How To Get A Book Deal in 2024 [Top 10 Secrets]

A book deal is when an author signs a legal agreement with a publisher to publish a certain number of books under its publishing. The publisher sends you a contract which tells you about how they would sell your book, what royalty rate they’d provide, how much advance they’d give you, and tell you about their terms and conditions. Since we form a book deal between traditional publishers and authors, self-publishing is not related.

Traditional publishing is not a short time thing. It takes a lot of time and effort. Therefore, it is a hassle to get a book deal. How to get a book deal? And what factors it involved in it? We’ll discuss all of it in the following blog post.

Traditional Publishing vs Self-Publishing

Self-Publishing

In self-publishing, you don’t deal with the things you don’t like. For example, you have complete control over the story of your book. You can edit or cut things or leave them; it’s of your own will. You also get 100% royalties and just a few percent you have to give to the platform where you have self-published your book. If you make a blog website, you can sell your book at whatever price you want. One thing that could bother you is that people do not look at your book as valuable compared to traditional publishing. But that is undoubtedly not some criteria. It’s just how most people see things.

Traditional Publishing

You don’t worry about the printing cost. Your publisher would distribute your book to different bookstores. But you lose control over things such as the story. They won’t change the complete story of your book, but they can change and edit anything that they think is not good enough. And it can offend you, but because you signed the contract, you have to agree to it. You can earn more recognition and popularity for yourself and your book when you publish it traditionally; however, you cannot take all the money as you have signed to receive a certain percentage of royalty. However, big publishers pay you significant amounts, like $5000 and $10,000 and even more.

Moreover, you cannot directly sell your book or print it, and you can’t even sell it directly with your price on your blog websites. In traditional publishing, you don’t design the book cover yourself. Your publisher would do that. However, you can give suggestions on how you want the cover of this book, and if they find it okay, they will accept it.

Comparing Traditional Publishers with Music Companies

You can think of traditional publishers like music companies. When a singer sings a song, it is undoubtedly good, but those composers and music experts in the company edit their song to look catchier and use it in films. Many singers might have issues about why certain lines have been edited in a certain way, why an effect is added to the voice, but eventually, listeners like it. The same can be the case with a book since publishers would never want to distort and make people hate it.

Below, we’ll discuss ten steps involved in getting a book deal done in 2023.

10 Steps to Get a Book Deal in 2023

Part A

Writing, Editing, and Pitching

1. Write a worthy Book

The fundamental step to begin is writing a valuable book. If we do not do this step right, other processes will be useless. It is like the first shirt button. If you button it in the wrong cavity of the shirt, every other button would automatically fall in the wrong place and eventually distort the look of your shirt.

If you are self-publishing a book that is not of much value, it will get published at least, despite the after-effects of people not buying it and the negative reviews. But traditional publishers don’t publish such books, no matter how many times you send them to different publishers. They don’t care since they ask you for money to publish your book. They only want a worthy book that they can publish, and if they are not getting it, they won’t publish it. Market Research and target audience research are crucial things you need to keep in mind when writing your book.

2. Editing the Book

Self-Editing

After you complete your manuscript, the next step you want to do is edit the book. Re-writing is essential. Before sending your book to the editor, do self-editing. Read your text carefully and correct mistakes in it. You can also send your manuscript to some of your close relatives and friends and ask them to read it and give you suggestions on how you can improve it. Take the appropriate tips from them. You can use tools like Hemingway, Grammarly, Prowritingaid to edit your text. However, you don’t need to accept all the suggestions the software gives you blindly. Carefully read and take the correct ones.

Expert Editing 

Your text needs different types of editing. Your textbook contains grammatical errors, structural mistakes in sentences, wordy sentences that need to be corrected. However, sometimes a writer purposefully writes a sentence correctly, but they don’t accept it in traditional publishing. Edit it and change it to proceed further. That is why a good editor understands your concerns and the publishers’ requirements and comes up with a way that doesn’t offend you, and publishers accept your text. Such editors are experts, and you can’t find them in short budgets. That is why traditional publishing is called a problematic way for book publishing. It has a lot of barriers that you need to cross. After you complete the editing phase, you need to hire a proofreader to read your text for one final time before publishing.

3. Find a Literary Agent

Traditional publishers don’t seek direct submissions. If you visit the websites of different big publishers, they have mentioned that they won’t accept direct requests. Contact them through a literary agent. One reason is that there are many people nowadays submitting manuscripts for a publishing deal. In the early days, things were not like this. Limited people used to write books, but nowadays, everyone tries to become successful by writing a book and therefore sends their manuscripts to publishers whether their book is good enough. So, the big publishers set a requirement that you need a literary agent to submit your text to publishers. You don’t have to deal with the publishing company; your literary agent would do the negotiating. The literary agent reads your script and only directs it to the publisher if it is good; otherwise, he won’t.

4. Sending a Letter to a Literary Agent

When your book is completely edited, you need to send a letter to a good literary agent. For that, you need first to find a literary agent who is good enough. To grab the attention and interest of an established literary agent, you need to write a good proposal that holds their interest to check your work. You can hire someone who can make excellent proposals and has already worked with established literary agents.

If a literary agent rejects you, you can reach out to another one. However, don’t pitch every literary agent one after another, thinking that any of them would indeed accept the proposal. Look at what you are doing wrong, whether you’re sending wrong proposals, your book is not good enough, or that literary agents don’t like your topic. You need to analyze things and then take steps. Note that literary agents don’t charge you anything before your book is published. They take a commission from your book.

Part B

Time Duration 

5. How long does it take to get a book deal?

When you are traditionally publishing your book, keep in mind that it takes several months or even a few years. Writing a book is also a long process. After it, you need to find talented editors for different types of editing. And for that, you’d need a large budget to carry out this task as they charge you considerable amounts. Let’s suppose you wrote a book in one year; you must keep another year decided in your mind to edit your book. After that, you would need another considerable amount of money for hiring a literary agent who would pitch your work to the publishers. And it can also take up to one year or more. And even after all that, there is no hundred percent guarantee a publisher would accept your book.

That’s why you need a lot of patience and willingness when you are traditionally publishing a book. And it would be good news for you if the publisher accepts your book and is ready to sign a book deal with you. If we count the years, we can say that forming a book deal can take up to 4 or 5 years.

Part C

Avoid These Things

6. Money Criteria

You don’t need to work with the publisher offering you the most significant amount as an advance. Although you can judge a publishing house by the amount it provides you, you need to research a lot more. You need to know if a particular publishing house is good in the long term for your book. According to the signed contract, you’ll keep earning from your book all your life, so you don’t need only to consider the advance money amount the only factor in choosing a publishing house.

7. Losing Hope and Patience

As we talked earlier, this is a long road with many stumbling blocks. Literary agents and publishers will reject you many times, and it could be a painful journey for you to publish your book. Just know that it is normal. You don’t need to lose hope and shut down everything and discontinue the idea of publishing your book. Work for it. Improve your book, and you will get published.

8. Quickly Switching to Self-Publishing

Don’t immediately switch to other ways of publishing your book. Decide beforehand if you want to publish your book traditionally or self-publish it. You’d need to wait and make smart efforts to publish your book traditionally, but once it is done, you’d be a published author, which can bring you more riches than self-publishing. Note that self-publishing is not bad, and we are not discouraging it. Also, it’s not best to go for indie publishing in which you make your own publishing company. You would need to invest more in this process, which you can save to hire good literary agents and editors.

9. Saving Money by only doing Self-Editing

If you are self-publishing, it is good, but traditional publishing doesn’t work this way. Even a literary agent won’t accept your book, so you cannot publish it unless you write and edit it so well that it doesn’t require more editing.

10. Giving Publishers Money

Publishers don’t charge any money or fee for publishing your book. If any publisher or literary agent does this, don’t work with him. They are not legit. Also, before you sign any contract offered to you by the publisher, don’t rush to sign it without reading it.

Final Word

So, we have discussed what is a book deal and how to get a book publishing deal in 2022. The foremost thing is writing a good book. No good means no publishing. So, you must ensure your book is valuable and worthy. After that, remember all the things we discussed above to publish your book. Moreover, if you need assistance in writing your book, you can reach out to our book writing company. We’ll provide you with expert writing help at affordable rates, and we’ll also assist you in publishing your book.