Tips to Getting Your Book Successfully Published

This is an excerpt from a book I wrote called PUTTING YOUR PASSION INTO PRINT, (Workman Publishing, 2005) about how to get a book published. It was written with my wife, Arielle Eckstut, one of America's leading agents, and the author of three books.

WHY PASSION?

Passion isn't usually the first item on the list of requirements for writing a book. But here's a fact: getting a book written, published and read by the public is really hard work. It will most likely take years and eat up thousands of hours with little or no up-front money. If you're writing about something that you don't necessarily care that much about, it's going to be hard mucking though the making of your book, let alone slogging through the publicizing, marketing and selling of it. Passion helps people keep-on keeping-on.

Passion is contagious. Whether it's on the page or flowing through your publicity, marketing and sales efforts, passion excites and moves people. More than any other single asset, passion will help you attract agents, publishers and readers. It will help you sell books. And have fun. And what good is any of it, if you're not having fun?

WHO ARE WE TO TELL YOU ABOUT GETTING PUBLISHED?

For one thing, we're both authors who have written books in a wide range of categories: memoir, fiction, practical nonfiction, sports and humor. For another, we've taught Putting Your Passion Into Print all across America, culminating in a class at Stanford, which was filled in under five minutes. Plus, Arielle is a literary agent who worked in New York City, the mecca of publishing, for 10 years before opening up the West Coast office of the New York-based Levine-Greenberg Literary Agency. She's mid-wifed dozens of first-time authors, as well as 7th, 11th, and 20th time authors. She's worked with every major publishing house and sold millions of dollars worth of books.