We Should Try and Get it Published!

Goal of this section: Identify the hurdles we ran into when exploring traditional publishing.

So, we wrote the book. What now? We should try and get it published!

It was at this moment we quickly found out everything we had done “wrong.”

One thing to keep in mind, is that my day job is that of a Product Manager in a big tech company. When I start to think about topics like "revenue" or "value" I have a tendency to think strategically in an attrempt to maximize ROI. In this case, I was looking at accomplishing two things:

1. Get people to read the book. I want as many people to see it as possible and udmnderstand real feedback on what we created. Whether its good or bad.

2. Maximize the potential revenue we could make from the book. This is just hard-coded in me.

Did you know that every year, the big 5 publishers receive “XXX” amount of submissions per year? Do you know how many get selected to be published? x%.

So, how do you get chosen? Well, apparently it's not so easy for someone who has no writing credits to their name, an essentially non-existent social media following.

Best bet is to try and write something and start “querying”, whatever that means… (DEFINE QUERYING)

Needles to say, we quickly realized that any hope of finding any sort of “success” with this book we had written, was going to be as likely as winning the lottery. Or maybe getting hit by a meteor… since those are slightly better odds.

Succinctly put; the ROI did not look good...