In my previous post I talked about what it takes to write and publish a scholarly book.  Most people who aren’t scholars aren’t thinking that way.  They want to publish a book for a broader audience to get their ideas out there.  How do you do that?

These days it can be done relatively simply by self-publishing.  I know almost nothing about how that works, other than that people do it all the time (more books get published that way than with trade-book publishers, I believe).  But I can say something about what it takes to get a book published with a professional publisher.

That, as it turns out, is really tricky, for reasons some people may not expect.  It involves a weird Catch-22.

In most academic fields — whether astronomy or biblical studies — trade books (that is, books for a broader readership) have normally been published by scholars who want to communicate with non-scholars.  The problem is that most scholars are not particularly adept at doing that  — they have difficulty explaining their area of research in simple, compelling language that is both interesting and informative (that’s always seemed a bit weird to me since most of these scholars teach 19-20 year olds.  Why aren’t they adept at communicating?  Isn’t that their job??).

Since publishers know that about scholars (oh boy do they know it…), they are normally reluctant to publish a trade book by a scholar unless they (the scholar)  already has a trade book published that has sold well.  But, uh, how’s that supposed to happen if a publisher won’t publish their first book?  Welcome to the Catch-22.  I have roughly 963 colleagues/friends/acquaintances who have complained to me about this.  I certainly get it.

As a result, scholars normally have to get a literary agent to represent them to a publisher to convince the publisher that the scholar will write a really good book.  BUT — ready for this? — literary agents normally won’t take on a scholar for a trade book unless… the scholar has already published a trade book.  Catch-22 Part 2.  This is not a problem most of you will have since few of you are scholars — your problem, though, if you want to publish a book is related, as I’ll explain.

But first I should say I didn’t have the problem, because I snuck into trade publishing through the back door.  I had no interest in writing a trade book and had to be cajoled into it.  When I published Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (my first trade book) I had already written and published three scholarly books, edited a fourth, and published both a textbook  and two anthologies of ancient texts.

The publisher who asked me to write the trade book (Oxford) already had a pretty good idea of what they were getting.  Once I wrote that book, I got asked by another press to write another trade book, and it went from there. (That, I suppose, is the other way scholars can sneak into trade publishing, by doing lots of other kinds of publishing first.)

For someone who is not already a known author, about the only way to get a publisher even to take a look at a book proposal is — here is Catch-22 Part 3 — to hire a literary agent who will push the book idea with a publisher.  And, as with Part 2, it’s almost impossible to get an agent unless you’ve published a book…

A bit more on that.  Agents are a kind of go-between for authors and publishers; in most cases they help authors devise an idea, craft the book, shape the book, write the book, and publish the book.   An agent can represent a book to publishers to get them to agree to publish it.  Most publishers will not even *look* at a book prospectus unless it is represented to them by an agent.   And so for most first-time authors, it is necessary to get an agent.

But getting an agent at all – let alone getting one with any track record of success – is itself a daunting challenge for an author who is a completely unknown quantity.  Agents make their living off of author royalties (normally an agent gets about 15%).  They too do not have time for projects that are going to make no money.  They much prefer to work with authors who are certainly going to get books published, hopefully with serious advances on royalties (the “advance” is the dollar amount given before the book is written as part of the contract, based on what the publisher hopes will be the number of sales; once [if!]  the authors share of the profits equal the advance) then the additional funds come to the author at set periods).  And so agents too do not spend a lot of time with potential authors whom no one has ever heard of before.

That is especially the case because agents get contacted a lot.  For my trade books with Oxford and Harper, I didn’t have an agent.  I just negotiated my contracts myself.  Things changed when my editor at Harper (with whom I had contracted and written six of my books) left the editorial world to become an agent and convinced me to partner up with him as my agent. Roger (his name) one time told me that he received something like 50 requests a month from authors/potential authors to represent them.  But he could take on only 6-8 new clients a *year*.  OK, then.

About the only way to break into publishing as an unknown quantity, therefore , is to write such a bang-up prospectus for a book, and, say, have a chapter to accompany it, to send to a bunch of agents in hopes that one of them will decide to represent the book.  [You may wonder how to find an agent.  So do I !  I suppose you look them up on the Internet?  The problem is that LOTS of agents require a fee and then do nothing to try to sell your book.  But hey, they do pocket the fee! )

If an agent does take on the task, almost always the book would have to be completed before a publisher would look at it.  It would have to be drop-dead amazing to the agent before it would even get a look by a publisher.  An agent would have to represent it and would have to convince a publisher to take a chance.  It very rarely happens.

So all of this is highly daunting, obviously.  And it may not seem fair. But it’s simply the reality of the situation.   Getting published for the first time is extremely hard if you’re a budding scholar just off your PhD; it is even harder for someone who is not a published scholar, who simply wants to get a book published with a reputable press.

On the other side of things, though, there is always the Internet!