Selling Your Book

Not all writing needs to be sold. There are so many reasons to write and methods by which to do it that have nothing to do with the free market, and thank the universe for that.

But if you have a book idea or you've written a book, and you're interested in selling this book to a mainstream publisher, then at some point in the process you will have to figure out how to sell your book. And I don't mean how you literally get the book into a reader's hands (although that is the end goal here), but how you describe your book in a way that makes a book agent want to read it, then a book editor, and then, finally, that coveted reader.

Some writers like to think about this from the initial conceptualization phase while others write the book first and then figure out what it is and how to sell it. Either way, this is an important step in the process of getting your book published, where you get to decide how people see your book before they've read the first page.

In this seminar, we will discuss how to describe our books or book ideas in the most effective, engaging way, and then work on formulating our own pitches that we will then share with the group to practice selling our ideas and to receive valuable feedback. We will also discuss what makes a quality book concept, and other publishing industry insight that I've gleaned from my experiences as both a published author and a publishing professional.

Alli Dwyer grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia where her family has lived for generations. She took fiction and poetry workshops at UVA during undergrad, where she wrote her first gothic pieces. After beginning her career in the trenches of NYC production companies and literary agencies, she moved to Los Angeles and now works as a book packager for an entertainment company. She has developed, edited, and sold many books across age groups and genres, including a NYT bestseller and Edgar Award winner. Her debut novel Strange Folk was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2024.