How to Get a Book Deal

by A.V. Geiger (adam_and_jane)

Have you ever walked into a bookstore and imagined your own story sitting on the shelf? If you're anything like me, you've probably thought about it once or twice. For a small but growing number of Wattpad users, this fantasy is coming true – but the path from Wattpadder to published author isn't easy.

My name is A.V. Geiger (Viv for short), and I'm the latest lucky one to make the leap to traditional publishing. I announced my book deal with Sourcebooks Fire YA in December, and I've received a ton of questions since then about the publishing process. I don't know how qualified I am to give advice, but I can share exactly what happened to me, and maybe you'll learn something from my experience.

The Traditional Publishing Process

First of all, let me explain how the process works for most aspiring authors. There's a common misconception that an author can simply take their book and mail it off to publishers for consideration. It will land on the desk of some editor, who will read it and decide whether it merits publication. If so, the author gets a book deal. Then the novel will be available in stores a few months later, and the author can tweet many adorable selfies while stumbling upon her own book at Barnes & Noble (or Chapters, Waterstones, etc.)

The reality is a lot more convoluted. While there are many small presses that accept manuscripts directly from authors, they generally won't get your book onto the display shelves at the brick-and-mortar bookstores. Amazon, yes. Barnes & Noble, not so much.

If you want to be the kind of author who takes selfies (and holds book signings) at the large book retailers, then there are only a select few publishers who can do that for you, and they hardly ever accept direct submissions from authors. They usually only look at novels that were hand-picked by trusted literary agents. The agents are the gatekeepers who weed through massive slush piles, looking for the next Veronica Roth or Rainbow Rowell.

So how does an author get an agent? You can't just go out and hire one. First, you have to complete your novel, polish it until it gleams, and then send prospective agents something called a query letter. This letter summarizes your entire book and why they should represent it in 250 words or less. The agents receive thousands of these query letters every year. They ignore most of them and respond to the 1% that sound promising, requesting to see the manuscript. Out of those, only a handful will be offered representation.

If an author manages to snag an agent, it then becomes the agent's job to submit the manuscript to acquisitions editors at major publishers. Many of these editors will proceed to ignore or reject it. Even with an agent's validation, many agented authors don't get a book deal on their first try. If the author is lucky and an editor bites, the author will be paid an advance, and the agent keeps 15% (plus 15% of every dollar the book makes from that point forward). If the book fails to get acquired, then no money between agent and author ever changes hands.

Most of the titles you see on the shelves in the major bookstore chains went through this process, but there are exceptions. Occasionally, an author finds a way to cut in line. There are various legends floating around about Wattpadders who found a shortcut, and I was never really sure if these stories were true . . . until it happened to me.

Short-Circuiting the Process

I joined Wattpad in 2013 with no prior writing experience, and I completed five novel-length stories in my first two years. My publishing daydreams turned serious when my fifth book, Follow Me Back, was still a work in progress. The story had about 200K reads at the time – not a monster hit by Wattpad standards, but the #1 ranked book in Mystery/Thriller. Then one morning I opened up my inbox, and there was this message sitting at the top:

Hi there,

I'm really enjoying FOLLOW ME BACK! I'm a literary agent, and while I haven't quite finished the story yet I think it has a lot of potential, so I wanted to say hi and ask if working with an agent is something you would be interested in.

I work here: [...].com take a look if you would like to learn a bit more about me.

Keep up the good work!

Lydia

lydia@[...].com

My life pretty much hasn't been the same since.

What happened in my case is rare, but not unique. Literary agents have been known to approach Wattpad authors with very large followings and read counts in the tens of millions. For example, Blair Holden (@jessgirl93) told me that she found her agent after receiving a similar message about her mega-popular book, The Bad Boy's Girl.

And then there's Gaby Cabezut, who received several such emails about a book that had 30 million reads, Prince With Benefits. In Gaby's case, the messages were a little different. They didn't come from agents, but from publishers directly – and those publishers were all based far away from any bookstore she'd ever visited. I asked Gaby her initial reaction to these messages, and she described it as: "Totally skeptical. Especially since they were from the Philippines."

After much research and consultation with Wattpad HQ, Gaby (who lives in Mexico) accepted a book deal from Summit Books, a subsidiary of the Philippines' largest magazine publisher. The book came out in print a year later, and she has no regrets: "Getting published and holding my book in my hands is the best thing that ever happened to me. Especially since I never imagined that it could come true...."

In my own case, my book was nowhere near as popular as Blair's or Gaby's, so a message from an agent came as a complete shock. Like Gaby, my first reaction was skepticism. The publishing business abounds with scams and unethical "schmagents" – people who make their money by preying on the dreams of desperate unpublished authors. Generally speaking, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

If you ever find yourself on the receiving end of such a message, my main advice is this: take your time and ask a lot of questions. I was extremely careful to make sure the person on the other end didn't expect any form of payment – that would have been a huge red flag. I also talked to some querying authors I knew, to see if anyone had heard of her. (They had.) I looked her up on a very helpful website called Preditors & Editors (pred-ed.com), where known publishing scams are posted. I even sprang for a subscription to Publisher's Marketplace, which keeps records of all the book deals that take place between agents and publishers. From everything I could tell, this agent was exactly who she claimed to be: a real literary agent with a well-established agency.

I agreed to let her represent me, which meant skipping the dreaded query phase, but it wasn't exactly a walk in the park from there. My agent made it clear that I would still need to do a revision. Traditional publishers will consider Wattpad novels, but they have to be significantly revised and expanded so that online readers have a reason to buy the book. My agent spent three months going back and forth with me on edits. I started with a 65,000 word first draft, added 25,000 words of new scenes, and then edited the whole thing down again to 80K. After all that, the book was finally ready to go on submission this past fall, and I ended up with offers from two different publishers.

So You Got a Book Deal . . . And Then What?

I visited my local Barnes & Noble this past weekend, and there were several titles from my publisher on display in the "New Teen Fiction" section. It's incredible to think that my own book will be sitting on that shelf, sometime in 2017. But there's still a ton of work for me to do between now and then. I will have another round of edits with my publisher this spring. Then I'll be expected to focus on marketing and publicity, and I'll have my work cut out for me. The Wattpad version of Follow Me Back has some enthusiastic fans, but my readership is miniscule compared to most other Wattpad books that traveled this path before.

So I'll let you in on a secret. As exciting as this publishing process has been, it's also terrifying. That New Teen Fiction shelf must have had a hundred books on it, and most of them won't be hits. They'll disappear in a few short weeks, replaced by a newer crop, and then they'll be forgotten. Some of those authors will fail to "earn out" their advance. (That's publishing-speak for when you sell fewer copies than your publisher projected – and it pretty much means you'll never get offered another book deal again.)

Odds are, my story will be one of the forgotten ones. That's what happens in the end to most traditionally published books. I'm OK with that. I feel like I've climbed a very steep hill already, and I'm so grateful to have reached this point. But still, when I look up, I realize I haven't actually made it up the mountain. I've only made it to the base camp. The peak still looms above, and the path to the top looks infinitely steeper.

I know that I have to keep climbing though, no matter what, even if I fail. And that's my advice to everyone who dreams of standing where I am.

Keep climbing. Don't look down. Maybe, just maybe, I'll see you at the top.

A.V. Geiger is a Wattpad featured author and recent inductee into the Wattpad Stars program. Her YA debut FOLLOW ME BACK was described in Publisher's Weekly as "a romantic thriller for the online generation, told through a combination of police transcripts, Twitter DMs, and a dual POV narrative." The complete first draft of FOLLOW ME BACK is still available on Wattpad, and Viv has recently begun posting her new YA romantic thriller, THE MERMAID HYPOTHESIS.