The previous post contained a
suggestion from author, publisher and speaker Rick Frishman. Today I follow up
with some more advice from him, this one courtesy of an interview with him at
the success systems now newsletter.
On book titles: “Titles should be one to four words. There is a study that showed bestselling books since 1902. They all had a one to four word titles.”
On (not) writing: “you don’t need to be a great writer to be an author. You need to know a great writer to be an author. I have a fabulous ghost writer that takes my content and energy and takes my stuff and then he knows how to write. I talk my books, he puts it down, sends it back to me, we edit it back and forth, back and forth, and lo and behold we have a book. Because he is a great writer.”
[My note: if you’re interested in making money writing, one approach could be to seek out people who have expertise and, ideally, some kind of recognition, and offer to cowrite a book proposal with them—note that I say a book proposal; you don’t have to write the whole book in order to find out whether a publisher will want it. But do make sure you have a deal in place (I suggest 50-50) before you do anything else. And make sure your coauthor is willing to participate in the marketing of the book.]
On his publishing house (Morgan James): “We look for books on how to make money, how to be agood parent, how to make a gazillion dollars on the internet. We just had a book become a huge best seller last week which is, “How I Made a Million Dollars on the Internet and How You Can Too.” …You can be a first time author. You don’t have to have other books. What you do have to have is a platform. Which is the golden word in publishing and what that is, is if I am thinking of publishing your book, what I want to know is what are you going to do to sell your book?”
(Establishing your platform is one of the topics covered in my book, “Your Writing Coach,” published by Nicholas Brealey. You can get it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online and offline retailers.)
