Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5240
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The up-hill battle you face is that there's a lot of material out there and publishers can afford to be choosy. Based on observation only (I haven't tried to get essay collections published nor am I a publisher, but I've watched others pursue this), publishers are looking for a unifying theme that can be used for marketing. With Christopher Hitchens or Jon Stewart that unifying theme is the author -- people have heard of those authors and are naturally going to pay attention. They've never heard of me or (I presume) you.

A unifying theme can work even for an author who is previously unpublished, but it requires an established base or a compelling hook. For example, Gordon Atkinson sold _Real Live Preacher_ (now out of print), a collection of essays from his blog (with some new material), and Michael Burstein sold [I Remember the Future](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0981639062), a collection of stories that had been published in magazines and had all been nominated for awards. Michael Lopp published _Managing Humans_ and _Being Geek_, collections that originated on his [blog](http://www.randsinrepose.com/), and Johanna Rothman published a book about hiring technical people based on entries in her [blog](http://www.jrothman.com/blog/htp/). In cases like those, people are attracted to the theme and have also had the opportunity to sample.

In your case, you offer a collection of essays that may be individually compelling, but they aren't tied together somehow, they haven't been previously published (I presume) and vetted by the public, and (I presume) you are not already known personally. That's going to be a hard sell. Things you might do to increase your odds, all of which will take time, include:

- Seek publication of individual essays in appropriate venues.

- Blog, and drive enough traffic to that blog to build the beginnings of a base. (How to do that is beyond the scope of this question.)

- Self-publish some of your material (e-books make this easier than it once was) so that you can point to those sales when approaching publishers later.

Original score: 3