What happens after your book is published has a great deal to do with whether you become published and profitable… or just published.

A book proposal is a direct-marketing document intended to persuade publishers to edit, print and distribute your book. It’s a sales piece intended to communicate inevitability of your book’s success.

Your book’s marketing plan, however, is intended for an audience of one – You! It’s not intended for your publisher. Rather, it’s intended to identify revenue streams that you will develop after your book is published.

Your marketing plan should describe profits you will earn above and beyond royalties from sales of your book. It should describe in detail your market and steps you will take to earn this income.

The reason to prepare your marketing plan now, before you sign a publishing contract or write your book, is that success of your marketing plan depends on way your book publishing contract is negotiated.

Coaching and consulting

Let’s assume, for example, that you plan to use your book as a way of enhancing your visibility and credibility among your target market. At simplest level, you will want to include your web site address at several points in book. Knowing this goal, you can insist that publisher agrees in writing to include your web site address in specific locations in your book.

Remember: promises don’t make it! Let’s take worst case scenario. You and your acquisition editor agree that you can include five mentions of your web site address in book. However, as often occurs, acquisition editor, after signing contract, fades out of picture.

But, before approaching an agent to represent you, you should finalize presentation of your book.

Agents don’t have time to waste dealing with publishing ‘wannabees’ who don’t have, and may never have, a concrete project to represent. To busy agents, dreams don’t make it.

If you approach an agent before you’re prepared, you may never be able to contact them again. They’ll consider you a ‘dreamer’ and disregard you emails and phone calls.

Elevator Speech

Before approaching an agent, prepare an ‘elevator speech’ describing your project in less than thirty-seconds it takes for an average elevator ride. If you can’t, your project probably isn’t ready for prime time.

Your elevator speech must answer four major questions:

- What is your book about?

- Who is going to buy it?

- How does it differ from existing books on subject?

- How are you going to promote it?

1. What is your book about?

Finalize your book’s title and contents before contacting an agent.

The title is crucial to your book’s success. It must attract attention of acquisition editors, book reviewers, bookstore managers, web surfers and readers. The title is often your one – and only – chance to make a sale.

Finalize your book’s table of contents and prepare a brief description of contents of each chapter. You should also know how long your book is going to be and number of illustrations, graphics or worksheet

Prepare two – three, if you’re a first-time author – sample chapters and hire a professional editor to fine-tune them. It’s better to show three perfect chapters than a finished manuscript filled with spelling errors.