So you’ve got a great idea for a book in the counselling and psychotherapy field. You’re all excited. You want to write. What do you do next to turn your idea into a fully-fledged publication?
Who’s it for?
That’s great you’ve got an idea. But a lot of what you need to do is to turn things on their head and ask yourself, ‘Who’s going to want this book?’ Unfortunately, all the excitement and passion we can feel inside ourselves doesn’t necessarily translate into a viable book for a publisher. Their first question is going to be, ‘Who’s going to want to buy this?’ So you really need to be clear about that. Is it for trainees? Is it for practitioners? On person-centred courses? On integrative courses? And you need to be realistic here. Bear in mind that people have hundreds of books on their ‘to buy’ list, so why would they want to buy yours? A book that is targeted towards trainees is likely to be particularly appealing to publishers, because that tends to be their biggest market. And if it’s the kind of thing that would be a core text on a module reading list, bingo, that’s exactly the kind of thing that many publishers will be looking for.
What else is out there?
You need to know the field. What other kind of books are like it? If there’s something out there similar, that doesn’t necessarily mean that yours is a no goer, but you need to make it clear to the publishers what the unique selling point (USP) of your book is going to be. Maybe it’s more accessible than the previous texts. Maybe it’s for work with children rather than adults? But you need to clearly state to the publishers why your book will fill a gap in the market that isn’t currently filled. And that means more than just quoting what you’re already aware of. It means doing some research on sites like Amazon or Google to have a really good rummage around to find out what’s out there so far.
What have you written before?
Publishers will want to be reassured that you can write. If you’ve written articles or journal papers before, that’s great; and a book or two will really convince a publisher that you’re going to produce what you say you will. If you’ve never written before, a book is a tough place to start, and you’re probably better off writing and submitting a few articles first—say for Therapy Today—to get a sense of how you feel about writing and what kind of feedback you get. Anyone, I’m sure, can write brilliantly, but believing we can write brilliantly isn’t the same as actually doing it. It requires the ability to be able put things in clear and succinct ways. And, more than anything else I think, it requires the kind of dogged, slightly OCD personality that is determined to go on and on even when you’re exhausted and tired and just want a glass of wine and sleep. If you’re not sure that’s you, then best to find out first.
co-authored and edited BOOKS
Writing a book with one or more other colleagues can be a great way to take a project forward: not only do you split the work, but you can get to have some great dialogues along the way. The obvious thing to say, though, is to make sure that you really do get along and you’ve agreed the basics of who’s doing what, etc. You really don’t want to get halfway through the book and discover that you’ve got completely different ideas about how it should end up, or your co-author’s moved to Goa and wants to spend the rest of their life doing yoga instead of writing.
You may also be thinking about putting together an edited collection of chapters on a particular topic. Again, that does split the work and means that you don’t have to know everything yourself; but don’t underestimate the effort of identifying, then editing, a whole series of chapters—and liaising with 10-20 authors along the way. Sometimes, when I’ve done that, it’s felt like it would have been easier to write the whole thing myself! Also, publishers don’t tend to like edited books as much as single or co-authored texts. They’re not usually as coherent, or as flowing, and generally they don’t sell as well. So if you do go down that route, I’d suggest taking a strong editorial lead, to make sure that everyone is writing to the same brief and same overall aims.
Which publisher?
There’s lots of different publishers out there in the counselling and psychotherapy field and you’ll need to decide which one to approach first. It’s ‘bad form’ to approach more than one publisher at any point in time, so you’ll need to start with one and, if they don’t like it, go on to another, etc. To find the right publisher, have a look at similar books in the field and see who they are published by. You may want to start there. If it’s a general counselling or psychotherapy textbook, particularly for trainees, Sage might be a great place to start. If it’s a bit more specialised, and particularly related to person-centred therapy or critical perspectives, PCCS Books could a very good choice. Routledge have a very wide ranging list and tend to publish a bit more academic, and specialised, books than Sage. And then there’s many others—like Palgrave, Open University Press, Oxford University Press—all with their own areas of focus and speciality. If you’re not sure, just go to their websites and see what kinds of book they publish. Do any of these look like yours?
If you know people who have written books with these publishers, you may also want to have a chat with them to see how things went. Were they good to work with, were they reliable and timely? Is there a lot of staff turnover? My own books have been mostly with Sage, and I have to say that they have been brilliant to work with. Not just professional; but supportive, friendly, and always encouraging. And they have the best parties (in fact, a colleague of mine recently wanted to publish with Sage just so that she could get invited!). I’m also very fond of PCCS Books and would definitely recommend them as a publisher to consider approaching. They’re a lot smaller than Sage, but have a real dedication to the books that they publish and care about the counselling and psychotherapy field very deeply. That makes a real difference when you feel like you are writing with a publisher that cares about the field—not just in it for the money.
Write the proposal
Then you need to write a proposal. This is, perhaps, 10 pages or so, in which you describe what the book is, who it is for, a synopsis of chapters, and a CV, etc. I remember writing my first book proposal back in about 1988, and the mum of one of my friends, who had published with Penguin, made the point (very nicely) that if the writing in the proposal was that bad, how were the publishers ever going to think I could write a good book! So spend some time crafting the proposal and showing, straight away, that you can write.
Importantly, a lot of publishers will have their own format that they want proposals in. For instance, check out the Sage guidelines here. Even if you don’t want to publish with Sage, that will give you some great ideas about the kinds of things you need to cover in your proposal.
Generally publishers will want to see some examples of your writings. Again, send in something that reflects the kind of thing you want to write in the book. if you don’t have that yet, you may want to spend some time developing it before you write your proposal—just so you can show to yourself, as well as the publisher, that you can and do want to write in that way. An example chapter or two can be a great thing to show to the publisher that the book can really work.
Of course, you could always write the book first and then send the whole manuscript to a publisher, but that's not always appreciated by publishers and can lead to a lot of wasted effort. Usually, publishers want to be involved in the development of a book, and will have a lot of good ideas about how to orientate it to their market.
Do I need an agent?
In this field, almost certainly not. If you think you’ve got a brilliant idea for a best selling ‘pop psych’ book, say for Penguin, then you may want to find a literary agent (you can search on the internet), but the amount of money in psychotherapy and counselling books means that it’s generally not worth it. And, yup, that’s right, not much money. So if you’re thinking that writing books in counselling and psychotherapy is going to make you your fortune, you’ll need to look elsewhere!
What next?
If the publishers think your proposal may be of interest to them, what they’ll then do is to send it out to some reviewers to see what they think, and to get feedback. You normally hear back in a few months. It’s not unusual to get rejected, particularly if you haven’t written before, and, of course, the thing is not to get demoralised but to learn from the feedback and see how you can revise your proposal for the next publisher.
If the publishers do want to take the book on, they’ll then send you out a contract to sign with various financial and timescale agreements. These are normally pretty straightforward, but a key thing to check is the royalties—that is, how much of the book sales you actually get. Normally, this starts off around 7%, so if a book sells for around £25, you’ll get about £2 per book. If you haven’t seen or signed one of these contracts before, try and see if there’s someone you know who has who can have a quick look over it and just check that it all looks OK.
Do I have to have an established publisher?
Absolutely not. There’s many ways to publish a book now that don’t involve going through the traditional route. It’s very easy, for instance, to do some self-formatting and then publish the book on your own website. Or just write the book as a series of blog posts. And that could be a good way of building up to a publication through more established routes over time. For instance, with my latest book on Integrating counselling and psychotherapy, I’d started off just writing a 20,000 word monograph to get the ideas out, and I put them on the internet. It was only several years later that I came back to this and fleshed it out into a full, 110,000 word text.
Is it all worth it?
Hm…
I couldn’t say it any other way than, for me, it’s an absolute bastard writing books. It’s a massive amount of work, commitment, focus, struggle—intellectually and emotionally. There’s time when I’ve felt completely out at sea, out of my depth, drowning. I’ve hated the book, hated myself for thinking I could write it, hated the whole process of sitting down for hours a day and trying to scratch out something of a meaning. But when you get that book finally in your hands, or when people say to you things like, ‘Ah, that book you wrote really helped me,’ or, ‘it made such a difference to my work,’ it does feel incredibly rewarding. Personally, I feel like, if I hadn’t of written, my life would feel so much more impoverished: I had so many things I wanted to say, and having that out there, in the public domain, forever, feels an amazing privilege. And it does make me want to say more things, to write more, to continue and deepen that dialogue with the world. So, yes, I guess, definitely worth it. Absolutely. But that’s just for me. And working out whether, for you, the pros are really worth the cons is, perhaps, the first step in the whole process.
Very best of luck with it.