Mega publishers like Simon and Schuster and Random House could someday cede the midlist to a vast army of self-published authors.

They’d focus instead just on blockbuster books by brand-name authors and celebrities.

All the rest — the literary fiction, the cookbooks, the self-help books, the bread and butter midlist books that now make up 80 percent of every publisher’s list — those books they’d cherry pick from self-published authors who’d already tested the market and had the credible sales to prove it.

Wild-eyed predictions?

This scenario of the future of publishing comes from Keith Ogorek, Senior VP for Marketing for Author Solutions, the market leader and rapidly expanding conglomerate of self-publishing companies and services based in Bloomington, Indiana.  The imprints on his company’s roster include iUniverse, xlibris, AuthorHouse, Inkubook, Wordclay, Trafford Publishing and others soon to come.  We talked the other day.

Some authors could be picked up, Ogorek believes, from the ranks of writers who’d paid the publishers to produce their books under in-house self-publishing imprints:  so called “farm teams” of authors willing to underwrite the costs of getting their books into print.

Does the farm team metaphor hold up?

Ok, so the guy has a vested interest in this scenario.  It’s his job to hype the heck out of the concept of self-publishing.  But he’s persuasively gung ho, viewing himself as a soldier in a great populist movement.

“What does all this mean for authors?” Ogorek asks. “They now have more freedom to control their own destiny and have a vote as to what happens with their books. Long live the revolution!”

But the farm team metaphor doesn’t quite hold up. Baseball players don’t pay the majors to join a farm team.  They’re drafted.  They get salaries.

Time will tell

Like a baseball farm team, though, in-house self-publishing divisions provide a new pool of talent from which a publisher can draw.  Time will show us how it plays out in reality.  It seems disingenuous, however, to suggest that signing up gives a writer any special access or a foot in the door.

The numbers, moreover, don’t yet bear out the farm team scenario.  Publisher’s Weekly reports that Thomas Nelson’s in-house self-publishing division Westbow Press has already published 75 books since January of this year, and has 300 signed contracts with writers.  But Thomas Nelson has yet to pick up a single title.

Ogorek predicts that will change in the months to come, once the self-published books have time to develop traction and credible book sales.  He says the contracts writers sign don’t give the publisher an option to acquire the book, and the writer is free to shop the book around to any publisher who may be interested.  Caveat!  Writers should be certain of the language in any contract they sign, and have it checked first by an attorney.

The future is now

But Ogorek’s scenario is already unfolding to a limited degree. Author Solutions has launched three partnerships with commercial publishers. One, noted above, is with the Thomas Nelson imprint Westbow Press. The author signs a contract with Westbow, and Author Solutions manages the editing and production of the self-published book.

They’ve struck a similar deal with publisher Hay House and their new self-publishing division, Balboa Press.  And another with romance publisher Harlequin Books‘ self-publishing venture, DellArte Press, formerly called Harlequin Horizons in an arrangement that fueled an uproar among writers and traditional publishers.  Ogorek downplayed Author Solution’s partnership with Harlequin, as essentially dormant.

How writers can leverage this situation

How can writers use this situation to their own advantage?  If you’re tired and exasperated at waiting, waiting, and then waiting some more for agents and publishers to wake up and pay attention to your book…take a look at self-publishing.

It’s not what it used to be. Self-publishing has grown exponentially and achieved an unprecedented degree of legitimacy.

This approach has emerged as a powerful and effective way to prove the quality of your content and show that you can self-market.  And most significantly, if you can achieve a threshold of sales, say from 5-10K copies on your own, a traditional publisher may offer you a deal to take over the book for their list.

This isn’t some future-tense scenario hyped up by self-pub marketing enthusiasts.  It’s real, and it’s happening now.

I know this because I’m starting  to receive more agented submissions of books from self-published writers.  And I’ve signed up several.

Agents: The missing link

That said, many agents are on the fence about self-publishing.  Old-school literary representatives still think of self-published books as somehow tainted.  They try to steer writers away from the idea.

Speaking for Author Solutions, Ogorek says agents with attitudes represent the biggest hurdle for their writers.

“The biggest problem we have now is getting agents to realize that self-publishing is good for their clients,” he says.

“Some agents still won’t take on authors who are already self-publishing. But many are realizing what money-makers these self-published books can be, not only in retail and bulk sales, but with eBook, translation and other derivative earnings.”

So who’s going to have the last laugh?

Speaking for myself as an acquiring editor, I’m on the other side of this issue, and anticipate that more agents will begin to move over.  Watch this blog for an upcoming post on agents and self-published writers.

Who’s going to have the last laugh, if self-published writers end up dominating the midlist?

Publishers or writers?  Or does everyone win?

You tell me.

News Flash! The recorded version of this webinar is now available at Writers Digest.

Join me live online for 75 minutes of candid and surprising revelations about what really happens behind closed doors when publishers decide whether or not to sign up your book.

Sponsored by Writer’s Digest magazine, this webinar will provide a step-by-step disclosure of what editors, agents, and publishers want to see in a proposal, how you can have the most effective impact on our decision to publish, and how you can help us champion your book for the best deal possible.

I’ll be speaking from the perspective of a publishing insider, an acquisitions editor who’s been receiving proposals and manuscripts and signing up authors for 48 years.

There will be time for questions and we can always continue the conversation here on the blog.

I encourage everyone who wants to know more about getting published to register now and tune in on Thursday, August 19th.

Webinar date: Thursday, August 19, 2010
Starting time: 1:00 pm Eastern

______________________________

Dear Folks,

If you’re interested in a recorded version of this event, it will be available after Aug.25th as an On-Demand Webinar at Writer’s Digest.  This link will take you to their shop.

What does a recipe for white cake have to do with selling a literary novel?

A lot, as it turns out, in the case of The School of Essential Ingredients, the acclaimed debut novel by Erica Bauermeister, described in reviews as a seductively delicious tale of love, loss, and redemption.

Identifying potential readers

“I decided to target foodies and cooking students by offering recipes created by my fictional characters, which I gave away in guest posts on blogs and at readings in culinary schools,” Bauermeister told me in a phone interview from her home in Seattle.

Her guest post titled Carl’s White Cake, appeared on the blog Bookingmama, and included enticing backstory details alongside the cake recipe. It can still be viewed on Bauermeister’s own site.

“When I started niche marketing this way, my novel shot up the Indie Bestseller List and stayed there for six months. But it fell off the list when I stopped to work on my new book.” Scroll down for more examples of niche marketing for books.

Fiction or non-fiction, niche marketing brings results

“Niche marketing is identifying and reaching out directly to groups of potential readers, says Sandi Mendelson, of the literary public relations firm Hilsinger-Mendelson which orchestrates campaigns for blockbuster authors Larry King, Tina Brown and many others. “It’s relationship building — and requires a personal commitment to an ongoing give-and-take conversation with your readers, using venues like blogs, vlogs, and newsletters as well as Skyping with book groups, specialized book tours, and readings.”

Taking it a step further, Bauermeister says “It’s about finding an angle in your book — an element of the plot or characters — that could appeal to a whole new audience of readers who might never have heard of your book or thought about picking it up.

“It means really knowing your market and offering them a tangible take-away, or surprising, original special information they can use in their daily lives.”

Niche marketing works in every genre, fiction and non-fiction.  Smart authors these days realize that this targeted approach to selling books is a highly effective use of their time and energy.

.

Case examples of authors targeting niche markets

.

Fiction

.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein (Harper Books)
Target niche: NASCAR enthusiasts

This New York Times bestseller is told from the point of view of Enzo the dog, who observes the life of his master Denny, a race car driver. There’s a lot about race track culture and what it takes to be a champion, so Stein targets racing enthusiasts with special readings and promotional materials at NASCAR events and local fan meetings.

.

Shadow of the Swords: An Epic Novel of the Crusades and Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam by Kamran Pasha (both published by Simon & Schuster)
Target niche: Muslim and Jewish community groups

These two historical novels, written from an Islamic point of view, are finding a market among Muslim and Jewish audiences. Pasha is intimately familiar with both groups, as he was born in Pakistan but raised from the age of three in a mostly orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Community groups like the Progressive Jewish Alliance, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and others arrange for him to read at events like a recent fundraiser for the Islamic Domestic Harmony Foundation for abused women.

“I know I’m reaching people because I get both fan letters and hate mail. Muslims either love the book or think I’m a traitor to my religion,” Pasha said. “Non-Muslims are either fascinated by hearing another perspective on history and religion — or they accuse me of being part of a terrorist plot to take over America.”

.

Breaking Dawn – Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown)
Target niche: sub groups (teen goths, fans of historical fiction, teen boys)

With this fourth book in the series, could the Young Adult Twilight Saga juggernaut find an even bigger audience?  Adrienne Biggs, a book publicist based in San Francisco, thinks so. “Beyond the principal market of teen girls, smart marketing should include targeting diverse niche readers like teen goths, fans of historical fiction, readers of thrillers, romances, and pop culture,” Biggs said.  “Plus, if they’re clever, they could also target moms of teen girls, teachers, and teen boys — all niche groups with connections to the main market.”

.

Lumby on the Air by Gail Fraser (Penguin)
Target niche: Lovers of Americana

This is the fifth novel in a series featuring the old-fashioned country town of Lumby populated by “relentlessly quirky residents who remind us just how crazy normal life usually is.”

Fraser interacts with readers on her extensive  website’s blog and chat room.  She writes that readers make some great suggestions. “I jokingly posed the idea of buying an 18th century grindstone to which I could put my nose when a deadline approached. Within hours, I had received a dozen emails from fans who had tracked down various grindstones for sale. The following weekend, we were hauling a stone back from Manchester, Vermont.”

Blurring the lines between fiction and real life, Fraser has created something of a tourist destination out of her own homestead, “Lazy Goose Farm” in upstate New York, where by arrangement, fans can visit the gardens, red barns and organic farming that inspire the fictional town of Lumby.  Online, reader fans can immerse themselves in Lazy Goose Farm and Lumby lore, and shop for branded merchandise, from coffee mugs and aprons, to paintings of Lumby created by Fraser’s artist husband Art Poulin.

.

Pushing up Daisies by Rosemary Harris (St. Martins Press)
Target niche: Garden lovers

This debut mystery, first of a series by Harris called The Dirty Business Mysteries, features a gardening sleuth. Harris targets garden lovers by giving away seed packets printed with the book’s cover at readings she gives at flower shows and garden clubs. Readers send her snapshots of the flowers they’ve grown from those seeds.

.

Non-Fiction

.

Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman (Random House)
Target niche: teens and their mothers

This groundbreaking book about girls and bullying in school was used as the basis for the hit movie Mean Girls. Wiseman is also the author of a recent Young Adult novel Boys, Girls, & Other Hazardous Materials (Penguin.)

Wiseman targets teens facing serious issues via “Rosalind’s Inbox” on her website, where she responds to questions in a video (vlog) format. With her high visibility in the tween market, she also created her Girl World Book Tour targeting mothers and daughters, packed with interactive features, Q&A sessions and book signings.

.

Is This Thing On? by Abby Stokes (Workman Publishing)
Target niche: computer illiterates

With the subtitle A Computer Handbook for Technophobes, Late Bloomers, and the Kicking and Screaming, Stokes discovered an unexpectedly large and receptive market among older folks who’d never touched a computer before. She calls them “silver surfers,” and discovered they’re well organized and eager for help.

Stokes targets these “digital immigrants” at conferences like the 10,000-member Southwest Computer User Group in San Diego. On the other side of the country, the Florida Association of Computer User Groups invited her on their cruise to Cozumel, and plans a direct-mail campaign to its 20,000 members with a special offer for her book. Every time Stokes makes one of these appearances there are new bulk sales and big spikes on Amazon.

.

Tips for writers

• Be creative. (You’re an artist, right?) Think how to convert the book of your heart to a “product” of special value to your potential readers.

• “Never say no!” (in the words of Abby Stokes.) Get out there and boogie. Send that postcard. Return that phone call. Resist the desire to be alone all day. Don’t be shy, no one can sell your book as well as you can.

• Be willing to phone-in or visit readers groups and book clubs who have an special interest in some aspect or angle of your book.  Check out this central resource for book groups across the country.

• Sign up for Google Alerts, so when a website, blog, reading club newsletter or posting mentions your name, you’ll be notified by email. Keep track of how often you’re mentioned on these sites and offer to do guest posts, send free books to members, and give away information, tips, tidbits that relate to the topic of shared interest.

• If your book holds interest for a professional or academic audience, go to conferences and meetings, ask to make a presentation or present a paper. Sell your book at the event. Get the mailing list of the organization for postcards or email mailings. If they have a newsletter of their own (and many do) take an ad and send in a free article highlighting ideas from your book.

.

Have you identified your niche markets?

And once you’ve got some ideas about groups of potential readers, how will they find you and your book?

This approach takes creativity, perseverance, passion, and that very important personal touch, so authors who take this on with enthusiasm and energy will be the most effective.  Each writer I interviewed for this post was deeply dedicated, feeling an enormous stake in the outcome.  These missions are personal and that makes all the difference.  One more time:  No one can sell your book as well as you can.

Would be very interested to hear about your experience tackling your own niche markets, what worked, what didn’t, what you’ll try next!

We were hunkered down debating whether to make an offer on a self-help book written by a seemingly well-qualified psychologist.

Then one of our dogged marketing assistants dashed in, shouting “WAIT!”

She tossed us a bunch of comments she’d unearthed from an obscure online forum: jaw-dropping, scathing assessments from former patients about the author’s failures as a therapist.  Whoa. We took a big pause — and ultimately dropped the project.

Don’t let this happen to you!

Searching with a fine-toothed comb

A little-known aspect of making a book deal these days is how a publisher’s editors, marketing and sales people verify an author’s platform and reputation.  We search for anything that might compromise our investment of time, passion, energy and money. Privacy’s not what it used to be, as we all know.

If your proposal or manuscript has reached the point of serious consideration, expect careful behind-the-scenes scrutiny of everything you’ve presented about your life and work.

If this is your first book deal

Publishers like nothing better than discovering and signing up the next big thing, the unknown writer with a great first book that promises to lead to many more. Before taking such a risk, however, careful due diligence is now standard operating procedure.

Here are some of the sources publishers check routinely these days, before signing up a new author:

.

Sources publishers check

• Google

Reports may emerge from the archives of deep cyberspace, providing an impression of your life and work.  Comments and other snippets can bubble up from blogs, forums and social networking sites.

• YouTube

We want to know how an author will handle media appearances, and YouTube is a great source of home videos, local public events, or regional cable media that let us see how the writer looks and sounds.

If you’ve appeared on any local or national media, those clips become “audition” tapes scrutinized by publicists whose job it will be to get you on these shows again, and others. A less-than-stellar performance can reveal areas for future media coaching or occasionally the verdict that you have a “face made for radio.”

• Academic Institutions

We confirm academic and professional credits so any discrepancies in dates and titles can be straightened out.

• Author Blogs

Authors these days have websites and blogs, understanding the importance of social networking and online marketing. We’re always happy to see that, but we also study these pages carefully to see how well they’re maintained, how frequently those posts appear and how many comments they attract.

• Nielsen’s BookScan

We automatically check Nielsen’s BookScan to shed the harsh light of reality on any claims of recent “bestsellers.” Nielsen’s BookScan is the industry standard report of actual cash register sales and captures approximately 70% of retail and online sales, so we’re able to calculate actual sales from their figures.  For more information you might want to check out this post, Author alert: What you don’t know about BookScan can hurt you

• Reviews

If you’re previously published, we’re very interested in book reviews that may have appeared in the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, or elsewhere in the professional press.  Of course, reviews mean that your work has been vulnerable to capricious literary opinion. We also consider Amazon reader comments, taking into account that they’re a mixed bag of quirky and inconsistent personal opinion.

.

Tips for authors

• Be accurate about your achievements

We’ll want to confirm that you really were the first or second author on that professional paper or journal article you mentioned. And did your brilliant op-ed column appear in a major newspaper – or was it printed only in the local shopping throwaway? It’s best to be scrupulously straight with us.

• Preempt any weak sales numbers

If your most recent BookScan numbers were weak, send royalty statements with your proposal, showing sales figures based on history prior to the advent of BookScan, including specialty stores, back of the room (during lectures, workshops or trainings,) or high discount bulk sales that wouldn’t appear on BookScan’s cash register reports.  Again, my best advice is written up here: Author alert: What you don’t know about BookScan can hurt you

• Anticipate any embarrassing online disclosures

Google yourself and see what pops up. Prepare explanations for anything that could possibly make us squirm. Get anything that’s really wrong or misleading taken down if you possibly can. If competitors are posting crazy stuff about you, or it’s a case of same-name mistaken identity, be sure to mention this in your proposal. Youthful indiscretions are also understood. We just don’t want to feel an author or agent is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.   

The author of the book we rejected could have alerted us that disgruntled patients who’d expected a quick cure had written snarky things about her online. Given that information, we might not have felt she was insincere or hiding things about her clinical performance, leaving us to wonder what else might turn up.

• Make your own new audition tape

Smart authors are submitting home videos demonstrating their sincere passion and expertise. Assuming you can look natural and speak persuasively without a script, such an effort can trump any less attractive random links or YouTube videos.

• Ask for an in-person meeting

If you can meet the editor, marketing and sales people in their offices or elsewhere, with or without an agent, jump on it. An honest and sincere conversation can go a long way toward persuading publishers to make the large financial and personal investment in publishing your book.  If you’re not able to come in person, ask for a telephone conference call. It’s something most publishers will welcome, once you’re on their radar screen for potential acquisition.

• Get your metrics in order

We’re dubious when an author tells us, “My site gets 5 million hits a month.”  Publishers use many resources for digital intelligence to verify and analyze website traffic.  Services like Quantcast provide us with snapshots of daily, weekly and monthly traffic, as well as demographics like age, education and income levels of site visitors. So do your best to provide accurate, verifiable data for your website or blog.

Use this knowledge to your advantage

Authors, please share your own experiences and tips with fellow writers. I’ll watch for any questions I can answer.

You thought you’d finished up a darned good manuscript ready to send out into the world, so you decided to give yourself a well-deserved vacation.

Upon your return, you started rereading your opus and began unexpectedly to channel your stern fifth grade teacher Mrs. Spellman. Remember her?

In a blinding flash, you realized you’d produced endless pages of boring backstory. And essential characterization, plot, even the climax itself somehow never made it onto the page.

Time to get back to work…

Reasons for rewriting

That’s a fairly typical reason for embarking on a major revision.  Or, you may have deliberately written a rough first draft, sketching in the big ideas, major characters, and what could be a rudimentary structure for the plot.

Or maybe you’ve gotten feedback that was less than enthusiastic. You might be able to ignore one or two vague or even snarky rejection letters from an agent or contest. But if you’ve received more than a dozen turndowns, you may have a problem that can only be solved by rewriting.

An editor’s perspective

Every manuscript has unique problems. Revision and rewriting involve entering the story, finding the issues and making substantial changes. There may be problems that have to do with structure, with narrative voice, with literary style, authentic dialogue or other elements.  As a developmental editor, here are some of the types of solutions I might suggest to a writer to resolve specific situations:

.

Juggling your options

• Adding or removing flashbacks (plot structure)

• Shifting the narrative voice from third person to first (POV)

• Deleting or adding paragraphs or chapters (focus)

• Adding major dialogue and visual description (characterization)

• Subtracting or combining characters (tightening the plot)

• Converting long passages of telling to showing (literary style)

• Changing motivation (theme)

• Repositioning the ending (emotional takeaway)

.

Outlines are golden

Make an outline. It’s a flexible, working document to reveal all the important elements so you can study and move them around. Consider an outline as a cinematic storyboard, to get an overview of your core scenario — the basic concept, story content, and plot structure — before you make any false turns or go too far down the road in what may prove to be a wrong direction. This is equally useful for non-fiction and fiction.

Consult a pro: Get a road map for revision

Writers these days often consult with independent professional developmental editors for overall evaluation and specific suggestions for rewriting before launching a proposal or manuscript out into the world. Here’s my advice on choosing a freelance developmental editor.

Your manuscript may be ready for a full-scale developmental edit, which will provide you with a road map for revision.  Depending on your editor’s approach, you’ll get back your manuscript marked up with page-by-page recommendations, including suggestions for additions, deletions, revisions and specific ideas for developing the concept and ultimate book.

Or an editor may advise you to rethink your core content and start again. Either way, earlier in the process is better, since it will ultimately save time and money by cutting down the number of rewrites necessary.

Avoid desperate choices

Faulty or dangerous advice can decrease the quality and potential of a manuscript, so watch out, it happens. Evaluate and reconsider the source of any critique. Always hold off on your own first impulses and wait for more long-term instincts to take hold.

Go slow. Take a deliberate pace to begin with.  You’ll save time and energy in the long run. The first rewrite is usually the most extensive and time consuming. Subsequent rewrites usually go more easily.

Don’t obsess. That independent editor-for-hire can serve another crucial role: to tell you when to stop. Enough! Some writers go crazy with too may rewrites, unwilling to let a book go forward on its own and give agents and publishers a chance to respond.

Remember if you haven’t had any luck connecting yet, that agents and acquisition editors must sell and publish books or they’ll go out of business. They really do wish they could say yes to your submission. They just didn’t like what you sent enough to take it on, unfortunately. When this happens, in most cases it’s because the proposal or manuscript needs rewriting.

Are you about to start a rewrite?

Or in the middle of one now? Any advice or questions for fellow authors?

Q: There’s so much for a writer to think about: platform, query letters, agents, marketing. What’s the most important thing to focus on?

A: That’s easy. Focus on the content of your book. There’s nothing more important.

Content is king

Before all else, keep your attention on the core concept and execution of your book — the writing, the story, the characters, the point and the purpose.

That’s what we acquiring editors and publishers care most about.

For writers who are feeling ignored or rejected by agents or publishers, with no response whatsoever to a query or only a vague but worrisome note like, Not a good fit…We liked it but there wasn’t enough enthusiasm…I have this advice: Remember that these very same agents and editors are searching eagerly for writers every day, scouring print and online sources, hunting for new ideas, trying to discover the next hot debut author.

We can’t survive without you.

So to improve your chances of attracting us and landing a book deal, consider these aspects of producing the best possible work:

Writing well

It’s the best revenge, right? Not every writer can be the next Saul Bellow or J.D. Sallinger, not to mention Henry James or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write as well as your hardest-working most demanding self. Your own best writing takes — and you knew this was coming – rewriting. It may take a dozen times or more. And if you sustain a consistent, authentic voice of your own, well, hey, that’s you writing, that’s who you are.

Remember that not all the great story tellers are actually the greatest writers, as Dan Brown and Stephanie Myers would probably agree, and so would my one-time author Robert Ludlum, were he still around. These very successful writers keep their characters in motion, and keep us on the edges of our chairs with cliffhangers galore, chapter ending after chapter ending, like this one from Dan Brown in the The Da Vinci Code:

“Do not react to this message, said the fearful whisper of the voice mail. Just listen calmly. You are in danger right now. Follow my directions very carefully.”

Who could put that down?

Creating characters we care about

Give us heroines and heroes who are admirable and with whom we can easily identify.  Villains who are compelling and fascinating even if loathsome. Readers want to care about what happens to your characters. This is true in fiction or nonfiction narrative like memoir, history, and biography.

Successful authors have learned that it’s not just the story, but specifically the fate of the main characters that keeps readers glued to the page.

Read your dialogue out loud. Do your characters have distinct voices? Listen to people around you and find those unique linguistic acrobatics we use every day. Even identical twins sound different from each other. How your characters speak is crucial to telling a great story.  For more ideas, jump to this earlier post,  Writer’s Toolkit: Eavesdropping for dialogue.

Telling an emotionally satisfying story

Even if it’s not a happy-ending story, it needs catharsis and epiphany. You want your readers breathing sighs of relief or shaking their heads in dismay at a tragic denouement. Rainbows or thunderstorms can provide equal closure. The point is to bring down the curtain and send the audience home with some kind of insight, inspiration, new found learning or even wisdom.

Organizing the plot

Where to begin: The happy turning point? The devastating crisis? Birth? Death? And what about all that backstory, the context of everything that’s come before? Flashbacks? Flashbacks within flashbacks? There’s no formula, only careful choices to make. Simplicity is usually the best policy, but if you can avoid incoherence and confusion when juggling the chronology of events, go for it.  For more help, take a look at this earlier post on Seven Techniques for a Dynamite Plot.

Keeping the narrative voice clear as a bell

It’s usually a good idea to have one point of view in fiction or non-fiction narrative. It’s not only young adult novels that benefit from that authentic, irresistible “I” narrator. Nevertheless, more than one point of view is common, workable and even essential for some stories. For example, despite the dangers of head hopping from one character to another, multiple shifts in POV can be employed with craft and artistry as in the recent House Rules by Jodi Picoult, and don’t forget it worked for Tolstoy. I ordinarily advise, however, one or two POV’s at the most, with a switch from first person to omniscient third person to fill in the details and provide perspective. It’s your call.  For more detail on the subject, check out this earlier post, Do Publishers have Rules about POV?

Surprising the reader

Avoid predictability. Even essential elements can be postponed and manipulated. Keep the reader guessing. This is true not only for mysteries and literary novels, but all forms of non-fiction narrative.

Drilling down to the essential ingredients

Choosing what to not to say is the art of storytelling. Less is always better, and it’s actually fun to choose among all that’s happened to create a unique and insightful way of seeing things. Leave out everything you possibly can.

Getting smart feedback

You don’t get second chances when submitting to agents and publishers.

Publishing professionals are flooded with queries, proposals and manuscripts every day and consequently don’t take more than a few minutes to read anything that doesn’t get their strong interest on the first page, which is a rare event indeed. So much of what we get isn’t cooked yet, fully formed, focused, or thought out carefully. Too many authors are in such a hurry to knock our socks off that they skip over the core content and jump ahead with grandiose, unrealistic marketing campaigns, and other premature plans that should come only after they have nailed the best possible concept and execution of the book itself.

So get objective, professional critique and developmental editing first.  For anyone seeking guidance, here’s my advice: Choosing a Freelance Editor: What You Need to Know

Make sense? Anything to add from your own experience? I welcome your comments.

The most creative minds in publishing are racing to develop iPad app editions of upcoming titles that will utilize the new device’s unique audio, video, interactive and social networking capabilities.

The excitement is contagious!

As a writer, you may want to start looking at how these apps can extend and expand the creative canvas of your book.

[These multimedia book apps are available only at iPad's App Store, while regular ebooks are available only at iPad's iBookstore. Confusing?  Yes!  Listen up, Apple. Put all the books in one place where we can find them.  Ok, onward.]

Hang on to the good stuff

Has this ever happened to you? You’re writing at a furious pace and your brain’s teeming with an overflow of information and ideas that can’t possibly all fit into your book.

But you’ve got some wonderful stuff that you’d love to use somehow. Maybe it’s some great backstory information like an FBI dossier on a principal character in your novel, or maybe it’s a terrific old newsreel that could help illustrate a key point about the Battle of the Bulge in your history of WWII.

The end of slash-and-burn editing?

As a developmental editor, I work every day with writers who have more material and imaginative ideas than can be contained on the printed page. It’s my job, however, to help an author maintain the forward acceleration, rhythm and pacing of the book without tangents or digressions — and to avoid including material that isn’t crucial in the moment.

That means that there’s frequently no solution other than slash and burn.

So I’m really excited about the technological advances underway that will provide writers with new channels for this kind of material. The iPad book apps in particular may offer outstanding opportunities to resolve backstory and other creative problems by embedding and linking to that additional content, adding informative and entertaining elements to the book that help tell the story and enrich the experience of reading.

The iPad is a game changer

In Publisher’s Weekly the other day, Stephen Prothero, author of the recently released God Is Not One described how his publisher suddenly requested an autobiographical video and other “bonus” materials for the forthcoming iPad version of the book.

“For my next book, I won’t be able to get away with traveling to Jerusalem or Bali with pencil and notepad, searching for a few choice quotes,” Prothero wrote. “I’ll need to bring an audio recorder and a video camera, and figure out how to integrate into my ‘book’ the sights and sounds of this Hebrew prayer or that Balinese cremation.”

Authors take note! The iPad book app will require a new kind of creativity to realize the artistic and commercial value of these potential elements.

What would Shakespeare do?

Imagine if William Shakespeare were living today. He’d written those wonderful 14-line love sonnets from the bottom of his heart and thought they were some of the best work he’d ever done. Because he’d been in the theater both on the stage and as a playwright all his life, he knew his poetry needed to be heard aloud, to be read by actors who could understand and illuminate the meter, rhythm, and beat of his iambic pentameter.

So maybe he’d hire some talented friends and direct them in a series of short videos, one per sonnet, set in urban locations with lots of cool effects. It could be brilliant.

His legions of readers, on their digital devices, could watch the actors recite the sonnets, hearing the wonderful rhythm, while reading along with the lines. Unusual words linking to dictionary definitions could help interpret the layers of meaning.

This has actually been done, using a multimedia application called the vook.  It’s titled Love, Love, Love: Shakespeare in the City and it’s one of the best examples of new-form publishing I’ve seen. For me, the visual experience gives a whole new dimension to understanding and appreciating these perfect gems in verse. The vook, a term coined by the application’s developers, is described as “a new innovation in reading” that blends writing, video and social networking. The company got a lot of press recently when author Anne Rice decided to publish a Vook edition of her story The Master of Rampling Gate. Vooks are available as computer downloads, or as iPad and iPhone book apps.

What would Hunter S. Thompson do?

I wonder what my old pal, the late Hunter S. Thompson, prince of Gonzo, would do if he were able to join with me in publishing a 40th anniversary edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as an iPad book app.

I bet he’d have a lot of fun with the iPad’s built-in features like shaking and tilting images, distorting, blowing up and shrinking illustrator Ralph Steadman’s wild drawings of his hallucinogenic adventures. We might also think about including some of our midnight audio tapes, where we dissected his manuscripts and plotted future tales of dread.

Maybe we’d embed a video game we could call “Shoot the Sheriff,” with stop action animation of Hunter taking aim at all those sheriffs he was covering as a reporter at their Las Vegas convention; dispatches that later became the basis of the book.

Oh the possibilities!

For the best examples, check out the kid stuff

The wildly popular Alice for the iPad, created by the tiny design studio Atomic Antelope, uses the device’s special technology for readers to tap, tilt and turn, shudder, and shake it so that Alice, the mad hatter, the jabberwocky, and Red Queen are all tossed around, changing sizes, and otherwise become the movable creation of the reader’s imagination in the moment.  Hopefully a future update will include sound, a surprising omission (aside from an occasional trumpet note) in this otherwise beautiful and exciting interpretation of the children’s classic.

You get the feeling that this is just the beginning of great things to come in book publishing for all ages.

Disney, meanwhile, has produced a delightful version of the book Toy Story. This free iPad app includes extensions, enhancements and interactivities including the ability for kids to record their own voices while reading the book, plus finger painting and a video game where you tilt and turn the iPad to send a soldier parachuting through deadly obstacles.

YA publishers are seeing great possibilities in these emerging technologies. A new interactive iPad version of Vampire Academy is launching this week, which will feature built-in live chat between readers. And they’re just getting started. John Makinson, the CEO of Penguin UK, said “We will be embedding audio, video, and streaming into everything we do.”

A great tool for self-publishers

For self-publishing authors, iPad book apps look like a logical way to provide exceptional content and added value to their books and also as an effective tool for marketing their titles not just to readers, but also to agents and publishers.

Only one thing’s for sure. Change is coming rapidly and smart writers, publishers, agents, and booksellers are trying to figure out how it can work for them.

What would you do?

Let me have your thoughts about this, please, and how you think an iPad book app might apply to your own work. Let your imagination run!

Listening in on random conversations — okay, blatant eavesdropping — is a time-honored technique for writers fine-tuning their ear and seeking authentic feelings with distinctive ways of expressing them.

Norman Mailer did it

If you practice eavesdropping, you’re in good company. Norman Mailer used to whip out a little spiral-bound notebook at parties and write down something someone had said. And he wasn’t subtle. It could happen in the middle of a conversation. I had that disconcerting experience with him more than once.

A cautionary note from Tom Robbins

My old friend, author Tom Robbins, wrote me on this subject the other day. “There was a time in my early so-called career when I would snare in my mental net witty lines that I overheard at parties or gallery openings, inserting them at appropriate places in my manuscripts — only to discover later, much to my embarrassment, that the line had not been original with the speaker but rather lifted verbatim from some television comedy show. (It takes a thief to catch a thief?)

I aborted that practice decades ago. But years later, I rode city buses in New Orleans to get a feel for the conversations of the black riders. It was their manner of speech rather than exact expressions that I was after, and this experiment proved quite helpful in assuring that the dialogue in Jitterbug Perfume was authentic.”

As Tom’s editor on Jitterbug, I can vouch for the masterful dialogue he created for his fabulous characters, in particular the sly and conniving Pan, the Goat God, who appears memorably in this novel.  Here’s a snapshot of what it was like, incidentally, to work with Tom on the book.

“If you die, can I have your stuff?”

Veteran author Charlie Haas told me “I do pay attention to what people are saying. I think it’s a good writing technique because it builds up one’s ear for dialogue and vernacular.” This memorable line overheard at a high-speed kite buggy race in the Nevada desert made its way word-for-word into his most recent novel, The Enthusiast: “If you die, can I have your stuff?”

Favorite haunts for eavesdropping

An informal survey of some author friends revealed these favorite haunts for best eavesdropping:

• “My favorite spot to people watch is a bar. People tend to speak a little louder and with lower inhibitions after they have had a drink or two.”

• “Some of the best things I’ve overheard were in the shower at the gym.”

• “It’s not very hard to eavesdrop these days. People talk on their cell phones so loud the whole world can hear their conversation. I’m always listening, not so much for anything specific, but to the entire orchestration.”

• “I just sit in a café, have my coffee and listen in on conversations around me. I write down what I’m hearing in a notebook and no one’s the wiser.”

• “I hear inspiration in everyday conversations and get ideas for my writing simply by listening to other people talk about their lives. The little gems of expression I pick up don’t always fit into the story I’m working on, so they stay in my notebook, waiting, until I think of ways to build context around them. But sometimes a line I’ve overheard can give me a starting point for a whole new story.”

Delicious fun

Try it yourself. It can be delicious fun. Yesterday I overheard a young woman on the sidewalk telling her friend goodbye. “I’m going home now to take a shower because I’m dirty,” she said. “I’m a dirty dirty girl.”

Hmmm. A writer could probably use that line.

A few tips

1. Write down the exact words whenever possible. That means always carrying a pen and paper or some other device for taking notes, like texting into a phone or typing on a laptop.

2. Try to get a glimpse of the speaker’s body language or facial expression that might reveal the true meaning between the lines.

3. Don’t throw anything away. What you’ve overheard may not be of immediate use to you but at some point in the future you may be working on something that could use precisely this line or something like it.

Have some fun with this. That’s why you write, right? People sure are interesting.

What have you overheard lately?

It takes courage and character to be a writer. It means accepting the risk of revealing yourself and overcoming fears of putting your honest feelings and dangerous ideas right there on the page.

Facing that blank page in the privacy of your own mind and stripping away your defenses to confront hard truths requires an act of courage that no one else can see.

Then, to go public with your work, you put those most intimate emotions out for all to consider. You may be advocating untested ideas, or pushing the envelope in ways that require at least the posture of courage and often a thick skin.

The most successful authors I know summon up enormous courage and fortitude when they begin to plow through the long process of writing and promoting a new book. As a developmental editor working closely with writers for more than 40 years, I’ve learned what helps sustain such a Herculean effort.

11 suggestions for writers

• Do other stuff that takes courage

Appreciate the difficult things you already know how to do, like teaching a class of unruly teenagers, climbing a tricky trail, or writing a letter to someone who owes you money. Or skydiving, for the adrenalin junkies out there!  That mythic, over-the-edge leap into the abyss.

This accomplishes two things: If you pick the toughest thing you’re able to do that isn’t working on your book, it’s relatively easier to sit alone in a room and move your fingers over the keyboard. And it can poke up the can-do confidence and bravery thermometer in your head. That may stimulate some wild new idea to escape your unconscious.

• Show your writing to someone you trust

Not family or friends, but someone objective with whom you’ve worked before on a tough job, physical or intellectual.  What you’re after is a gut-level reaction.  So ask: “Make sense?  Want to read more?”

• Take advice

Get help. Consult a professional, experienced developmental book editor.  A good editor can help a writer overcome existential dread by providing specific places in the text with suggested language of what to write.

That’s part of a developmental editor’s job, to help authors revive the creative flow with restored courage.

• Write on a schedule

Devote a block of time to writing every working day. Consider it something like a spiritual practice.

You’ll strengthen the habit, build discipline, and ultimately produce better results.

• Talk to yourself

Close the door. Go where no one else can hear, speak out loud, take a first stab at whatever you’re trying to pull together. One sentence. Two sentences. Speak into the mirror.

• Write to yourself

I know a writer who’s already written 200 pages of notes to himself about his next book, answering questions like “What would she do now? How about this? Should he call her back?” He’s nearly confident enough now to start the actual outline and write a first draft.

Try a voice journal. That can help get the juices flowing.

• Start over

It’s like clearing your throat. Pause a moment after wiping the slate clean and come back to it in a few moments. Write something, even if it isn’t great yet, for your eyes only.

Then make it better, clearer, closer to what you wanted to say. Keep doing that until you have a paragraph that works.

• Let it simmer

Sometimes a so-called writer’s block is a necessary pause in the creative act. The ideas and feelings need to bake a little before being ready to test.

• Take no prisoners

Dig deeper for insights or ideas. Be hard on yourself when you reread the latest draft, even if it’s the fourth or fifth time around.

• Get silly

Hula-hoop with the kids. Or some equivalent playfulness.

• Face the music and dance

Literally. Your favorite music can get your foot tapping, your body moving around the room, and your creative soul back into the cosmic dance of life.

.

How do you sustain your courage?

We all need more courage in our writing once in a while. Instead of worrying, churning and ruminating, stop and try something new. Hope these ideas help.

So writers, how do you find and sustain courage?  I’d love to hear your stories.

Picture this: An irate local author can’t find his latest title on the neighborhood bookstore shelf. So he slips into the storeroom, grabs his books from the back stock and heads straight for the store’s most exclusive patch of real estate – the front table – where he elbows aside the bestsellers and drops his own books down in their place.

True story.

That anecdote comes from veteran bookseller Andy Ross, who for 30 years owned the venerable Cody’s Books in Berkeley (when bookstores still carried back stock.)

Bookstores account for 60% of sales

Make no mistake: Book placement matters. Brick and mortar bookstores account for more than 60 percent of all book sales, so we publishers agonize over where our books are placed, and struggle to get higher visibility, title-by-title, for the books we love.

And where a book sits can incite bitter shelf wars among authors, publishers, sales reps, and retailers, leading to frequent incidents of guerrilla merchandising, with the interested parties surreptitiously rearranging the stock for their own benefit.

Can the right book placement produce a bestseller? Probably not, but sales can jump if a book is displayed face-out near the cash register – considered the absolute best spot in the store. Sales can also surge if a title has an enthusiastic hand-written staff recommendation tacked to the shelf.

Pile ‘em high and watch ‘em fly

That’s bookseller lingo for building those towering monoliths of stacked bestsellers you see near the entrances of the biggest bookstores. Other coveted placements to increase visibility and sales include the end caps of bookshelves and book posts with all the titles facing out.

Face-out or spine-out?

What author wouldn’t rather have their book turned face-out, with the cover visible to bookstore browsers? That placement decision, it turns out, is up to the store staffer who shelves the books. It’s usually a factor of how many copies are on the shelf; if there are more than a few, there’s a better chance the stack will be turned face-out. An eye-catching book jacket helps too.

The kiss of death

Sales will suffer, on the other hand, if – horrors – a book is shelved away in Sociology – a catchall section for ambiguous titles, and the kiss of death for book sales. Even worse and most frustrating of all, is if a store clerk misshelves the book to begin with. Then the book is doomed. It’s impossible to locate, even if a customer requests the book and the store shows it’s in inventory.

_____________

Here’s more from my conversation with Andy Ross, who is now, incidentally, a literary agent whose authors benefit from his unique perspective and expertise as a former bookseller.

What determines the category where a title is shelved? What if, for example, a particular book could be interpreted as either a memoir or self-help?

The publisher assigns every book a section code. That code determines where a book is shelved in the store. It can be an important strategic decision. One of my authors, for example, is writing a book that could be positioned either as a travel narrative or political history. Travel narrative is hot now, so we’ll emphasize that to the publisher.

Who decides if a book is placed on a front table or other prominent spot?

The publisher has the biggest influence because they pay the store a placement allowance.

What’s a placement allowance?

It’s a percentage of the prior year’s total sales. The big bookstore chains get millions to spread around, while independent booksellers get a fraction of that for all of the publisher’s new titles. So basically the publisher is pumping money into the accounts to purchase the best space in the store — front tables, end caps and window space, in the same way General Mills and Proctor and Gamble buy space for their breakfast cereals and dish detergents in the supermarkets.

Do publishers allocate dollars for specific titles?

They pay fees for store placement. I suspect that money is also paid under the table for special side deals in the chains for a few blockbuster dreams. Of course nothing is ever in writing. There’s no way anyone can monitor this stuff.

What about those staff recommendations on the shelves and covers?

Those can definitely make a difference, especially if they’re personal and hand-written.

But a lot of those “staff recommendations” at the chain bookstores are phony, and written by someone at the central office. The American Booksellers Association also used to crank out fake recommendations for stickies, that you were supposed to slap on the big books.

Can a bookseller create a bestseller?

Not really. But a bookseller can certainly give a book a big kick-start. Here’s an example: Fred Cody (the founder of Cody’s Books) had sold a surprising 200 copies of Tom Robbins‘ first novel Another Roadside Attraction. That impressed him a lot. So when Houghton Mifflin came around with Tom’s second book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Fred ordered 1,000 copies. That really got the publisher’s attention. They leveraged that information and told all their other accounts that the legendary astute book buyer Fred Cody had taken a very strong position and they should too. Eventually the book was a big hit, still selling today.

I did the same thing later on with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. We moved out more than ten percent of all their total sales, and these were in my opinion some of the great works of modern literature.

What can self-published authors do to get shelf placement?

Self-published authors can make a deal with a local bookstore to have a reading or even a workshop, if they can guarantee that enough people will turn out. Then stores can special-order copies and put them in the window or front tables to promote the event. Now that there are oceans of self-published books, there are more of these events.

_________________

Writers, have you had bookstore placement and visibility problems?  Were you able to resolve them?  Have any questions?  I’ll watch for them in your comments.

_________________

Andy Ross is a literary agent whose book The Dog Who Never Stopped Loving by best-selling author Jeffrey Masson is a lead title from Harper Collins this coming fall of 2010.

.

A great pitch is often the first encounter in a successful publishing relationship.

As an acquisition editor, I listen avidly to every writer’s pitch, hoping each time to find a terrific new prospect for publication.

For the uninitiated, a pitch is an author’s brief, face-to-face verbal presentation to an agent or an editor like me, (usually at a writers conference) of what’s wonderful, original, and saleable about your book and why you’re the best person to write it.

The view from my side of the table 

I’ve been on the receiving end of more than 150 pitches over the past few days. Writers queued up at my table at the Harvard Writer’s Conference in Boston and then back in the Bay Area at the San Francisco Women’s National Book Association’s annual pitchfest.

A familiar annoying bell signaled the start and finish of each session. Writers in line stood clutching their papers, trying to smile, trying to remain calm. It can be nerve wracking on both sides of the table, believe me – with the potential each time for an awkward disconnect or the beginning of a fabulous relationship.

Scroll down for my tips on preparing and delivering a great pitch

Why writers need to learn the art of the pitch

Why all the emphasis these days on the art of the pitch? What does summarizing a 400-page work into three minutes of out-loud proclamation have to do with being a good writer? Did Darwin or Freud pitch? Did Ernest Hemingway?

No, they didn’t. But a writer today is required to tell the world – agents, editors, publishers, sales and marketing executives, book store buyers, reporters, feature writers, TV personalities, radio producers, not to mention book buyers — what the book is about and why it’s worth their time and money.

Your pitch needs to be short and convincing — and entertaining, if appropriate. Your delivery has to be spot on.

I know how some writers suffer through this process. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us who aren’t trained in sales or dramatic acting, and it can be especially difficult for shy, introspective, private individuals — as are many writers.

“Hey I didn’t sign up to be a snake oil huckster, a talking bobble head!”  Lots of writers feel this way. But pitching is a fact of life, and furthermore, it works.

So how should you approach this ritual initiation? Here are some tips I offer in sincere good fellowship. You can do this!

Before the pitch: Preparation

1. Talk about the book first, about yourself second
Start out by talking about the book, the story, the special purpose or original idea. Some people spend too much of their allotted time delivering lengthy academic or professional credentials that may be impressive but aren’t the most important thing.

Be sure to include a description of your target audience, and be specific.  If your book is a memoir, for example, it’s more useful to tell us if it targets “women facing the death of their lifetime partner” rather than to say only that the book is meant for women.

2. Include your understanding of online marketing
Express your willingness to help market the book. This is a new requirement for authors today and it’s essential. Please don’t tell us that you hate email, don’t want a website and refuse to blog.  Mention your platform.

3. Be sure to tell us about this!
Include key information like “My last book sold 20K copies” or “60 Minutes did a segment on my research” or “I won the O’Henry Best First Story award last year” or “I do workshops and trainings every weekend and sell a hundred self-published books in the back of the room every time” or “I’ve hired a personal publicist.”

4. Time your pitch
Be tough on yourself when preparing your pitch to keep it under two- and-a-half minutes. That way you’ll have time for any quick questions or feedback, and you won’t be caught short when that darned buzzer rings.

5. Practice on friends and family
Do this, not for their critique of your content, but to make sure they can hear you clearly and understand your words.

6. Try it out on videotape
You need to see yourself and hear your own voice. Remember this is how we’re going to see you. We’ll be thinking not only about what you say but also how you look.

♦ ♦ ♦

The day of the pitch: Delivery

1. Check your appearance
Dress as if you’re going to a professional job interview, or to a meeting at your publisher’s editorial offices.

2. Remember your manners
Resist an impulse to push or shove aside the person ahead of you. I’ve seen that too many times, no kidding! Shake my hand and look me in the eye.

3. Speak clearly
Deliver your pitch in a normal conversational tone. I want to hear and understand your every word.

4. Don’t read
Please don’t read a prepared script. Try your best to deliver the words spontaneously. We want to see your ability to speak on your feet, to be natural and authentic.

5. Adjust to your listener
Allow yourself some wiggle room to adjust to your listener’s response. If they smile and their eyes light up — relax, you’re doing great. If their lids droop and they start looking over your shoulder, skip to the chase. Watch for those cues.

6. Confidence is great but avoid overselling
Some writers pile on assurances like “Oprah’s going to love this,” or “My writer’s group says it’s terrific,” or “My book is completely spell- checked, finished, ready to publish and you won’t have to do any more work on it.”

We appreciate conviction and authority, but not hyperbole. And we need to believe that you’d play well on our team.

7. Have realistic expectations
By happy if we say “That’s interesting…send me a proposal or sample chapter.” Better yet would be “Let’s talk more in an hour when this session is over.” But even the request for more information in writing is good news and indicates some success.

_____________

I’ve heard great pitches that went all the way. I know other acquisition editors and agents who’ve met writers they love through pitch sessions. It’s worth learning the craft of pitching. Attend any event where you have the opportunity to fine tune and try out your pitch. It’s a great way to get objective professional feedback from someone who’s looking for the next big thing.

What about you?

Writers, I’d love to hear about the view from your side of the table. Send in the best, worst, funniest experiences you’ve had pitching your books to agents and editors.  Here’s a chance to tell us a thing or two about the pitching process — and to help fellow writers who may be preparing for their first attempt.

Agents, editors, and publishers receive queries every day from professors, scholars, clinicians and other academics who say they have a great idea for a trade book based on their research, thesis, journal article or latest discoveries from the lab or clinic.

Sharp editors also scour the daily press for the latest breaking news about scientific discoveries and newly reported studies on topics dear to the heart of the general reader.

Scroll down for details on how publishers work with academic authors to produce popular trade books: editorial development, co-authorship and working with a ghostwriter

Popular translations of recent discoveries

Medicine, biology, economics, environmental sciences, genetics, psychology, and neuroscience  are all popular in the media these days, as we learn more and more about human nature, why we behave this way, and what we can or cannot do about it – at least for now.

I’ve been involved in many successful arrangements with academics that have worked out for everyone and produced good books that sold well. Right now at Jossey-Bass/Wiley, we’re co-publishing a series of books with Harvard Health Publications based upon the application of recent research in neuroscience.

On the best-seller list right now

Other examples of scholarship and research-based titles on the New York Times best-seller list right now include The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane V. Ravitch (NYU), Superfreakonomics by Stephen D. Levitt (U Chicago,) and Change Your Brain, Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen, MD.

Converting academic writing to popular prose

Aside from the usual factors in a decision to represent or publish the work – originality, author platform, competition – there’s usually a special issue with the literary style of the academic writing itself.

Students spend years of hard work on PhD theses, then submit research and scholarship in articles for peer review journals.  Later, as distinguished professors, clinicians and scholars, they are expected to produce a kind of dry and didactic style of writing. Their prose is often fraught with citations, parentheses and other trappings of secondary research that’s boring to wade through and difficult to understand.

It’s often tough for academics to shake off this firmly ingrained style. Consequently, even smart and well-educated agents and editors may be left scratching their heads in confusion with only a glimmer of comprehension. What does this mean?

Nevertheless, because the underlying ideas may be fascinating, important and useful, such projects are often taken on and repackaged with the following basic strategies.

How academic authors produce popular trade books

Three strategies

1.  Editorial Development

If the author has the capacity to revise the proposal and ultimately write the manuscript with major direction from a developmental editor or other dedicated professional, then it may be possible to produce a book that a general reader can understand and learn from.

The editor will work with the author line by line, page by page, explaining, clarifying, reorganizing, polishing, adding important narrative story elements like dramatic case histories and anecdotal examples with dialogue, visual description and characterization and removing the requirements of academic citation and qualification.

2.  Co-authorship

Sometimes the solution is to bring in a second writer, identified clearly on the book’s cover or titles page as “with” or “and” their name. In this case, the professorial author may or may not produce a first draft but with it or without, the co-author writes the book.

The original academic author has the ultimate authority and approval over the manuscript, but the writer does the heavy lifting, including outlining, drafting, interviewing, further researching, and taking responsibility for keeping the production on schedule, under the guidance and supervision of the publisher.

3.  Ghostwriters 

When the original author doesn’t want to advertise that they had help writing the book, we turn to a ghostwriter.

Ghosts don’t care so much if they get credit so long as they are properly compensated. You may find their names buried in the book’s acknowledgements with some vague kind of thanks, but not always.

Co-authors and ghostwriters are highly regarded and greatly sought after. Agents and editors try to assemble a stable of cherished professionals, some of whom specialize in one field or another, but others who are experienced in a variety of types and genres based on their skill and alacrity.

These writers are usually well paid and don’t work on speculation but rather with a substantial advance and a negotiable percentage of the author’s royalties.

This kind of collaboration begins with a written agreement regarding duties and compensation and the possibility of disagreement and dissolution.

My advice: Get help early on

It’s always better to send an agent or editor a proposal that is already in a form that appeals to the general reader. This may mean engaging a developmental editor or co-author prior to getting an agent. You can find agents, by the way, through recommendations and personal references from your colleagues, meet them at readings and writers conferences, or search them online.  It’s hard work that may take a while, but getting an agent is absolutely essential.

If you go forward on your own, keep in mind that what may seem clear to you may nevertheless need a lot more explanation, example, and narrative polish.

Agents and publishers appreciate it when you acknowledge your willingness to revise and collaborate up front. Then be prepared to compromise and modify your academic way of communicating so your ideas can have a broader readership.

All these techniques – editorial development, co-authorship or working with a ghostwriter — have been utilized with great success, producing books that appear regularly on best-seller lists.

She grew up in a tiny Mormon town in Idaho (pop 841,) she writes poetry, reads kids’ books and says she avoids the internet as much as she possibly can.

Kristen Tracy sold her first book in 2006 to Simon and Schuster. The title was Lost It, a story about a girl losing her virginity underneath a canoe. The book is in its 7th printing.

Things snowballed after that and now she’s got deals for two series, one with Hyperion for YA readers, and another with Random House for the Middle Grade bunch (tweens.) She’s had three more books published, another will be out in June, and others are coming down the pike.

So, what set Tracy apart? How did this little-known writer break out with a one-two punch and land two multi-book contracts?

Here’s how it happened

In Tracy’s own words, here’s what she did to get where she is today — plus a few of the things she’d do differently.  Her words come from a talk she delivered recently at the San Francisco Writers Conference.

• I started early

I’ve been accumulating story ideas since I was a kid. I grew up in a conservative Mormon community, where there was a lot of great scenery, but not much else.  I was surrounded by potatoes, farms, and Libertarians.

But I had an interesting life.  And, luckily, I was an alert child, which meant that I paid attention to my world.  So now, even though I’m far away from that life, I’m able to draw from it. As a writer it’s important to pay attention to your surroundings.  I got lucky in that I did this before I knew I was a writer.  A lot of my stories are set in small Idaho towns.  I know those pastures. I know those gravel roads.

• I read like crazy

I read for the market. By this I mean I studied the classics, like The Great Gatsby, the Outsiders, Judy Blume books, the winners of the Newbury Awards, the National Book Awards, plus titles from the adult and YA best-seller lists in the NY Times.

• I analyzed Harry Potter

I got an MFA in poetry writing and taught college students who were preparing to teach high school and elementary school students by reading adult and children’s literature. My students and I took apart and analyzed Harry Potter and how it worked.

• I got an agent

I looked for names of agents in the acknowledgements pages of books I liked. I searched agent websites and blogs to find the names junior agents who might be willing to take a chance on an untested author. I broke the rules and sent not just a query letter but a first chapter to pique their interest. I wouldn’t take no for an answer and finally landed with Sarah Crowe at the Harvey Klinger Agency in New York.

• I believed in myself

I tried to ignore super-duper-afraid-of risk advice from a mentor who told me to “give up the fairy tale” of wanting to write literary books for young adults and stick to teaching. I really appreciated her taking me out to dinner, since I was broke at the time, but after that advice I stopped accepting her invitations.

• I try to keep my life balanced

Sometimes, during rounds of edits, you have to wait.  I try to fill my time with worthwhile stuff.  I’m a volunteer gardener on Alcatraz.  Also, I try to take road trips.  In term of creativity, I cross-pollinate by writing poetry.

• I didn’t accept every suggested revision

I’ve learned to understand the difference between revisions that improve the story and those that improve the saleability of the story.  A few editors were certain Camille should be three years older.  Because more than one person made the suggestion, I figured they must be on to something.  So I turned my fourth grader into a tween.

But then the editor who ended up buying my story told me that Camille struck her as a fourth grader, not a tween.  So…I turned Camille back into a fourth grader but decided to make my next project about a tween girl, in The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter.

The people I trust the most with revision suggestions are the editors who’ve loved my books enough to buy them. Wendy Loggia, my Middle Grade editor at Random House and Emily Schultz my YA editor at Hyperion, are ideal readers for me who offer tremendously insightful feedback, but ultimately let me make my own decisions.

• I do stuff with young people

I volunteer at 826 Valencia and tutor emerging teen writers.  I think being around kids and teens — witnessing their world — is important when you’re writing to this audience.  I listen to how they talk to each other and what they think about the world they live in.

• The biggest thing I’ve learned

Over the last four years I’ve learned that a lot of stuff in publishing is out of my control.  But the one thing that I have total control over is the story I choose to tell and how well I tell it.  This is where I put all my energy.

Mistakes I’ve learned from

• I resisted blogging and social networking

I don’t have a promotion-oriented soul and I am reluctant to accept that the internet is my friend. It took me a year to get a website up.  I still don’t do blog tours. I enjoy my cat more than I enjoy networking.

• I turned around revisions too quickly

I set up the expectation that I would do miraculous things in a time crunch all the time.  If I could do it again, I would sit on my revisions for three weeks before I turned them in.

______________________

Tracy’s first book Lost It has sold more than 35,000 copies according to BookScan, which captures about 75 percent of all sales.

Since then she’s had three other books published, including Crimes of the Sarahs (Simon & Schuster), Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (just out from Random House and already in its fourth printing), and The Reinvention of Bessica Lefter.

A Field Guide for Heartbreakers from Hyperion, will be out in June. Others in both her series are in the works at Hyperion and Random House.

A successfully self-published book can propel you down the road to a book contract at a commercial publishing house.

That’s the truth of the matter, despite the worries I hear from writers that self-publishing could doom their hopes of ever landing a real book deal. Don’t listen to those persistent rumors and urban myths that agents and editors won’t take on books the authors have published themselves.

Scroll down for the top four reasons self-published books get picked up

Two I just signed up

Here are a couple of recent examples of self-published books I signed up for our current list at Jossey-Bass, the west coast imprint of John Wiley and Sons.

1. The first was an original approach to writing a memoir by Linda Joy Myers. We knew that memoir writing and publishing was thriving and continuing to grow, and this how-to book on writing a healing memoir was something no one had done before.

The author had published the book herself and sold nearly 5,000 copies in a relatively short time at lectures, trainings, and weekend workshops. She’d also founded and directed a new organization called the National Association of Memoir Writers under whose auspices these trainings occurred. So we were impressed with her growing platform and proven ability to sell her own book.

We changed the title from the original Becoming Whole to one more descriptive: The Power of Memoir – Writing Your Healing Story. We also did a lot of developmental editing on the book, focusing it more on a program of how-to-write a memoir, and adding excellent case examples that were each highly readable stories in their own right.

2. The second self-published book I bought recently was called Golden Anniversaries, a fresh approach to sustaining a long-term marriage. Under that title, the book had already sold 8,000 copies since published in hardcover just four months earlier.

It had also won several prizes, including the Gold Medal for “Best Relationship Book” from the Indie Book Awards.

The authors, Charles and Elizabeth Schmitz, were a husband-and-wife team who’d been married themselves for more than 42 years. They had built a terrific platform, both in the academic world as PhD professors and as very active trainers on the relationship education and workshop circuit, with back-of-the-room sales at every event.

In this case, very little developmental editing was needed, another plus, since it’s always great for publishers to receive a polished manuscript ready to go into production.  We changed the name of our version to Building a Love that Lasts: The Seven Surprising Secrets of Successful Marriage.

One that got away

We lost an auction for another self-published book by a Berkeley psychologist about coping with and reducing women’s anger. We offered a good advance to take over the book, but McGraw-Hill put up twice as much. Proof that self-published books can generate intense interest among competing publishers.

Self-published novels are picked up too

Case in point: David Carnoy, an author we featured here in an earlier post called The unvarnished truth about self publishing, just reported that his novel, Knife Music, was picked up by Overlook Press for publication in July, 2010. Overlook is a very fine and classy small literary publisher founded and run by Peter Mayer, a publishing star and, incidentally, an old friend.

Top four reasons self-published books get signed up

1. Indication of the writer’s courage and confidence

We appreciate an author who has the conviction and confidence to invest in self-publishing. It takes courage and a lot of time and energy to write, edit, design, pay for the copies, and then sell them one way or another.

It demonstrates that this isn’t a random hobby but a passion, something the writer really cares about.

2. Evidence of a market for the book

We’re impressed with sales over 5,000 copies. 10,000 is even better. These kind of numbers show that there is, in fact, a market for the book, that there’s something original and compelling about it, and that the author knows how to self-market and publicize it..

We assume that we can add on a lot of value, expertise, and resources to the book’s re-publication, so it can have a greater success for all involved. The author has helped to identify the niche that can be targeted and we can take it further with direct marketing and publicity.

3. Proof the author can market the book

We know that the authors of a successful self-published book will continue to self-market and sell the book on their own.

That’s part of our deal when we sign an author. We assume and expect a continuing active engagement in the kind of marketing that only the author can provide: constant outreach, blogging and social networking, which has become the most effective way to sell any book.

4. An expectation of ongoing bulk sales

We know that self-published books are often a kind of calling card tool the author uses at trainings and workshops for back-of-the-room sales. These authors continue to make bulk sale purchases from a commercial publisher after the new edition has come out.

More advantages for writers

I’m a strong advocate of self-publishing for people who want to get a book out quickly without going through all the frustration of struggling for months and years to get an agent or publisher.

With self-publishing you have total control over every aspect of the book.  It’s an effective way to test and develop a book, since with small print-on-demand editions, the editorial content, cover design, and marketing approach can be polished up as you go along.

And keep in mind that the standard industry figures show that at least five percent of all self-published books convert to commercial publication. That’s a significant number.

Who’s tried self-publishing?

Any tips to pass along to fellow writers? We look forward to hearing about your valuable experiences and thoughts on the subject.

“A voice journal will keep your characters from becoming little versions of you.”

That advice comes from James Scott Bell, author of The Art of War for Writers, a new book of strategies and exercises for fiction authors.

“You’ll find yourself excited about your characters. You’ll think about them even when you’re not writing. They will become real to you.”

Creating nuanced characters

As a developmental editor working with a broad variety of fiction and non-fiction writers, I try to help them flesh out the various elements of an authentic, complex, multi-dimensional character portrait.  These include an original voice or vocal style, as well as physical appearance, age, and other unique details that leap off the page.

Nuanced characters are crucial to the success of a book.  The reader has to identify with them, care about them, or at least want to know what happens to them.

A voice journal is a tool that can help your characters come alive, wake up and sing, and keep your readers reading. With Bell’s kind permission, here’s how it works, from his book:

Keeping a voice journal

from The Art of War for Writers, by James Scott Bell

The voice journal is my favorite way of getting to know a character.

A voice journal is simply a character speaking in stream-of-consciousness mode. You prompt the character by asking the occasional question, and then just let your fingers records the words on the page.

It’s essential that you do not edit as you write. It’s best to write in five- or ten-minute chunks, without stopping. Over and over again.

Here is what a voice journal might look like with a character I’m making up right now:

My name is Pierpont Feenie, and people stare at me because I’m six foot nine. So what? That’s the body I got, and that’s the body I use. I go down to Venice Beach, and I play basketball, I feel alive. I can jump, I can fly, I am the best there is on the blacktop. They got guys down there, college guys who think they can bang with me, but I’ve got the sky hook, I’ve got the beef, and I love to lay them out. Laying them out keeps me from killing people. See, I used to be an assassin. The tallest assassin in the world.

When I started the voice journal, I did not know that Pierpont was an assassin. But he told me he was. So I wrote it down.

However, if this does not fit the needs of my story, it’s very easy to change that and go on with something else.

Next, you can concentrate on background:

I was born in New Jersey and grew up in the rough part of Newark. My dad died in a subway tunnel. Somebody pushed him off the platform. They never found out who. I was eight years old and my mom didn’t do too well after that. I had to take care of my little sisters. Twins. Two years younger than me. I had to grow up fast. The night our building caught on fire, well, that made me grow up even faster…

Keep going with this. It’s fun, and it makes for better characters in better stories.

Get inspired

We can all learn from the greats. Listen to this passage from one of Elmore Leonard’s best books, Get Shorty. Here’s Chili Palmer the gangster, in Miami, leaving Vesuvio’s after lunch:

Chili went in the checkoom to get his jacket and all that was in there were a couple of raincoats and a leather flight jacket must’ve been from World War Two.  When Chili got the manager, an older Italian guy in a black suit, the manager looked around the practically empty checkroom and asked Chili, “You don’t find it?  Is not one of these?”

Chili said, “You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, has lapels like a suitcoat? You don’t, you owe me three seventy-nine.”  The manager told him to look at the sign there on the wall. WE CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST ARTICLES.  Chili said to him, “I bet you can if you try. I didn’t come down to sunny Florida to freeze my ass. You follow me? You get the coat back or you give me the three seventy-nine my wife paid for it at Alexander’s.”

Good, isn’t it.  Elmore Leonard is a master.

What about you?

Who are some of your favorite characters?  What makes them pop for you?

Try a voice journal yourself and let me know how it goes.

The rest of Bell’s book has other useful tips and ideas for writers, whether you’re working on fiction or non-fiction.

You can get more details at his website.

Q:  There’s some background information I need to include so my narrative makes more sense.  How can I do that without breaking the flow of the story?

A:  Many writers struggle with blending in historical context and a who’s who of key characters from the past whose influence has led up to their protagonist’s current dilemma — and how to do it seamlessly, without creating confusion or burdening the reader with too many details.

They grapple with how to work in the immigrant ancestors. Or how to explain about the bra-burning grandma or the parent with no boundaries.  Or the moody kindergarten teacher. Or the sadistic vocal coach. Or the tragic first lover who drank himself to oblivion.

Scroll down for a list of six suggested technical solutions.

What the reader needs to know

Every story has to start somewhere in time and space. But what came before?

There’s so much stuff the reader needs to know! How can a writer weave in the backstory details that are essential to understanding the story?

All authors of narrative fiction and non-fiction deal with these questions — whether they’re writing an adult literary novel, young adult or middle grade fiction, fantasy, sci-fi fantasy, romance, or narrative nonfiction like a memoir, history, or other complex true story.

Successful writers experiment with different technical solutions

There’s no one solution or formula.

Every rule you hear about can be, and often is, broken. Here are some of the options that make good storytelling so interesting but hard to achieve.

6 backstory techniques

1. Start in the past

Begin with a summary of the historical background as a prologue to the present time.

One example of this is the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, in which Charles Dickens famously begins “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and proceeds majestically to portray the Kings and Queens of England and France, and describe the Norwegian wood that would be eventually be made into the guillotine that decapitates Sidney Carton, the book’s hero.

But such prologue material doesn’t always work.

In the original version of The Great Gatsby, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a lengthy biography of the title character. His editor Maxwell Perkins suggested he delete this slow beginning, which Fitzgerald did.  He later rewrote the text as the excellent short story Absolution.

As in that case, a danger of this technique is producing too many pages with more information than a reader can possibly remember. So if you try this technique, keep it short.

2. Start in the present, then flashback in time

Begin with a dramatic moment in the here-and-now in chapter one. Then in chapter two, jump back to an equally compelling moment that took place in the past. This can be effective but again, the danger is in getting trapped in too much explanation.

Even more problematic is a flashback within the flashback, something I see frequently.  A double-whammy like that can leave readers scratching their heads in bewilderment.

3. Go back and forth in time

Here’s an example of how to structure a narrative around shifts in time: Chapter one takes place in the present. Then chapter two takes place in the past. Chapter three is back in the present, four in the past, and so forth, creating parallel tracks.

I worked with author Katherine Neville on her bestselling novel The Eight, a great example of two apparently separate plots that meet ingeniously in a surprise ending.

But Katherine’s book was an exception, and this structure can become tedious if not executed brilliantly.

4. Insert memories

In a common but tricky technique, the heroine may think to herself, “She promised me that necklace, I’m sure of it…”

Or a memory is dropped into the dialogue.  The protagonist may say to another character: “Listen, David, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but…”

This can work, but the writer must take special care, because it can also become clumsy and intrusive.

5. Shift perspective

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville starts with an “I” narrator Ishmael, but later shifts the point of view to a third person narrator, then moves occasionally to Ahab himself, then back again at the end to Ishmael.

If done skillfully and with discretion, shifting voices can work, but in general I don’t recommend “head hopping” from character to character in order to fit in backstory information.

6. Include footnotes

In The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig includes dozens of footnotes that analyze psychoanalytic theory relating to the characters, and other fictional footnotes that expand and explain the story.

Similarly, in his monumental novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace includes more than 400 endnotes to break up the linear chronology and to supplement and clarify the core text.

This is a very special technique and difficult to pull off, needless to say, but has absolutely worked for great literary writers and provides a splendid model for all.

Struggling with this? You’re in good company

If you’re struggling with the backstory blues, you’re in good company. Remember different strategies have worked for different writers, each with their own special strengths.

For example, my esteemed friend Tom Robbins frequently jumps around in time with impunity in many of his wonderful novels, including Skinny Legs and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.

Also, Leo Tolstoy wrote many versions of War and Peace, each of which kept moving further back in time. He ultimately decided to start at an even earlier point in time, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, which included what he felt was the necessary historical context.

How an editor works with a writer to resolve backstory problems

The issue of how to best integrate backstory details emerges frequently in my own work as a developmental editor. Here are a couple of recent examples.

Stitching in a family secret

In one case, an author and I replaced a 14-page prologue with three less repetitious and more powerful internal memories and one passage of quoted dialogue that conveyed a family secret, hidden for years, then suddenly revealed in present time.

Adding a flashback chapter

For another book, the writer and I identified a crucial past moment in the heroine’s coming of age, then developed it fully with dramatic action as the second chapter of the book.  We didn’t need to resort to another flashback for the rest of the story.

What has worked for you?

I look forward to hearing from you with reports of your own backstory solutions.  What have you found especially challenging?

Have you managed to avoid the dreaded information dump?  Please pass along any suggestions to fellow writers!

Psst!  Wanna write a scorcher for the booming YA market?

OK, here’s the secret: The first thing you need to do is create an authentic, quirky, true-to-life voice.

The story and characterizations in Young Adult fiction are crucial too, of course, but the most important element is that distinctive narrative personality.

The strongest and most powerful voice is a first person “I” narrator that draws the reader right inside a young character’s head. Third-person can also work.

Always go for an honest voice that captures how teens really think and talk to each other. Never talk down. Never be phony or try to sound cool.

That’s the bottom-line advice from three very active literary agents in the genre. Scroll down for more from our interview.

What’s behind the boom?

Three words: online social networking.

Kids are out there loving their books and telling each other all about them. They’re reviewing new titles on Facebook and Twitter. They’re texting and blogging and emailing back and forth in a gargantuan network of interactivity.

Authors are a big part of this scene — plugging in with their young readers all over the world, right in their own space, interacting in a way we’ve never seen before in the publishing business.

Soaring book sales

All this word of mouth has had a tremendous impact, resulting in soaring book sales for publishers — and a corresponding spike in new book deals for authors.

Hardcover sales are up a whopping 24 percent over this time last year in the juvenile fiction category “Social Situations, Family and Health,” according to Nielsen BookScan. And sales are up 16 percent in another hot category, “History, Sports, People and Places.”

At the same time, we’re seeing lots of action in book deals, with agents and publishers signing up new projects at a brisk pace.  New publishing deals in Young Adult and Middle Grade fiction were up more than 16 percent in 2009 over the prior year, according Publisher’s Marketplace.  Compare that to deals for adult mysteries, up 9 percent, and adult romances, up 2 percent.

Three agents to watch

These timely perceptions come from three agents at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management, based in NYC. With many big YA book deals among them, they exude an enthusiasm and energy that’s highly contagious.

The agents and their recent sales:

Stacey Glick:  “My main sale recently was a huge three-book deal [more than $500K] for Amy Huntington’s Sleepwalking. [Read Amy's pitch letter here] I’ve sold two others to Harper Children’s, and I have high hopes for a couple of others that I’m about to go out with.”

Michael Bourret:  “I’ve had a very good year. I sold a bunch, more than during the year before. A lot of my sales have been for series – six books, four books at once. My author Heather Brewer has done extremely well with her Chronicles of Vladimir Todd series.”

Jim McCarthy:  “I’ve had five or six major sales, some for multiple titles. My author Richelle Mead, for example, finished up the sixth and last book in her Vampire Academy series, which has been on the NY Times Series bestseller list for 22 weeks, so we spun off two characters from the academy to sell a new six book series.”

I spoke to Stacey, Michael and Jim by conference call the other day.  Here’s some of our conversation and more of their insights for writers:

The term YA is used so loosely. What exactly is a Young Adult book?

Mike:  YA books are for teens. Strictly speaking, it’s 12 and up, though from 14 up the books are racier.

Jim:  YA also includes MG or Middle Grade books, which are for “Tweens”, 10-12 years old. These MG books usually have a younger protagonist, a heroine or hero who’s not yet a teenager.

Are there taboo subjects a YA author needs to avoid?

Stacey:  Not really. Judy Bloom has been writing for years about controversial topics like divorce, race, masturbation and teen sex. No X-rated sex scenes of course, or anything in bad taste. And Roald Dahl certainly never avoided the dark side of young peoples’ imaginations. Currently, the Stephenie Meyer Twilight books have made erotic romance more acceptable in contemporary YA literature. So there are no rigid rules about what you can write.

Jim:  That’s right. Unlike adult books, there’s a built-in support structure, since librarians and teachers are looking for challenging books with big issues that will attract teen readers.

Who are the biggest and best publishers buying YA?

Mike:  All the major houses publish YA, some within several imprints.

Stacey:  Simon and Schuster has  Simon Pulse and others, at Penguin there’s Razorbill.  Holt, Scholastic of course, Houghton – all have YA imprints. Farrar Strauss, Knopf, and Little Brown tend to publish more literary books in YA.

What kind of advances are you getting?

Stacey:  We’re seeing four to seven figures. In some cases YA books are sold for less than $10K because we just want to get the author on the YA community’s radar screen.  That’s particularly true when it’s a paperback original and there’s hope for a series to follow.

Mike:  The lower advances are usually for a publisher-generated series that doesn’t give an individual writer a credit, but has one fictional author, like Carolyn Keene for the old Nancy Drew series. For example, Simon Pulse has a romantic comedy series that’s written by a number of different authors.

Jim:  But YA’s can sell for up to $1.5 M and more, particularly for a series by a brand name author.

Are YA books illustrated and does the author have to provide the art, too?

Mike: Many books for teens and pre-teens have illustrations at the opening of each chapter, particularly the MG titles. But the author doesn’t have to supply the art.  The publisher usually provides the illustrations unless the author is a professional artist.

Has the downtrend in the economy affected the price of YA books?

Jim:  Not really. The pricing is really different than for adult books. Publishers do the hardcover version for only $16.99 or $17.99. They’re shorter books – usually only 25K words. The trade paperback books cost less too, only $8.99. So most of our books are still coming out in cloth, then later in paperback.

Is it true that more girls than boys read YA books?

Jim:  Yes, girls are the biggest readers. Boys less. Girls will read books that have either a girl or boy as the protagonist, but boys prefer books with boy heroes. That’s why a lot of MG books particularly, have two central characters: a girl and a boy.

Mike:  Boys are still reading the classic old Hardy Boys adventures. There haven’t been any new ones published for years.  Nancy Drew, on the other hand, keeps rolling along with new titles every year.

What do you predict for the future of YA writing and publishing?

Stacey:  I’m very optimistic. There’s no reason why this category shouldn’t continue to flourish in the years to come. It’s a rich, creative field with so many options and possibilities for writers and readers.

Jim:  Definitely. There’s a robust trend and it’ll keep going. No other category has such diversity and such an enthusiastic interactive audience of avid readers.

______________

Wow. We’re not in the twentieth century any more, Toto. There’s a whole native generation that’s grown up texting, tweeting, and living in an online community of social networkers. The rest of us need to catch up or we’re in danger of being as extinct as a dinosaur.

In memoriam of the great master

J.D. Salinger

1/1/1919 – 1/27/2010

Speaking of an authentic, quirky voice, how about everyone’s favorite YA leading character: Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Here’s Caulfield in a line from the book:

 ”What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

____________

Kids are doing exactly that online these days, which is one of the wonderful things about contemporary YA.

The irony, of course, is that Salinger, who died this week at age 91, was himself the Garbo of publishing, famously never wanted to talk to anybody at all, and had “No Trespassing” signs posted all around his remote homestead in New Hampshire.

Attention authors

If you’re writing adult books now, consider the flexibility and potential of the YA market. What a great audience of readers.

If you’re already a YA author, what are you working on? Tell us about your experience and advice and post any questions in comments.

I can’t help smiling when I read a good hook.  When it happens, it’s a rush, a little like falling in love.

The hook — those critical initial sentences of a query letter from an author, or the opening of the book proposal itself — are the first and most important words that agents and acquiring editors read.

Hooks that capture and delight us

If the hook doesn’t capture our attention, delight us with sparkling prose, enlighten us with fascinating news, or make us laugh at your wit and surprising twists and turns, then the rest of what you’ve sent is in grave danger of getting dumped and deleted.

A good hook persuades an agent and editor that you’re serious and capable. It’s the first step in convincing us to drop everything and devote ourselves to making a major commitment of time and money on your behalf. Once we’re hooked, we’re ready to go to the next level and be your champions in the lengthy and difficult process of publication.

So it’s not surprising that writers struggle with this.  A hook can’t be boring or lack energy. It can’t read like a canned formulaic cut and paste. It has to pop and stand out from the crowd. It’s not easy to do.

Memorable hooks that led to book contracts

I surveyed some friends in the business, all agents, for their recent favorites. Here’s what they sent.

The body comes down the river…

“Under a low sun, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud languid swarm of bluebottle flies, the body comes down the river like a deadfall stripped clean.”

–The opener of Finn, a Novel, by debut author Jon Clinch [Random House].  From his agent Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management

A brother shows you who you are…

“A brother shows you who you are – and also who you are not. Your family has a certain flavor or smell unlike any other. It has an ethos, perhaps even a mythology all its own. You are a ‘we’ with your brother before you are a ‘we’ with any other.”

–The hook for the anthology Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry by David Kaczynski, about his brother, Ted, known as “The Unabomber” [Jossey-Bass/Wiley]. From the agent for the project, Andrew Blauner

Plunged into the world of an American teenager…

“The reader is plunged into the world of an American teenager living in a bewitching foreign city while attempting to rebuild her shattered life after the death of her parents.

 She finds herself in the most typical teenage condition – falling in love with the most untypical person imaginable: an eighteen-year-old Resistance fighter who died in 1942.”

–The hook for Sleepwalking, by debut YA novelist Amy Huntington, which sold recently in a major 3-book deal, ($500K and up) for publication in Summer 2011, 2012, 2013 [Harper Children's].  From her agent Stacy Glick, Vice President at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management

My new book is narrated by a dog…

“I am a Seattle writer with two published novels.  I have recently completed my third novel, and I find myself in a difficult situation: My new book is narrated by a dog, and my current agent told me that he cannot (or will not) sell it for that very reason. Thus, I am seeking new representation.”

–The hook in an initial query from “emerging” author Garth Stein, whose novel The Art of Racing in the Rain ended up snagging a $1.2 million book deal and has so far sold more than 750K copies; on the New York Times best seller list for the past 31 weeks [Harper].  From his (new) agent, Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management

A chance encounter with a Chinese Muslim dissident…

“The Beijing ‘08 Olympics are over, the war in Iraq is lost, and former National Guard medic Ellie McEnroe is stuck in China, trying to lose herself in the alien worlds of performance artists and online gamers.

When a chance encounter with a Chinese Muslim dissident drops her down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, Ellie must decide whom to trust among the artists, dealers, collectors and operatives claiming to be on her side – in particular, a mysterious organization operating within a popular online game.”

–Opening hook of a book proposal by debut author Lisa Brackmann for Rock Paper Tiger  [Soho Press, June 2010]. From her agent Nathan Bransford at Curtis Brown, LTD, San Francisco

A personal training course for amping up your creativity…

“Can sitting in front of a light box increase your creativity? How about listening to Bach’s Italian Concerto in F major? These are, believe it or not, crucial questions to the survival of humans.

In The Creative Brain I’ll present a personal training course for “amping up” your level of creative thought and productivity. The strategies in my book are based on findings from neuroscience that identify seven specific brainsets (the biological equivalents to mindsets) associated with creativity.

I’ll outline techniques that will guide readers to reproduce these brainsets, thus increasing creative ideas and motivation. (And by the way, the answer is ‘yes’ to bright light and “no” to Bach’s Concerto.)”

–The hook from a proposal for The Creative Brain by Shelley Carson PhD [A Harvard Health Publication at Jossey-Bass/Wiley] submitted by her agent Linda Konner.

Hooks to share?

There’s no question that the hook is an essential element in the process of finding an agent and getting a publisher.

What do you say, readers? Have any hooks to share?  Any you’re working on now?  How’s that going?  I’ll watch for your questions in comments.

“Writing a memoir is an act of courage. Be brave. It means exposing who you really are, which is hard to do, even to yourself.”

That advice comes from a conversation I had recently with Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., President of the National Association of Memoir Writers. She’s the author of a new book, The Power of Memoir: Writing Your Healing Story, which we’re publishing at John Wiley & Sons in February.

Scroll down for Myers’ great tips for writers.

Memoirs are hugely popular

“Memoir writing is a grass-roots movement sweeping the country,” says Myers, a psychotherapist and coach who has led memoir workshops and trainings for more than 28 years. “We want to understand ourselves, to reach a deeper level of meaning about what we’ve experienced.”

This week’s New York Times best-seller lists include the memoirs Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert — not to mention blockbuster celebrity memoirs by Andre Aggasi, Edward Kennedy, and Sarah Palin.

I personally receive a dozen or more memoir proposals and manuscripts from agents and writers every month in my capacity both as Executive Editor at Wiley and as a consulting editor working with private clients.

Making sense of our lives

We publishers think it’s partly the demographic bulge of baby boomers who are reaching an age where they’re trying to make sense of their lives.

There’s a timeless universal instinct to sit around the fire and tell stories that explain the world, and also to listen – for insight and inspiration. When we read another person’s memoir we learn about them and get inside their skin. And when we understand another person, we can understand ourselves better too.

Memoir writing may in fact be an evolutionary survival mechanism, a creative artifact of human culture and tradition, and the need to create order out of the random chaos of our lives.

It’s not simple or easy

But writing a memoir that’s of interest beyond family and friends isn’t simple or easy. Myers identifies the two biggest obstacles every memoirist faces:

The memoirist’s two biggest obstacles

Your inner critic

That’s the nagging voice in your ear that says nothing you write is good or true, the voice that inflicts you with shame and guilt, especially if you’ve experienced trauma, abuse, or loss. The inner critic can inhibit you from acknowledging and revealing — even if only to yourself — what actually happened in your life.

Your outer critics

They are the family members and others who don’t want anything about themselves or their history revealed in writing.  Try your best to shut down the outer critic while you’re writing. Don’t tell your family or friends what you’re working on.

Once you’ve finished writing, go through and take out all the anger. Delete anything that’s there just for revenge. Leave only the truth as you see it, and then show it to them, if they’re still living.

If you’re writing for a broader audience

You need to focus your material.

“You have to get outside of yourself and think about your reader,” Myers says. “What does the reader want to know and what’s irrelevant?

This makes you less self-centered, and it also has developmental benefits, by integrating your experiential ego with your observing ego. When you write a memoir, you become the ‘I’ who’s telling the story, and also the ‘I’ narrator who has perspective on the story. So that means you’re both the eight-year-old in the story and you’re an adult observing yourself when you were eight.”

Linda Myers’ 7 tips for defeating your inner critic

1. Start today

Get past that inner critic and start writing. Get it down on paper or up on the screen, then go back and rewrite it. Don’t wait.

2. Keep it private

Don’t show or tell anyone until you’re ready. Listen to your own voice only, and protect your sanctuary, your inner self, home, wherever and however you’re writing.

3. Write the truth

Be ethically and emotionally accurate. This is your story and this memoir belongs to you. Don’t ask family or friends for permission to write this, and if they disagree or get upset when they do finally read it, tell them “This is my story.  This is how I see it. You can write your own story if you want.”

4. Seek understanding

Remember why you’re writing this memoir. Search for meaning, and healing for old wounds. Any anger or desire for revenge will hurt you more than anyone else.

5. Find a focus and theme

Include only what tells your story, since a memoir is not a journal or diary. It’s not like reportage or playing back a tape recording. You’re picking and choosing what to say and how to say it.

6. Writing dialogue

You can’t be expected to remember exact quotes. Go back in time and recreate the scene in your mind’s eye. Write it down, however awful it may be at first. Then read it over, shape it, listen some more, and rewrite until it’s more accurate and has not only the essence of what people said, but also how they said it.

7. Liability

If you’re writing about controversial, criminal, or other potentially damaging matters attributed to people in your story, show the manuscript to a literary attorney to evaluate potential liability. Even if you’ve disguised individuals, people recognize themselves. Try to avoid legal action before it happens.

Getting published

To improve your chances of getting published, you’ll need to write and rewrite.  And if, like many successful writers, you want feedback and assistance, don’t hesitate to hire professional help.  Take a look at this earlier post on what you need to know about choosing a freelance editor.

Once finished, self-publishing a memoir has become an increasingly popular and honorable way of reaching the public fast. Or you can try to get an agent and go for mainstream publication.

Sure it helps if you’re a celebrity or best-selling novelist, but my colleagues at other publishing houses and I are still seeking new authors, fresh faces, and the dream of literary and commercial success.

Are you writing a memoir?

Are you writing a memoir?  What have been your greatest challenges?  What has helped?  Please share your experience in your comments.

Q: Someone in my writers group complained that my plot is hard to follow. Can you help?

A: You might need to work on the transitions — the glue that makes a seamless narrative.  You might need to add a few words of clarification or entire new passages to bridge the gaps.

Your reader could be bewildered because those critical transitions  between the scenes and events of the story are missing or insufficient.

The narrative could read along pretty well but suddenly there’s a bump in the road, a jarring hiccup from one scene to the next that leaves the reader perplexed, confused, disoriented and up in the air: “Wait a minute,” the reader thinks. “This doesn’t make sense! Where are we? What’s happening? What did I miss?”

As an acquisitions and developmental editor, I see this all the time. It’s a very common problem, and easy to fix. Consider some of these types of transitions depending on the specific needs of your draft manuscript:

Types of Transitions and Bridges

1. Date and location headings

A specific date, including month, day and year, like April 7th, 1941 set in caps or italics on its own line at the beginning of a scene or chapter can be an effective way to keep the time straight, especially in a work of fiction or non-fiction that spans many years. You can even spell out the location, like December 25th, 2009, Portland, Oregon, to eliminate the need to explain it elsewhere in the text.

2. A few words of orientation in time and space

Getting the reader from one scene to the next in a coherent manner can be as simple as including some words of orientation, such as “Early the next morning…” or “Three days later…” This discrete addition may save the narrative from disintegrating and make it easier to follow.

3. Third-person narration

Some form of third-person narration can often fill the missing link, like “Alice decided not to wait for the letter to come but made plans to leave on her own. She found herself standing on the platform at the train station the next morning, with only an overnight bag and the Lonely Planet guide to Ecuador…”

4. A character’s inner thoughts

If you’re writing a first-person narrative, you may need to let us into the character’s inner thoughts to explain what’s going on. “I thought about what Dad always said about the true meaning of money, so I….”

5. A new scene or chapter

In many plot-driven stories, memoirs, biographies or histories, the author may have left out an essential piece of the puzzle that can’t be ignored.  This may require the insertion of a full-scale scene or chapter that shows the narrative development from an omniscient perspective, or from another character’s point of view.

The trick is to realize this and locate the precise spot for the new additions.  A good editor can help by identifying not only the location, but also the kind of insertion that’s needed.  Sometimes it’s a new piece of dialogue; sometimes it’s a quick run around the block to see the story from a different point of view.  So read over your manuscript with a critical eye or get some objective professional advice from a teacher or independent editor.

Pruning and planting

Good writers understand that the process of writing and rewriting has to include both pruning and planting. They know it’s essential to take the scalpel to any repetitious sentences or chapters, while at the same time not being so cool and stylish as to bewilder, disorient, and ultimately alienate the reader.

Of course, a writer doesn’t want to be pedantic in tracking the linear sequence of one event after another, whether it’s fiction, memoir, biography or history. Less is often better and an effective literary style should never be based on formulaic step-by-step recitation.

Everyone needs an editor

I’ll bet you can find unnecessary or repetitious words in this post that if removed would make the writing better. And what did I leave out?

Write in with your own experiences and any advice to pass along. I look forward to your comments.