Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not talking about self-publishing - I mean a legit agent and a big 5 publishing house.

Well. Look at it this way; literary agents get 20% so unless you have a track record of some kind. 20% of an unknown and untested author 's first book is, essentially, 20© of morning.

If you have a juicy political sex scandal story then you can probably find agent.

Good luck.

Author here. Curious about this. I've been published for many years, so maybe things have changed. But my agent gets 15%. Foreign, film, etc. bring the total up to 20%.

Anonymous wrote:I'm not talking about self-publishing - I mean a legit agent and a big 5 publishing house.

Well. Look at it this way; literary agents get 20% so unless you have a track record of some kind. 20% of an unknown and untested author 's first book is, essentially, 20© of morning.

If you have a juicy political sex scandal story then you can probably find agent.

Good luck.

As someone who has been tangent to the writing and publishing world for 25 years, keep in mind the landscape has changed dramatically. Odds are good that neither King or Grisham would be published today. The reading market has changed (collapsed), attention spans have changed (collapsed). Books are still being published but it's a much narrower range of books being published. Just look at the new arrivals if you're at a bookstore and compare to what it was like in 1995.

You really need to know your target audience and write extremely well to that audience. Too many write for the audiences of the past, not tomorrow. But it is unpredictable what the audience of tomorrow is like. Statistically speaking, it's a smaller pool of liberal progressive females, which is why so much of new fiction is dominated by what this group wants. If you're not writing to this demographic, good luck. And even writing styles have changed. The standard 400 page, 100k word book of the 1990s has shrunk to half that. Prose is simpler. The complex, in depth novels are long gone with the very rare exception.

My neighbor just did. But he owns a restuarant and agreed to throw a book signing party paid for by him. He also knows a few celebs and is friends a few Real Housewives, who came to book signing and pitched his book on their Intra accounts etc. So he handled a lot of fixed expenses of marketing book and showed how it would get an audience and they paid to make the books. Was a childrens book.

I also worked at Library growing up and getting libraries to buy books is big. For instance Stephen King back in the day every Library in US would pre order auto buy 5-10 copies of every new book he did before it even came out. Who is your market.

For nonfiction? You better have hundreds of thousands of followers.

If you are a regular person, not a former First Lady, you are mid-list at best and would get a tiny advance and little support.

However, a book can be an entree to speaking or to teaching as an adjunct.

I’m married to someone who wrote a NY Times best seller. The first contract was HARD. He has a great agent and still got so many passes from publishers. It’s just really hard to sell your first book because publishers don’t want to take risks.

Second contract was easy after the success of the first book — he’s working on that book now and publishers threw money at him.

I have an agent and I’m published with a smaller publisher. It’s not as hard to get an agent, it’s much harder to get a big publisher. If you can get an agent and any legit publisher (doesn’t have to be a big one), you should consider yourself lucky.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wonder about this, because the books cranked out by big publishers are sometimes (often) completely awful.

I guess my tastes are not aligned with the public. The young adult section particularly is full of trash.

It's not necessarily about good, it's about what they think can sell.

In commercial fiction, it's primarily about being able to tell a good story that has great pacing and keeps readers wanting to know what happens next. Beautiful prose is secondary to storytelling. There aren't that many literary novels that do that well. The ones that do break out frequently tell a great story beautifully.

Does your book have a hook? A unique angle? Are you an insider in an interesting world, who can show that world? Are you a diverse author with a diverse story to tell?

And a way to find agents who are in your space, subscribe to Publishers Marketplace .com (you can do a monthly subscription) and follow who is selling what. Then you can target agents who are having success in your space.

I have two friends who did it. One is with Macmillan and one is with Penguin Random House. Both have multiple books published and both write fiction--one writes chick lit.

Anonymous wrote:I wonder about this, because the books cranked out by big publishers are sometimes (often) completely awful.

I guess my tastes are not aligned with the public. The young adult section particularly is full of trash.

It's not necessarily about good, it's about what they think can sell.