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How to be a successful author by Sherri Rosen

How to be a Successful Author

So you want to be an author. You carve out hours every day to write. You read ferociously. You edit and rewrite. Heck, you might even quit your day job to write for a season with complete devotion. Finally, after months, usually years, of hard labor, you’ve got a manuscript.

So you look up an agent who will sell your book for you. You search high and low for months. Countless emails, endless phone calls. Finding an agent, you soon learn, is like fly fishing on Miami Beach—it’s not really possible. And so, gripping your manuscript tightly, you start to google publishers that accept unsolicited manuscripts.

There are not many. In fact, you only find three. So you print your manuscript on fancy paper, write up your own proposal, and mail it to thirty publishers, whether they’ve asked for it or not. You’re on your knees in prayer. You’re fingers are crossed. You can’t sleep at night. Every day you check your inbox to see if they’ve said yea or nay.

At last. The responses come flooding in, one at a time. And all of them are nays. Your book, it seems, is not a good fit. But then, just when you’ve given up hope, you get it—an email from Big Deal Press. They love your book. They offer you a royalty advance contract. You sign it, take your lover out to dinner, and think you can sit back and watch the book soar.

Your book releases. It sells a thousand copies. And then it staggers, gasps, falls over, and dies. No one notices it. In fact, most days it seems no one remembers it. And you’re wondering why.

As a writer, you are not only a writer. You are your own business. You must invest in you. You cannot just write a book, walk away, and expect book sales to fly into the ether. You must do what nobody wants to do: you must build a platform, and you must publicize. It’s unromantic and it’s not the writing lifestyle, but if you 1) Research you target market; 2) Work hard to build a platform; 3) Invest daily in publicity, you might have a chance at success. Build, remodel, and build again.

If you work hard to publicize your book, you could be more than a writer. You could be a full time author.

 

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2013 at 4:06 pm and is filed under African American, athlete, Clients, Friends and Colleagues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “How to be a successful author by Sherri Rosen”

  1. Mark Charlton-Davis Says:

    Can you help authors to publish? I have two books

  2. sherri rosen Says:

    I work with people that can help you self-publish Mark perhaps on Kindle or iBooks.

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