Every writer dreams of attracting a lucrative contract from a major New York publishing company. And although not everyone achieves that dream, many writers do. But they have to rise above everyone else and prove they have what it takes to write and sell a profitable book.

If you want to improve your chances of winning that contract, consider the following secrets to getting editors’ and agents’ attention.

1. Write Your Best Book
Although this may seem obvious, you might be surprised at how many writers send off manuscripts that they themselves haven’t read and revised. But when agents and editors are swamped with manuscripts, you may only have one shot to make a professional impression. If you want to be taken seriously, then you need to do everything you can to make sure your book is the best it can absolutely be. What does that mean? DON’T send your first draft! Read your book from start to finish over and over again until you can’t find anything to improve. Then give it to someone else—someone you can trust to be honest and helpful—to read it as well.

2. Build a Platform
You can’t come from out of nowhere if you want a publisher to risk thousands of dollars buying your book. You need to establish a record of experience and expertise. If you write creative works, like memoir or fiction, publish in respected, widely read journals. And for business and how-to books, promote yourself and your ideas through speaking engagements, publishing articles, and publicity. Other ways to build a platform include selling 5,000 or more self-published books, building a list of clients and qualified prospects, and writing a blog that gets thousands of visitors. A platform lets editors and agents know that people like you and you’ll probably be able to sell a lot of books.

3. Make Connections
If you don’t live in the city, then making connections in New York can seem impossible. It’s not; and knowing someone in the business (or with connections in the business) can be the break you need to stand out and sell your book to a major publisher. What can you do to make connections? Attend writing conferences and literary events; network with other writers; and tell everyone you meet that you’re a writer. You never know when a friend of a friend will work in the publishing world.

Your Path to Commercial Publication
It takes work to sell your book to a major publisher. But even if your writing skills aren’t quite ready, you can start looking for opportunities that will better your work, build your platform, and establish connections that will help you on your path to publication. Everyone has to start somewhere!

Melinda Copp

Twenty years ago having a publishing company was pretty much the same as it was 100 years before that, while there may have been a change in the technology used to produce the content to be published the actual publishing still required large, noisy, and expensive printing presses, large rolls of paper, and many skilled workers to run the process.

Skip forward to today, and look at what is involved in running a publishing company in the Internet age, while it is true that if you still want to produce a paper based product that can be picked up off the shelf at the local bookstore then, still, very little has changed in over 100 years.

The big change today is that to get the content into the hands of the people who want to read it there are so many better options than printing it onto the remains of a dead tree. With broadband Internet being so widely available and computers being so low priced, it is possible for almost anyone to produce high quality content in their own home and distribute it over the Internet for almost nothing when compared to a traditional print run.

So how does a modern publishing company make money if everything it produces is available on the Internet, the answer is the same as it always was, people pay for the content not the paper it is written on, so you can still charge the same amount for an eBook as you would have for a paper book, as to anyone who wants it, the content is the valuable part, and that remains the same whatever you are reading it from.