Intelligence.

Talent.

Creativity.

You won’t need any of these things to succeed as a writer so I want you to put them out of your mind. At its most basic, selling books is about sales, not literature. And selling books is no different than selling anything else, be it cars, Girl Scout cookies or your dad’s retirement watch. It’s about market research, getting your name out there and not being afraid to use a little sex appeal. I’ll teach you how to pump up those numbers and always be closing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

Okay, today’s article will be broken into five steps, and at the end of each section, I will take you through my personal journey of how I sold my first book.

Step One: Find your market

I’ll be blunt. Publishers don’t give a shit about literary quality. And just like my dad used to say to that strange woman who lived with us for six months, the only reason they want you around is to make them money.

You should be able to answer these questions for your publisher: Who will buy your book? How will you hook them? Can you make them feel like they’ll regret it if they die before they read your book?

Now full disclosure, I landed my first book deal in 1999, a simpler and more innocent time: Borders was still around, nobody knew who al-Qaeda was and people didn’t carry around little machines made them constantly anxious, depressed and seething with self-hatred. Also, I should mention I technically had actually been published before this, but it was by a very fringe publisher that I don’t think counts. (As an aside some of my critics will claim this group was the media wing of an AIDS-denial group, like the one that promoted Foo Fighters early on. But they actually thought all diseases were a hoax, so it’s a little disingenuous to single out AIDS.)

Anyway, my first real book deal with a company that actually had an office was in 1999. The book was called Spilled Milk, a psychological thriller about a man named John Milk who snaps and murders everyone in his office. Back in the 1990s people worked in stable office jobs like this and I was able to convince my publisher readers would connect with John Milk’s alienation and discontent.

Step Two: Make a name for yourself

Agents and publishers are risk-averse. They almost never go with an unknown. Fun fact, when JK Rowling submitted one of her manuscripts to publishers under a different name, over 140 of them turned down her story about a transsexual woman who rapes an entire class of kindergartners.

So what do you do if you’re not already famous? Well, most people assume you can skip this step, meet a literary agent at a bar, sleep with them, smash your face against their bathroom mirror and threaten to call the police if they don’t promise you a book deal. But unfortunately, almost all literary agents bug their apartments to prevent incidents like these.

After I had written Spilled Milk, I made a name for myself by stopping a homeless man from jumping in front of a train in my hometown. I made the local news and even got some very brief national news coverage. I wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but it was enough to convince my publisher people might vaguely recognize the name. It is unfortunate, however, that the same homeless man jumped in front of a different train a month later after he ran through the money I gave him to jump in front of the first one.

Step Three: Find an agent

Going back to what I said earlier, if you can’t blackmail agents, how can you land one? Well, it all starts with a query letter. You can find my video on that here.

But queries and proposals and sample chapters are all a little impersonal. You need to find a way to make a true connection. This is a person you might be working with for months, hell maybe even decades if you have a few dozen books in you. My first agent introduced me to my first and second wives at the same underground sex club, and he’d still be my agent today if he’d taken my advice and had someone always there to spot him when doing autoerotic asphyxiation.

But how did I land him? Well, it wasn’t by mailing a manuscript and it wasn’t by sending an email, which was all the rage in the late 90s. And no, it wasn’t the underground sex club, where you’re not allowed to use your real identity anyway. No, I met him at a writer’s convention in upstate New York. These are great places to network. When nobody was looking, I started a small fire near his booth and, because I was ready and most writers are useless, I quickly put it out. One thing led to another and twelve years later I was a pallbearer at his funeral. Funny how life is sometimes.

Step Four: Have a self-marketing plan

Repeat after me: Your book will not sell itself. It’s true now and it’s always been true. Nobody would’ve read Moby Dick if Melville hadn’t convinced Nye’s to give away a free copy with every case of sperm oil.
There’s a lot of great information about building your author brand in this video here, but just to go over the basics: write an author tagline, network, and if you’re really fucking ugly, develop your online platform as much as possible.

Today, a marketing plan might involve some of these things: setting up a blog, promoting your book in advance on social media and in YouTube videos, tweeting inane ramblings at 3 in the morning and so on.
Things were different in 1999, but still might apply today. For Spilled Milk, my plan was to set up a book tour along the east coast and put up some controversial billboard ads along the New Jersey turnpike.

Step Five: Choose the best deal

This section of the video will apply to only a very small minority of you, so if you’re not completely confident, driven and borderline delusional about your ability to succeed, you can skip to the end of the video. Okay, for those that stayed, you’ve got several different publishers vying for your attention. It’s prom all over again, except this time won’t end with you having to scrape your limo driver’s brains off the pavement.

Now, for a new author a normal advance will be somewhere between 100,000 dollars and 20 bucks. But you have to read the fine print. The biggest advance won’t always earn you the most money. You can’t forget to look at the royalty structure.

For Spilled Milk, I was offered a $5,000 dollar advance, which in Joe Biden’s America is almost $700,000 today. I was over the moon. You know, I was able to pay off my loan sharks and I had enough money left over to buy Maxwell Caulfield’s leather coat from Grease 2.

But what I didn’t realize was that instead of getting royalties, the contract I signed stated that I’d actually have to pay 20 cents for each book sold. I ended up disowning the book and actively telling people not to buy it on my book tour.