When an editor’s “attention span” becomes an “attention spa”

Very often, if not mostly, the editor who gets your proposal really would rather be doing something else. This is not a criticism of editors, its just the reality of the publishing workplace. Reading proposals is a future-planning task that only gets touched when the now-tasks are done. Besides this, the queue of quality proposals is quite long. As a result, an editor’s attention moves away very quickly if anything about your proposal is unclear or irrelevant. It doesn’t take much to do it. Here are some common indulgences:

-Bang on about your credentials
-Criticize popular books
-USE CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASIS
-Use multiple exclamation marks to amplify your point!!!

Whatever your indulgence, at the end of an editor’s attention span is an attention spa. All it takes is one letter, and they plunge into a warm, bubbling daydream where you no longer exist. If this occurs, your chances of publication diminish quickly.

Quick Tips

-Use plain English
-Let your proposal’s merits speak for themselves
-Choose your words like they are the last words you are allowed on this earth
-Have the whole book finished before you contact the editor

What’s your opinion?

What kind of language puts you into the attention spa?

Photo by Murtage

What chance do I have of getting published?

You may think you have little chance of getting published. After all, the statistic on unsolicited manuscripts in Australia, a country of 20 million people (not counting boat people-who in my books are most welcome) is 1 in 5,000. In the USA, that would expand to 1 in 50,000. So, the question becomes, are you capable of becoming noticed in a crowd of unsolicited information?

Here are a three tips to getting noticed:

1. Do your category homework

Books are like cars. Are you a people mover (popular fiction), family wagon (childrens books) or painted bus (popular self help)?
Without category recognition, you’re goneski. Get into a mould and do your creative work within those parameters.

2. Be cool

When you query, propose or offer a manuscript, be super-easy to deal with. The person judging your chances is likely to be a very busy woman who had to crash through a glass cieling just for the opportunity to deal with your dream. Be respectful, expect nothing and pray. If in doubt, use a phone call no more often than fortnightly, 60 seconds a piece. Be you, be brief, be teachable.

3. Work your platform

Who will buy the first 3000 copies? If you can’t answer that question with confidence you are not ready to be published. You need to reach your audience with your value proposition by your own industry and persistence before you get published. Failing that, you are relying on talent and luck, which although well documented as a recipe for success, has a lower statistic on breakthrough deals.

Photo by gruntzooki

What’s your book idea? Comment here and I’ll reply.

Super-sell your book series in one great line

I came across a handy listing of great first lines to novels. Here is the link to the top 100, originally published by ABR and found here at infoplease.

The line that hit me between the eyes was number 12 – Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here it is:

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.”

There are three very cool take-aways I’d like to share with you.

1. Twain uses the line to sell two books here – the prequel (Tom Sawyer) and the sequel (Huckleberry Finn). There are no groans of having to backtrack though – the book unfolding in this line is a stand alone story as well (“that ain’t no matter”).
2. Listen to the authenticity of the voice. You get the sense that Twain knows this boy better’n he knows his own writin’ hand. The voice is true and real enough to want to hear more-much more.
3. From a writer’s-tip perspective, I get the feeling its not the stumbling grammar that achieves the voice – the voice creates the stumbling grammar. Get the character from inside of you and and it just comes out – eventually.

Over to you

What’s your all time favorite first line and why?

Four ways to get published

1. Just write something and send it around to Publishers

We’re all doing it, so if you’re new, think twice about taking the route of obscurity to discovery in one step. It does happen, but its more likely to happen if combined with some of the other ideas below.

2. Develop expertise points and cash in

Expertise points come through original research, teaching, experience or practice that makes you immediately relevant to a defined audience. Take a look at who publishes material to service the desires of this audience and contact them if you see an opportunity to add to their line up.

3. Do something amazing

A sixteen year old Australian girl, Jessica Watson, is currently sailing around the world solo, non-stop.
There is no doubt her story will attract a book deal on her return.

4. Know the formulas

The world of books seems to reward writers disproportionately. Original talent can go unnoticed and formulaic work can be wildly successful. There is a good reason for this – Publishers are risk averse and like the comfort of precedent when it comes to investment. Books exist in categories (crime, fantasy, romance, picture books for example) because the formulas please large numbers of paying customers and this is where Publishers continue to invest. In this sense, being “formulaic” is essential. At the Olympic Games, the figure skater who serves up the expected elements with originality and a fresh twist ends up with the flowers and the gold. Its much the same with books.

Pushing the trolley

In Cormac McCarthy’s latest but hopefully not last novel, The Road, (2006) the action follows a father and son navigating the shell of an annihilated America. Each day, day after day, they push a shopping trolley with their handful of possessions, through unimaginable devastation. The landscape is bare. There is no encouragement but what warmth they can find inside themselves. The father drills the boy: “We are the keepers of the flame”. The boy takes this as law, and continues the journey, finally reaching help, family and hope.

When we set out to write, we face the same journey. Everything seems to stand opposed to us. But our job is not to find shortcuts. We simply push the trolley, until we reach the place we were destined to.

Secrets of success in dealing with Publishers (Episode 1)

This is the first in a series of posts centering on my experience as a Publisher at Macmillan. I am proposing to deal with the following over the series, focusing on what actually happens inside the castle of old-money publishing.

1. Proposals meetings
2. How to be a career author
3. Planning a brand vs planning one book

If you have something else you would like to hear instead or further to this list please comment.

EPISODE 1: PROPOSALS MEETINGS

Proposals Meetings run monthly or quarterly in most Publishing Houses. At these meetings the whole interdepartmental assembly (sometimes fondly called the “team”) comes together to choose future projects. These meetings look at proposals with:

A. One eye on the past and
B. One eye on the sandwich plate in the middle of the table.

The eye on the past is to measure your proposal against past failures and successes. For this reason your proposal must be across the detail of the other key players in your space. The eye on the sandwiches is due to the fact that in publishing, most of us work very hard for wages not commensurate with the other occupants of town’s big end. Most of us need very strong proof that taking on a book is going to help us continue to eat.

For the proposing author, the dual challenge here is to ensure you know your category’s history and have developed a fresh twist to help make its future look like the newest, sexiest model of a favourite automobile. If you are writing speculative fiction, you must know that beyond Rowling’s dazzling monuments tower Philip Pullman and Garth Nix in their own citadels. You must tip your hat, do your training and be prepared to run an original race along the very same track as those who went before you. The same applies whether you write fiction, non-fiction or textbooks.

Your proposal must have already sold itself to the Publisher you or your agent submitted it to, so at the point of the Proposals Meeting, they are your Sales Representative. The key to keeping all available eyes off the sandwich plate and on your very best assets, is to have your Publisher emotionally connected to your work. This means:

- Writing your precious heart out in the cold, dark and lonely hours and leaving nothing in reserve
- Being prepared to walk away and start again
- Trusting the Publisher will judge the work by:

(1) The current opportunity afforded by the category
(2) Your own platform as a professional person, and
(3) The intrinsic strengths of the work

- Trusting the Publisher will get every nuance you left for them
- Following the Publisher up in brief, polite, well worded emails sent between 8-9am, and finally, a phone call

So, over to you. Can I answer a question for you? Help explain an experience you’ve had with a Publishing House?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Secrets of success in dealing with Publishers (Episode 2)

Self publishing makes you the brand

Commercial publishers have never been terribly enthusiastic about selling direct to audiences. Through relying on third party distribution, most have neglected their consumer brands so badly that today very few of their consumers are able to name them. Stocked in a sea of sameness, logos and values all bleed into one. Let’s be honest, how many people who loved Harry Potter know the publisher was Bloomsbury? Or who knows the name of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was published by Bantam Press? Heck, I wouldn’t know who published Stephanie Meyer without looking it up myself (like I did Dan Brown – and that was just to sound informed). In reality, there are probably only a handful of publicly-recognisable brands in the entire industry – chief amongst them the Oxford University Press dictionary range. In a cute reversal, now no-one can name the author!

In reality, authors become brands through the sales-success facilitated by their silent partner, a publisher. However, when you self-publish, you become the publisher and the author in one dynamic person. This means that, like it or not, you are the brand. Given that we’ve already demonstrated that huge publishers don’t always get recognised as such, this has its advantages. One of these advantages is not the ability to muscle into wide retail distribution. Doing so requires you to have written twenty books and hired a team of sales people to make any kind of go at it. This is the bit publishers are best left to do. A herd of books is required to crash through the brambles of retail.

Self publishing is an invitation to become a social networker par excellence. The free tools we all enjoy in this space means selling direct through our blogs and online resellers avoids the pitched financial battle of retail. Going forward, with or without a publishing deal, you’re going to be your best publicist, promoter and salesperson, and your best mechanism will be your own online and public activities. If you’re going to go there anyway, while a big publisher steamrolls you into retail, there seem to me to be good reasons to think about starting there and allowing yourself and your audience to grow.

Writing or illustrating for cash

Publishers, and Educational Publishers in particular, are spending big money by paying writers and illustrators upfront fees in exchange for the assignment of rights. This is an opportunity for talented writers and illustrators to make a living. But what are the traps? Here is a SWOT analysis from the point of view of a freelance writer/illustrator – with some insider Publisher tips.

S=STRENGTH

Getting paid up front means food can be purchased and stored in the fridge. Rent can be paid. Cash flow is the key to every business. As a writer, you know that, but oftentimes creative people, for all their talents, find find basic commerce a drag. The ability to turn your hand to educational or other content to a specific brief, with narrow research time, no fuss and short deadlines is tantamount to cash flow. Further, every time you get a gig, your your name is in the public space.

TIP: Have a look at the major educational publishers’ websites. There is a wide range of products you could consider contributing to. These include children’s literacy-based readers, school and college texts, study guides and supplements. If you write well, or draw well, find an educator who knows something about a subject area, match your skills to a category I just mentioned and look for a gap in the market. The results could be surprising.

W=WEAKNESS

Assigning rights means you are forfeiting a royalty and copyright for cash up front. The metric for cash is usually a minimal, break-even print run x ARP / your contribution. This means, the fee equates to a publication not making a whole lot of money. As a result, you negate the risk of massive hours down the drain but miss the chance at bigger money that comes with higher sales.

TIP: If you assign rights, you should reasonably expect to retain the moral right to be named as the author of what you wrote. Look for this in any contract you may sign. There’s no point writing if you don’t get a mention.

O=OPPORTUNITY

One successful freelance gig=more offers. A good writer could reasonably expect to book a year’s work in around 8 weeks if they knew:

- the educational market as well as I do
- how to combine with educators with little commercial experience in order to supply Publisher needs.

This post is not going to unfold all of this but I’ll start with a tip.

TIP: Have a look at government departments in your country/state responsible for education and curriculum change. See what areas they are looking at. These are exactly the same areas the Publishers are looking at. Make enquiries to Publishers you find active in these curriculum areas to see whether they are seeking good all-round writers. Remember, your pitch will be strengthened if you combine forces with an experienced educator. You write the copy, they write the questions and activities. If you are an illustrator, combine with the writer and the educator to build value.

T=THREAT

If you always write for cash, you may undermine your passive income opportunity. Royalty payments are a passive income opportunity in the sense that, with a successful publication, you continue to be paid while a book is selling. If you are only known as a freelance writer, you lose the bigger opportunity of becoming a capital A Author.

TIP A capital A Author will seldom write under any agreement other than a royalty-based contract, but an emerging writer fond of food and shelter will need to be flexible.
My advice is to build a portfolio of successful cash-based contributions and use this to help drive a royalty based deal over the line. Freelance gigs are always useful – try and keep both types of gig rolling out simultaneously, building your name and value one word at a time.

Photo by Franco Folini

An aspirational author’s guide to (success or) self sabotage-(part 2)

In Part 2 of this look at the do’s and don’ts of approaching a Publisher, I have decided to be a little more practical, and actually to help emerging writers rather than amuse myself and my friend Robin Dickinson with further ironical statements.

6. Formatting

Know that editors are like elves in Tolkein or goblins in Rowling. They have terribly strict rules that they live by, and as a proposing author you must obey them. Failure to obey editorial rules around formatting brings immediate friction, or a slowing down of relevance. Consider a burp during speed dating. A fall in figure skating. The same applies here. The general rule is consistency in all your formatting choices. Beyond this, the basics are, choose a plain font, like Times New Roman (forget Comic Sans), and use double spacing. This assists reading at speed. Do number the pages and don’t plaster everything with copyright notices. Doing so is like telling the Pope you’re a Catholic too, over and over again. Publishers live by copyright, so assume they will respect yours.

7. Proposal document

Books have been written about the importance of this document, and people have bought these books to the extent that the subject is worthy of consideration. Here’s the rub. Its easier for someone at a Publishing company responsible for manuscript assessment (ie sorting between bin ‘em, burn ‘em and buy ‘em) to read a proposal document of ten pages, outlining the intended market, the book’s distinctive relationship with this market and other successful books servicing it, than it is to read a complete manuscript unsupported in any way. A proposal document that includes a chapter breakdown and summary and is accompanied by three solid chapters is going to send a manuscript assessor to lunch on time, with a good level of engagement with your ideas. That’s the ballgame. The people at the other end of your writing journey are just like you: busy, easily bored and hungry.

8. Discoverability

As a proposing author, are you on anyone’s radar at all? Its harder to publish a writer who has 50 folllowers on Twitter than it is to publish one who has 50,000. Publishing is a numbers game cross bred with a value game. The more people you can reach, with a valuable piece of content, the more successful you will be. Make the effort to build an audience independently through the (amazingly) free resources of blogging (through excellent services like WordPress) and Twitter. If you are reading this, you probably already are. If not, consider these measures fundamental.

9. Communication style

If by some wonderful (or wonderfully random) series of events you receive a call from a Publisher or Agent, how will you decide to come across? Will you listen or will you gush? Publishers live in a sea of information, so they prefer to hear everything in summary. If they call you, they may have been touched by your story. Try not to prick the bubble by explaining how cleverly you created the illusion. Listen to the words the caller uses and, while responding naturally, give yourself a microsecond to adapt your response to the style of the caller.

10. Next book

A wise writing coach once shared with me his concern that many writers get so absorbed with the publicity and effervescence of their first book that the next book is not published until two or three years after the first. Consider your work in serialised formats before you finalise the first manuscript. Could it be a trology? A quartet? The twenty-one Famous Fives? Know that your lifespan as an author depends on you having a new book coming every one to two years.

Photo by Philofoto