The Literary Agency Group Blog

THE WRITER’S FIRST FANTASY

2008-07-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

Choosing the right designer for the appropriate attire to accept your Nobel Prize for Literature was a bit of a hassle. And the flight to Stockholm seemed never-ending, even in first class. And let’s not even get into your acceptance speech. After Faulkner, Morrison and Steinbeck, the literary world believed it had all been said and you blew them away!

But placing the gold medallion on your mantelpiece threw off the color of your living room and you’ll have to get a new carpet and curtains. Good thing the prize came with $1,000,000.

Now where to put the framed Pulitzer Prize and your National Book Award? The cover of TIME magazine and the New York Times Book Review already clutter your studio wall. Time to upsize?

Oprah was wonderful. Leno and Letterman were funny and it was such a thrill to dump Imus’ invitation.

Hollywood went into a frenzy bidding for the movie rights and it was so nice that Steven Spielberg dropped in make his own personal pitch. But when Martin Scorsese knocked on your door in the middle of it!

Happy enough now?

Problem is you never will be until you dream that first dream—the 'Golden Fleece' of the writer's quest: being read.

Instead of fantasizing about yourself, the writer, imagine being the reader. Getting published, first and foremost is not about 'good writing', but good reading.

Dream all you want, but a writer who is not a reader will never be either.

THE WRITER'S JOB

2008-07-06T05:11:00.000-07:00

“I write so well, always have, everybody’s told me. So why can’t I get published?"

Because you don’t get it. Because you think a book contract is the grand prize in some “quality of writing” contest.

Grow up. Leave your “academic” mind-set behind and start thinking “publishing.”

You write well? So what? Spelling, grammar, and punctuation skills are a given. “Well-written” on a rejection notice is the most courteous insult in the industry.

Do you believe for an instant that an editor thinks…”This is a ‘well-written’ manuscript and should be a book”?

Not this editor. It’s all about what’s on the page—the words are telling me a story or they are not. On the page, I can feel passion even obsession, plus discipline and control because…

I am being told a story!

Imagine a great book as a gigantic impenetrable wall, its perfectly sculpted bricks laid one after another smooth and tight.

The bricks are the words. The writer is the bricklayer.

The storyteller made the bricks and mixed the concrete that holds them together.

Where did the bricks come from?

Start with an idea, add a vision, then a concept, characters and conflict with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Then lay the bricks.

Tell, then write.

Anybody ever say that you tell well?

Do so and you just might get published.

Metaphorically Speaking

2008-06-27T07:38:00.000-07:00

As the quest to be a published author is not unlike going to war, imagine your manuscript as a…weapons system.

If you are an arms manufacturer or a builder of military aircraft or vehicles, success is all about selling. Get a government contract and you’re in business. Because if you can’t, you’re not.

Nothing sells faster than a new weapon proven highly effective, extremely dependable, and easy to use at a reasonable cost.

Case in point: a weapons system comes in with a 90% rating for a $10 billion price tag. Unfortunately, to get the product to a 98% rating would cost $150 billion.

What had potential is suddenly a bust.

What’s your excuse?

Too many novels that go unpublished fail because they are submitted at 90% and the author believes that ‘pushing the envelope’ on the work is not worth the investment.

Not about typos or grammar gaffes or that 3rd paragraph on page 42—at 90% the work is not yet at the “correction stage”—what’s needed a PUSH. Either the story lacks high-enough stakes or a unique conflict or compelling metaphor. Something is missing and the author refuses to believe the story can possibly be deepened and made marketable.

Not so much about change, but completion.

That’s no way to go to war.

There’s another weapons system’s trap too many authors fall into, but so does the US Government which last week christened a billion-dollar hunter-killer submarine with a 99% rating. The only thing the boat lacks is a mission.

Same with too many manuscripts that boast terrific grammar and spelling and excellent punctuation—Everything an editor could hope for except an audience. It’s about the writing rather than the reader. Who would pay money for this book? What’s in it for the reader?

Are you ready to be published? Only if you’re ready to go to war.

What is YOUR Selling Point?

2008-06-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3435993,00.html

Reported by Pub Lunch

New Book In Poland Claims Walesa Was Communist Informer

A book released in Poland on Monday by historians Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk claims to offer evidence that political leader and Nobel laureate Lech Walesa was an informant for the country's secret service in the 70s. Co-author Gontarczyk said in an interview, "Life is complicated sometimes. He was a young deckhand then."A German newspaper says Walesa "has denied the allegations and called the institute's authors 'fanatics' with libellous claims. He has threatened legal action and said he will soon release his own book to tell his side of the story." The paper notes that "during his presidency in 2000, Walesa won a court ruling that said he was not a spy. But opponents, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, say they know he had worked for communists.Deutsche Welle

What's a new biography of Lech Walesa got to do with your manuscript?

Whether you're writing an autobio or a history, mystery science fiction or romance, your SELLING POINT is that single sentence that separates your manuscript from all others. Without a 'big idea' up front, odds are your efforts will be left behind.

What is your SELLING POINT?

Could This Happen To YOUR Book?

2008-06-24T04:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/books/24shack.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[Could This Happen to Your Book?]

Read and imagine.

Christian Novel Is Surprise Best Seller

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: June 24, 2008
NY Times

Mr. Nowak, a maintenance worker near Yakima, Wash., first bought a copy of “The Shack,” a slim paperback novel by an unknown author about a grieving father who meets God in the form of a jolly African-American woman, at a Borders bookstore in March. He was so taken by the story of redemption and God’s love that he promptly bought 10 more copies to give to family and friends.

“Everybody that I know has bought at least 10 copies,” Mr. Nowak said. “There’s definitely something about the book that makes people want to share it.”

Thousands of readers like Mr. Nowak, a regular churchgoer, have helped propel “The Shack,” written by William P. Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk in Gresham, Ore., and privately published by a pair of former pastors near Los Angeles, into a surprise best seller. It is the most compelling recent example of how a word-of-mouth phenomenon can explode into a blockbuster when the momentum hits chain bookstores, and the marketing and distribution power of a major commercial publisher is thrown behind it.

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, “The Shack” had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even Mr. Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

Its publisher, Windblown Media, a company that was formed expressly to publish “The Shack” in May of last year, estimates that the book has sold more than one million copies. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which usually tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has sold about 350,000 copies, although those numbers do not include sales at stores like Wal-Mart or direct sales from the publisher’s Web site, theshack.com, which may have accounted for an unusually large percentage of the book’s sales.

Early in the novel the young daughter of the protagonist, Mack, is abducted. Four years later he visits the shack where evidence of the girl’s murder was discovered. He spends a weekend there in a kind of spiritual therapy session with God, who calls herself “Papa”; Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.
Sales have been fueled partly by a whiff of controversy. Some conservative Christian leaders and bloggers have attacked “The Shack” as heresy. The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, devoted most of a radio show to the book, calling it “deeply troubling” and asserting that it undermined orthodox Christianity. Others have said the book’s approach to theology is too breezy to be taken seriously.

Brad Cummings, a former pastor and the president of Windblown, said the company, which first shipped books out of his garage, spent about $300 in marketing. Word of the book ripped through the Christian blogosphere, talk radio and pulpits across the country.

“People would call back, asking for a dozen or a case,” Mr. Cummings said.

Even people initially put off by the book’s characterization of God as a black woman were won over. “I was so stunned by the presentation of Papa that I couldn’t deal with it,” said Bill Ritchie, senior pastor of an 8,000-member nondenominational church in Vancouver, Wash., who recalled putting the book down at first. He eventually finished it and told his congregation that it was “one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in years.” Since early this year, his church has been buying copies to sell to members by the caseload.

In May Hachette Book Group USA, a large mainstream publisher, entered into a partnership with Windblown to continue to publish the book. Hachette is now investing heavily to place advertisements on subways in Atlanta, Chicago and New York, as well as running television spots on the CNN airport network and other local stations.

Mr. Young, who is known as Paul, said he had written “The Shack” as a gift for his six children. The shack was a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain,” Mr. Young said in a telephone interview from the Phoenix airport on his way to a book reading.

He said he had suffered sexual abuse in New Guinea as the child of Canadian missionaries. After an extramarital affair 15 years ago, he said, he spent a decade in therapy, trying to earn back his wife’s and family’s trust.

In 2005 Mr. Young, now 53, started writing the book to show how he had healed by forging a new relationship with God. He chose to make God an African-American woman, he said, because he wanted to alter religious preconceptions. “It was just a way of saying: ‘You know what? I don’t believe that God is Gandalf with an attitude or Zeus who wants to blast you with any imperfection that you exhibit,’ ” Mr. Young said.

He gave 15 copies to his children and a few friends. When the friends wanted to send copies to other friends, Mr. Young wondered if he might have something suited for a wider audience.
He e-mailed the manuscript to another friend, Wayne Jacobsen, a former pastor and the author of Christian-themed books.

Mr. Jacobsen read the novel and immediately thought it deserved a larger following. “It brought God alive in a way that I think few books in literature ever do,” he said.

Mr. Young, Mr. Cummings and Mr. Jacobsen worked for 16 months through four rewrites. Mr. Jacobsen then showed the manuscript to several publishers, but it was rejected everywhere — both by Christian publishers, who found it too controversial, and secular publishers, who thought it was too Christian.

So Mr. Cummings, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Young invested about $15,000 of their own money to print and distribute the book. All three began sending copies to influential Christian friends, and orders started rolling into Windblown’s Web site.

Mr. Young, who with his wife filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and lost their home of 19 years at auction, said that with proceeds from book sales, he has been able to pay several bills.

In November Jane Love, the buyer of religious books at Barnes & Noble, read “The Shack” and took a chance with a small order. As sales soared, Ms. Love increased her orders.

The book has since gone on sale at Borders, Wal-Mart and Costco. Kathryn Popoff, vice president for merchandising of adult trade books at Borders, said the book was appealing to audiences beyond Christian readers.

But some booksellers said they were not sure that non-Christian readers were interested. At Rainy Day Books, a literary independent bookstore near Kansas City, Mo., Vivien Jennings, the owner, said she had sold only nine copies in four months. “The buzz never made it here,” she said. “What it tells me is that it is still pretty much restricted to the Christian audience.”

Everybody loves a success story, the more unlikely the better, but upon closer examination, the author had some things going for him few others even bother to think of.

1) At the core of the novel, Mr. Young had an idea: “The shack was a metaphor for ‘the house you build out of your own pain.’”
2) He knew what his story was about: “It was just a way of saying: ‘You know what? I don’t believe that God is Gandalf with an attitude or Zeus who wants to blast you with any imperfection that you exhibit.’ ”
3) He wrote himself out of it. Without compromising any of his own personal values, the author wrote the book as fiction. “Fiction is fiction,” somebody almost famous once said. “Not autobiography in a party dress [or a tuxedo].”
4) Mr. Young, Mr. Cummings and Mr. Jacobsen worked for 16 months through four rewrites. (Don’t confuse ‘editing’ with ‘proofreading’ or ‘rewriting’ with ‘correcting.’ The author had help he could trust who obviously pushed him to complete his story. Bottom line: the guy did the work.

Of course, ‘The Shack’ was rejected everywhere, again proving true the prime mantra of publishing: “Nobody knows anything.” Those behind the book invested more than $15,000 to print and distribute it and thanks to “word of mouth” struck it rich. But be advised, if not for the work before, there would have been no success after.

Bottom line: Wishing, hoping and praying won’t get your book on the NY Times Best-Seller List. Nor will an incomplete or completely expected story. Mr. Young stepped up and stepped out when he envisioned God and struck a chord with the Christian market.

Any less and this article never would have been written.

As Publishing Always Changes

2008-06-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

Jun 5th 2008 LOS ANGELESFrom The Economist print edition

Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry

JEFF BEZOS, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, destination for nearly four-fifths of online book buyers, appears harmless. But to some in the publishing industry, he looms like a recurring nightmare. Having upset booksellers' apple-carts in the 1990s with his online stores, he is now widening his assault on the industry, as he personably explained in a speech at Book Expo America (BEA), a trade fair in Los Angeles, on May 30th.

From the outside, book publishing looks like an impregnable edifice: 411,000 new titles were published in America last year, and more than 3 billion books sold there. Growth was 4.3% in the “adult trade” segment, the mainstay of the market. In fact, the existing order is fragile. Reading in America, as in many rich countries, is down. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, says leisure reading is declining, especially among the young.

Since 1985, books' share of entertainment spending has fallen by seven percentage points.
Books have changed very little in half a millennium, but they may now be on the verge of going digital. The first high-resolution e-book reader, made by Sony, came out in 2004. Last November Amazon launched the Kindle (pictured), a $359 e-book reader with a high-speed wireless link to the firm's online store, allowing e-books to be downloaded in seconds. Mr Bezos says Kindle e-books now account for 6% of sales of the 125,000 titles available in both print and electronic formats.

Though they are an improvement on a computer screen, e-book readers remain crude simulacra of books. A poll released by John Zogby at BEA found that 82% of Americans strongly prefer paper to pixels. None of the handful of e-book manufacturers will divulge sales figures. First-quarter sales of mass-market e-books in America have tripled since the same period in 2005, but they were worth just $10m.

But Kindle and its kind are merely the first generation of a product that is sure to evolve quickly in the coming years. Eventually, e-books point the way towards a cleavage of content from platform, threatening publishing with the wholesale change that has hit the music industry. It is a familiar story: fearing piracy, publishers are already adopting various mutually incompatible security technologies that are sure to annoy readers—although ePub, a new standard backed by many big publishers, may clarify things.

Unlike digital music or video, digital books require consumers to change their consumption habits. In some categories, such as textbooks, digital books are growing rapidly. As well as reducing costs by eliminating printing, warehousing, shipping and returns, this transformation could help publishers such as Elsevier and Springer recapture America's $2.3 billion college textbook-resale market.

Although e-books may one day transform the industry, another new technology that is less visible to readers is already making itself felt. Print on Demand (POD), which allows books to be printed and bound to order, is making millions of books available even if they appeal to only a narrow readership. Here, too, academia leads the way. Stephen DeForge of Ames On-Demand says his POD business, which specialises in printing small runs of customised books for schools and universities, has been growing by 45% a year since 2001. Last year his firm printed more than 800,000 books in runs as small as ten copies at a time.

The opportunity has not been lost on Mr Bezos. In March Amazon announced that it would require all the POD books it sells to be printed by the company at its warehouses. Mr Bezos says that this enables Amazon to have a book ready to ship within two hours of an order being placed online. Between POD and the Kindle, Mr Bezos thinks he can sell “any book ever printed in any language”. But printers and distributors, like booksellers before them, fear the oncoming Amazon juggernaut.

Technology is also opening up new formats. Serialisation is making a comeback: a firm called DailyLit divides e-books into small chunks for drip-feeding by e-mail. Harlequin, a Canadian publisher of romantic fiction, sells short-fiction e-books for reading on PCs or other devices in a lunch hour. Last autumn the firm, which sells around 130m books a year, became the first big publisher to offer its entire catalogue in both printed and digital formats. Brent Lewis, who runs Harlequin's digital business, says his firm's digital readership is composed of the same middle-aged women who read its printed books.

An economic slowdown may play to the new technologies' strengths. The costs of printing and shipping paper and cardboard are rising. Mr DeForge says POD is now cheaper than standard printing for runs of fewer than 1,200 copies, and the threshold is rising quickly. And if consumers become more price-sensitive, e-books may become more appealing. This week's Kindle bestseller, a political memoir by Scott McClellan, a former White House spokesman, can be downloaded from thin air in less than a minute for $9.99. A paper copy costs $15.37 on Amazon's website, and will not be in stock for three weeks.

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

What does all this doomsaying mean to the as-yet-unpublished writer? Is there ANY good news?

The one silver lining in the gray publishing cloud is that POD and self-publishing is now cheaper and via internet marketing, more practical with more potential than ever. Gone are the days when ‘vanity’ printers would sweet talk naïve authors into paying $10,000+ for 2,500+ hardcover copies, most of which would wind up gathering dust in the author’s basement or worse, running up storage fees in the printer’s warehouse.

As the old proverb goes, “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

So what’s a struggling author to do?

The vast majority of manuscripts that are never published are submitted unfinished. Editors can spot this a mile away and won’t even bother reading them. The fault lies not with the author’s agent or the agency’s editor, but solely with the author.

“Nobody knows anything is the mantra of this business,” and I am no exception. One thing I’m pretty sure of: Before one can get published, one must be read.

Too many authors go into the ‘get published quest’ with an ‘academic mindset,’ as if the work deserved an A+ in a creative writing class and therefore should be published. Sorry, but that isn’t the way the game is played.

Publishing is, first and last, a SELLING business and is looking for book that will MAKE people read. ‘Quality’ is a given. SEPARATION is the key. What separates your work from all others?

What can the reader find in your book available nowhere else? This book is worth paying money to read…

Not because it’s ‘good’ or ‘interesting’ or ‘well-written.’ Not enough. What is the SELLING POINT?

What about the work will make the editor think, ‘Hmm, this shows promise.’
Getting a book contract is not unlike selling a cat in a bag. But be advised, no matter how beautifully designed and intricately woven the ‘bag,’ no ‘cat’ no contract.

Identify your ‘cat’ and make it howl from word one. The notion that the work is ‘so well-written’ an editor will read 50 or so pages to get your SELLING POINT is wishful thinking. Without the ‘cat,’ claws bared in the query letter, odds are the manuscript won’t even be read.
Times are changing. Technology is forcing the industry to evolve. But the need for a story that will make people read will always be the driving force of publishing.

Why not yours?

2008-06-21T17:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/how_to_promote_your_novel_guest_essays_bbq_sauce_86609.asp

Monday Jun 09, 2008
How to Promote Your Novel: Guest Essays & BBQ Sauce

About three months ago, I recommended that book publicists (and suffficiently motivated authors) discover John Scalzi's "Big Idea" series, a category of posts on his blog where guest writers discuss some of the concepts underpinning their latest books. Last week, the featured guest was N.M. Kelby, who revealed how a madcap Florida murder mystery like The Bad Girl's Bar & Grill was born out of a visit to a puppet workshop in the coldest throes of a Vermont winter.

(Insert the now-standard disclosure of interests I wish I'd come up with myself: "Whatever. Google me.")

Kelby (who's in the middle of a big tour that extends into the fall, including an October date here in New York) told me last week about another one of her inspirations, a blog called The Homeless Guy by Kevin Barbieux, who has lived extensively on the streets of Nashville, though he was able to move into an apartment last month—and, after learning of his literary influence, is doing his best to get his public library to bring her in for a reading. The influences run in the other direction, too: BBQ specialist Ardie Davis decided the novel needed an official barbecue sauce, so he made one, "slightly spicy with a little bit of orange." I can't wait to taste them... and I already have a good idea about which bloggers I'm going to make sure get my extra jars, and the copies of the novel that go with them...

In the Age of the Internet, how does an author spread the news that he or she has written a novel? How DO you tell the world?

Begin by researching, looking for websites that specialize in your genre. John Scalzi’s site zeroes in on science fiction, the “Literature of Ideas” and he is eager to get ‘big ideas’ out there.

But you’re a yet-to-be published author. Will this pro even bother with you? Oh, yes, IF you’ve got a ‘big idea.’

Therein lies the rub: too many authors have long SF stories filled with all kinds of futuristic technology and exotic characters but NO ‘big idea’ or if they DO have one, bury it so deep in the manuscript that an editor will tire and give up looking for it.

Selling a novel is not unlike the old ‘cat in a bag’ scheme. Problem is that the writer believes that because the ‘bag’ is so beautifully designed and intricately woven…No, NO, a thousand times no. It’s all about the ‘cat,’ the ‘big idea’ that separates this novel from all others.

In seeking to publicize your novel, always start with the ‘cat’—MAKE the ‘big idea’ hit home and you’re halfway to a book contract. Play with the ‘bag’ and you’re dead.

Of course, if your novel is going to be published and you’re looking for something ‘official’ to tag onto it. VISA paid dearly to be the ‘official credit card’ of the 2008 Olympics. I don’t think they’d take to kindly if you linked your novel to VISA, copyright infringement and all.

But what about stuff with a long-expired copyright. Hmmm…

Beetoven’s 5th Symphony is the ‘official score’ of this novel. How’s that for good company?