“This is the worst-edited book I have read in years,” said the Milwaukee Journal in its review of Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (Oxford University Press). The review's headline proclaimed: “Sloppy editing mars Pyron's well-written, thorough book.”

Typos, misspellings, and other goofs from bargain-basement copyediting diminish a book's credibility and embarrass author and publisher. Less obvious is the lack of developmental editing, which can cause a book to miss its market. In a developmental edit, a market-savvy editor guides an author in producing a more salable book. Below are four of my clients' success stories.

Editing a Professional Book to Reach a Consumer Audience

The Battering Syndrome is a successful $79.00 hardcover book marketed directly to professionals by the National Crisis Prevention Institute. The publisher knew the same information could benefit lay readers as well. So I was brought in to rewrite the book as a $14.95 softcover. I introduced a conversational style, cut the length, and simplified the vocabulary and sentence structure. Even the new title is designed for the trade market: He Promised He'd Stop: Helping Women Find Safe Passage from Abusive Relationships.

Clear and Simple Is Best

Good Housekeeping magazine reprinted a chapter from The Safety Minute, telling its publisher, Safety Zone Press, that they bought the rights because the book's content was presented so clearly they could easily select the material most appropriate to their 5 million readers. Mademoiselle used the book's lists of safety tips as interview points in creating an article about the book. Developmental editing had turned the author's great content into a highly readable book by stripping away excess wording, rewriting each tip as a direct command for action, and presenting the text in an inviting format.

Clear Editing from the Beginning for Easy Sub Rights Sales

The public television series Ancestors selected Genetic Connections, the first title from Sonters Publishing, for its companion guide to the series—the only resource picked for the segment on genetics. The book (a Benjamin Franklin award winner) was easily condensed in time for the broadcast because its highly technical content had been exhaustively edited from the beginning to be clear and user-friendly.

Begin at the Beginning

Even authors who market their manuscripts to agents and publishers can benefit from professional editing—before submission. The first publisher that Jeanne Dams sent her manuscript to, Walker & Co., offered her a two-book contract (since expanded to four) and published The Body in the Transept with no changes. She credits this extraordinary reception for a new author to having a well-edited manuscript to submit. When this first book won a 1996 Agatha Award, sales jumped and HarperCollins bought the paperback rights. Thoughtful editing had helped a talented new writer withstand intense scrutiny by editors, publishers, and mystery fans.

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After more than 25 years as an editor in niche publishing in New York, Chris Roerden, M.A., began her own freelance book editing service in 1983. Her high quality work has won many awards for the publishers and writers who are her clients. Chris was the 1995-97 president of MidAmerica Publishers Association, a member of Mensa, and a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Maine. Contact Chris Roerden at
Edit It, 3683 Waterwheel Court, Greensboro, NC 27409; 336-323-1032; 877-266-5334; Fax: 336-323-1033. Email: croerden@aol.com. Web: http://www.MarketSavvyBookEditing.com.

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6:08  Other Sources of Editorial Material

In your continuing search for new authors and new material for your line of books, you might want to research some of the following sources. Remember that content is the main purchasing motivation for 43% of all consumer book buyers (1996 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing.

Review the Ingram subject categories.

Here are the official Ingram subject categories as of January, 1994: animals, antiques/collectibles, photography, art & architecture, automotive, biography/autobiography, business/economics/finance, bibles, calendars & diaries, family/parenting/children, Cliff/Monarch notes, crafts/hobbies, cooking/wine, home improvement/construction, diet/health/fitness, education/teaching, environmental studies, fiction (many genres), games/gamebooks/crosswords, gardening/horticulture, recovery, history (military, general), humor, inspirational, literature (classics, criticism), love/sex/marriage, nature, true crime/espionage, general nonfiction, new age/parapsychology, performing arts, philosophy, medical/nursing, politics/current events, poetry/ plays, pop arts/pop culture, psychology, reference, regional interest, religion (many categories), sale books (remainders), science/mathematics, transportation, sociology/anthropology/archeology, sports & recreation, study guides, technology & industrial arts, theology, travel, movie/TV tie-ins, computers (many categories), coloring & design books, and blank books—plus the following non-seasonal themes: aging, Asian studies, African American studies, Civil War, gay studies, gifts, Hispanic, home schooling, Judaica, men’s studies, Native American studies, weddings, and women’s studies.

Follow the news.

Witness the O.J. bestsellers, from I Want to Tell You by O.J. Simpson, Faye Resnick’s Nicole Brown Simpson, Christopher Darden’s In Contempt, Henry Beard’s O.J.’s Legal Pad, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run for His Life, and Larry Schiller’s American Tragedy.

Selena!, a book published in Spanish and English, made the bestseller lists five weeks after the death of the Tejano music queen.

Within one week of the final match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer, B.T. Batsford published the first instant book on the match, Kasparov v. Deeper Blue. Former instant books like the White House Tapes and the Pentagon Papers became bestsellers.

Trivial news can also contribute to bestselling books. For instance, America’s Dumbest Criminals and Wanted Dumb or Alive both became bestsellers.

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Authors: Be alert to news opportunities. When Carol Turkington, a former newspaper reporter, heard that John E. du Pont shot Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz, she immediately decided to write a serious study of how a self-destructive man was protected by his wealth from getting the help he needed. A few days later, she called her agent with the idea. She then faxed him a proposal, which he reworked and sent on to Turner Publishing. That same day, they closed on an offer which included book and television rights for No Holds Barred.

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Catch the moment.

When I saw 18-year-old Noa Rabin’s eulogy at the funeral of her grandfather Yitzhak Rabin, I knew there was a story there. Her words sent chills up my spine and tears to my eyes. I hoped some other publisher would pick up on the power of her words. They did. Bernard Fixot and Susanna Lea of Robert Laffont Fixot Seghers tracked Rabin down at army basic training and signed her to do a book about growing up in Israel amid the ever-present danger of war. Knopf bought the American rights to In the Name of Sorrow and Hope.

Other memorable television moments that would make or have made great books include the lone man who stood against a column of tanks heading to Tiananmen Square, the flight of O.J. Simpson in the white Bronco (about missed opportunities amid incredible success, written from a man’s perspective), and Kerri Strug’s vault at the Olympics.

Court controversy.

Lyle Stuart has made a career out of publishing controversial books, from The Anarchist’s Cookbook to The Sensuous Woman to Jackie Oh to The Turner Diaries. Controversy makes the news and helps to sell books. Most of his books became bestsellers.

Sponsor contests.

Avon/Flare sponsored a biannual Young Adult Novel Competition for authors between 13 and 18. Winners received a publishing contract and an advance of $2,500. Avon published Lee J. Hindle's Dragon Fall in 1983 and Tamela Larimer's Buck in 1985.

Each year, Greenfield Review sponsors two Native Authors First Book Awards, which grant publication and $500 to two Native American authors, one a poet, the other a novelist or nonfiction writer.

Do research.

To research its new line of Swept Away romances, Avon participated in Seventeen magazine's market research questionnaire. They also sponsored a contest in which students were asked to finish the following sentence: “If I could travel through time, I would most like to see, experience, and meet . . . .” (in 150 words or less). The winner received $200 plus recognition in the book inspired by his or her essay.

Bill Tamlin, editor of St. Paul Companies News, attaches a red pen and a page of instructions to ten copies of the newsletter. The randomly chosen employees are asked to put a star by passages they like, draw a double line where they stop reading, and pick the newsletter apart. He finds this process gives him immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Why couldn’t you do the same with your books?

Know your customers.

Get to know your customers. Put reader feedback cards in your books. Insert surveys in your books. Do surveys at your web site. Set up a feedback channel at your site to make it easy for people to write to you about your books and authors. One of the reasons the Dummies series was so successful is that they listened. The market had been begging for easy-to-use guides to computer software, and most of the publishers were missing it. Dos for Dummies came along, and soon IDG, a startup, was the leading computer book publisher.

Scholastic makes it a point to find out what children are interested in reading and what they actually are reading. As Barbara Marcus, their executive vice president once noted, “We make it our business—and it is our business— to talk to children on an ongoing basis to know what they like and what they’re interested in.”

One day Walter Zacharius, publisher of Kensington, overheard two women in a bookstore complaining that there were no romance books for people like them. As a result, he was one of the first to start a multicultural line of romances for African Americans.

Joanna Lund knows the small-town, middle-America audience for her Healthy Exchanges cookbooks. “I have four rules, and I never deviate from them.” she says. One, the recipe must be healthful. Two, every recipe must pass a taste test by her truck-driving husband. Three, if it takes longer to fix than to eat, forget it. And, four, every ingredient must be available in DeWitt, Iowa, where she lives.

One of the reasons Jacqueline Susann was so successful is that she knew her audience: “I write for women who read me in the goddam subways on the way home from work. I know who they are, because that’s who I used to be.” She knew they wanted glimpses into the lives of the rich and glamorous, but she also knew that the rich ultimately had to suffer (so her readers could go home feeling better about their own lives).

Be alert to trends.

Watch for what’s hot and what’s not, what’s in and what’s out. These lists of trends can serve you well. Here is one example of current trends. In the July 1997 issue of Catalog Age, here are the “in” items: the color blue, jewel tones, fairies, water fountains, European country, soft gothic, casual elegance, aromatherapy. What’s out? the color green, earth tones, angels, candelabras, American country, dark gothic, shabby chic, and psychotherapy.

Think of the ways you can make use of these trends. One of the reasons that Avery Publishing finally made it on the map is because they adapted their healthy cookbooks to the low-fat trend. When they retitled Gloria Rose’s Cooking for Good Health to Low-Fat Cooking for Good Health, sales jumped fivefold, from 20,000 copies to 100,000 copies.

Follow statistics.

Statistics are one way to predict new trends. Here are a few facts that might inspire a new book for you.

Americans spend $17 billion dollars on their pets, including 63 million cats and 54 million dogs.

In 1970, the percentage of single adults was 28%. By 1997, the percentage had risen to 39%. There are 3,000 dating services in the U.S., which earn $1 billion each year.

There were 30.1 million self-employed workers and small business employees in 1996. These people spent $1 billion on information in 1996.

In 1992, more than 400,000 children were hurt in bicycle accidents.

Marriott Management Services, which provides meals at the dining halls on many college campuses, reports that 15% of their students eat vegetarian. At some schools, the percentage is as high as 60%.

Follow other successful publishers.

Many publishers already follow the latest trend. Note that most knockoffs don’t sell as well as the original, but many do make the bestseller list or sell well enough to justify their existence.

Look at the knockoffs to the bestselling The Rules: The Code (“When you live by The Code, The Rules no longer apply!”, which sold 265,000 copies in 1996), Breaking the Rules (a humor book), and The Southern Rules (“You read the rules, now read the real rules!”).

Betty Eadie’s Embraced by the Light inspired a whole slew of saved by the light books, including the parody Petted by the Light.

Not only are the Chicken Soup for the Soul authors knocking themselves off with bestselling book after bestselling book, but here are a few other knockoffs which became year-end bestsellers: Stories from the Heart by Alice Gray, God’s Vitamin “C” for the Spirit by Kathy and D. Larry Miller, and Heart at Work by Jack Canfield and Jacqueline Miller.

The success of Sisters, a warm-and-fuzzy coffee-table book, has led to the publication of Mothers and Daughters (by the same authors), Daughters and Mothers (by the same publisher), and other coffee-table books devoted to relationships of best friends, gay partners, lesbian partners, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and HIV-positive women.

Buy from other publishers.

Other publishers often let a book go out of print long before its natural sales cycle has been exhausted. Why not take advantage of their shortsightedness?

Blue Heron Publishing bought the paperback and audio rights to Laura Kalpakian’s Graced Land from Grove Press. The novel had previously won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award as well as been filmed as The Woman Who Loved Elvis, starring Roseanne Barr. Hence, it made an appropriate choice for the Oregon publisher.

When Turner Publishing folded in 1997, Regnery bought the rights to Donald Dewey’s biography, James Stewart. They also bought up remaining copies of the book so they could continue selling it right away under their own imprint, Without changing the ISBN number, they notified wholesalers and bookstores to change the title in their databases to show Regnery as the publisher.

When Harper & Row let The Martha's Vineyard Cookbook go out of print (because, as they said, there were only two bookstores on Martha's Vineyard), Globe Pequot Press was able to pick up the rights free. Since then, they've sold more than 40,000 copies of the book to gift shops, gourmet shops, and other retail outlets throughout the New England area.

In the summer of 1997, HarperCollins announced that they would not publish 100 titles they had committed to and were releasing the authors from their contracts. At the time, I suggested in Book Marketing Update that there surely were a good number of independent publishers who could take over the rights to those books and make a handsome profit on them. That is exactly what some publishers did.

A longtime collector of paperbacks, Marc Gerald was aware that many mass-market paperbacks were written by African Americans. A former fiction editor for True Detective, he cleared the rights for the best of these novels, edited them, and republished them under Norton. The first four titles in the series, released in 1996, were The Angry Ones by John A. Williams, The Farm by Clarence Cooper Jr., Portrait of a Young Man Drowning by Charles Perry, and Corner Boy by Herbert Simmons.

Buy foreign rights.

To obtain a title that has not yet appeared in the United States, but which has proven its worth, look into purchasing rights to books published in other countries.

Northwood Press bought one title, Dear Children of the Earth by Schim Shimmel, from a Japanese publisher while, in turn, selling one of their titles, Brother Wolf, to another publisher in Japan.

Listen to specialty booksellers.

More than anyone else in publishing, booksellers know what is selling and what is in demand by readers. Why not make use of their expertise to generate new titles? Ask for their feedback on proposed titles. Also, ask for their recommendations on up and coming authors.

You might even create an entire line of books with the store's imprint. That's what Farrar, Straus & Giroux did with Kitchen Arts & Letters, a specialty cookbook store in New York. Their first title, Christmas Memories with Recipes, came out in the fall of 1988.

Similarly, Warner Books has begun publishing a joint imprint with the Traveller's Bookshelf, another New York specialty bookstore. Already they have published eleven titles in Karen Brown's Travel Guides series. Directors of the bookstore suggest authors, ideas, and titles as well as approve book covers. They also do a lot of promotion.

Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Book Shop (another specialty bookseller in New York), established his own publishing imprint, The Mysterious Press, in 1976. Later, he joined in a partnership with Warner Books and still later with Houghton-Mifflin.

Peter Glassman and James Carey, owners of the Books of Wonder children's bookstore in New York, have their own Books of Wonder Classics imprint with Morrow Junior Books. Besides suggesting titles, authors, and illustrators, they work with the art director to ensure top quality production. Glassman also writes an afterword for each edition.

When Jerry Pallotta visited an Audubon Society bookstore, he noticed that there were no alphabet books on birds. So he decided to do one to complement his Ocean Alphabet Book.

Listen to general booksellers.

While all of the above examples involve New York specialty booksellers, it should be possible to make similar arrangements with some of the top-rated booksellers in your region—whether they are general booksellers or specialty booksellers.

For example, if I were a publisher in Colorado, I would certainly try to arrange a co-publishing agreement with the Tattered Cover Bookstore, one of the largest independent booksellers in the country. Or how about an imprint featuring Powell's in the Pacific Northwest?

In 1993, Swain Wolfe self-published his novel The Woman Who Lives in the Earth after getting a rejection from a major publisher but encouragement from his local bookseller, Barbara Theroux of Fact & Fiction in Missoula, Montana. Within weeks, the book was on the store’s top ten bestseller list. With Theroux’s help, Wolfe began a marketing campaign by sending galleys to a hundred independent bookstores. Later they sent 700 jackets with testimonials to additional bookstores. After many more bookstore appearances and five reprintings, Wolfe eventually sold the book to HarperCollins.

Karen Pandell, author of Ghost Beyond the Garden, worked part-time at The Open Door bookstore in Schenectady, New York, because she wanted to “see books from that point of view, to learn by working there.” A co-worker at the same store, Karen Pandel also found bookstores a great place to work “to understand bookstore lingo.” A former librarian as well, Pandel has written six children’s books.

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gable, Florida, was so excited about Arthur Sokoloff’s self-published book, Life Without Stress, that he recommended the book to Lauren Marino, editor at Broadway Books, as well as an agent. Broadway bought the rights to the book for a substantial five-figure advance and published a hardcover edition in 1997 and scheduled a paperback edition for 1998.

Besides getting ideas for new titles, you should also get feedback from booksellers on your titles, cover copy, and even the contents of the book. Since they are on the front lines of bookselling, they often have insight that you won’t have. In a July 1997 New York Times front page article, some larger publishers were criticized for listening to chain store buyers. I disagree. I think every publisher should listen to store buyers and others in the business. But let your better sense decide what advice is useful and what advice is not. In the article, Ira Silverberg of Grove Press described how he decided not to publish a memoir by songwriter Jerry Leiber after getting a tepid response from Barnes & Noble. The same article also quoted Harold Evans, publisher of Random House, who changed the cover for Mario Puzo’s novel, The Last Don, and retitled Melvyn Bragg’s Credo to The Sword and the Miracle after consulting the chains.

Listen to your sales reps.

Sales reps have been responsible for bringing a number of good selling titles to their publishers attention. A Warner rep first recommended that they publish James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy. A Houghton Mifflin rep came up with the idea for their Best American Sports Writing series. John Little, an independent sales rep, has suggest a number of reprint ideas for the Bison Press.

When the owner of Albuquerque’s Bookworks picked up a copy of Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest published by Calyx Books, she liked it so much that she praised the novel to a rep from Warner Books. With Warner’s interest, the book went to auction. Bantam came out the winner with a $700,000 bid for that title and a follow-up book.

Listen to feedback from your reps also. Their feedback is the main reason you should attend the sales meetings of your distributor (if you have one) or invite the reps to see your line (if you have your own reps). For instance, when Mitch Rogatz of Triumph Books presented The 25 Greatest Moments of Golf to his sales reps, the first thing they asked him was: “Does it include Tiger Woods?” When they found out it didn’t, they told Rogatz that he simply must change it even though the book had already been printed before Woods won the Masters. Rogatz listened. The book was updated to include Woods.

Listen to schools.

Pay attention to any feedback you get from schools or libraries. Sharyn November, a senior editor at Puffin Books, listened to the fourth graders of Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn when they pleaded with her to republish Grace Penney’s Moki, which they had fallen in love with even though the only copies they had to read were faded photocopies. Agent Gail Hochman, a Berkeley Carroll parent, tracked down the rights and found that Houghton Mifflin, the original publisher, was willing to sell paperback rights, which Puffin picked up. Now the children of Berkeley Carroll can pass on their favorite book to their friends and fellow classmates.

Listen to the media.

Besides paying attention to news stories, also listen to the media for other hints. For instance, when Kathie Lee Gifford of Regis & Kathie Lee noted during a holiday show that The Small One was her son Cody’s favorite story, her audience went right out to the bookstores to find it. The bookstores, however, could not find it since the book was out of print at Disney Press. The next year at Christmas, however, Disney brought out a new edition to meet the demand. In November of that year, it was the most requested children’s book at Ingram.

Read your telephone poles.

Be on the lookout for stories or authors while you are walking the street, eating at a pizza parlor, passing a telephone pole, or doing your laundry. Why? Because those are the places that Xander Mellish posted excerpts and promos about her short stories. Plus she created a web site. Since then, her fans have translated her work into four languages—and she has found an agent!

Publish locally.

Everybody loves their own hometown, so regional and city-specific titles almost always sell well. Not only the usual tourist coffee-table books with plenty of pictures, but also other titles such as How to Live (Fairly) Elegantly on (Virtually) Nothing in Los Angeles, The Boston Ice Cream Lover's Guide, and The Washington Driver's Handbook: A Guide to Capital Cruising have all found strong audiences, both local and tourist.

According to U.S. News & World Report, consumers make 80% of their purchases within 20 miles of their homes. That’s one reason why Catherine Rahart’s The Valley’s Legends and Legacies sold so well in California’s central valley. In fact, the Fig Garden Bookstore in Fresno sold more than 1,000 copies during 18 days of December 1996. As co-owner Keith Shore noted, “Local author, local publisher, local stories.” That’s why it sold. And that’s why Stan Yogi’s Highway 99 made the bestseller list of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association.

If you can’t feature local, then feature some place famous: Walt Disney World, Santa Fe, San Francisco, Paris, DC, or the Antarctica. As Eric Kettunen of Lonely Planet noted recently, “People rolled their eyes at Antarctica, but we expect to sell 20,000 copies this year.”

Fictional characters can also sell.

Do they have star power? Yes, they do, says Stephen Kerr of Business Marketing Consultants, “People still search the cities and woods of England for signs of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Sherlock Holmes. A book entitled The Sherlock Holmes Guide to London would definitely fare much better than The John Jones Guide to London.”

Search the lists.

Marketline Press, publishers of Debt-Free & Prosperous Living, won’t publish a book until they’ve checked the SRDS mailing list directory to be sure there are sufficient mailing lists of customers who might want the product. Since most of their sales come through direct marketing, they need those lists to make it work.

One other way lists come in handy is to check out the mailing list offerings of your competitors. For instance, below are a few titles from Rodale’s top 50 books for 1989-90 and the number of names collected under each title through direct sales.

Allergy Self-Help (19,786)
Arthritis: What Works (146,757)
Cancer Prevention (33,047)
Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies (340,148)
Encyclopedia of Natural Home Remedies (144,483)
Flower Garden Problem Solver (33,779)
Healing Foods (607,989)
Total Recall: Books Your Memory Power (7,668)

6:09  Get Good Blurbs

If you can't sign celebrities or established authors, the next best thing is to obtain a foreword or blurb from such people. Anyone with visibility or name recognition (celebrity, expert, reporter, host, leader) is a good candidate for writing forewords for books by unknown authors.

Robert Miller's Most of My Patients Are Animals was given a big sales boost by James Herriot's rave introduction to the book. The book, published by Paul S. Eriksson, was also chosen as a featured alternate by both the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club.

Don Dible's Up Your Own Organization received such favorable advance comments that he decided to make use of them to help promote his book. In the end, three known business leaders, Robert Townsend of Avis, William Lear of Lear Motors Corporation, and John Komives of the Center for Venture Management, wrote an introduction and foreword to his book. Of course, he made sure their well-known names were featured on the front cover of his book.

Richard Grudens, author of The Best Damn Trumpet Player, sent out books and comment pages to potential endorsers and in very short order received rave reviews from Frankie Laine, Larry Elgart, Kathryn Crosby, Warren Covington, and others.

Cat Wagman, self-publisher of Why...Thank-You!, noticed an email address for Greg Howard, creator for the Sally Forth comics, in one of the daily panels. She sent an email message to Sally, from one working mother to another, about how hard it is to get children to write thank-you notes. She then asked if Sally (and Greg) would like a copy of the book and be willing to provide feedback. Howard answered by return email, saying he would look at it but could not promise anything. Several weeks after she sent him the book, he sent her an email note providing her with the testimonial she wanted.

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Authors — Do you know any well-known authors or other celebrities who could write a foreword, introduction, or other blurb for your book? If so, ask them to write a foreword. It will make your book more salable. If you don't know anyone personally, write to a few well-known experts or celebrities who would be appropriate for your book. Your librarian will help you locate their addresses (in Who's Who or Contemporary Authors or some other biographical resource).

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If I had a choice, I’d rather have a blurb with impact written by an unknown over a bland blurb written by a celebrity or expert. To give you an idea of the kind of blurbs that work, here are a few of my favorites:

Use humor.

Jan Murray, the comedian, wrote the following note about Dr. Morton Cooper, author of Stop Committing Voice Suicide: “Dr. C has done wonders with my voice. Now if he can only do something with the rest of my body.”

Use simple, warm imagery.

Jack Canfield, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul, wrote the following comment about Lessons from Mom by Joan Aho Ryan. He wrote that the book is “as nourishing as mother’s milk...and full of simple truths and wisdom for everyone.”

Hitch your wagon to a star.

USA TODAY wrote that Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook is “better than The Bridges of Madison County.” Library Journal used the same star to praise The Notebook: “This is a more romantic testament to love’s enduring miracle than Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County because the Calhouns choose the rigors of daily domestic life over a dream of four days.”

Make it sing.

Bill Hirschman, reviewer for Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel wrote the following of Alan Maltz’s Miami–City of Dreams: “Alan Maltz’s camera croons like Mel Torme, Gloria Estefan, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Buffet on a CD changer gone mad.”

State the benefit.

When Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen wrote their testimonial for this book, they were very clear about its primary benefit: “If you want to sell 25,000,000 books like we have, read and use this book.” Short, sweet, and to the point.

6:10 How to Get Good Testimonials

Below are a few pointers on how to get good testimonials. For a more extensive discussion, see John Kremer's special report on How to Get Testimonials (available for $5.00 from Open Horizons — http://www.bookmarket.com).

Network with others.

The key to getting great testimonials is to make connections, because the more connections you have, the greater chance you have to reach the people you really want to reach. Remember the law of six degrees of separation. You are within five people of the person you want to reach. You know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows the person you want to reach. That’s for anyone in the world!

If you are a good networker, I believe you are within three people of anyone in the United States. For twenty-five years, I was within one person of the president of the United States. Since my connection died a few years ago, I’m within two people.

Take a chance.

Don’t be afraid to contact important people. You may be surprised by their response. For instance, Jim Smith, author of The Last Mission, wrote former president George Bush asking him to look at the book. A few weeks later, he received a letter from Bush saying that he wanted to make the book part of his Presidential Library collection. Smith then included a copy of the letter in all his press mailings.

Talk to the person on the phone or by email.

These are two of the best ways to feel someone out. These two methods also have the advantage of being quick and easy to carry out. Pick up the phone and call. If you can’t track down the person’s direct line, track down the number of that person’s agent, company, publisher, or organization. As a last result, send a letter to the agent or other contact point.

Get an introduction.

The best way to approach an important person is to get an introduction through a mutual acquaintance.

Provide a starting point.

It is perfectly legitimate for you to send along three or four choices that someone might use in recommending your book. While most people won’t use your exact quote, they might use it as a starting point for creating their own. By providing samples of the kind of quotes you’d like, you increase your chances of getting a really useable quote rather than a bland generalization.

Get a release.

If you get a good quote, write back to ask for permission to use it in promoting your book. Be specific on how you are going to use it (on the back cover, in ads, in PR releases, or whatever).

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Authors: If you want good testimonials, get them yourself. You will always do a better job than your publisher because, in most cases, you will be far more motivated.

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6:11 Create a Knockout Sales Handle

When a sales rep goes to visit a store, he has two main things he uses in selling the book: a copy of the cover and a short sales handle. As Michael Korda, longtime editor for Simon & Schuster, once noted, “If you can’t describe a book in one or two pithy sentences that would make you or my mother want to read it, then of course you can’t sell it.”

You need this sales handle to convince your sales reps to push the book, to convince the booksellers to stock the book, to convince media to listen further to your pitch, and to convince consumers to go out and buy your book. All the way along the chain, you will have only a few seconds to catch someone’s attention. The best way to do that is with a good short knock-your-socks-off sales handle. To create such a sales handle, you might again try to hitch your wagon to a star. Here are a few such sales handles:

• Jennifer Enderlin, editor of James Michael Pratt’s The Last Valentine, described it thus: “Ghost meets The Notebook meets The Red Badge of Courage.” In one short sentence, she tied the book into the power of three stars while giving a good description of the content of the book.
• Random House used two lines to promote A Gracious Plenty by Sheri Reynolds: “The breathtaking new novel by the author of Oprah’s April ‘97 Book Club Selection” and “Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, Spoon River Anthology, and Our Town...”
• The cover of All We Know of Heaven, a first novel by Anna Tuttle Villegas, proclaimed that it was “The Love Story for Our Time.” A bold statement, but one that seemed to be upheld by the amount of rights activity the book generated.
• For the legal thriller, The Tenth Justice by Brad Meltzer, Rob Weisbach Books gave it a high-concept tag line: “Friends meet The Firm.”
• When Open Horizons published Nat Bodian’s The Joy of Publishing, we used the following pitch: “In the bestselling tradition of The Joy of Sex and The Joy of Cooking, now comes The Joy of Publishing.” Of course, publishing doesn’t have quite the same fascination, but the line worked because Bodian’s book was about the history of publishing and included mention of both bestselling books.

As with testimonials, you can also use humor, benefits, puns, and imagery to sell a book. Here are a few sales handles that use such techniques:

• “It ain’t broke; it just needs duct tape.” — This sales handle captures the humor and essential content of the bestselling Duct Tape books.
• Here is the trademarked slogan of Joanna Lund, author of the Healthy Exchanges cookbooks: “It’s not a diet. It’s a way of life.”
• The sales handle for the novel Meg was a takeoff on the key sales line for the movie Jaws, “Don’t even think of going into the water.”
• The advertisements for Mark Sullivan’s The Purification Ceremony carried the tag line pun, “It’s time to prey.” The book was also pitched as a Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Silence of the Lambs hybrid set during a deer hunt in British Columbia.

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Authors: One of the first things you should do in creating a good book proposal is to create an incredible, motivating sales handle for your book. In fact, I’ve known of books that were bought by major publishers based on a one-word sentence describing the concept for the book.

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6:12  Titles: The First Impression

A good title alone can make the difference between a mediocre seller and a bestseller. The title of a book, like the headline of an advertisement or news story, often makes the difference between a reader passing the book by or picking it up and giving it more careful consideration. More often than not, the reader gives less than a moment's attention to any book title; if you don't capture the reader's imagination or curiosity or desire in that short moment, you will have lost the sale.

More important, however, is that many distributors, bookstore buyers, reviewers, and subsidiary rights buyers also judge a book by its title (and its cover). They know from experience that a good title sells more books. As Gloria Norris of the Book-of-the-Month Club once noted, “We can break out good writers—especially if their books have good titles.”

Below are a few suggestions on how you can create titles that will sell more books. For a more detailed discussion, see Nat Bodian's book, How to Choose a Winning Title.

Test your titles beforehand.

Either use focus groups, your key contacts, or small test markets. Some authors have gone to shopping malls and bookstores to ask for feedback from anyone they met. While this is an informal testing method, it can provide you with some valuable feedback about your title and your book.

Politico Dick Morris hired a polling firm to test-market 21 possible titles for his book. In a sample of 700 Americans, the top vote-getter was Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the ‘90s.

When Pamela Gilberd, author of The Eleven Commandments of Wildly Successful Women, approached Andy Ross, owner of Cody’s Books, about her book, he told her that with a title like that, she didn’t have to sell him on the book because of course he would buy it.

Test with classified ads.

They are a cheap and workable way to test the effectiveness of titles, since the title alone either sells the book or it doesn't. In one such case, a publisher tested two different titles for two books by advertising the books in full page ads in leading newspapers across the country. Which of the following titles do you think did best?

1. The Art of Courtship vs. The Art of Kissing

2. Care of Skin and Hair vs. Eating for Health

Here are the actual results: The Art of Kissing sold over 60,000 copies in one year while The Art of Courtship sold only a little over 17,000 copies. Care of Skin and Hair outsold Eating for Health by 52,000 copies to 36,000. In each case, both titles had the same number of exposures to the same number of readers.

Be specific.

Let the readers know what they can expect to get from your book. Specific benefits are usually more effective than general benefits in appealing to book buyers.

When Clint Richard sold Pocket Books a photography book featuring the Tejano singer Selena!, he had titled it Photographs and Memories. The publisher, however, retitled the book. Selena! sold 650,000 copies and went straight to the top of the bestseller list. Many of Selena’s fans would have walked by the other title.

Use subtitles.

Use them to provide further explanation or description of the book's contents or benefits. Here are two examples of superb benefit subtitles: Herb Cohen's You Can Negotiate Anything: How to Get What You Want and Callan Pinckney's Callanetics: 10 Years Younger in 10 Hours.

Several years ago, Birch Lane Press challenged all comers to a longest subtitle contest, which was a great way to get a Publishers Weekly note about their own title, The Big Splash: A Scientific Discovery that Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life, the Water We Drink, the Death of Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans, the Nature of the Cosmos and the Very Future of the Earth Itself (40 words).

A few weeks later, Scarecrow Press responded with their 47-word subtitle for Adventurers Afloat—A Nautical Bibliography: A Comprehensive Guide to Books in English Recounting the Adventures of Amateur Sailors upon the Waters of the World in Yachts, Boats, and Other Devices and Including Works on the Arts and Sciences of Cruising, Racing, Seamanship, Navigation, Design, Building, etc. from the Earliest Writings Through 1986.

Such long subtitles may be carrying the process too far since many people would be lost half way through such a long title.

Choose titles that play off the titles of other well-known books.

Melvin Powers of Wilshire Book Company wrote a parody of Jim Everood's bestselling book, How to Flatten Your Stomach, which he titled How to Flatten Your Tush. His parody made several bestseller lists.

Charlotte Peche titled her book on gynecology, The One-Minute Gynecologist, thus drawing on reader's familiarity with other One-Minute books. The subtitle for her book helped to clarify what it was all about: One Woman's Search for the Quick and Painless Visit.

Choose familiar leads to your titles.

For example, The Joy of Sex, The Joy of Lex, The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Photography, The Joy of Publishing, and so on. Or, that classic book title lead-in: How to ... do just about anything. Or, finally, how about 101 Ways to ... do just about anything?

Use the subject of your book as the lead-in to the title.

In that way your book will be listed in the title index of any reference work just where inexperienced readers would look for a book on that subject. Also, since many bookstores now rely on computers to track their sales, it is important to have a title with lead words that give the substance of your book and will fit into the 25- to 35-word title field of many store inventory systems now on the market. This can also be important for helping people to find your book on many online bookstore sites.

That is one reason we changed the title of one of our earlier books from The Directory of Book Marketing Opportunities to Book Publishing Resource Guide. It's also a good argument for such titles such as Book Marketing Made Easier and Iacocca: An Autobiography.

Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl had a great lead-in. Its first word attracted a lot of attention. In fact, Brown sold movie rights to her nonfiction book based solely on her title. That's all that the producers wanted; they wrote a new story line to go with the title.

When Euphrasia Carroll of Planetary Publications surveyed a chain store buyer as well as a dozen independent booksellers for their Teaching Children to Live: 55 Games and Fun Activities for Raising Balanced Children in Unbalanced Times, she found that they wanted you to put what you wanted them to remember in the first 25 characters of the title. Then use the subtitle to describe the book and audience further.

Make it pronounceable.

If you expect your authors to tour or do interviews, make sure the title is one they can pronounce. I wrote one book about kinetic optical illusions (illusions created when you spin a black-and-white pattern on a record turntable) with a working title of Dizzy Discs and Other Kinetic Illusions. However, I would never use that title for the book, because I have an impossible time pronouncing the word “discs”—that “c” between the two “s's” is incredibly awkward. When I published the book, its title was Turntable Illusions: Kinetic Optical Illusions for Your Record Turntable.

Make it memorable.

When John Gray followed up his bestselling Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus with What Your Mother Couldn’t Tell You and Your Father Didn’t Know, Borders returned 50% and Ingram 70%. Why? Because the second book didn’t have nearly as memorable a title. As Susie Russenberger of Ingram noted, “The previous book had a great title, but this one was really hard for people to say.” When Gray began doing more Mars and Venus books, he again leapt to the top of the bestseller lists.

Make it mysterious.

When Jim Hornfischer of Literary Group International pitched Mary Thurston’s history of dogs, he did not sell the book until they changed the title from The Dog Lover’s Book of Dog History to The Lost History of the Canine Race.

Several novels with intriguing tabloid titles were discovered in the slush piles of Simon & Schuster (Franco American Dreams) and Berkeley (Going Postal). These novels would not have been discovered if their titles had been more general.

6:13  Choose Uniquely Wonderful Titles

This suggestion for titling your books is the most important of all: Choose new titles, wonderful titles, titles that speak of romance, glory, wonder, or delight. This advice is absolutely important when titling novels. Nonfiction books can get away with being prosaic, but novels must be enticing, or startling, or daring, or warm.

Here are a few of my other favorite book titles (certainly not a complete list): Cold Sassy Tree, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Stolen Ecstasy, The Lonely Silver Rain, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Winds of War, Silk Lady, Angels of September, Waiting to Exhale, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Color Me Beautiful, In Search of Excellence, How to Be Your Own Best Friend, Think and Grow Rich, Dress for Success, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Earth in the Balance, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, How the Irish Saved Civilization, and Jesus, CEO.

6:14  A Rose by Any Other Name

Don't be afraid to change a title if you can make it better. Never stop playing with the title until you get it right. Even after the book has been published, it is still possible to change a title. It's been done more than once. And done successfully.

One note of caution: If you change a title, make sure everyone knows, especially your wholesalers and booksellers. For instance, it took Douglas Rushkoff’s American publisher two months before they discovered that bookstores did not know about their change of his title from Children of Chaos to Playing the Future, a change they made because their computer research showed that books with “chaos” in the title were not selling as well.

One paperback publisher changed the title of a book from Five Days to Five Nights. The second title sold much, much better than the first.

One of the first books I published was FormAides for Direct Response Marketing. What a horrible title! The book was well-reviewed, but its sales were not spectacular. It was a superb book, with a poor title and poor cover design. Fortunately, we did sell out of that edition and were able to bring out an expanded edition under the title, Mail Order Selling Made Easier. Book club rights for this edition were sold to The Executive Program and Fortune Book Club, UK rights were sold to McGraw-Hill, reprint rights were sold to John Wiley, and our retail sales were fantastic. When John Wiley brought out their edition, they retitled the book The Complete Direct Marketing Sourcebook, another good title but one that hasn’t sold as many copies as Mail Order Selling Made Easier.

When Garden Way changed the title of one of their books from The Squash Book to The Zucchini Cookbook, sales rocketed from a paltry 1,500 copies to over 300,000 copies.

Fisher Books found that sales picked up considerably after retitling Cooking for Compliments as Dairy Food Cooking.

The Little Blue Book Company often tested the titles to their books. Here are the yearly sales resulting from some of those changes:

Patent Medicine and Public Health — 3,000
The Truth About Patent Medicine — 10,000

The Sonnets of a Portrait Painter — very few
The Love Sonnets of an Artist — 6,000

The Mystery of the Iron Mask — 11,000
The Mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask — 30,000

Poems of Evolution — 2,000
When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish — 7,000

On the following page are other title changes which I feel were made for the better:

The Pineapple Diet Book to The Beverly Hills Diet Book—The second is much more glamorous and enticing. Pineapples pucker my mind.

Tomorrow Is Another Day and Tote the Weary Load to Gone with the Wind—and the heroine's name was changed from Pansy to Scarlett O'Hara. Which title do you think has sold millions of copies and became a major motion picture? Would the original titles have done as well?

They Don’t Build Statues to Businessmen to Valley of the Dolls—Which book sounds like a novel you could lose yourself in?

It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet to All Things Bright and Beautiful—Not only was the second title more interesting, but it allowed James Herriot to come up with wonderful titles for the rest of the books in the series.

Your Guide to Coping with Pain to Conquering Back Pain—The Canadian title was changed when Prentice-Hall came out with a U.S. edition so that the title would better reflect the book's contents. And better reflect the American way of viewing problems.

A Story That No One Can Beat to And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street—Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by 27 publishers under that first title. When Ted Henle of Vanguard Press bought the manuscript, the first order he gave Seuss was to come up with a snappier title. He did.

Notes from a Teacher's Wastebasket to Up the Down Staircase—The first has the flavor of an old maid teacher; the second catches the chaos and joy of teaching.

Chapters in the Life of a Young Man to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—There is more romance in being an artist. Plus the vibrant “portrait” enlivens the title more than the stale “chapters.”

The PRE-Reading Experience to Developing the Early Learner to The IQ Booster Kit—Note how the title becomes more specific while at the same time offering greater benefits. Which would you buy if you were a parent? Which do you think sold best?

Trimalchio in West Egg to The Great Gatsby—Which would you rather recommend to a friend? I can't even pronounce the first title, but, oh, the second title! Look out, Tony the Tiger, here I come!

A Grammatical Institute for the English Language (with an 18-word subtitle) to The American Spelling Book—Which title do you think sold best for Noah Webster’s first spelling book, published in 1783?

If you’d like to read more fascinating stories of title changes, check out André Bernard’s little book, Now All We Need Is a Title.

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Authors — Be open to suggestions for changing the title of your book. Don't insist on your title. Allow your publisher an opportunity to give the book a title that will sell more copies. Indeed, you should always be developing and testing new titles yourself. Keep trying out new titles till you find one that clicks—not only with your inner sense, but also with friends, booksellers, librarians, and strangers on the street.

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When Harvey Mackay was writing Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, he kept trying out different titles. He rejected Prepare to Win as too mundane and 88 Lessons for '88 as too dated. Finally, he came up with a line from the book, How to Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten, which he liked because of its powerful symbolism which combined a bit of raunchiness with a sense of curiosity.

His publishers at Morrow, however, hated it. They said it was too long and too vague. But Mackay was convinced it was the right title, so he hired Janz/Abrahamson, a Minneapolis company experienced in naming consumer products such as hot dogs, beer, and jelly. They put together a focus group which checked out over 800 titles. Mackay's title, minus the How to, remained their top choice. When Mackay showed the results to the people at Morrow, they capitulated. As Morrow's senior editor, Adrian Zackheim, noted in an article in Inc. magazine, “If an author feels such a moral certainty about a title, you've got to say yes.”

When his agent told Carl Upchurch that people would hate his Convicted in the Womb because “it sounds like you’re blaming others for your problems,” Carl went along with changing the title to Let There Be Hope. A year later, however, when Bantam published the book, they used the original title, Convicted in the Womb: One Man’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker. A conservative radio host hated the title so much he invited Carl to be a guest on his show. The other title would not have gotten that reaction.

6:15  Titles as Point of Purchase Advertising

Whatever you title your book, remember that the title of your book must serve at least three purposes:

1. It must attract the attention of the book buyer.

2. It must indicate what the book is about. For nonfiction, the title should be as clearly descriptive as possible. For fiction, the title should be appropriate for the specific genre.

3. It must, if possible, create the desire to buy.

The best titles, like all good advertising headlines, serve all three functions at the same time. Remember that the title (along with the cover) of your book is often the only advertising message any buyer ever sees. Make sure the message is clear and effective.

Indeed, even the cover is not always seen by the buyer. Go visit a bookstore or library to see what I mean. Walk the aisles. What do you see? Spine after spine, titles only.

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Note: How important is a title? Critical. Indeed, it is possible to sell a book based on the title alone. That's what Cindy and Alan Garner did with their self-published book, Every Thing Men Know about Women. Why do I know that the title alone sold the book? Because the book had nothing in it except 120 blank pages. Yet the book sold well over 2 million copies!

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