How I Secured a Big Five Publishing Deal with Almost No Social Media Platform

[This essay is re-published from it's original home at Jane Friedman's blog, a wealth of information for writers.]

The fairy tale

Once upon a time (on May 30, 2024) I sent the email that would change my life, “Dear Editor, please find attached my book proposal.” In late June the editor responded saying that he was interested and on the 30th of July he sent me an offer and a contract. Here I was, a previously self-published author with no significant social media following, holding a contract from a Big Five publisher.

I danced in the kitchen. I cried. At my daughter’s suggestion I printed out the email and carried it around with me, petting it lovingly between meetings. I then leveraged my contract with Little, Brown UK to secure a fabulous agent (Hi Amanda!) who negotiated an even better deal. When I signed my book and agent contracts, I had 130 subscribers to my Substack mailing list and 450 followers on Instagram. Now, almost a year from those fateful moments, I stand on the precipice of launching that book into the world. I bet I’ll live happily ever after.

Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if after reading this essay you knew the secret magic to help you unlock your own version of the same dream?

I’m going to say something hard and true…..This is a fairy tale. The facts that I reported are accurate. But there’s so much I left out. I do want to help you fulfill your own writing dream. And I’m here to humbly suggest that the parts of my story that I deleted from the fairy tale version are much more important to helping you find your way.

The full tale

Let’s start again.

Most of my adult life I have yearned to be a published author (as I bet is true for many readers here). My biggest fear has always been that I’d go to my grave having never written a book. But for at least a decade, I spent more time talking about writing than actually just writing. I was almost 40 years old before I shifted from contemplation and worry to action. The fairy tale looks fast and smooth but the real story started seven years ago and had lots of bumps and stumbles along the way.

• In 2018, I bought a self-guided Jane Friedman course on writing a book proposal. I worked on a proposal in fits and starts while parenting a 6 year old and running a business.
• In 2019, I cold-emailed a writing coach who was thanked in the acknowledgments of a book by my favorite author. I worked with Shoshana Alexander for months on a half formed book idea.
• In 2020, the world fell still and my life became very small. The emotional and physical health of my whole family went up and down and up and down. Then I got an exciting new job. Then I moved to a new county.
• In 2022 I reached out to Shoshana, the writing coach, again with 40 pages of tormented poetry, which became the raw material for my first book. We formed it into something useful. I submitted it regularly and widely, racking up over a dozen rejections from magazines and chapbook competitions
• In 2023, I self-published The Ballad of Burnout. I hacked my way through a self-made book launch campaign and I paid for a professional Goodreads review. The reviewer gave The Ballad of Burnout two out of five stars, calling it “detached, a little flat, disjointed.” Happily, other readers had a different experience and over two dozen of them took the time to leave glowing reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

And I just kept writing. I wrote another book, then I wrote a book proposal. Yes, I know, that’s the wrong order. But I think I needed to prove to myself that I could actually write another whole book fueled by something less toxic than burnout and adrenaline. I stalked manuscript wishlists and agent profiles and the depths of query tracker. I queried dozens of agents. After each batch of rejections, I revised the book proposal based on what I was reading and learning. I honed and pivoted my query letter and submission to match my next best sense of a better market fit.

After 30 agent rejections, I revised my plan again. I asked my friends who were published authors whether they’d be willing to introduce me to their editors. I received four warm introductions to editors at small and large publishing houses. Three introductions were met with silence.

For the final editor introduction, I re-pitched the book as an illustrated self-help guide. I was reading an illustrated book adaptation at the time and I thought, “Oh why not?” I knew the editor had a track record with illustrated nonfiction and I was excited to see how clear design and illustrative support made a book so much more accessible (a good fit for my audience of overwhelmed readers).

This is where the fairy tale starts. I emailed Andrew McAleer, an editor from Little, Brown UK, and he expressed interest in my proposal. I asked him to give me two weeks to try to find representation. I re-queried all the agents that I could. Four agents expressed interest, two declined when they learned it was Little, Brown UK (not USA). Two video calls later, Amanda Bernardi at Highline Literary Collective agreed to be my agent. As a reminder, when I signed my book and agent contracts, I had 130 subscribers to my Substack mailing list and 450 followers on Instagram.

Even now, I feel nervous saying this aloud. I know it’s irrational to think that these two professionals “just missed” that I am not bringing a ready audience of hundreds of thousands of customers. But what if they did? What if they read this and the truth is finally unveiled? What if they, in perfect cinematic synchrony in London and New York, pause midstep, wrinkle their brows, and realize in a blinding flash that this fever dream of betting on Kerry Makin-Byrd and Start Here: A Practical Guide for the Overwhelmed is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mistake?

What would happen then, if they both cancelled the contracts? (Warning, I’m about to say something insane and bold and true that I believe 0.01% more than I buy into all my fears.)

Nothing would happen. Nothing devastating would happen.

I would cry. Of course I’d be sad and embarrassed. I’d end up having a lot of awkward conversations uninviting people to my book launch. And I would keep writing. I would figure out how to get Start Here out into the world. Because its lessons helped me. And I think it might help others too.

Now (finally!) we arrive at the most important part of this essay, how my author journey can inform your own continued author progress. I’m going to suggest three core lessons:

1. Expect failure and stop thinking about it as failure.

If you happen to be counting, my author journey from 2018 to today included at least 51 failures (I just remembered that I didn’t tell you about all the people I asked to provide Ballad of Burnout endorsements who said ‘no.’ We’re not even counting those). At least fifty-one ‘no’s’ across the past six years. My guess is your story of up and downs may be similar.

If we both keep writing, growing, and working there will be hundreds of no’s in our future. That is the way it is.

But I want to suggest that these experiences aren’t failures at all. I invite you to see each ‘no’ as a chance to learn something useful, either about yourself, your product, or the market.

2. Be clear eyed about your own marketing strengths and weaknesses.

Each failure can provide us with useful information about where our expectations or offerings are not matching reality. Our job is to look fearlessly at that information so we can keep iterating.

I’m using the short hand of “marketing strengths and weaknesses” but strengths are simply places where what you own or offer fits well with the book market as it stands now. Weaknesses are the aspects of your work and your business that don’t fit well with the current needs of the market.

You know my biggest author weakness (or misfit with the current market). I have no significant marketable platform. Isn’t it cringe that I’m talking about this with you? Aren’t we all trained to hide our biggest, most glaring weaknesses? In life? In work? In our book pitches?

I understand the rationale for this training, and I think it limits us.  In life. In work. In our book pitches.

Instead, I suggest that you practice radical clear-seeing so you can be ruthlessly (and lovingly) honest with yourself about the strengths and weaknesses of your mindset, your work, and your offering to a publisher. Then, when you have a good sense of your own strengths and weaknesses (for this moment in time), you can practice the classic psychological choice: to accept or to change.

• What weaknesses are you willing to change? Think market fit, building reputation, and demonstrating an audience interested in what you have to say.
• What weaknesses are you not interested in changing, so instead you will accept the limitations that come with those weaknesses?
• And the most fun, what strengths will you amplify and leverage to reach your own definition of success?

If I think about my own work so far, here’s my own radically honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses:

• Weakness that I was willing to change: I changed my Start Here book proposal a number of times, informed by the rare but specific feedback I got from agents, colleagues, or my own reading as I learned more about what publishers are looking for.
• Weakness that I was not willing to change: The Ballad of Burnout was written in this funky lyrical poem stream of consciousness style. I wasn’t willing to change it so I accepted that it would likely never be traditionally published, given I don’t have formal poetry training, the language is pretty but novice, and I don’t bring my own platform to support sales.
• Leveraging my strengths: I hold a number of strengths and privileges. I’m white and commercially attractive. I have academic training and a degree that bolsters my legitimacy to give people advice. I don’t have a strong platform myself but I do know a number of people with larger platforms.

Here’s how I described this in my book proposal: “Kerry is fortunate to have many connections in the wellness industry and access to multiple communities in her primary and secondary markets. These connections will be utilized in a wide variety of ways to fuel platform building, pre-sales, and longevity of book sales. A brief (but not exhaustive) list of major marketing efforts are described below.“ I then go on to list 16 people I have a one-degree or two-degree connections with who I requested endorsements and book marketing support from.

Some of these people have already sent me an endorsement for Start Here. I’m booked on one friend’s podcast a few months from now. This is awesome and I’m grateful. And even among these strong connections, some of those 16 people have already said no. No to endorsements, no to support. Remember, none of this is a failure, it’s just information.

Which brings me to my final point. I think the most important strengths I bring to this work are tenacity, grit, and buoyancy. It is the first thing Jane Friedman says in The Business of Being a Writer, MINDSET MATTERS. I’m thrilled to share the good news that this mindset can be built over time, honed like a muscle. Here’s how:

3. Soothe, transcend, then move—again and again.

The main point of Start Here is that a century of science points to three key steps to managing overwhelm and creating an intentional, flourishing life.

• First, we soothe ourselves so that we are calm, grounded, and curious while facing the challenges of our lives.
• Next, we can transcend the details of a single perspective, instead using our amazing ability to integrate knowledge, create multiple perspectives, and be kind to ourselves as we examine things as they are (instead of how we deeply wish they were).
• And finally, empowered with clear-seeing and new ideas, we can move toward a future we hope for, one small step at a time.

Specifically, what did this look like on my own author journey?

Soothe: I wrote most of The Ballad of Burnout sitting on a yoga ball, bouncing frenetically and chewing three pieces of bubble gum at a time. I was consumed with fear but I desperately wanted to keep writing. Now, with a little more writing practice (and thus less fear), my soothing skills are a bit more subtle. Mid-typing, I pause and breathe deeply when I notice my shoulder tensing and creeping up to my ears. When I feel stuck, I walk around the house or I repeat my writing mantra, “one small step, one small word, one sentence.”

Transcend: Journaling is one of the most useful ways that I can give myself some distance and perspective. I write about my fears that Amanda and Andrew will realize I’m a poor bet. I write about how disappointed I am that X said they won’t write me an endorsement. I collect piles of quotes from other authors who have struggled too. Here are two of my favorites:

• “But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.” —Charles Darwin, two years after he published On the Origin of Species
• “I work nonstop on my short story, crashing through a fifth draft, then a sixth, oscillating between exhilaration and despair. One minute I think, This here, this is a good sentence. The next I am on the brink of throwing the whole thing away. But I am used to this by now.” —Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize Winner and National Book Award finalist

Each of these touchstones helps me remember that I’m not alone. It helps me remember how lucky I am, how lucky we all are. How incredibly lucky are we? To practice an art that requires such little money and tools to create. To have the opportunity today or tomorrow or someday in the future, to puddle words into paragraphs of meaning.

Move: I keep focused on my guiding principles: to provide value, to help people make sense of the world while crafting a new and more hopeful world into being with my writing. Then I take one small step, one doable step today.

In Start Here, I say “Iterate and keep going. The perfect first plan knows it is imperfect. Channel the lessons of Darwin. Behaviour change depends on three key skills: variation, selection and retention. As you iterate and progress, choose what is working (selection) and keep doing that (retention). Make small improvements based on what you observe (variation). On and on, over and over, till you reach your goal.”

There is no ending

In The Ballad of Burnout, I tell the story of the Golden Buddha or Phra Phuttha Maha Suwanna Patimakon.

In Thailand there is a pure gold statue of the Buddha

For hundreds of years it was encased in clay and bits of colored glass to hide its value

During a move, the large hulking relic was dropped, smashing to the ground

After the fall, the dull armor fractured, falling away in chunks

Underneath layers of clay movers found the golden statue

Yes, maybe clay is my degrees, my ”noble” profession

I feel the cracking facade but have no faith about what is underneath

I am no more (or less) a gold statue than any of us

Don’t be distracted by the clay and bits of colored glass, by the apparent fairy tale versions of other people’s success stories. They’re illusions and tell us very little that is useful for our own work. Instead, scratch deeper, look for the gold. With courage and clear seeing, you can assess your own situation, accepting what you are unwilling to change, changing what will optimize success, and (most fun) doubling down on the wild strengths in yourself and your work.

You can do this. You are already doing this. I’m cheering for you.

Learn more about Start Here: A Practical Guide for the Overwhelmed by Dr. Kerry Makin-Byrd.