September 29, 2010 
DG&B 
While reading today’s AOL headlines, I came across this concise summary about getting published written by Lisa Johnson Mandell, a published nonfiction author. I don’t think she says anything we haven’t heard before, but it still bears repeating, and she does sum it up pretty nicely for the novice author. Plus she offers some direct advice from her reputable agent, which is valuable and right on target. The title of her piece is a bit misleading since she talks at the beginning about self-publishing a book, which she’s right might be easier than you’d think, but the suggestion that going the more traditional agent and publisher route is easier than you think is a bit of a stretch. It’s harder than ever in many ways with the market being so competitive, and finding an agent and publisher requires a lot of things to go write (a pun, not a typo). Enjoy!
Category Archives: advice
The best page you’ve ever written (you hope)
In the interest of adding to my formal list entitled Things I Think Are Genius, I submit the soon-to-be-launched website called page99test.com, as spotlighted in this piece from the Guardian. The website takes the recommendation once given by English novelist Ford Madox Ford that readers “open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you” and puts it into practice. The development of page99test.com aims to examine this concept by challenging authors to submit the ninety-ninth page of their work for readers to assess.
The concept seems alternately fantastic and flawed. By the ninety-ninth page, most if not all of a book’s central characters and plot lines should be established. But at the same time, is one page enough of a snapshot to make the reader want to dive in, start to finish? It just might be that the ninety-ninth page of any given book happens to be the one page wherein absolutely nothing constructive occurs. Then what? Definitely something to ponder as your typing finally breaks on to page ninety-nine in Microsoft Word.
Better off dead?
I was heartened to read Leila Sales’ piece in last week’s Publishers Weekly about the inordinate number of dead parents in children’s literature, for it’s a subject I used to bring up myself when talking to writers’ groups. My lame attempt at a laugh-line was always that if YA novels were the real world, no-one would become parents, because the chances of survival were minimal at best. Leila does a wonderful job of identifying why writers tend to kill off parents—lazy writing, instant sympathy, parents are dull—while also offering some practical solutions for how to keep the parents alive without making them major characters.
So, just to add my own two cents: if you’re a teen writer struggling with parent characters, instead of killing them off, get ‘em divorced. First, it’s more believable to kids who are typically aware of divorce issues they or their friends may have in their real lives. And second, divorce offers tons of deliciously messy plot possibilities, while death usually leads to the standard scenes of mourning, loss, regret—and a big yawn from readers.
However you handle parents, though, it’s worth putting in the effort to keep them alive not only for the health of your manuscript, but also for your success at the submission stage. For me, announcing in chapter one that dad’s in the ground almost always leads to the rejection pile, regardless of the rest of the story—it’s a pet peeve right up there with spunky, redheaded middle-grade heroines. But that’s another blog post….
How to be rejected
Back in May, Jane asked you guys what your biggest query mistakes were, and many of you were quite eager to share your horror submission stories with us. Hopefully reading those horror stories gave you a bit of advice on how to improve your queries.
But, if you’re looking for advice on how to turn an acceptance into a rejection, look no further than the staff over at Writer’s Relief, whose sarcastic tips for failing (or, succeeding—in receiving rejection letters!) are published on the Huffington Post.
My favorite tip for rejection has got to be taking it personally. There’s nothing like an author who gets politely turned down and then seeks payback!
Going through this list, what have you been most guilty of?
Stephen King breaks it down
Our client and friend Kathryn Casey posted a link on Facebook the other day to a blog featuring a 2005 piece by Stephen King that promises to teach you everything you need to know about being a successful writer. Now, Stephen (if I may call him that) and I have always had a troubled relationship. No, not like that! I’ve never met the man. Even though I’ve only ever seen him in person across a crowded Javits Center at BEA back when it was the ABA, like many of you I’ve followed his literary peregrinations with great interest despite the fact that I find every new book by him increasingly impossible to wade through. My feeling is that his prodigious talent as a storyteller and prose stylist notwithstanding, he just misses being one of the “greats” (you know who they are). In recent years, however, I’ve become a fan of his EW columns and I always enjoy his quirky take on pop culture. The guy’s smart and successful and he obviously has a lot of wisdom to impart but he does it in an accessible manner and never seems to take himself too seriously.
Whether you’re a fan of Stephen King’s work or not, however, you have to admit that he has fashioned a brilliant career as a writer and these tips are both amusing and dead-on. Except for #11, of course. You do need an agent to turn everything else to gold—maybe not when SK was starting out, but definitely now that the business has become a multi-headed hydra.
What do you guys think of SK’s advice? Anything that especially jumps out at you here?
Brand and platform building basics
We talk about a wide array of publishing topics on our DGLM blog, and in thinking about what to write for my longer entry, I looked back at our marketing and publicity posts and realized there was an opportunity to cover some new ground by discussing brand or platform building for nonfiction authors. I feel like so much of my time lately is spent speaking with and/or writing to nonfiction aspiring authors who are interested in writing a book, but are working on building their brand or platform to get to the point in their career where a book is viable. We are not branding managers, but helping authors to build their brands and platforms has become an important part of our job, in particular for nonfiction authors—advising, coaching, and making suggestions about ways in which an author can build their brand effectively and across multiple platforms. I’ve begun describing the process as akin to making a pizza, with the book project being one piece of the bigger pie. In order for the pie to be complete, all of the other pieces need to be in place. This is a different model than it used to be. When I first started agenting twelve years ago, many authors were able to build their brand by starting with their book project if they had a great new idea, or a fresh twist on an existing one. The book then gave them the credibility and opportunity to branch out into other areas. That is no longer an option for authors and publishers. Instead, authors must present publishers with a publicity and marketing plan in their book proposals that rivals a pr firm’s. It has to be professional, polished, and very, very thorough. It should list ways in which the author has established their brand or platform in three key areas: print, television, and online. Print consists primarily of magazines and newspapers; television can be anything from local or national tv segments (think the Today show) to hosting or co-hosting a reality show; and online has endless possibilities, from blogs to websites to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, there are countless online opportunities to be mined.
To give you a couple of examples of very different authors who have worked hard on their brand building, and done it with some measure of success, there’s Tori Spelling, who has a new book out, which talks on her book’s promo copy about being her own brand: “It’s not every Hollywood starlet whose name greets you on a Virgin Airways flight into la-la land. But Tori Spelling has come to accept that her life is a spectacle. Her name is her brand, and business is booming. Too bad when your job is to be yourself, you can’t exactly take a break.” She’s a celebrity (even if most would consider her C-list), so it’s easier for someone like her, but she’s still taken her celebrity and used it in a numbers of ways to expand her brand. Books, products, shows, etc. and she seems to be continuing to come up with new ideas all the time.
Another author who strikes me as having done effective brand building recently is Zac Bissonnette, author of Debt Free U. Here’s a brief piece about him and his book that describes how he has been doing financial writing since high school. I’ve been seeing him and his message in all three key categories in recent weeks since his book’s publication. He’s no Suze Orman yet, but he’s well on his way considering he’s still in college!
In my own personal experience, a mother-daughter memoir I recently sold was the result of over two years of hard work the authors undertook after a branding/platform building conversation we had when I explained to them that I thought their story had merit (it’s about the daughter’s diagnosis of bipolar as a young adult), but that they needed to begin to speak about their story, and become prominent figures in the mental health community. Because they are so compelling and hard working, in a relatively short time, they’ve been able to do just that, and are now really changing the face of mental health. Their book when it is released in 2012 will be another piece of their pie.
Another story from my own list illustrates the brand/platform building concept. Allison Fishman is a well-known and respected chef and cooking school instructor who I know from high school. For years we talked about building her platform and the best timing for a book project for her. While I was on one of my maternity leaves, I saw that she was co-hosting a Lifetime show, Cook Yourself Thin, and that the accompanying book had become a #1 New York Times bestseller. I contacted her and told her the time was right to get a book proposal out for her with that piece of the pie in place, and we ultimately found her a good home for her first solo effort, which will release next spring. Years of hard work and dedicated platform building finally paid off in a book deal.
If you find you need help to build your brand, there are resources out there and a new industry is emerging as this type of brand building becomes more important in today’s marketplace. Branding agents and managers, like publicists, work with not only authors, but celebrities and experts of all kinds, to help them manage the ways in which they can extend themselves into the marketplace in a positive and productive way, building on existing coverage and relationships without over saturating any one area of the marketplace. I’m hoping even more of these branding managers pop up because I think the need is there for these services, and from what I can tell, the pool of people out there doing this for authors is still pretty limited. I’d expect it to be a real growth area in the coming years. If there’s anyone any of our readers have worked with or know of who you can recommend, let us know.
To a certain extent, the brand building needs to be strategic, and looked at from a short term and longer term perspective. I often ask authors if they have a plan for the next year, three years, and five years. Once they develop their goals, the work to get there can begin. All of that said, it’s impossible to follow a straight path when things come up that could change the trajectory so it needs to be flexible. For example, if you are writing for several websites and blogs and get an opportunity to do a column at a national magazine, you jump at the chance, even if it means cutting back on other areas for a short time because the opportunity to gain major national exposure is an A-list brand building goal.
There are always a myriad of ways to get to where you want to go, and these are just a few basics for what to consider if you are embarking on this journey. We are always looking to find authors who have a positive, original message to share, and have managed to build their brand to a level that it can support a book. We’d love to hear about any brand building success stories out there if you’d like to share. There’s a lot to learn from those who have managed to do it successfully.
Giving back
Perhaps it’s because it is the Jewish New Year or maybe it’s due to a recent experience, but I have been thinking about “giving back” and mentoring.
Writing is such a solitary and difficult thing to do and when an opportunity to obtain support from an established writer presents itself, it is always very inspiring. Recently, however, I saw this work in reverse and it really made me sad and angry.
I have a client who received some good national publicity, which resulted in my signing him to do a book proposal. The publicity also attracted a well known TV personality and book author who would have been a wonderful support to my client and his project. I’ll call him Mr. P. Mr. P approached my client and offered his help, so the two had lunch. Mr. P promised that if the proposal were sold, he would provide an introduction and, based on that statement, my client added Mr. P’s promise to his proposal. It turned out this particular proposal wasn’t easy to sell, but finally we received a small offer partially based on the promise of a foreword from Mr. P. When my client went back to him just to make sure that, indeed, the promise would be fulfilled, Mr. P agreed but said he would charge a fee that was three times the advance—a totally outrageous amount! Needless to say, the client turned down the publisher’s offer and the project is now dead. What really makes me sad about this situation is that I know Mr. P well, and when he was just starting out, many, many people gave him their support—one of the main reasons he is so very successful today.
On another occasion, some years ago, I remember my client and good friend Gus Lee wanted to get an endorsement for his first novel from Amy Tan. His editor made an introduction between the two and Amy generously provided a quote for China Boy which helped the book to sell. Since then, the two have become very good pals.
I think it is so important to remember, once you are successful as a writer, that supporting others who are coming up only enhances what you are doing. It is incredibly mystifying to me when people who achieve fame and success forget where they came from.
I wonder if you have any thoughts on this subject. I would love to hear them.
Yikes!
As we leave you for the holiday weekend, a cautionary tale: Apparently Penguin is suing an author to recover the signing payment on a contract they’ve canceled for failure to meet a deadline. It must be said, that deadline was in 2007, and there were presumably multiple extensions that got them here, so Penguin has been quite accommodating. And that signing payment is not exactly chump change.
As a person who is ever so slightly panicked at the prospect of finishing my to do list before leaving for the holiday weekend, the notion of breaking a contract for non-delivery strikes fear into my heart, but for those of you who need that extra bit of danger before something seems real, it seems this might just be it.
But hey, a three day weekend is a great time to hunker down and write, right?
From the Vault: A model for memoirs
Happy summer, everybody! For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging. It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when. So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year. We’ve cued up enough, but if you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!
Recently I was poking about on the website for This American Life, the altogether brilliant public radio show and now HBO television show that is one of the only things that tempts me toward faithlessness–in thought if not deed–toward book publishing. (Book publishing and public radio—apparently I don’t even fantasize about career-cheating with a high-paying job). In any case, I happened upon their submission guidelines. Although these are tailored to the demands of a radio show with a very distinctive sensibility (anyone who’s never listened should give it a try) they struck me as pertinent to book projects, especially memoir.
Memoir is a tricky category, one that I love but one in which the bar for writing is high and the demand for platform still higher. If you’re not already famous, or a participant in the Real Housewives/Dancing with Stars/America’s Top Model franchises, persuading a publisher to take a chance on your own story can be challenging. Despite the ubiquity of reality shows, not every person poised to write a personal narrative has a tv deal (yet), which means that for those people brave enough to wade into a sodden market that editors politely call “saturated,” not only had you better write very, very, very well, but do so in service of a story in which the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. So how, exactly, does this mathemagical equation work?
I thought This American Life’s submission guidelines came up with a pretty good answer: They write:
“The material we most often reject is writing that lacks a narrative. A lot of it is good, vivid writing, but without a real story to it. Often it’s recollections about some person the writer knew, or some time in their own lives. Often there are interesting anecdotes, but without any driving question, or real conflict. There’s nothing bigger at issue and nothing surprising revealed. In many of these stories, the characters are all the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning. No one learns anything. No one changes.”
Why yes, I thought.
Elsewhere on the site, in an amusing essay in which she talks about having her own work rejected repeatedly from This American Life, regular contributor Hilary Frank writes; “Specifically, This American Life is looking for stories with two main elements: the narrative action, or plot (in which one thing happens to the characters, and then another, and then another), and moments of reflection (where someone says something surprising about what the story might mean).”
Yes again.
Like most every piece of writing featured on the show, this is well said. They want work that has drama, that surprises, that toggles between the personal and the universal, and is also very, very well written. The fact that many of their contributors—David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Shalom Auslander—are successful published writers seems to indicate that these parameters translate well to the printed page.
Perhaps the model above is not the only one that works for memoirs, but the advice seemed to me well worth sharing. You can check it out in greater (perhaps excruciating) detail at http://www.thislife.org/About_Submissions.aspx.
From the Vault: Don’t quit!
Happy summer, everybody! For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging. It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when. So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year. We’ve cued up enough, but if you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!
It’s most authors’ dream, isn’t it, writing for a living? Being able to leave the grueling, monotonous nine-to-five grind for the glamorous world of publishing; sitting at home in a bathrobe, warm cup of coffee in hand, ever expanding manuscript at foot; calls about sequels and movie options; big packets about promotion and publicity arriving daily. It’s a nice dream, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality of most stay-at-home authors, many of whom will tell you that it’s often lonely, nerve-wracking, and just as soul-crushing (if not more so) as a “normal” job. (For a cheerier take on this subject, see Michael Prescott’s blog entry.) But let’s ignore the plight of those who write for a living for a moment, and focus on the other 95% of authors.
Very, very few novelists get to stay home writing all day. The truth is, many people get one book published, and then find that if the first book doesn’t work, the second becomes very difficult to sell. And, with advances for first books seemingly getting smaller every day, one book sale isn’t enough to live off of for a year, much less retire on. I know my view of things is colored by the rather high cost of living in New York, but even authors in the smallest towns can’t survive on $5,000 a year.
So what’s a first-time author to do? My advice is to keep the day job–the benefits are more than financial. Let’s go back to the writer sitting at home. Publishing is not glamorous; it’s hard work. The full-time writers I know work harder and longer than their peers. They spend much more than eight hours a day writing, thinking about their writing, wondering what their agent is thinking, pondering the loss of yet another editor, desperately trying to refrain from e-mailing their publicist again about that review in the Sioux City Herald, talking with other writers (about their agent, editor, and publicist), blogging, and generally praying that they won’t have a coronary before the end of the day. Authors who have day jobs are often able to put things in perspective: there’s more to life than their book(s). They get to leave a large part of the worrying to us agents (it’s part of what we’re paid to do – see Jane’s latest blog entry here), and that’s as it should be.
My take on this aside, I decided that I would speak to somebody who actually did leave work to write rather than just commenting from up here on my perch. Sara Zarr, the author of the forthcoming Story of a Girl, quit her job as an administrative assistant a few months after we sold her book. She had a lot to say. “If you get a book deal and are thinking about quitting your day job, there are a lot of factors to consider. Of course, it depends on what your day job is. If it’s a career job, if you’ve invested years of time and energy into it and it fulfills some part of you that writing can’t, keep it. If it’s a minor job that you don’t care too much about (or you hate), and you’re reasonably hirable in the current job climate, quit and try the full-time writing thing. You can always go back into the job market if you need to or if you find you don’t do well sitting home all day. Quitting does free you up to travel and promote your book if you need to, which is nice, but not mandatory.” Her last piece of advice struck me as particularly important. “It’s not necessarily all or nothing. My employer let me scale back my hours while I was working on revisions. You might be able to arrange something more flexible at your current job or find part time work.”
I know it’s tough to write and work at the same time while also keeping up with family and social commitments. I understand that working full-time as a writer seems glamorous, but writing for a living is something that only a handful of people are able to do, both for financial and psychological reasons.
When that final offer comes in from the publisher of your dreams and your excitement is tempered by the fact that you can’t quit counting beans, don’t panic. Your book is going to be published, and you’ll get to keep your sanity. It’s the best of both worlds.
I really welcome comments from authors about this one.