If you had told me three years ago that I would be writing a business book commissioned by a leading business publishing house I would not have believed you.

We thought that it might be interesting to keep a blog relating to the process of getting the book, Brilliant Selling’, written and published - it feels a little strange starting the story with only an idea of how it might end…

Sitting comfortably?

It started some two years ago with our genuine interest and passion for sales which probably led to Jeremy and I working together anyway (along with some other shared interests and goals of course). Actually, we could have been ’sitting comfortably’ in that our training business was growing,  we had some great clients and were working both in the UK and throughout Europe.  We were talking about our strategy for the next couple of years and Jeremy mentioned that he would really like to write a book. After much discussion we came up with the idea of a book on sales management. Both Jeremy and I had been sales managers and felt that there was very little in the way of resources to help turn a succesfsul sales person into an effective manager of sales people.

The Proposal

We set about writing a proposal. Actually, this took us a long time. A couple of months at least - not full-time but creating a first draft, thinking about it, returning to it and ammending it. Finally we had something we were really pleased with ‘The Four Pillars of Successful Sales Management - the complete new resource for all sales managers to maximise results…right now!” Now I read it back, maybe it wasn’t that snappy!

We bought a copy of ‘The Writer’s Handbook’, sent the proposal off to around 50 agents and sat back to wait over a few literary lunches with lots of red wine. Surprisingly, the phone didn’t ring off the hook. We did get some good responses and most suggested that we would be better off going direct to a publisher for this kind of book. Back to ‘The Writer’s Handbook’ and out went the proposal to 30 publishers.  Well, things went awfully quiet after that and we were just thinking that the publishing community weren’t yet ready for us when, in the space of two weeks, two publishers called and invited us to meet with them.

Interestingly, neither publisher felt that the idea of a sales management book would sell well but both were interested in a book on selling. It needed to be a practical ‘how to’ book with lots of tips and advice - just what we had planned with our sales management book but aimed at sales people. When we went away to research the market we found that there was a gap and we got more and more excited about a book that had potentially far wider appeal.

In February 2009 we signed the deal with Pearsons for Brilliant Selling.

Summary

A few key learning points by way of a summary to this stage:

• Spend the time researching your market before writing a book proposal. Be clear on why you think there is a market and what other books service that market along with why yours will be different.
• Write a good, clear proposal. Ours was about 14 pages long and included sections on the purpose of the book, the target audience, the style & format, proposed chapter headings, competitive books and biographies of the authors (us). In addition, we created a sample chapter to show (hopefully) that we could write and give a better indication of style.
• Be prepared to be flexible. Punlishers have ideas about what will work for them and their market. In our case we wanted to write a book that was practical and about something we knew we could add value to. Instead f sales managementwe ended up focusing on the broader market of sales.
• I have heard from lots of authors not to be put off by a lack of response but, even as a sales person, it would have been easy to carry on focusing n the ‘day job’ and forget the idea of a book. If you have a good idea for a book and you take the right steps there is a good chance your proposal will be read. Don’t expect it to happen immediately.

Now Jeremy and I just have to write it…