The Biggest Mistake Entrepreneurs Make When Trying To Get a Book Deal

What if your dream of landing a book deal is being held back by mistakes you don't even realize you're making?

In this episode, Meghan Stevenson pulls back the curtain on what really matters in traditional publishing for entrepreneurs and experts. She explains why great ideas alone are not enough, and why proof of concept, a strong audience, and a clear strategy are essential for success. Meghan reviews her “Three P’s” framework: Potential, Platform, and Proposal, and shows how each one plays a critical role in getting publishers to say yes.

You will learn why testing your ideas before writing matters, how building an audience gives you real leverage, and why rushing a book proposal can cost you your only chance. Meghan also shares why relying on shortcuts or AI can weaken your pitch and how preparation makes all the difference.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about writing a nonfiction book that sells, builds authority, and opens real doors in publishing.

Episode Highlights:
(0:00) Intro
(2:24) Understanding how traditional publishing really works
(4:25) How book deals happen with agents and editors
(6:56) The Three P’s: Potential, Platform, Proposal
(11:41) Why testing your ideas comes first
(13:46) The truth about building a strong platform
(15:34) What publishers look for in sales numbers
(18:27) Common proposal mistakes to avoid
(21:34) Preparing for your “one shot” at a deal
(24:38) Final recap and how to take your next step
35:54) Outro

Have a great idea for a book but don't know where to start? MeghanStevenson.com/quiz


Traditional publishing expert Meghan Stevenson blasts open the gates of the “Big 5”—Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan—to share what every entrepreneur and expert needs to know about landing a book deal. 

In episodes released every Monday, Meghan shares wisdom and stories from 20+ years in publishing as well as interviews with authors, literary agents, and editors. She also answers questions from listeners like you. 

Whether you are an experienced entrepreneur with an empire, or are just starting out—this podcast will help you understand what you need to do in order to turn your dream of being a bestselling author into real life. 

Transcript

Why Proof Of Concept Matters

Meghan 0:00

What if your dream of landing a book deal is being held back by mistakes you do not even realize you are making? In this episode, Meghan Stevenson pulls back the curtain on what really matters in traditional publishing for entrepreneurs and experts. She explains why great ideas alone are not enough, and why proof of concept, a strong audience, and a clear strategy are essential for success. Meghan introduces her “Three P’s” framework: Potential, Platform, and Proposal, and shows how each one plays a critical role in getting publishers to say yes. You will learn why testing your ideas before writing matters, how building an audience gives you real leverage, and why rushing a book proposal can cost you your only chance. Meghan also shares why relying on shortcuts or AI can weaken your pitch and how preparation makes all the difference. This episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about writing a nonfiction book that sells, builds authority, and opens real doors in publishing. Episode Highlights: (0:00) Intro (2:24) Understanding how traditional publishing really works (4:25) How book deals happen with agents and editors (6:56) The Three P’s: Potential, Platform, Proposal (11:41) Why testing your ideas comes first (13:46) The truth about building a strong platform (15:34) What publishers look for in sales numbers (18:27) Common proposal mistakes to avoid (21:34) Preparing for your “one shot” at a deal (24:38) Final recap and how to take your next step 35:54) Outro To

Welcome And Host Background

Who This Show Is For

Publishing Models Compared

How Book Deals Actually Happen

The Three Ps Framework

Potential: Can This Book Sell

Platform: Can You Move Copies

Proposal: One Shot To Win

Common Mistakes And Fixes

Recap And Next Steps

Meghan 0:00

create a best-selling book, you have to have proof of concept. Your advice has to work and it has to fill 200 plus pages. And people want to have to buy it. People who already know, like, and trust you, right? Your customer base. Most entrepreneurs I meet have not tested and shared their ideas enough. And that can come back to bite you in a couple different ways. Welcome to the Kind of a Big Book Deal podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn about traditional publishing. I'm your host, Meghan Stevenson. After working as an editor for two of the biggest traditional publishers, I started my own business helping entrepreneurs to become authors. To date, my clients have earned over $7 million from publishers, including Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Harper Collins, and Hay House, just to name a few. In these podcast episodes, I will blast open the well-kept gates to traditional publishing. I'm going to explain what every entrepreneur needs to know about landing a book deal without losing your mind. I'm going to share stories, answer your questions, interview the successful authors I've had the pleasure to work with, and probably say platform more than a tech pro. So if you dream of landing on a bestseller list but have no idea how, this is the podcast for you, and I am so, so glad you're here. What you're about to hear is intended for highly motivated entrepreneurs and experts who want a book deal. As an expert in book publishing who has worked in the industry both as an editor at a major publisher and as a professional collaborator who helps authors land deals and write best-selling books, I'm going to tell you how to avoid the three most common mistakes that I've seen entrepreneurs and experts make throughout my career. But I'm going to get even more specific than that. If you intend to write a prescriptive how-to nonfiction book, if you know that your advice and perspective makes an impact for others, if you feel ready to step up and be more visible in your business, if you want to grow your audience and therefore also grow your bottom line, and if you are ready to go after all of your dreams, then what you are about to hear is absolutely going to help you. So let's jump in. By far, number one, the biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs and experts make when it comes to their book deal is not understanding how the traditional publishing industry or the publishing industry as a whole works. So people assume, and I think this comes from our position as readers, that the writing or the idea is what really drives book sales or what really drives book deals. And that can be true. But in the how-to prescriptive non-fiction space, which is what I'm talking about here, because a big misconception I see on social all the time is authors blowing up my spot when I'm talking about how-to traditional published non-fiction, and they're talking about self-published romance or self-published romanticy or hybrid published, you know, only for the C-suite books. Like books are different, y'all. Like traditionally published books are different than self-published books, which are different than hybrid published books, which is different than romance, which is different than fantasy, which is different than literary fiction, which is different than how-to nonfiction, all right? But when it comes to book deals in the prescriptive how-to nonfiction space, book deals are really about book sales. And that is because publishers are for-profit companies, right? Like that is like the difference in the traditional model. The traditional publishers do have to care about book sales. In self-publishing and hybrid publishing, where you, as the author, is paying to play, you are paying to get published. It doesn't matter as much. They don't care, right? They get their money because they help you produce the book. Traditional publishers get their money by helping to buy authors that sell books, right? And they help you produce it, they pay you, right? For the future profit that you're going to make them. It's a different business model. And if you can wrap your mind around that, it'd be really helpful. Also, you need to understand the path. So book deals happen with editors. Now, there is the opportunity, I've done it myself, where an editor reaches out to you directly. I have a couple clients that had that happen. That's the best path of all, right? The editor finds you, they see you on social, they see you doing good work out in the world, and they send you an email and say, Hey, Meghan, would you like to write a book? And you say yes, and then you get a publishing deal. That does happen. I would say out of the hundreds of clients that I've worked with over the last 10 years in my capacity as a collaborator, that has happened once, right? So it's one in a hundred. And if you're a proactive bee like most of my clients, you're not gonna settle for that waiting. You're gonna go out there and, you know, try to get it yourself, try to make it happen yourself. So that does happen. But most of the time, what happens is that a literary agent goes out and finds you or sees you doing good work. A literary agent then sends the project to an editor, right? And that's how a deal gets done. Now, where do literary agents get their clients? Well, the big reputable literary agents that are established in their careers, they get them through their contacts, which includes people like me, right? Professional collaborators who are out here helping experts and entrepreneurs who don't have a literary agent, but who want a book deal. We're gonna help people like you, right? There's also, you know, referrals. A lot of my clients that come direct from agents are have been referred by one of that agent's other author clients. So that happens. Before agents, you get into collaborators like me, and that is my role. I'm not a literary agent. However, I do work with a lot of literary agents, and I work often in close capacity with them because I'm trying to put every client I work with, and hopefully you someday, into this path, right? You work with me on a proposal, we send that off to an agent. A literary agent loves it, wants it to represent it, they send it off to the publisher, we get a deal, we write a book, you're a bestseller. That's how it should work. Okay. That is a very high-level explanation of traditional publishing, but that is the path. Now, you might say, okay, Meghan, how do I work with you? And that is a great question. And we qualify heavily. And the reason we qualify heavily is because I'm not cheap. I'm expensive. Uh, it costs $30,000 to write a proposal with me. It costs more than that to write a book with me. We do have an offer that wraps it all together, but that is fairly expensive. And so I want to make sure you're gonna get the result you want. I want to make sure that my results stay great, right? That I have a great client result rate. And so I am really choosy. So my three qualifications, and I would say every literary agent's qualifications and every editor at a publishing house's qualifications are what I call the three Ps. So the first P is potential. Could this book idea sell in today's market? I have entire podcast episodes, YouTube episodes about each of these Ps. So if you want to dive in deeper, you certainly can. But just know like potential is like, could this book sell? And often what we're doing is we're taking 20 years of seeing what books worked, what books sold, what books were on the bestseller list, and what didn't, and kind of running an algorithm in our minds very quickly about how does this book fit? One day, just fun tangent town story. I have a very good friend of mine. She's been in my life for over 20 years, and she works now in our business as an ops manager. And so part of her job is to help me with comp titles, competitive and comparative titles. When I taught her this, we we actually went to a physical bookstore. We went to Elliott Bay in Seattle. Here in Seattle, the biggest indie bookstore in Seattle, and I taught her. And it was really hard for me because I had to really dumb it down. Like, think about what you're an expert in, and you have to go all the way back to like assistant entry level conversations. And that was very challenging for me to teach her this shorthand because my mind is going very quickly in the potential land, right? It is it can make that decision in two seconds. And so for you to know that you have potential in today's market, you can, as an author or an entrepreneur, look around. Have books like yours been published? Is your book different enough? Is it a book, right? Is it not just a podcast or a TV show or a business opportunity or a mastermind? Right? Does this book sell? Does it work in book form? Number one. And then number two, could it sell in today's market? Does it fit on the shelf? Does it meet what the reader's looking for? Are books like it working? Even if you hate those books, even if you want to say, hey, this book sucks because of X, Y, and Z, that's great. We want that at a certain level, especially in popular categories. But we want to make sure that there's people going out. There's enough people with the problem, right? There's enough readers with the problem for the book that contains your solution to sell. So that is potential. Again, got a whole episode on it. If you want to dive deeper, go ahead. Platform. This is a very simple thing. Platform gets convoluted, but it comes down to this super easy question. Can you, as the author of this book, promote and sell enough copies to make it viable for the publisher? Again, I've got a million different episodes on this. We could talk about platform four fucking days. Okay. But essentially it's about sales and it's about promotion. So to me, entrepreneurs and experts are the best at platform. I have no idea how a fiction author figures out their platform. Absolutely none. Like, please tell me. I have no idea why you would want to do that, how you do that, any of that. So, but as an entrepreneur and expert, you got to get good at promotion. You got to get good at sales, right? You got to get good at marketing. And so is that already in place or are we building it and we can show them we're building it. It's not just a plan for your book to be viable. And what is viability? Anywhere between 10 and 30,000 copies in the first year is viability. Depends on your publisher, depends on the level of advance, depends on how wishful their profit and loss estimate when they try to buy your book is. All right. Should do a whole episode on that. But for now, that's what platform is. And the last piece, so you've got potential, you've got a platform. Uh now we go to proposal. Is your book's potential and your platform explained in a way that a literary agent editor can wrap their mind around it and see how you'll sell 20,000 copies or more. Okay, so this is where people trip up as well. I'm gonna talk about why or where you trip up. But the important thing for you to know is that book proposals are your one and done. They are not, oh, I'll send it out and see how it goes. That is not what you want to do here. You have one shot at your book deal 99% of the time. I'm actually taking a client to market in 2026 that has failed to sell before. It's been a few years. I'm hoping everyone will have forgotten about his previous fail. It's on a slightly different topic. Hopefully, we'll be able to do it, but it is a it is a hurdle. You don't want to have that hurdle in your own race. So don't rush that part of the process. Okay, so let's drill down into the mistakes that entrepreneurs make within each of these three Ps. So potential. The big thing people who miss here is that to create a best-selling book, you have to have proof of concept. Your advice has to work and it has to fill 200 plus pages, and people want to have to buy it. People who already know, like, and trust you, right? Your customer base. Most entrepreneurs I meet have not tested and shared their ideas enough. And that can come back to bite you in a couple different ways. The first way is that you don't have enough intellectual property to even finish a proposal. That's happened to my clients before. It is not a great outcome. You do not want that for yourself. And that was because she hadn't really tested her ideas. She had a few successful clients, but she worked one-on-one with us people. She could create custom solutions. She didn't have frameworks that worked for in a one-to-many capacity. And so we did not have enough intellectual property. This has actually happened a few times. I'm thinking of one client in particular with this story, but it it does happen a decent amount. The even worse outcome of that is when you get a book deal and then we realize you don't have enough intellectual property to write an entire book. Or maybe your book runs super short, right? Instead of a 70,000-word book, which is pretty standard, you end up with a 50,000 or 45,000 word book. Okay. So we really need that proof of concept. Because if we are running short, here's a collaborator secret. I'm going to put more case studies in. But if you haven't worked at scale with a lot of clients, I'm not going to have enough case studies to include. So you just want to make sure that they you take your time. Because when you rush to write a book before you have created that content, before you've created frameworks, before you've tested your idea at scale with both individual clients and one-to-many offers, you are going to fall flat on potential, right? And the other thing about potential that people don't think about, sure, you don't have full proof of concept, but when you don't share your ideas, you also really don't have platform. So that brings me to my second P. Can you, the author, promote and sell enough copies to make your book viable for a traditional publisher? This is why entrepreneurs and experts are uniquely poised to actually land book deals. Because, like in your business, you're expected as an author to do most, if not all, of the marketing for your book. Publishers do not specialize in your area of expertise. It's kind of ridiculous. When I see people on social media being like, well, publishers don't do anything more, publishers won't market and sell my book. They could be talking about fantasy, they could be talking about self-help. They could be talking about coaching. They could be talking about crystals. How is the publisher supposed to understand the pain points, needs, and desires and dreams of all those fucking people? It just is unrealistic and it just doesn't work. And I don't think publishers ever did it. I think this is one of those myths, like the nuclear family myth. It just doesn't exist. It never existed. Let's pretend it this just all acknowledge this is not ever gonna happen again. It never really happened in the first place. All right. Anyway, going back. So authors need to have a big audience and the ability to sell 20,000 books because you want that PL at the publisher to have a profit, right? So publishers are gonna throw your book, your platform, into a profit and loss statement. Um, and they're gonna do that when they want to buy the rights to publish your book, right? That's how they actually do it. That's how an editor does it. I've run many of these in my career. I fudged the fuck out of them, also, right? But but most of the time you want it to be in the ballpark of reality, okay? Because if you don't, if you have a bunch of books that you spend a ton of the publisher's money on as an editor and then they don't sell, you're gonna get your ass fired. So let's say you have a hundred thousand followers, and we can guess that you know your conversion is gonna be anywhere from two to five percent. That could be anywhere, you know, from two thousand books to twenty thousand books, right? I think that's rough math. You could, you know, you're gonna need anywhere from a hundred thousand to over a million followers to land a traditional book deal. Now that's talking if your platform is mostly on social and email, right? So for our digital content creators, people like that, online coaches, all of that. However, it isn't always true. So I have a client right now, she probably has 10 to 15,000 followers across platforms. She's got a pub, a pretty popular TEDx talk. But what you don't see online is that she goes and speaks all the damn time. She is out on the road every week, and she speaks to over 100,000 people a year. Pretty bonkers. I can't see that online, but it's true. And I'm I'm guessing she's right, right? I get her autoresponder enough to trust that she's telling me the truth. So speaking, facilitating workshops, your connections can really matter. Now, you don't want to rely only on your connections, especially if they are big names or celebrities, because oftentimes they will be flaky, and everybody, everybody in our industry really knows that, right? But what you want to think about in terms of platform is not just the numbers of followers, there is no magic number. I have a whole episode on that, but you want to think about your sale through. So if we can roll up and say, and I have done this in proposals before, hey, you know, the lowest cost way to work with me is thousands of dollars. I get my enrollment numbers every time I open up a program or sell a course, I have, you know, X amount of people, I convert at this rate. I convert at 10%, right? If we convert it at 10%, you could have as little of 200 followers, 200,000 followers and be good. So think about it that way. Because the way that people fuck this up is they either don't grow it and expect magically to get a book deal and for the publisher to do all their sales and marketing for them, which is just fantasy, or they don't put the effort into understanding why you know publishers really want this. And it's to your benefit. Platform, your platform is your power in a lot of ways in your business and for your book. So you should grow, grow it, right? If you want to grow your business, platform is going to be key. So the mistake people make there is they give up assuming they can't ever have a platform and or they just get mad about it for no reason, right? Because again, just like a nuclear family, and a publisher doing all your marketing and sales for you has not existed in my lifetime, probably your lifetime, and maybe our parents' lifetime. Okay. So let's go back to the three P's. So let's talk about how you can fuck up your proposal. This is the third P. So there are so many ways I see people fuck up their proposals, my friends, but the few I'm going to save you from are rushing to send a proposal to a literary agent or an editor. So I had a client, roll up, and she had a half-baked proposal. And so, just so you know, too, when potential clients roll up and they say, Hey, I already have a proposal, I will always look at it. I'm not gonna like dive deep. I'm not gonna give you like a 30-page critique unless you pay me for that. But like, I'm gonna look at it and I'm gonna tell you what I think. I don't have a filter, so I'm gonna say, Hey, you know, to her, I said, This is good. You could get a deal on this, I can make it better, I can improve upon it, I can improve your chances, right? But, you know, you do you. And so she was going to rush it out and send out the just okay proposal rather than taking the time to put together the best proposal she could. And that we'll see how that shakes out. But more often than not, it ends up not getting a deal, right? Because it is half baked, and because editors get dozens of these a week. And so for yours to stand out, it has to be pretty exceptional, it has to be pretty amazing, and it has to be really well put together because in a lot of ways it is a headless horse person pitch. So it is going off on, you know, in a PDF or a Word document or a Google Doc, and it needs to speak for you and solve for you and market you and present you as someone worthy of a six-figure book deal without you even being there. So that's gotta be a pretty fucking awesome document, okay? And this is my specialty as well. Proposals are my jam. I am this, I'm recording this in the week between Christmas and New Year's. I'm excited because I'm gonna write a proposal this week and I am pumped about it, okay? I'm very good at this weird little document that nobody really knows how to do, except for me and a couple literary agents. So, second mistake is using artificial intelligence or a shitty resource. So I get a lot asked a lot why I don't write my own book on writing proposals. And I think the obvious the answer is pretty obvious, which is that number one, I get paid way more than I to, you know, write proposals for people and I would to write a book. And second, those resources, those proposal books, guides, digital courses, whatever, they are outdated the minute they are put out. All right. So using shitty resources is not your fault. Uh, dear wannabe authors, dear experts, dear entrepreneurs. It's just that in 12 years of doing this work as a collaborator, there has not been a single author-written proposal I didn't want to improve or tear to shreds. And that's because people would use Chat GBT, or people would use AI, or people would use books, or people would use some agent freebie to put their proposals together, and none of those really were great. None of those were really good. So just keep that in mind. Another mistake people make is really not understanding, like deeply understanding, that you only have one shot. So I love to use reference to American Idol. So if you think about American Idol or any of those talent shows, right, you can roll up and you can be unprepared, right? You can just assume you're gonna crush it and go up and just sing your song and walk away. Or you can say, Hey, I want to try out for American Idol. I want to see if I can be the next Carrie Underwood or Kelly Clarkson. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take vocal. Lessons for a year. I'm going to choose my song. I'm going to get a stylist to pick me out the most complimentary outfit I could try. I'm going to talk to a public speaking person so that I'm not, you know, nervous or weird. I'm going to go to therapy so that I am, you know, emotionally regulated and like my best self when I roll up. I'm going to get my hair and makeup done on the day of. I'm going to do research on, you know, American Idol Reddit about what city to go to and when to show up and how to master the line, right? You could do all of that preparation. You could do all of it if you wanted to. Or you could just roll up. Or you could do somewhere in between. And most of the time, what I see people doing is that somewhere in between. Versus saying, hey, I'm going to take my time. I'm going to learn what I need to learn. I'm going to get prepared. I'm going to hire the right help and do it the right way. And when I see people do it the right quote unquote right way, whether it's with me or not, I see success. Right. We had a client earlier in 2025 that unfortunately, because of some changes on our team, no fault of their own, we had to say, hey, we can't work on this project for a little while. And she said, okay, cool. I don't want to wait. I'm going to take it to a different collaborator. And she worked with a colleague of mine, which is wonderful. And she got a book deal, which is all great. She would have gotten a book deal whether she worked with me, whether she worked with my colleague, whether she worked with someone else, as long as it was a reputable person putting out a good product because she was a platformed author with a good idea. Like, that's the thing. She got, she did the American Idol thing, right? She she hired the stylist, she hired the vocal coach, she hired the public speaking expert. She hired the therapist, she hired the hair and makeup crew. Like she did all the right prep work. So you want to make sure that you understand that it's your one shot and do the appropriate prep work because you're not going to have a second chance. And even if you do have a second chance, like my client and I talked about earlier, you're going to have a bigger hurdle to overcome. All right. Because you already have that no. And that's psychologically for you. That's also with your literary agent. That's also with, you know, any publisher. Because sometimes people have weirdly, you know, great memories, and they might remember you and they might remember that they rejected you. The bigger mistake I see here is not getting professional help. Because, you know, you do have that one shot. You do want to make sure you're going about it the right way. You do want to make sure you are covering for what you don't know. Right? I love the phrase, you don't know what you don't know. And that's so important and so true when it comes to book publishing, especially. So let's wind this all back and recap the episode. So the biggest mistake you can make as an entrepreneur who wants a book deal is not understanding how the traditional publishing industry works. Specifically, if you don't take the time to prove that your book idea has potential, if you don't put effort into building an audience and author platform, or you rush putting together a proposal, or worse, rely on AI to do it for you, right? And then you miss your opportunity. So you can take it from me because I have gotten the opposite result. I've helped my clients get book deals over and over and over again. Since 2012, 85% of my clients have landed book deals. And I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The 15% of my clients who didn't land deals were the basis for this episode. So if you want to be like the 85% and not that 15%, you can take my free quiz to get your next action step to avoid these mistakes and make your book deal a no-brainer for everybody involved, whether it's me, another professional collaborator, your literary agent, your editor, your publisher, and hopefully your readers as well in the future. The link is in the show notes. And in the meantime, cheers to your success. Thanks for tuning in to the Kind of Big Book Deal podcast. Want to see where you're at on your book journey? Check out my free quiz at MeghanStevenson.com forward slash quiz. That's M-E-G-H-A-N-S-T-E-V-S-O-N.com forward slash quiz. See you next time.