On October 27, Martin Cloake takes our one-day course pitching and marketing a book, a practical guide on getting from the idea to the final publication.
In the next in our series of interviews with the trainers, Journalism.co.uk asks Cloake what he has had published and what the commonest pitfalls are on the way to becoming a book author:
What books have you written?
I've now had a number of books published, all on football and mainly about Spurs, the team I support. I avoided doing sports journalism for years as football was my relaxation away from the trade, but the old cliché of 'write about what you know' kicked in.
I've been lucky enough to find a great co-author, Adam Powley, and we pushed each other to pitch and deliver the first book, 'We Are Tottenham' (Mainstream, 2004). It features interviews with a variety of Spurs fans interwoven with the story of a dramatic season at the club - there's invariably drama at Spurs, usually as a result of the club shooting itself in the foot. We wanted to make the fans the main subject, and to challenge the idea that a football crowd was a single mass. We wanted to highlight the different people and personalities to demonstrate the game's appeal, and also to retell some of the great stories we'd heard or been part of over 25 years of following the team. We seemed to succeed, and were delighted when Hunter Davies - a bit of a hero for us both - agreed to write a foreword in which he said, "This is the kind of book every football club should have."
As a result of that book's success, we were approached by Vision Sports Publishing to write 'The Spurs Miscellany' (VSP, 2006), a compendium of facts and stories about the club, which has just gone into a fourth edition and is one of VSP's bestsellers. In turn, this enabled us to persuade VSP to commission 'The Boys from White Hart Lane' (VSP, 2008), the story of the great Spurs team of 1978-84 told through a series of interviews with the players. It was a real treat to do this, meeting the heroes of the team we'd grown up watching - players like Steve Perryman, Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa.
We were also asked to contribute significant sections of a book called 'Football, The Ultimate Guide' (Dorling Kindersley, 2008), an annual about the world game aimed at 8-12 year-olds, as part of an editorial team of five.
An unusual project I was asked to work on was 'The Tottenham Hotspur Opus' (Kraken Sport & Media, 2008), a high-end project commissioned by the club to mark its 125th anniversary. The Opus series are pretty extraordinary, each one comprising 300,000 words and 1,500 pictures, measuring up at half a metre square, and weighing 30kg. The print and repro quality is excellent, as you'd expect from something which retails at prices starting from £4,000! I was the project's consultant editor, advising on content, recommending writers, and contributing 23,000-word features including interviews with Martin Peters, Martin Chivers and - that man - Hunter Davies.
I've just finished writing my first solo project, a follow-up to the miscellany series for VSP, called 'The Pocket Book of Spurs' (VSP, 2009) which is due out this October. And there are another couple of projects in the pipeline.
What's your top tip for getting a book from an idea to a well formulated pitch?
When you can work up a reasonably detailed chapter-by-chapter plan, you know you've got a sustainable idea. When you can concisely identify a clearly-defined target market you can get a publisher's attention.
What are the most common mistakes made in a book pitch, in your experience?
Using the phrase, 'this will appeal to everybody'. Clearly, nothing will appeal to everybody. That's why we live in a fascinating, stimulating world with plenty of scope to inspire good books.
As self-publishing tools become more widely available online, are there new digital ways journalists/writers can market their books that you'd recommend?
The technology now available makes it much more possible to produce good-quality material and sell it to a potentially large market. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about the media is aware of that. My view is that this provides a greater opportunity for authors to direct the marketing of their books, and to mine the potential of contacts and communities.
Personally, I'm still a little wary of self-publishing. An established publisher can exercise greater rigour and push authors harder to produce a better end product - with the best will in the world, we all tend to be a bit soft on our own copy. Established publishers also have better access to the means of distribution than solo individuals, something often forgotten when we congratulate ourselves on the control we have over the means of production.
A full list of Journalism.co.uk's courses can be see on the training pages. For more information or to book a place, contact ed at journalism.co.uk.
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
