Category Archives: Uncategorized

May 03, 2013   Jessica   conferences, Jessica, pitch sessions, suggestions, Uncategorized  
3

Do’s and Don’ts for Pitchers

 

In the past few weeks I’ve done several pitch sessions (pretty much the only sort of pitch I’m likely to entertain, since I’m not much of a baseball fan) and although my advice may well be familiar, my experiences would indicate that it bears repeating.

Do: Relax. Pitches are good practice, but your ability to pitch your project does not necessarily determine its fate.  What matters most is always on the page, so don’t treat the meeting as a summary judgment of your future in publishing.

Do: Identify a few contemporary writers to whom you feel your style/work compares. I am always surprised when an aspiring writer can’t come up with a few “like” books or authors.  This is a basic and almost inescapable question.  Having an answer at the ready shows that you know the market and are reading in the category into which you hope to be published.   Once you’ve pitched your book and made a couple comparisons, feel free to turn the question back on the agent/editor.  “Having heard my description, is there a project that you think sounds like an apt comp title?”

Do: Follow up via e-mail.  If an agent has invited you to send along your query or additional materials, you can feel free to issue a gentle nudge several weeks after your meeting.  Mention the conference in your subject line or in the first few lines of your letter.

Don’t:  Bog down in a play by play synopsis of the plot. Think about your summary as back cover copy and try to craft a description that is as more persuasive than exhaustive.

Don’t:  Arrive at your pitch session in search of an idea. It’s fine to field a concept in hopes of soliciting feedback, but know that agents and editors can seldom suggest a book idea upon meeting someone.

Don’t: Try and present more than one (or at most, two) ideas at a time. Fine to mention that you have other projects in the works, but concentrate on the single pitch that is strongest and most suited to your appointment.

Do you have any pitch related questions? I would be happy to field them. (It seems baseball metaphors are impossible to escape in the spring).

April 08, 2013   Jim   book club, Jim, Lauren, Uncategorized, writing, YA  
3

The Abramo/McCarthy book reading bonanza

Looks like Lauren and I (and hopefully you!) will be reading ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell for our first foray into an online book discussion.

We have lots of ideas that we’re going to try out with this. Keep eyes on this page and on both of our Twitter feeds for updates.

Throughout the process, we’ll have Twitter chats and longer form blog discussions, and we want you to be involved.

If there’s one thing Lauren and I have learned over the several years we’ve worked together, it’s that neither of us has any shortage of opinions, so with any luck this will be a lively discussion.

So what’s next on the docket? Read the first half of the book! Our first Twitter chat with be at 6:00 Eastern on April 30, and the first big blog discussion will be on Friday, May 3.

Hope to see you all there!

 

 

UPDATE: Join us tonight, Tuesday, 4/30, at 6 p.m. to discuss the first half of ELEANOR & PARK!  Just follow the hashtag #eandpdglm on Twitter.

February 07, 2013   Jessica   e-books, editors, future of publishing, interview, Jessica, Uncategorized  
5

Golden Age?

A few days back, NPR did an interesting interview with Little Brown publisher Michael Pietsch, best known for being the editor of authors like David Foster Wallace and James Patterson, who is just about to take over the helm of the Hachette Book group, one of Publishing’s “big six” conglomerates.  His declaration that we are now in “the golden age of publishing” might strike you as Panglossian delusion, or—if you are me—maybe, just possibly, a little bit true.

I suppose, as Zhou en Lai said about the impact of the French Revolution, it’s too early to say.  Pietsch is a persuasive spokesman for what the new indie publishing movement might regard as the ancient regime.   It’s true that he’s not all that likely to rail about the benefits of creative destruction—but he made some good points.

“What has changed in a really exciting way is the ways you can get people’s attention. It used to be one book review at a time, a daily review, maybe you get into Time magazine. Now there’s, with the Internet, this giant echo chamber. Anything good that happens, any genuine excitement that a book elicits can be amplified and repeated and streamed and forwarded and linked in a way that excitement spreads more quickly and universally than ever before. And what I’m seeing is that really wonderful books — the books that people get genuinely excited about because they change their lives, they give them new ideas — those books can travel faster, go further, sell more copies sooner than ever before. It’s just energized the whole business in a thrilling way.”

I do agree with Pietsch. But it’s also true that the internet is so vast, fractured and compartmentalized, that lighting this wildfire word of mouth—getting something to go viral—is harder than a status update and a clever tweet.  Once upon a time, back in the (possibly mythical) days of the “monoculture,” when most Americans had some shared sense of big books, popular musicians, and hit TV, Time magazine had a huge subscription base—a review there, or a spot on a leading morning show could launch a book into best-sellerdom.  This is still true to a certain extent, but I have heard plenty of publicity directors note (and sometimes mourn) the demise of the old certitudes.  It seems to me that publishers see the potential of our new paradigm, where newspaper book reviews are few but book bloggers proliferate and readers can rave about their favorite authors to a potentially unlimited audience, but are still figuring out just how to leverage it. Publicity and marketing plans includes online marketing and social media, but publishing houses are a long way from mastering these new tools.

As you all doubtless have heard, cultivating an on-line presence is regarded as much the author’s duty as the ability to write.  This can feel a bit burdensome, but it’s also true that authors have greater influence over the fates of their books then once they did.  Most authors were never in a position to call up a Today Show producer and pitch their stories, but they can, with diligence and work and a pinch of luck, try to connect their book with its readers.

What do you think?

Golden Age?  France in 1788?

October 30, 2012   Michael   Uncategorized  
4

Our email is down

Due to the power outage in lower Manhattan, our server is down and we are without email. We hope to be up and running soon, and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can. Our thoughts go out to all of you affected by Sandy.

 

UPDATE:  Power has returned to Union Square, so our server is up and running again.  Thank you to everyone for all your patience while we catch up!

October 04, 2012   DGLM   great books, subtitles, titles, Uncategorized  
7

The not so subtle subtitle

 

Yesterday I sat down with two clients and their editor for a pleasant meet-and-greet and to discuss their recently acquired work of nonfiction.  We talked about the editorial process, the production schedule, cover,  interior design and title.   The only hiccup arrived when we got to the subtitle. The suggested copy was, in the estimation of the authors, just a little over-the-top.  In particular, the subtitle seemed to intimate that the book’s contents would Change Its Readers Lives. Forever.

The authors wanted the offending lines replaced with something a little more modest, less hyperbolic—some phrase rendered in a tone more wry and recognizable. They offered to come up with some alternatives. The editor was amenable, and we all agreed to reconvene our discussion over e-mail, where we could bounce ideas off of one another. I don’t know about you, but I cannot properly consider a title or a subtitle until I see it written down, and I think best alone and in front of a keyboard.

I’ve been mulling over possibilities and I’ve yet to come up with the precisely-right phrase. Subtitles are tricky because they must 1) capture the content of the book and 2) convince a person to buy it.  I also I feel a bit conflicted.  The reader/consumer/book buyer in me knows better than to believe the overheated rhetoric of subtitles, but 15 years in the publishing business makes me wonder if we are quite ready to dispense with overstatement. More humble assertions like “this book will leave you largely unchanged, albeit with slightly less free time” well, there’s not much appeal in that. What do you say? Would you be as drawn to a book that promised to be only “mildly interesting” or “easy enough to read?”  Do you find subtitles off-putting or inviting?

Perhaps it’s just me, but I suspect that these breathless, over-earnest subtitle pledges, calculated as they are, also speak to the secret wish of every reader.  The desire to find that magic book—the one that does blow our minds, change our lives, the story, true or imagined, that affects us in some powerful, primal way.

April 19, 2012   Jessica   creativity, Uncategorized, writing  
8

Art and Anger

Busy couple of weeks in publishing: Macmillan and Penguin are girding for battle with the Department of Justice, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction went unawarded, The Atlantic published a gratuitously nasty review of The Art of Fielding, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/a-swing-and-a-miss/8943/ and a writer I know keeps sending me links to stories heralding the end of books.  I’m tempted not to finish my blog post in case I’m trampled by a horseman of the apocalypse or raptured away.

Wait…  Nope. Still here.

I like to think of myself as an even-keel,  unflappable type (luckily, none of my siblings ever read this blog, so there is no one to dispute this claim) but even I found myself muttering angrily to myself over the last week or so, wondering if Eric Holder couldn’t find some better use of his time. A cursory glance at the headlines confirms that there is no shortage of systemic and perhaps more pressing injustice to which the DOJ might attend.  

After reading this piece, http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2012/04/steve_jobs_adrienne_rich_mark.html however, I have resolved to channel my frustration in positive ways.   Start a tech company, maybe.  Paint a modernist masterpiece–floating red rectangles might be right.   Indeed, David Stabler at the Oregonian examines anger as a source of creativity. He looks at Steve Jobs, the painter Mark Rothko and poet Adrienne Rich, none of whom, you might note, are alive to “go thermonuclear” or otherwise argue with his thesis.  I’m not entirely sure I buy it, seems too closely related to the specious notion that artists ought to suffer, a subject the Guardian took on a few weeks back. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/apr/02/myth-of-the-suffering-artist  

What do you think? Does anger fuel your writing? Or does apoplexy stifle your muse?  Meanwhile, I’ll be sure to let you know if my irritation gives birth to something brilliant.

April 09, 2012   Jim   Uncategorized  
28

Ask me!

We here at DGLM have proscribed times we blog. I took Mondays back when there were options, and sometimes this works out for me (three day weekends). Other times, by the time I get to a place I feel remotely caught up, the last thing my brain wants to do is be creative. I don’t know how you writers all do it day in and day out.
So here we go again: rather than come up with some vaguely interesting post about (fill in the blank), I’m opening this puppy up to questions again. Ask me anything you want. If you get a question in between now and 9:00 tomorrow morning, I’ll answer to the best of my abilities.
Go ahead: do your worst.

April 05, 2012   Jessica   titles, Uncategorized, writing  
4

Sock Patterns and Office Chairs

Although I’m a bit late for April Fools, a little silliness seems in order on this sunny spring day: Moby Lives, the blog connected to indie publisher Melville House, features the winners of the Oddest Book Title of the Year. http://mhpbooks.com/oddest-book-title-of-the-year-award-winner-named/ Although the winner was a Thai Cookbook from Australia titled Cooking with Poo (prompting me to wonder whether my six-year-old son was among the judges) I was more partial to four.

 

2. Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh (Royd Press)
3) The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson (Createspace)
4) Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli (Elmatar)
5) The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A Rush (North Atlantic Books)
6) A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares (Phaidon)
7) A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson (Amberley)

 

 

As this list perhaps does not reflect, but as we all know, coming up with titles is apallingly difficult.  Or rather, coming up with effective titles is difficult, though I cannot help but think A Taxonomy of Office Chairs is awful by design. A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two is so bad it’s brilliant.  A good title is crucial, both for the purposes of selling a book to a publishing house and thereafter for attracting a book-buyer/reader.  Regardless of the degree to which my client and I believe we have come up with the precisely right word or phrase, there’s a good chance our title may change. Not only the acquiring editor, but the publisher, the publicity department, and the sales and marketing teams generally weigh in, and with so many cooks in the kitchen, it’s sometimes hard to create a wining recipe.  One editor for whom I worked swore by the racing forms: from scanning the names of the colorfully named thoroughbreds she could arrive at a title.

How do you proceed? I know some writers begin with their title, which–in the wake of yet another title brainstorming session–I am beginning to think is the right approach.  How about you? How and when do you come up with a title?


March 12, 2012   Jim   Uncategorized  
26

On conferences and agents and the future…

I spent part of Friday at the PASIC Power conference, a gathering of published romance authors right here in midtown. I’ve done quite a few conferences, and for the most part they’ve long been the same. Agents and editors chatter on about how to go about convincing agents and editors to work with you, move on to listen to authors’ plea for consideration, and then retire to the bar confident in their feelings of superiority.

I kid.

Mostly.

There’s been a change in conferences lately, and it’s a fascinating one. The tone has gone from attendees asking, “How do I get you?” to the less ego-boosting, “Why do I need you?” Or, as someone in Friday’s audience queried, “What can publishers and agents do for me that I can’t do for myself?”

I happen to believe that agents do play a vital role for all authors and will continue to do so. I’m sure that will come as a complete shock and that you can all acknowledge that I have no bias whatsoever in this debate…

Buehler?

Buehler?

Okay, I have a huge bias, but a) I can admit it, and b) I still think I’m right. Because the role of the agent has long been as author’s advocate and manager. And however your career is going, I think there’s room for a partner in this process.

That said, I think this moment, wherein everyone’s worth is called into question, is a valuable one for all parties. It allows authors to really demand that they be paid attention to and that they be serviced properly. Obviously that’s good for the authors. But frankly, it’s also good for agents because I believe that being questioned on these topics makes us consider our work in very real ways and forces us to strive to do better.

Something else happened at Friday’s conference. I started wondering out loud. Is it possible that as more and more people start self-publishing, there will be a flood of books that aren’t actually ready for publication (either because they’re just not very good or because they’re by authors who still need to develop and probably should have waited until their second or third or fourth manuscript to share it with readers)? And if that’s the case, what is the effect on the reader? How will new authors get started if they’re competing for attention with a million other novels that possibly shouldn’t be out there?

That’s when I threw out an idea that wasn’t super popular: is there a chance that publisher branding will play an increased role in reader decision making? One less than thrilled attendee muttered in the back of the room that no one pays attention to who publishes novels. Another agent went on the record to disagree with me and state that author branding is what counts and not publisher branding. Certainly, those things are true. But for new authors trying to rise above the morass, it’s an idea that intrigues me. Is it crazy to think that the lay-reader will start paying attention to publishers? Could other publishers brand themselves as successfully as Harlequin has?

Or is it just as simple as the fact that word of mouth will drive people to (and away from) new fiction?

December 13, 2011   John   Uncategorized  
0

Be of good cheer

Further to Jane’s wonderful optimistic post yesterday, I thought I’d share another piece of good news: According to today’s New York Times, bookstores are back!

Okay, we all know that the Times is hardly trustworthy (to put it mildly) when it comes to their reporting on the publishing industry, and per usual, there’s a fair share of anecdotal overreach here. But even with the caveat that the massive sales projected for tablets could likely affect print sales next year, the overall picture they paint right now is pretty darn rosy. So nice to see some happy independent booksellers out there!

It’s also nice that the success seems to be spread across different categories, with fiction and non both holding strong. And while the props for beautiful illustrated books dovetails a little too neatly with the Times recent article about book design—hey, in the spirit of the holidays, I’ll give ‘em that one.

So with the usual grain of salt taken, I hope this provides some uplift for all you readers who support your local bookstore—your purchases are making a difference this year!

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