Are You Ready to Land a Book Deal?

Answering your most common questions has been fun for me, and I’ve been getting great feedback. Thanks to those of you who hit reply and told me that this is helpful.

(Check out #1, #2, and #3 if you have no idea what I’m talking about.)

Today I’m going to answer #4 —

What kind of numbers/metrics do I need to work with you on a proposal?

For those of you who don’t know, in prescriptive how-to nonfiction, you get a book deal based on a proposal. Something that’s different about MSB is that we don’t write proposals for people who aren’t ready . . . . and most of the time people aren’t ready because they don’t have an audience or platform big enough.

Naturally, the next question a lot of folks have is about the magic number.

How many followers and email subscribers will make you ready?

I’m going to tell the truth and say that I used to have numbers.

But I don’t anymore because I realized, painfully, that metrics don’t tell the whole story. A client can seem to have the right metrics — thousands on an email list for example, or a huge social following — but not have enough unique content for a proposal, much less a book.