[Hoping to get your book published? Here is the continuation of yesterday's interview with Ian Coburn.]

Hunter:

What is it that publishers look for in a book? Or for that matter, do they know what they’re looking for?

There was a guy who tried an experiment with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion. He changed the titles, put the name of Alison Laydee on them, and sent a few chapters to 18 publishers. One of them recognized the books; the other 17 rejected them or didn’t respond.

If Jane Austen isn’t good enough, what’s an aspiring author to do?

Ian:

Well, in all fairness, some of the publishers may have recognized the works and tossed the queries, baffled that an author thought he could pull the wool over their eyes. That being said, most of the queries probably just didn’t get read or were only quickly perused. They came via the route outlined on the publisher’s site or in guides, where they didn’t get past editorial assistants—aka the gatekeepers. Publishers are looking to do as little work as possible, just like the rest of us. The more you can bring to the table, the better. Overall, it seems they want an angle, the bigger the better. This is why people who aren’t authors get deals—prostitutes who sleep with governors, governors who get fired, etc. The media eats up the stories and that gets publishers seeing dollar signs.

Don’t worry about what publishers want. What do readers want? That’s where your focus should be. To get a publisher, then, show publishers you have what readers want.

Hunter:

How much of the marketing responsibility falls on the author versus the publisher? Time you spend marketing is time that you could have spent writing another book. How do you find a balance between promoting what you have and coming up with more?

Ian:

All marketing is you. Repeat; all marketing is you. If you get lucky enough to have your publisher market your work, great; that’s a huge bonus. But go in with the attitude that all marketing is on you because it is. Market smart. I went to the Printer’s Row Book Fair in Chicago a few years ago to market God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. A lot of authors sat behind tables, waiting for visitors to approach them. I handed out bookmarks advertising my book, mingling with the crowd. I gave out hundreds (these people were buying books; they needed free bookmarks!) and saw my sales on Amazon jump up over the following couple weeks. You should always be going after your audience—reaching out to bloggers, handing out free bookmarks to readers, speaking, and so forth, as opposed to waiting for your audience to come to you.

Near and following the release of any book don’t plan on doing any writing. All your time will be spent marketing, as it should be. As long as you are getting results—media interviews, blogger reviews, a flow of reviews on Amazon—you should keep marketing hard. It will taper off and as it does, you can then get back into writing. Eventually, all marketable interest will wane and you can then focus nearly entirely on writing again. I say “nearly” because you should always keep an eye open for marketing opportunities, typically by monitoring journalist and media queries for material. (Get on the “Help a Reporter Out” list, also known as “HARO”; it is a free list of queries from the media that goes out three times a day.)

Hunter:

Is it best to write the book first and then try to get it published, or get a publisher to accept the book first and then write it? If I recall correctly, Tim Ferriss took the latter approach with The 4-Hour Workweek. The problem with the former is that it puts a lot of faith in “if you build it, they will come.”

Ian:

Again, it really depends on what’s important to you. For me, it’s typically most important to get my ideas on the page. Writing is a release of my ideas that I want to share. It’s most important to me to share the ideas. If I don’t find a publisher who wants to pay me to write my ideas, that’s not good enough in some cases. I can’t just go to the next project. I want people to at least have the chance to get the information, so I start the project as I pitch it. I was halfway through God is a Woman when the publisher picked it up. Only small publishers wanted my latest as I pitched, so I completed it without signing with anyone, hoping to get a big publisher interested at some point. (I didn’t query many big publishers, wanting to hold off until I have a lot of page hits to show them.)

Generally speaking, most nonfiction work isn’t completed past the first few chapters until a publisher is found. Fiction work is almost always done before you start pitching. Is it most important to you to get paid for your work or to complete your work? If you wait for a publisher to pick it up, there is a very good chance your work will never be written. (Some experts purport that completing a nonfiction work ahead of time is the mark of an amateur; however, more and more publishers are asking to see complete works for nonfiction.)

Hunter:

People such as Steve Pavlina, Hugh MacLeod, Jonathan Fields, and Gary Vaynerchuk got their book deals in large part because of their popular websites. Not that they built up their online presence for the purpose of publishing a book down the road, but since they had the traffic, there was much less risk for the publishers.

When does it make sense to build up an online audience first, versus going directly for the book deal without any internet fame?

Ian:

I’m living proof that you don’t need Internet fame to achieve success with a book. Some popular blogs and sites don’t do well as books. Should you write a blog? Build an Internet following with a site? Blogging and writing a book are two very different types of writing. Take me for example. I’m not a good blogger because I tend to have one complete idea. I don’t have all the continually fresh content a blog needs. I’m more, “Here’s what I have to say. Here’s what works. Follow it, make it your own, take what works, discard the rest, and it will work for you. That’s all I got.” This works very well in a book because a book has a start, a middle, and an end. Blogs can often be entered at any point and don’t end. Bloggers often struggle writing books because they need to have an end and content that doesn’t only start a debate but also closes it. Next thing you know, the blogger has a variety of similar ebooks and books because he didn’t complete the thought in the first book. It can get confusing for readers; which one should they read first? Or should they just stick with the blog? I prefer to speak rather than blog, which is why I have a vlog/blog. The site serves mostly to provide applications of what I discuss in my second book as examples of implementation.

It all boils down to sincerity. If your writing is sincere it will find an audience because people want sincerity more than anything today. Sincerity sells. It makes a site, blog, or book popular, if even in just a niche. I wrote God is a Woman because I wanted to share my funny sexual and dating misadventures while giving readers, especially college students, the chance to learn from my mistakes so they could avoid them. I couldn’t go back and fix things in my own life to make unhappy experiences happy but I could share my experiences so others could avoid the same pitfalls and be happy. That’s what made it get noticed even without a popular site or name on the Internet. Sincerity is what made audiences laugh when I was a comedian.

If you’re not a recognized name in your topic, it is best to start a blog or site sharing your work as you create it. It can only help. You can still pitch while creating the site; no harm, no foul.

Hunter:

Ian, thanks for all this information. There’s plenty here that will give people a leg up on their competition.

Any questions for Ian? Ask away!

After ten years as a comedian, where he holds the entertainment industry record of 106 straight weeks touring, Ian Coburn no longer wanted to entertain people; he wanted to help them achieve their goals, just as he had with comedy. “There is no better feeling; no greater sense of accomplishment.” His tangible decision-making process for making good choices is shared in his second book, currently available for free download at www.bestpossiblechoice.com, where you will also find examples of its implementation.

• How To Get Your Book Published: Interview With Ian Coburn, Part 1
• The Marge Simpson Guide To Writing A Novel
• How To Write A Novel In 21 Days
• How To Write A Movie Script In 21 Days
• The Blogger’s Guide To Effective Writing
• Deos Splnielg Rlaley Mteatr?
• Write For The Web: Drive-by Shooting
• Automatic Blog Post Rehasher
• Other People Will Reveal Your Calling, If You Listen
• The 10 Most Readable Blogs (That I Like)