Seven Things Nobody is Telling You About Writing a Book People Buy

What if everything you believe about getting a book deal is wrong?

In this episode, Meghan Stevenson delivers a bold, honest breakdown of what it really takes to write and publish a nonfiction book that sells. She challenges the idea that passion and personal stories are enough, reminding listeners that readers care most about solving their own problems—your job as an author is to serve them.

Meghan shares seven powerful truths, including why writing is actually the easiest part, why most “overnight” bestsellers take years to build, and why simple ideas often outperform complex ones. She explains how successful authors treat books as part of a bigger business strategy, not a magic shortcut to fame.

You will also learn why most book sales come directly from the author’s own efforts and how consistent promotion can eventually lead to word-of-mouth growth. Through real client examples and behind-the-scenes industry insights, Meghan offers practical guidance for entrepreneurs who want their words to matter, their message to spread, and their book to make a real impact.

Episode Highlights:
(0:00) Intro
(1:20) Seven truths about book deals
(2:58) Writing is the easiest part
(5:25) Why bestsellers take years
(6:28) Focus on the reader, not yourself
(10:08) Simple problems sell best
(11:53) Books must support your business
(15:23) You are your main marketer
(17:37) How word of mouth begins
(24:32) Recap of the seven lessons
(26:01) 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 Readers Don’t Care About You

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This can be a hard one. This can be like kind of kill your darling-ish. Readers don't give a shit about your story. In many ways, this is an entrepreneurial mistake. It's a fact of business, all business, that customers ultimately don't care about you, the business owner, the service provider. They care about themselves. Welcome to the kind of a big book deal podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn about traditional publishing. I'm your host, Megan 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, HarperCollins, 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 bro. 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. Publishing is a gatekeep world. But what if I could tell you everything you needed to know about traditional publishing in order to get a book deal with just seven simple insights. That's right. Today I am gonna share the seven things that nobody is telling you about writing and publishing a nonfiction how-to book that people want to buy, and that maybe will hit the bestseller list. Because when we pause and when we think about why y'all are listening to me, why you as an expert or an entrepreneur want to get a book deal, why you're seeking out this information, ultimately that's because you want your words to matter. You want to make an impact. And to do that, the deal is just the beginning to really make an impact on readers, to really make an impact on your followers, to really grow your audience, your business, your impact, and ultimately your results. You gotta sell books. So today we're gonna talk about the seven things you need to realize as an expert or entrepreneur who wants a book deal that's not currently in the conversations I'm seeing online about traditional publishing. I'm gonna come in hot, y'all, with the top seven reasons or things that you're not seeing online that you're not hearing from other book coaches that maybe you haven't even heard before. And then I'm gonna dig into each. So let's hit the top seven without any further ado. Number one, writing your book is actually the easiest fucking part. Number two, most bestsellers you see are years, if not decades, in the making. Number three, and this might hit hard, y'all, readers don't give a fuck about your story. Four, the best-selling books solve the simplest problems. Five, the most successful nonfiction authors are consistently focused on growing their business. Number six, the number one source of book sales is gonna be you. That is until seven. When you hit an inflection point where word of mouth is selling your book without you having to do much of anything. But make no mistake, that snowball effect starts with you. So now that you know the top seven ways that you can write and publish a book that sells, that readers want, we can talk a little deeper about what you absolutely need to know and the mistakes you can avoid. Heads up. In this next part, I'm gonna do some show and tell. So if you want to see the visual, and you might want to, check out this episode on YouTube. So let's talk about number one. Writing a book is the easiest part. So I'm gonna back up here because what I've got behind me, and you can see this if you're on YouTube, is all my favorite books that I've worked on in my career. Now there's another bookshelf in my office that contains all the books that have good energy that I want to keep in my space, and not everybody makes that, by the way. But these are my favorites back here. And I can tell you that every single person on this list, on this shelf, and there's probably what, 20, 30 books back there, including the three I've got featured down here. Every single one of those people, if I was to bring them on the podcast, they would say, Hey Megan, I thought writing the book would be the hardest part, and it was actually the easiest part. So that's the first thing you need to know about traditionally publishing a book. Now, self-publishing, high-roblishing, maybe writing the book is the easiest part there, but most of the time I don't hear that. Most of the time across every side of publishing, people say writing the book is the easiest part. Because it's all on you, right? There's no, you know, you're not hearing no's or comments from haters, you're not, you know, having to sell or market or promote something. You don't have to deal with a team when you write a book unless you're hiring me and then I'm helping you, right? So like writing a book is the easiest part. Second, most bestsellers are years, if not decades, in the making. So one of my most famous and certainly Instagram famous clients is Rachel Rogers. Here is her book, We Should All Be Millionaires. So I didn't write this book. I'm gonna be completely straightforward. I helped Rachel with her book proposal. So I helped her land her literary agent and her deal. And what I knew at the time was that we worked on this proposal in this book in I want to say 12 of 2018, spring of 2019. And when we worked on this book proposal together, she had been an entrepreneur for 10 years. She had run a law firm for several years, and then she had changed to what she's been doing for the last, you know, five to ten years, which is running Hello7, her company. But that book and the ideas in it took her 10 years to figure out and extrapolate into frameworks and like organize her thoughts and all those things. So that's number two. Most bestsellers are years, if not decades, in the making. Number three, and this can be a hard one, this can be like kind of kill your darlings-ish. Readers don't give a shit about your story. In many ways, this is an entrepreneurial mistake. So it's a fact of business, all business, that customers ultimately don't care about you, the business owner, the service provider, they care about themselves. Now, maybe you know, I go to a yoga studio in my neighborhood, I love that owner, she's great. Is she my bestie? No. Would I, you know, be in contact with her if I wasn't taking yoga? No. After I leave the studio, are we gonna be friends? Probably not, right? And so if you think about that, like there is a parasocial relationship, uh, especially if you're online, between your followers and you, that's gonna happen and your readers and you, certainly. My best-selling authors, they kind of have a cult following around them, right? Rachel included. So, like, it is what it is, but I think when we think about you getting your deal, getting your book, a lot of times when authors come to me, they're like, my story's so important, and it is true, you, but customers and readers don't care about you, they care about themselves, and that's really true for your book as well. So, and that's especially true with the publishing industry, because they are seeing your book not as a piece of work or you know, a deeply personal, heartfelt representation of you. They're not seeing that shit as precious at all. They are seeing it as money, they are seeing it as a unit, they are seeing it like, you know, a UPC crowd of cheetahs at the grocery store. And they're literally thinking of it that way because that is their business, right? They are commercializing it, they are putting out books as product. And so, you know, when you think about it, the less precious you can be as your author or self, the better, especially when you're in the process of getting a deal. So when we remember though, that readers are buying your book to solve their problem, and that problem could be anything, right? It could be making money and generating wealth, it could be losing weight, it could be learning how to, you know, master a skill. It could be simply to entertain you in terms of fiction, that's entertainment, right? So if you consider why readers are buying your book, it's to solve their problem, right? Because even though it's your story and it might be really meaningful to you, ultimately what they're trying to do is like improve their lives through your story. And memoir does that well when it's executed well, but it's really hard to do. So that's why I like actually talk about discouraging people from memoir and thinking more about like prescriptive nonfiction, because we're creating like problem solution. It doesn't mean your story can't be a part of that, it absolutely can. But when we're just sharing our story, just the way that we're kind of wired as humans, we're less likely to engage. It's kind of like how when someone talks about themselves all the time, we kind of tune out at a certain point, right? Unless we're highly invested in that person. Same idea here. And the reason I say it's an entrepreneurial mistake is because a lot of people make that mistake with their marketing. You'll see it all the time with new entrepreneurs on social media. They'll be talking about them and their story and like all of that, and they're not focused on the customer, right? Good marketing is always focused on the customer, and so that's what we're trying to do here with our book, too. We're trying to market, even if that is to our literary agent, right? Even if that is to a publisher, even if that is to your editor, even if that is to, you know, your readers you're following, you're always trying to engage them about what they care about, what what they're passionate about, rather than being me, me, me all the time. All right, number four, and this is one of my favorites, y'all. The best-selling books solve the simplest fucking problems. Okay, this book is so simple. And for y'all that are listening, I'm pulling up atomic habits, of course. I didn't even finish this book actually before I jumped on the podcast today. I took out my bookmark because it was only like halfway through, and it has literally been in there for like four years. I never even finished this book, honestly. Um, it was that simple. And the way that James Clear did this is really brilliant, is that he and his team studied the New York Times bestseller list and the content within those books specifically, so he would know how to structure a best-selling book. So if you've ever looked at the bestseller list or you watched something like the five-second rule or the left end theory be like gigantic bestsellers, or girl wash your face is a great example as well. And you just thought, wow, those books are really dumb. Why are they bestselling? That's this in action, really. The best-selling books solve the most simple problems, right? But you also see that this is a perennial problem, right? Habits improving our lives, getting great results, making tiny changes. That is fantastic, right? Everybody wants that. So they're perennial problems, they are simple problems, and they are universal in a lot of ways, problems, right? The more niche we get, the easier your sales marketing promotion is gonna be as an author, but the smaller of the market you have. So that can be advantageous. I'll probably do a whole episode just on that, whether you to niche or not, niche, that is the question. But in terms of, you know, best-selling books, like a lot of times they're they have a formula, right? It might not be as obvious as like romance or sci-fi formulas, but there is a formula. Okay, number five. The most successful nonfiction authors are consistently focused on growing their business. So the other day I sent a landing page of one client to another client, because it said, look, she is doing the best pre-sale thing she could do. Because she was doing everything. My client's doing everything for her upcoming book, and it's gonna be out by the time this book is um out, so I'm not gonna share it, but it's it was a great thing. And what is universally true among my clients that have been successful, both in terms of being ready to write a proposal, being able to get a deal, and then having great success for their book beyond, you know, the initial deal and the initial sales period, is that they're constantly investing in growing their business and expanding their audience, reaching new people, and like just really learning from what's been successful for them in the past and iterating on that and and just keep growing it, keep growing it, keep growing it, right? And the book is just one piece of that. Now, my successful clients are incorporating that book into their content, they're incorporating it into their business operations, they're giving it to every client, they're creating speaking engagements and offers around it, they're they're doing everything they can do. But that book is just one piece of all their goals. The book isn't siloed, and it certainly isn't a magic source of new followers, leads, business growth, clients, speaking engagements, because y'all, that is not how books work. Okay. I've done this in the past, I'm gonna do it again. And again, this is another great idea for you to watch me on video. But this book, I'm holding up atomic capitals, is basically paper, ink, and glue, right? It's a snot walk, it's a snot talk, it does not promote for you, y'all. So it's not a magic source of growing your business. I actually had a um a friend who reached out to me recently, and we've been working together for five or six years. I'm her client, just in full um transparency. And she was like, Oh, yeah, I'm gonna hybrid publish because it'll give me all these opportunities. And I was like, You've already self-published another book. You should know better by now, right? But I was like, look, that's not how it works, right? You create the opportunity and then you sell books through those opportunities you create, right? The book doesn't magically do shit. And so she was like, Oh yeah, you're right, you know, but it was really funny because I think a lot of people get into that magic thinking because there is a lot of marketing message and promotion from like, you know, self-inhabited publishers saying, like, write your book and you'll use it as a business card and it'll do all these amazing things for you. But that is just a marketing message, y'all. That is not the reality for most people. So, what a better strategy is is saying, okay, here are all the goals I have for my work, for my impact, for my life, for my money, for my, you know, whatever, and here's how the book fits into all of those things. Spoiler alert, that can also be a great way to figure out which type of publishing you do, right? Because if your goals for your work, your impact, your life, your money aren't aligned with traditional publishing, cool, no problem, right? Um, or maybe you find that they are. In my friend's case, they totally were. She just didn't think of it that way. Okay, so that is number five. The most successful nonfiction authors are consistently focused on growing their business. Okay, number six, and I I'm maybe I'll live to regret this, but I'm gonna sing this like uh in sync. So if you you catch the reference, good for you. Um, so number six, the number one source of books sold is gonna be you. All right, publishers don't know how to market to every audience they publish. This should seem really straightforward, but it it's so funny. I have to always be repeating this message because people don't get it. I don't know why. I don't know, it's kind of like the nuclear family where everybody thinks there's like a time where America was great and like we had these perfect nuclear families, and everyone had what they had, and there wasn't any on the house people, and there wasn't any poverty, and that's just not real, like ever. Uh so same thing, it has never been the case where a publisher could just like make you a best-selling author, right? It's just not how that works. And in today's market, and at least the market of the last 20 years, and this is like pre-social media, pre, you know, real internet, they don't know how to market to your distinct audience, right? They don't know how to market to every single niche, every single reader, every single store, even. And so that's why traditional publishers require authors to have an audience. So if you don't like the reality that you have to promote, market, and sell your own book, and you are going to be the number one source of your book sales, then that's just unrealistic for traditional publishing. You can self-publish, you can hybrid publish, but across all those different avenues of publishing, no matter which way you publish, the number one source of books is going to be from your promotion, your efforts, your marketing, your connections, your speaking engagements, and your pre-existing sales channels. Okay. So that's really, really important. I think that's probably the biggest thing that people don't talk about enough. There's a lot of complaining online about what publishers don't do, but publishers have never done this shit. And you, as an author, as a business person, should want to sell your shit. I don't know how this is like that crazy. I love selling my shit. I love talking to people who are a good fit for the offers I have. I love it. Be like, great, get on the phone with me. I'm gonna figure out if I can help you, if we're the right fit for each other, and if we are, I'm gonna sell you on it. But if we're not, I'm not. Pretty simple, right? But it is really, really important that you understand that sales comes from you. There is an exception to this, okay, and this is number seven. I mentioned it before. When you hit an inflection point where word of mouth starts to sell your book. So let me explain how this happens. You might have seen it. I think the let them theory is a great example of this. I think girl wash your face is a fantastic example of this, and this is where like authors come out of nowhere. They do not come out of nowhere, okay? It's that you haven't been paying attention or that you haven't seen this part of the internet, right? It's always amazing to me when there's like a new influencer in my inbox or on my social asking me about publishing, and they have like five million followers, and I've never heard of them in my life. It happens more often than you'd think. But here's how it goes. So, initial book promotion, and I am by no means an expert in book promotion, so I'm saying this is a fly on the wall. Okay. So basically, what happens, and I love for this to happen, is you as the author go out and you promote the heck out of your book. You know, you do it in pre-sale for six months before your book is out, you do it, you know, the month of your publication, you throw the book parties, you do the launches, you do the webinars, you do the freebies, you do the add-ons, you do the coaching incubation, you do the mastermind, whatever the heck you do, you do a bunch of speak engagements, whatever it is, right? And then what happens is it gets in the hands of your readers. And the first person it's gonna get into is the hands of early adopters. So this is an established trend in, I think it comes from tech or marketing and sales, retail sales, but you get people that are like early adopters to you and that are like just the biggest fans, and they're gonna go out and buy a lot of books. Um, and that's great. But what that'll indicate then, let's say I go down the street here to my independent bookstore, and I say, Hey, I would love, you know, 10 copies of We Shall Be Millionaires, and then my friend down the street also goes down and says, Hey, I have like a couple copies of We Shall Be Millionaires. They might stock We Should All Be Millionaires and see if it says sells through, right? Because independent bookstores all create their own inventory, so it's not like a set range of books. That's why independent bookstores don't have every single book ever, they have books they think they can sell. So, you know, if I'm doing that, that creates a little bit of a wave. And if that book consistently sells through that store, even if it's one copy, two copies, three copies a month, it's gonna keep being in that store. So then you're gonna have a couple of snowball effects. First of all, you're gonna have customer reviews that are great. You're gonna say, hey, you really should read this book. You're gonna have, you know, podcast appearances that people are listening to five years after the fact. You're gonna have shares, you're gonna have booksellers in the stores hand selling saying, Hey, you know, I loved Rich AF by Vivian too. And you should read it if you're looking for a book on how to manage money. You'll have those little shelf talkers, those are those little tags saying, you know, Beth at the indie bookstore loves this book. There is that snowball effect. And you get a little bit of that too from the bestseller list. I think people think this is more magic than it is, but you do get a little bit of that from the bestseller list if only because bestseller list lend credibility. Same thing with like having enough sales to be in the airport store or having enough sales to be in, you know, secondary markets like you know, retail shops and yoga studios and gift shops and things like that. But all of that, if we back up that train, all of it comes from you, right? Because if you hadn't gone out and sold it, if you hadn't established a big enough audience to get the deal in the first place, none of that would have happened at all. So I have a funny story about this. Um, and I feel like I tell this story a lot, but I'm gonna keep telling it because it's awesome. And also this book is awesome. So, How to Retire Overseas by Kathleen Peticord. So when I was at Penguin, I edited this book. I did not come up with the idea to acquire it. My boss did, um, the publisher at the time came to me and said, Hey, reach out to these people and and see if they want to write a book. And so I literally called Kathleen up and said, Hey, do you want to write a book? And she said, Yes, of course.

unknown 21:38

Okay.

Rapid Recap And Next Steps

Listener Questions And Free Quiz CTA

SPEAKER_00 21:39

And she is an old G of online marketing, man. She had an email list in like 2011. Okay. So she and I, you know, she worked on this book, she wrote it. It's great, it's a great book. We put it out in hardcover. And this book, let's see, when was this book published? This book was published and 2011. So that means the original book came out in 2010, which means she actually had an email list in 2009. So let me back that up. Wow, how early is that? It's like the time of logs and things. So anyway, we we published the book in hardcover in 2010. And it does okay, but not anything crazy, but enough to justify a paperback. Should do an episode on that too. Why? Some books go in paperback and some some don't. But I went to the paperback, and about six months in, the publisher of the paperback imprint that I worked for at the time, an imprint called Plume, which was within Penguin and is now within Penguin Random House. She called me into her office and she said, Hey, why is this book selling? And I was like, I don't know. Let me go ask the author, right? So I go back to my office and I email Kathleen and I say, Hey, your book's selling great. Congratulations. What's up? And she said, Oh, yes, we're just doing this big launch. We had this big conference. We had to buy like a thousand books. And you know, we put it in with Barnes and Noble because I didn't want to bother with penguin, blah, blah, blah. So I go back to Kat uh my boss, who's at the at the time is named Katherine. Catherine, Katherine, the publisher. Kathleen, the author, uh, said, hey, Kathleen said she just had her big conference and she's got this like lunch going on, and they're buying a bunch of bulk buys, and then also like she's just getting a lot of visibility right now. And they were like, oh, awesome, great. And this book has been one of my best-selling books of my entire career. I forget where it's at, but it's definitely over a hundred thousand copies. And that author didn't have a million followers, that author didn't have, you know, like an amazing media, like she just has a really good business, and so that's really, really important. But that snowball effect came from her. Like, we didn't know where it came from as the publisher because we couldn't see all of that. But one quick email to her was like, oh yeah, I did this, and then now we're seeing all this, like basically gent grassroots, organic word of mouth. Crazy, right? So it's awesome. All right, let's go back. So that was number seven. So we can recap. In this episode, I shared the seven things nobody is telling you, I mean, other than me, about writing a book that people want to buy and that eventually becomes a bestseller. So let's recap those top seven things that I've told you but nobody else is saying online. Number one, writing a book, it's the easiest part. Number two, most bestsellers are years, if not decades, in the making. Number three, readers do not care about your story. They care about what they're gonna get out of buying and reading your book. Number four, the best-selling books solve simple ass problems. Number five, the most successful nonfiction authors are consistently focused on growing their business. And the reason why is because that grows their audience, it grows their readership, it grows their book sales, and it grows sales of everything else. Number six, the number one source of book sales, it's gonna be you. Number seven, until you hit an inflection point, right? The number one source of book sales is going to be you as the author until you hit an inflection point where word of mouth sells your book. But make no mistake, the beginning of any snowball effect you get is still gonna be you. Okay, it's still gonna come from you. Now, it's your turn because I want to know what you want to know. So, what questions do you have about writing a book that people want to buy? What questions do you have about making your book idea a New York Times bestseller? Feel free to drop me a line, leave me a voicemail, comment on my socials. Links as always are in the show notes. And until next time, 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 MeganStevenson.com forward slash quiz. That's M-E-G H A N S T E V E N S O N dot com forward slash quiz. See you next time.