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I was at a book event a few weeks ago, chatting with a woman about an idea she had for a non-fiction book.
“You should do it,” I offered, “hammer out a proposal and see how the idea feels once you’ve started sketching it out. Make it as big of an idea as you can. With my book, I went big.” (More on book proposals and the process below, as this is one of the FAQs I get in my DMs and inbox daily.)
“Well,” she said, “I dunno. Maybe? But you had a big following.”
I hear this all the time as the reason to not begin.
Yes, it’s self-defeating, but it’s also somewhat of a misconception—I’m a pretty good proxy for anyone who needs to begin from scratch, who doesn’t mind a long, slow build. (Do not look to me for virality, I have no clue how to manufacture it and work against social media best practices most of the time because I don’t know what best practices are.) Fair warning: This might be a boring read for anyone who doesn’t care about the world of content, but hopefully it answers a lot of the questions I routinely get and inspires any of you roiling with self-doubt to just start where you are.
So first, yes, I’ve had a long career in media that was at times quite visible (I’ve always done press, including being one of the TV spokespeople for all the magazines I worked for while at Condé Nast). I co-hosted a very popular podcast and was in millions of peoples ears as they drove to work or fell asleep. BUT, I’ve historically been terrible/lackadaisical about building my own following. I’m in the same graduating class of editors as Eva Chen and
but I just didn’t get the memo about how to be fun, erudite, and hilarious on social media. Case in point, in 2018, I was told that I “didn’t look like a real person” on Instagram because I had fewer than 1,500 followers—it didn’t look legitimate and work-wise, Instagram didn’t want to verify me. This made sense: I posted rarely, and when I did it was a random hot mess of book mail and photos of my kids. So I tried a little harder, and made little progress, but then I was on a Netflix show that came out in early 2020 and I crossed the 10K threshold overnight, which I remember because it seemed remarkable.I started making videos talking to my phone at the beginning of COVID, videos sharing information from experts I had interviewed about processing what was happening. People liked these videos and my follower count grew, but not by a ton. I know this because I did not include my Instagram follower count in the book proposal that my agent took out to auction that August, which means that it was not a selling point. In fact, it was probably low enough to work against me.
A couple of years later, in March 2022, I hired Missy Modell and Yes Ma’am Creative to spend a few months helping me get my social media organized—I didn’t know, for example, that I should be making basic cover tiles so that people could make sense of what I was about by looking at my feed, or that I should try to keep videos to reel-length (90 seconds). These are things that might be obvious to others, but I didn’t know. This process also helped me get on a schedule and to see what I was up to—it sounds a little silly, but it’s not until you start making and tracking things (in my experience) that you can both see your own thinking and understand what makes your point-of-view somewhat unique.* At that point I had about 40K followers from posting etymology videos, book reviews, and random thoughts, and I’ve continued to grow in the past two years. Very slowly. About 1% a month, though faster during my book launch.**
*Case in point: One online friend who is a highly specialized therapist had a lot of anxiety about “starting” to post—following similar advice to the above, she made videos, at first for no followers (it feels really silly and awkward, I know), and now suddenly has 150K followers on TikTok. It can happen!
**I have a lot of qualms about spending my energy on Instagram and have been drifting away. Not only am I concerned about the lack of regulation in tech in general, and the shirking of responsibility of social media companies in particular, but it feels really bad to spend a lot of time creating free content—that followers likely won’t even see—to enrich Meta. They have a perverse business model.
Meanwhile, I launched my podcast Pulling the Thread a year after I left my job, in September 2021. Podcasting is my most comfortable and confident medium—I had done well as a co-host on a big and durable show for many years—and the podcast production company who I work with thought I should be able to launch at a decent, though significantly reduced size. Not so fast. It turns out that it’s hard to pick up where you left off, and that listeners who might have been interested hadn’t noticed I was gone, or didn’t realize I had landed on my own. It’s also a crowded landscape. I thought my production partners were probably too ambitious, but even so, I was shaken by my early numbers: In the first months, I achieved 10% of their plan. It’s taken me two-and-a-half years and 140 episodes to build to what they assumed would be my opening gambit. Oops! My best advice to anyone who wants to start a podcast: Plan out the first year, as so many shows die at episode six. If it doesn’t feel exciting, don’t do it—I love hosting a podcast, I will always do it. And it’s also how I do much of my book research.
The brightest growth spot has been this newsletter, which I launched on Mailchimp to coincide with the podcast. My first send went to 424 subscribers. I moved to Substack last January with a few thousand subscribers, which I’ve grown at about 10% a month for the last year to about 20K. Compound interest! The growth is great, but the thing that I’m most proud of is the open rate, which is routinely in the 60%+, and I love every reader I’ve met in the wild. Honestly, it’s really flattering to meet people who like/read/listen to PTT, it’s truly the best crowd. (Meanwhile, I did a post with Substack HQ about growing the newseltter for people who really want to nerd out. They do a lot of these and they’re very transparent/helpful.)
I can’t advise everyone about their unique content strategy—it’s got to come out of each of you, but you might not find it until you do it. I recently wrote a newsletter about the content landscape in general called “If You Build It, They Will Come: Maybe?” where I explore some of this. The biggest takeaway from that piece is that if you build it, something will happen. That’s about all we can count on these days.
My college best friend visited last week and we worked next to each other at the kitchen table while I hammered out this newsletter. She left her corporate law job to bootstrap her own makeup company called Reina Rebelde. Regina is from Guadalajara, and noted that while Latina women are massive beauty buyers, there was essentially nothing in the space made for them by them. Eight years in, she wanted me to stress to you all two things: One, she doesn’t know how I still don’t know how to do my own makeup (more on this to come, I have progress to report), and two, she is very tired. “Please don’t Ra-Ra everyone the way everyone Ra-Ra’d me.*** This is brutally hard.” (If you’re so inclined, buy one of Reg’s great lipsticks.)
(***This note from Regina is important. Collectively, we’re better at encouragement than we are at action, i.e., we love to tell each other to chase dreams but then don’t always show up to support the creation of said dreams that we told each other to chase. I don’t know if this is a gendered thing, but I’m going to think about and will write about it down the line.)
So, I don’t want to pretend it’s not hard, particularly if you want to turn writing into a career—I have many “jobs” now, and am far from relying solely on any one of them. In the world of non-fiction, books often work best as a marketing tool to drive your core business (teaching, consulting, therapizing, advising, speaking, etc.)—if your core business is writing books, well, you might need additional ways to make cash unless you are breathing rarified air as a mega, mega bestseller. Unfortunately, it’s not as glamorous as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone makes it seem. No crocodiles, no emeralds, no yachts.
So, let’s quickly talk about publishing a book for those of you have asked me to clarify the process.
This is for non-fiction only, which is sold off proposal. Fiction is sold as a finished manuscript.
First, you need a proposal, whether you use the proposal to get an agent, or the agent uses the proposal to get you a book deal. (Some publishers offer open submission periods where you can submit your proposal directly to editors—they often stipulate what they want you to send for consideration—but if you can get an agent, it’s probably to your benefit.)
Proposals are important. Yes, if you sell the book you will deviate from this original plan, but they are an excellent mechanism for organizing your thinking and the arguments you plan to make. Plus, if you can’t be bothered to write a proposal, then you definitely don’t want to take on writing a book.
A proposal will also help you determine whether an idea is “big” enough to hold down a book (i.e., there are lots of smaller “big” ideas within the main theme). Too many books could have been an article because they’re a single idea that’s stretched too thin. Work your idea over until it’s big. I promise: It’s often not worth writing a small idea book. It’s a lot of effort, make it count. Be as ambitious in scope as possible while still cohering to a thesis you can ably nail down.
You can Google around for sample proposals to use as a reference but they typically contain an introduction, a sample chapter, a comprehensive outline, comparison titles, and a marketing and media plan. Your introduction needs to be amazing. A potential agent or an editor won’t make it to your sample chapter unless your introduction really sings: Consider drafting it like a letter that underlines why this book needs to exist, what it will expose or illustrate for the reader, and why you’re the one to write it (i.e., how you, specifically, relate to the book’s themes). Spend a lot of energy on this introduction. Tell some fun stories. Use great examples. Clarify like crazy. Make it feel urgent and timely and like it will be a propulsive read.
Once your agent feels your proposal is ready, they’ll submit it to a list of editors—sometimes an editor will pre-empt a manuscript and take it off the table with a nice offer before it circulates. Sometimes only one house will bite. If more than one imprint is interested, you meet with editors to get a sense of their vision for the project and whether it’s a good fit, and it then goes to auction where everyone submits simultaneous bids. Only one imprint per house will bid, so one imprint from Simon & Schuster, one imprint from Harper Collins, etc. (Penguin Random House has Penguin and Little Random, so you could get a bid from each side.) There are tons of small, independent presses with fantastic lists as well. Some people also choose to self-publish. (I don’t know much about that route, but it can be a viable option if you plan to direct market your book to your existing audience, want to make a nice margin, and don’t need the distribution channels or skills of a traditional publisher.) If your book doesn’t sell, hopefully you’ll get good insight as to why, though typically it’s because editors don’t think the readers for the material are there (this is why successful comparison titles are important, so you can illustrate audience for similar books).
BTW, I’m not an expert in the publishing industry (though I’ve worked on a lot of books) so this might not be 100% accurate. Photo-based and interior/cookbooks have a different process for submission, too. And they definitely have a different market: If you sell one of these you’ll be responsible for paying for the art out of your advance, which means these are really more branding tools than they are money making tools. (In fact, I have friends who have gone in the hole to make a coffee table book—not even counting their own labor—but it felt worth it to support their core business.)
Meanwhile, this is my most important piece of advice: If you want to write a book, read a lot of books. Study how great books are structured. Notice how your favorite authors introduce and then pull you through their ideas. Don’t worry about being influenced. Let them influence you. You will become a better writer by osmosis. (And if you are, in fact, influenced directly, that’s what end notes and bibliographies are for.)
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