How to Publish Your Nonfiction Book: A Complete Guide to Making the Right Publisher Say Yes

By Rudy Shur

Book Overview

While many writers dream of seeing their books in print, most don't succeed simply because they don't know the ropes. Written by a publisher with over three decades of experience, How to Publish Your... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0757000002
• ISBN13: 9780757000003
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Square One Publishers
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

A Must for All Nonfiction Writers

If you are writing a non-fiction book or you write non-fiction I recommend you pick up a copy of How To Publish Your Nonfiction Book" today. I am sure you will find it a very helpful and useful guide to publishing your non-fiction book.This book guides you, step-by-step, through the publishing process. Author, Rudy Shur, will tell you how to choose the right publisher, how to prepare your submission package, how to negotiate a deal, and much more. In addition, he gives an easy-to-use glossary, resource list, and index at the end of the book. You will refer back repeatedly to this one book.

Read this book to understand what publishers want

I'll begin my review of this book with a confession of my personal bias. Rudy Shur was my mentor. When I had a vague idea of a book I wanted to write, I sent a proposal to him, and he got back to me in 3 days. Even though he was the busy CEO of health publishing leader Avery Press, he spent very literally hundreds of hours helping me over two years, mostly evenings and weekends, by email and phone. With consummate patience he taught me how to define my audience, empathize with my readers, and distinguish my book from the competition. He gave me an editor who made every sentence clear, and then a designer who made my words fit the page. But the most important thing the author of this book taught me was how to write a book with a picture of every page in my mind as I composed it. I have since written (and sold) six more books, and it's largely due to Rudy Shur that I can live comfortably and do what I love to do.What you will find in this book is a step-by-step, practical approach to placing your book. This book contains comprehensive sections on finding the right place for your book, understanding the economics of your book and treating your potential publisher like a human being, and making your deal. As an author who's written enough books to have more than a few things go wrong, I can only say that every contingency I've experienced or heard of is covered in this book. For writers who have limited time to read, the book is laid out to include summaries of key points: Questions about where your book fits in: Hardback? Soft cover? Trade? Mass market? Which publisher.A section that could have been titled "Ten Kisses of Death for a Submission Package"Warning signs of a contract that won't workanda checklist to make doubly sure that the publisher to whom you are entrusting years of your life is the right publisher for you, as well as many others.The book also presents the Square One system, which is the publisher's view of what made over 1,000 sucessful books successful.If you want a step-by-step, comprehensive, encouraging guide to getting published, you just can't do better that How to Publish Your Nonfiction Book. No first-time author should be without it.

Get this book if you want to get published!

This is the best author's guide to getting published that I've seen in nearly 30 years in the business. It's well written, reader-friendly, entertaining, informative and gives you easy-to-follow steps on getting published. What more could you want in one book?Exceptionally pragmatic guidelines are cleverly presented in nifty features such as 8 Basic Rules, 8 Steps to submission, and 10 Common submission errors. You also get some very practical sample cover letters and tons of helpful hints in the margins. You'll no doubt find the glossary of publishing jargon and the resource directory to be very helpful as well. The "SquareOne" book classification system is a remarkably clear and simple guide to the taxonomy of nonfiction books. Essential knowledge for getting publishers to understand, and accept, your work; it should be read before you actually begin to write.I'm particularly impressed with Shur's chapter 7:The Deal (on the publishing contract) and chapter 8:When It Doesn't Happen (on what to do when you don't get a contract).This extremely valuable how-to author's guide is so complete as to be just as useful to published authors as well as first-time writers. And, thanks to Shur's motivating encouragement to would-be authors, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever said "someday, I'm gonna write a book."

an absolute requirement for a non-fiction writer

Granted I went about things the unusual way to get my two non-fiction books published (was lucky enough to find a great agent), but I wanted to see how things were supposed to work. I'm happy to report that the author knows what he's talking about! My agent taught me much of what he writes, but if you don't have an agent (or don't need one), this is the fastest and most painless way to figure out how to avoid the "slush" pile(where most unsolicited manuscripts go). He provides the format for the 5-6 pages of material you need to send (do NOT send the whole book) and explains the most common mistakes that just about anyone would make if they didn't read this kind of book first. Extremely useful, well laid out and easy to follow.