There has to be a better way to sell books

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

There has to be a better way to sell books

(via)

A colleague recently asked my advice for a friend of his who has put together a book proposal. It’s really good, he said. What should she do if she wants to get published?

I walked him through the usual rigmarole: Don’t reach out to publishers directly. Query literary agents who represent authors of a similar ilk. The agent should work on commission, no upfront fee. Once they take her as a client, the agency will help her fine-tune the proposal before pitching it around. Even if this proposal never sells and its moment passes, it’s good to have an agent relationship for future ideas.

But then I added the necessary caveat: Your friend doesn’t have a big social media following, right? And she doesn’t have a prominent, public-facing job? In fact, she doesn’t have anything she might plausibly cast as an author platform? Well, then you should probably also tell her she almost certainly won’t get a book deal, not even if she’s written the best proposal in the world.

As a piece by Rebecca Jennings at Vox detailed earlier this month, this is how it works now. In publishing—and other creative industries (Jennings mostly covered books and music)—platform is the name of the game. And it is a terrible game, the dissolution of which feels increasingly urgent. There has to be a better way to sell books.