3 Things You Need to Get a Traditional Book Deal

What it takes to get a traditional book deal is pretty simple.

Potential + Platform + Proposal = Book Deal

This actually explains why so many celebrities write books. If a literary agent or talent manager came to me tomorrow with a reality TV star and said let’s get this person a book deal, it wouldn’t be that difficult. That person already has a platform — or an audience — that’s easy to sell to because those folks already know this person. In a lot of ways, their audience is ready to buy the book. What I would do in this situation is simply create the editorial — a concept and the actual words on the page — to match their audience, persona, and brand.

However, this isn’t the case for most authors because most people aren’t celebrities. So, when people find me — and this may be the case for you — what they have is the opposite. You may have an idea (and sometimes multiple ideas) for a book — so you have potential — but you don’t really have the platform yet. And that’s a problem because publishers won’t touch your project without a distinct audience to sell your book to. That’s why selling memoirs is so hard for the average writer, because it’s so hard to build an entire audience and platform around a personal story.