How and Why to Publish a Bestselling Book By Anna David Copyright © 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher. Before you go any further… Do you want to know if you have a book in you? Go to www.futureauthorquiz.com to find out! Table of Contents Introduction .......................................................................... 1 PART 1 – WHAT I’VE LEARNED ....................................... 3 You Don’t Have to Have a Ridiculously Interesting Life ..................................................................... 5 You Don’t Have to Be Ridiculously Talented .................. 9 You Don’t Have to Be Well-Connected .......................... 13 You Don’t Have to Have Any Connections at All ........ 17 You Don’t Have to Get a Traditional Book Deal ........... 21 PART 2 – WHAT TO LEARN FROM THAT ....................... 45 Know Your Mission ........................................................... 47 Know Your Limitations..................................................... 51 Follow the Rules ................................................................. 55 PART 3 – WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH WHAT YOU’VE LEARNED .......................................................................... 65 Know Your Why ................................................................ 67 Become a Public Speaker .................................................. 69 Launch a Podcast ............................................................... 89 Consulting, Coaching and More .................................... 107 BONUSES ......................................................................... 111 Bonus 1: The Sample Advanced Reader Team Newsletter Sequence ....................................................... 113 Bonus 2: Effective and Ineffective Podcast Pitches and Blurb Requests ............................................ 122 Bonus 3: How to Craft an Email Nurture Sequence .. 127 Bonus 4: How to Write an Effective Medium.com Post ............................................................ 150 Bonus 5: How to Write a Memoir .................................. 158 Bonus 6: How to Publish on Amazon ........................... 177 Bonus 7: The Pre-Book Launch Cheat Sheet Checklist ............................................................................ 182 CONCLUSION .................................................................. 183 ABOUT THE AUTHOR .................................................... 185 Introduction You see them. They’re on TV. They’re speaking at conferences. You hear them. They’re talking to you through your headphones or car speakers when you listen to podcasts. You hear about them. People are recommending them, on Twitter and in person or on Instagram or at dinner parties. You’re being handed their work whether you want it or not. Who are they? Best-selling authors. The question is: How do you become one yourself? The answer: It’s not as hard as you might think. PART 1 – WHAT I’VE LEARNED You Don’t Have to Have a Ridiculously Interesting Life I didn’t become a writer because my life is so fascinating that I felt like I needed to write about it. I became a writer because there simply wasn’t anything else I knew how to do. I wrote my first short story when I was in eighth grade and it was about my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Mein, who was very mean (even a 12-year-old can understand the cleverness of a homonym). I submitted my first short story for publication when I was 12. Or maybe it wasn’t the first. I just know that the first rejection letter I still have is from when I was 12 years old. It’s framed and on the wall in my reading nook. Dear Anna, it reads… Thank you for submitting your story, All About My Splinter, from your “My Garden of Adventures, Book 1” series. I really enjoyed it—very good reading. At this point, we have all our written material set for the next few editions of Boing! But, I will keep you in mind for later issues. If we do use your story, I’ll write to you and let you know. Many thanks and keep up the good writing! It is signed by a man I have often wondered about. ANNA DAVID · 6 Was he an aspiring writer and if so, did it make him feel like he wasn’t living his life’s purpose when he had to send rejection letters to 12-year-olds? I never found out. But I did find out that even as a pre-pubescent, I was following the “write what you know” adage and as a relatively sheltered 12-year-old growing up in Northern California, I didn’t know about much beyond getting splinters. (Pity whomever had to read later books in the “My Garden of Adventures” series; my money’s on my mom, who had been the one to comfort me years earlier, at the age of seven, when I’d discovered via The Guinness Book of World Records that the youngest author was six so I couldn’t set the record myself.) Even though setting records had been a personal obsession of mine since I’d seen Bobby and Cindy Brady set the world teeter totter record on The Brady Bunch, I let that go. But I didn’t let go of the “write what you know” adage. I write about my life. I only forgot to do that once—in my second novel, Bought, which Publisher’s Weekly aptly called a “misfire.” YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE A RIDICULOUSLY INTERESTING LIFE · 7 I hated the book so much that I begged HarperCollins to let me do a full rewrite even after they’d acquired it for a significant amount of money. (They told me I didn’t need to rewrite it—that, after all, they’d bought it the way it was—but I did end up rewriting it and still hated it.) So, I write about my life. And yet here’s the thing: my life isn’t all that interesting. I haven’t discovered the cure for herpes, been elected to office or even set the god damn teeter totter record. I’ve still made that life into eight books and hundreds if not thousands of articles, posts, essays and live stories. Because it doesn’t really matter what the story is. It matters how it’s told. You Don’t Have to Be Ridiculously Talented There’s a popular meme floating around the web: “Great writing is 3% talent and 97% not getting distracted by the Internet.” It is often accompanied by an image of a person who appears overwhelmed while staring at her computer screen. I’d like to offer an amendment to that. It’s not as cute- sounding but from what I can see, it’s just as much, if not more, accurate. “Succeeding as a writer is 3% talent and 97% not giving up year after year.” Because here’s the thing: the most successful writers I know aren’t the most talented. I know fiercely, skin-tinglingly talented ones who have to pay the rent by working at gossip magazines or worse. I know not particularly talented ones who rake in accolades, money or both. It’s not about talent. It’s about what you do with the talent you have. And it’s about following the second-most popular adage when it comes to writing: “Writing is rewriting.” ANNA DAVID · 10 How do I know this? Because I’ve both taken and taught a plethora of writing classes; I even majored in Creative Writing in college. It was, of course, an utterly useless degree but it did teach me one thing: writing can’t be taught. Here’s what you do when you’re a Creative Writing major: 1) You write stories. 2) You workshop those stories, which means that your teacher and classmates read them and then provide feedback. 3) You rewrite your stories based on that feedback. At no point do you get lessons on how to write stories because it is presumed, if you choose to major in something as useless as Creative Writing, that you a) are delusional and b) already know how to write short stories. Most of my fellow students didn’t become writers. You know who did? Plenty of people I know who didn’t major in Creative Writing. They are people who’ve spent years and years and years honing their craft, possibly subscribing to the Malcolm Gladwell popularized belief that you have to do something for 10,000 hours to develop mastery over it but probably going well over that allotted time frame. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE RIDICULOUSLY TALENTED · 11 It’s not about being a gifted writer. How do I know? Martin Amis is a gifted writer. Jennifer Egan is a gifted writer. Philip Roth was a gifted writer. I’m not a gifted writer. I’m quite good in that I have a lot of practice obsessing over words and placing them together in a way that can best articulate my feelings while also sounding both original and clever. I’m good. But I’m not gifted. Despite not being a gifted writer, I’ve had a great career, in some form or function, as a writer for the past two decades. That is because I didn’t give up. And in doing so, I’ve made the most of the talent I have. You Don’t Have to Be Well-Connected Over the years of being a writer, there’s one comment I’ve heard more than probably any other: “Well, it’s easier for you,” the person will say. “You have an agent. You’re well-connected.” I am. Because I’ve been doing this for so long. I was a professional writer for almost 10 years before an agent was interested in representing me. Here’s the connection I had when I was first launching my career: Someone who worked for my dad had a daughter who was a costume designer on a soap opera. That was as close as I got to knowing anyone in the media. But here’s where I was inarguably, unabashedly lucky: I had parents who were willing to support me for six months when I moved to New York to intern for magazines.