless you really work it. The media pretty much ignore all the requests they get to announce new books. There are 200,000 books published every year and fewer people reading. Even if you land Doubleday or some other national publisher, you still need connections and hard work to promote your book. And good agents are even tougher to find than publishers.
6) Recovering your costs. You have to sell thousands of books to recover the many costs of writing, publishing and marketing. Only 250 or so Americans make a living writing fiction, so don’t quit your day job.

This all sounds onerous because it is. It’s the marketplace’s way of filtering the eagles from the pigeons. And yet despite all the time, frustration, rejection and cost, I’m still working on book #3.
If you’d like any more information about my journey, send me an email with your phone number.
Bottom line: keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet firmly planted in reality.