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| Category: Writing:Publishing |
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| About the Book | |
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At this moment, thousands of would-be authors are slaving away on their keyboards, dreaming of literary success. But their efforts won’t count for much. Of all those manuscripts, trade book editors will sign up only a slim fraction. Why are so very few ever accepted for publication? And of those titles--ones that that editors paid thousands of dollars to contract, print and publicize--an unhealthy percentage never sell enough copies to earn back their advances. Two years later, most will be out of print! Each season, literally tons of new books get launched on waves of publicity and author signings, only to languish in the warehouses. Never shipped, eventually they are pulped or remaindered. Yet with stubborn regularity, other titles surge out of nowhere to hit best-seller lists coast to coast, and remain in print for years. Again, why? To earn his salary as an acquisition editor, Tam Mossman needed to find--and contract--several successful books each year. Faced with too few hits and too many flops, he grew baffled. Why did book buyers seem so fickle? As he finally learned, they’re not! After more years of publishing experience--as editor, presenter of new tiles to salesmen, magazine publisher, author, and literary agent--Tam understood the sad, blunt answer: Nearly every author sets out on the wrong foot, asking “What kind of book do I want to write?”, or--which can be equally self-defeating--“What kind of book does my agent or editor or reviewer want to see?” Before powering up their computers, the crucial question they rarely ask is,"Is this a book that readers will pay for?" Yes, Amazon.com, Kindle, and other techno-advances are forcing publishers to surrender their 19th-century business models. But even given the glut of ever-new information and entertainment free for the clicking, those bottom-line dynamics remain the same: Why will browsers will pick up one title and ignore fifty others? What motivates them to pull out their credit cards? There’s no single explanation. Actually, there are countless ways to attract (but never pander!) to readers. But after learning from his own mistakes, Tam finally isolated the essential “vitamins” needed to keep reader interest alive and well. Sometimes subtly, often blatantly, every successful book always manages to include them. Conversely, lack of those same crucial elements results in reader malnutrition--with typically fatal results in term of sales. By employing all seven Strategies, your book will inform and delight your reader. They can give your effort the kind of widespread appeal that lets "Atlas Shrugged" and "Elements of Style," "Gone with the Wind" and "The Joy of Cooking" keep on selling, year after year. 7.625 Strategies in Every Best-Seller will show you exactly what they are--and why they're so effective--with examples chosen from the top-selling titles of the past 20 years.
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| About the Author | |
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As an editor of Trade Books for nearly 20 years, Tam Mossman polished, restructured, even rewrote scores of manuscripts to make them irresistibly readable. Formerly an art critic for two Philadelphia newspapers, he’s now a self-described “manuscript mechanic,” helping new authors win contracts with established publishers. |