Gold1:

Golden Rule No. 1

Do you have a book

worth publishing?

It is said that everybody has at least one book in them, but you must use a cocktail of commonsense and honesty to measure whether anybody is interested in the book inside you. The same golden rule applies whether it is a book of fact or fiction: It must be of interest to potential readers outside your personal circle. Try to judge for yourself before wasting the time of a publisher, and be totally honest with yourself when asking three key questions:

"Is my book worth publishing?"

"Is there a market for it outside my family and friends?"

"If I was in the publisher's chair would I put my money into it?"

If your honest answer to the three questions is "yes" then go all out for a publishing contract. The 20 Golden Rules in my website will I hope help you open the door to the exciting, exhilarating (and often exasperating) world of publishing where the financial rewards if you are among the ten per cent lucky ones can be enormous.

Money aside, there is nothing outside parenthood to beat the satisfaction of seeing your book published. I often think of it in terms of giving birth. There is the morning sickness when you struggle to get the early chapters written, then the bulge of the manuscript as the book grows until an average nine months later you hand your new-born pride and joy over to the publisher. Then hope and pray that it has got legs and will run and run.

Autobiographies are the hardest book ideas to sell to publishers unless you are a) famous; b) have an extraordinary tale to tell; c) have a commercially viable life story to relate.

The fiction road is the most trodden, and also the one strewn with most broken dreams. For every novel that becomes a best seller and makes it to the silver screen there are ten thousand that finish in the remainder bin and make peanuts for their authors.

Publishers are no longer as philanthropic as they once were. Dirty words like "profit" and "commercial" are now commonly used in a publishing world where you need to convince them that your book idea will (perish the thought) make money. At the very least, they will want to cover their costs which are escalating at a worrying rate.

Ask yourself the question: "What do I have to offer in an autobiography that will make people interested in buying the book?" You are halfway there if you can assure the publisher that there will be newspaper/magazine interest in the serialisation rights.

If you are offering a novel, ask yourself: "Is this any different to a hundred other novels out there on the shelves? Can I do anything to improve it and make it more saleable before I hand it over to the publisher?"

Bear in mind that each year thousands of typescripts (or, as we old-world authors call them, manuscripts) are submitted to publishers by expectant authors. Only a small percentage are accepted. What you must do is make your idea stand out as more worthy of publication than the rest. You do that by packaging and presentation, as I explain in Golden Rule section 3.

The days of submitting an idea on the back of an envelope are long gone. Publishers are now ultra professional, and they expect the same of their authors. If you and I are going to earn from the Internet, I must convince you that you should do everything you can to make your book stand out from all the others. All authors should start off with the three "Is":

Be IMAGINATIVE ... Be INFORMATIVE ... Be INDUSTRIOUS.

You must have all three. No writer can survive without a fertile (furtive even!) imagination, and if your book is not informative you will quickly lose your reader. Even when writing fiction, you are looking to inform your reader about the events and characters populating the pages.

It is the "industrious" ingredient that frightens off many would-be authors. The number of books that have been started and never finished must run into millions.

There is no easy way to write a book. You have to sit down all on your own and work at it. Thomas Edison said that his inventions were "one per cent inspiration, ninety nine per cent perspiration." The breakdown is more like 50/50 when it comes to writing a book, but without the perspiration you will not get your book finished. That's the brutal fact I want you to take on board before moving on to Golden Rule No 2 that just might put a new idea into your head.

Golden rule No 1 is not to waste either a publisher's time or your time with a book that has little interest outside your circle.