Five Tips for Getting an Agent Interested in Your Self-Published Book

One question I'm seeing on some forums and blogs I visit is the following: what are traditional publishers looking for when they decided whether to pick up a self published book? This would have been a silly question a few years ago, but with the indie publishing revolution, the world of authors, agents, and publishers has dramatically changed–and an agent shopping a self-pubbed book to a publisher has become a reality. Now, I'm not a publisher, but I've read a lot of opinions from different bloggers/commenters, and I decided to whittle the best advice I heard down to five points.

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1) Good writing

I know–you're thinking, yeah, yeah, of course. But it had to be mentioned. Is the writing style original? Is it fresh? Fast-paced? Or is it too wordy, too heavy on exposition and fact-telling? In fiction, does it whisk the reader along so it becomes almost effortless? What's that blurb at on every James Patterson book: The pages turn themselves! (With a little help from his ghost writers X_X)

2) Intriguing topic

Every story has been told in one form or another: the revenge story, the love-triangle story, the time-travel story, you name it. What publishers want are new twists on old themes. And of course that all-important twenty-five-word-or-less pitch. I used to think that was unfair, trying to compress a four-hundred page book a sentence or two. But then I realized when a customer goes to a bookstore, they read the blurb on the back cover and decide whether they want to buy it or not. All's fair in love and war and publishing.

3) A platform.

This, I believe, is extremely important. In this new world, the author and publisher are marketing partners, and I've even seen some e-publishers like Diversion Books, which is open to new authors and publishes the likes of Jason Pinter, ask for your, in addition to a query, a complete marketing strategy, including: your blog, unique monthly visits, number of Facebook friends, number of Twitter followers, number of newsletter subscribers, etc.

So if you don't have a blog, start one! It is your centerpiece of social media. It allows you to start a dialogue with your readers, or future readers.  And it also serves as a hub for all your other social media ventures, such as Twitter, Facebook and so forth.[image error]

One thing in particular to mention with your posts–and experienced blogger will know this–is the importance of tags. If you have a self-pubbed book, and you want to get the word out with your posts, don't tag the book's title, because chances are nobody's going to be searching Google for that. Instead,  think how people search, use their words. For example, if you wrote a book called Doctor Death, adding "doctor" or "death" to the tags will have your book popping up in medical searches! It would be much more beneficial to use tags like "adult suspense" or "quick read" etc. This way, even if people aren't searching precisely for your book, you will be searching them.

5) Don't bother going to traditional publishers and just self publish!

I've seen a lot of bloggers  raise this point and it's very valid.  I recently read a JA Konrith post where I believe he said he was making more than three grand a day on his self-pubbed ebook sales. Now, that's a rare case of course, but you never know………

PS: And get your blog listed on as many search engines as possible. Speaking of which, I just entered mine in technorati, and part of their validation process requires me to paste the following code in the post, so ignore the password-looking thing below!

Technorati code: 2VABMG39PUDW