Location: Books & Such Nashville Office

Weather: Hot and chance of showers

One of the big assumptions we make in this new age of digital publishing is that we will have the power to make the technology work. I haven’t seen anybody addressing that issue, but it seems we should in this age of brown-outs and computer crashes and having to back up our writing “just in case.”  I am reminded of the saying about what assumptions do to all of us.

What is your principal concern as we head full-scale into the age of electronic publishing? Here are three that come to mind for me:

1. What will the traditional publisher do with and for my writing?

2. How will an author explain the publisher’s decision to produce her/his writing electronically to his or her long-term audience, some of whom use e-readers and some of whom don’t?

3. What kind of promotional support will the author need to give electronic publications, and how will that best be done?

I’ll be eager to read your thoughts. We’re all groping at this point. In the meantime, I want to read Lane Smith’s new children’s book due out in September, It’s a Book. The review says it’s an exchange between a jackass (the digital version) and a gorilla (the print version). Sounds interesting.

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

I’ve always loved memoirs. I’m interested in the personal, how and why people do things, and so a memoir provides me an opportunity to examine the writer’s life through his or her eyes. I even wrote a spiritual memoir several years ago and felt honored when one of my readers said, “I really appreciate how you just tell the story and let me draw my own conclusions.”

Testimonies have been a mainstay of Christian witnessing and publishing. Perhaps the most famous early book was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563, which detailed the lives and deaths of the early Christians. More modern Christians made Elisabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor, the story of her husband’s martyrdom with four others in Ecuador, a best-seller in 1957.

A memoir allows the writer to recount events through his or her own understanding. While you can argue with the author about what his or her life meant, you really can’t argue with what happened to that person. In his 90 Minutes in Heaven, author and survivor Don Piper doesn’t even bother trying to explain why he had no vital signs for an hour and a half. He believes he went to heaven, and while it doesn’t make logical sense, since we weren’t there, how can we argue with him?

Memoirs are of perennial interest to publishers, though their popularity can wax and wane with the public. The secret is the quality of the writing. Memoirs aren’t the same as an inspirational story of narrative nonfiction that recounts the events in someone’s life. Memoirs are more about the writer’s interior terrain rather than about the events that occured. What changed in the person from the start of the memoir to its conclusion is the question the book answers.

Some of the best memoirs pull no punches in exposing the author’s life. I enjoyed Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God, and many have commented about the strength of Mary DeMuth’s Thin Places. The author’s ability to express the near-unthinkable makes these works of special interest and value to a reader trying to make sense out of life. (My favorite memoir of all is not from the Christian canon, but it reflects Christian truth: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy.)

Long ago my honors English teacher said, “I don’t know why you kids bother to read fiction. You should read nonfiction. Not only is it even more amazing than fiction, but it’s also true.”

Reading memoirs, particularly spiritual ones, enables me to catch a glimpse of the unusual way God works in the lives of his followers. It encourages me, gives me ideas about how God might be working in my life, and shows me that each individual relates to life in a different, and often entertaining, way. Difficult circumstances remind me of people’s resilience and how I can trust God with my life, too.

And they’re frequently really great reads.

What memoirs have you enjoyed? Why?

What made you chose them in the first place?

What do you look for in a spiritual memoir?

Are you drawn to a famous person’s book more than an unknown with a fascinating, true story to tell?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

This week we’ve talked about a few of the ways the publisher-author relationship can go askew. It’s not that anyone intended that to occur; it’s just that life looks very different from inside the publishing house and outside the publishing house.

As someone who has worked within publishing houses for more than a decade, I understand the dynamics of what happens when an author: oversteps boundaries; doesn’t believe in boundaries; or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, believes being silent despite disappointment makes the relationship work (not!).

What should you do if you find you’ve not realized where the boundaries were?First, being honest with everyone involved should go a long way toward clearing the air. Once a relationship develops problems, it’s weird how everyone offended closes up (or discusses the problem among themselves but not with the offender). So giving people permission to admit you’ve been driving them crazy is a good first step.

Of course, you have to be ready not to be defensive when they agree that, yes, you have been a pain to deal with.

Second, talk about how the relationship went wrong for you. There really are two sides to this story (at least two sides; lots of people are involved in publishing your book). It’s good for staff at the publishing house to think about how the inciting incident(s) looked from your side of the fence.

Third, come up with a plan to resolve the problem. Just acknowledging that all did not go well is not the same as finding a solution. That solution needs to be dreamed up with the publishing personnel, the author, and the agent. Once the plan is agreed to, then the agent can oversee its implementation and that the plan is followed up on.

In many ways, your relationship with your publisher is like any other relationship. Apply good relational principles, and you’re likely to come out looking better than ever to your publisher.

Have you or someone you know had communication problems with his or her publisher? How were they resolved?

Or were they swept under the carpet?

What ultimately happened?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Let’s say your relationship with your publisher has gone swimmingly through the editorial process. Your editor got you, and you got your editor. What a team!

Now your manuscript has been polished into a gleaming specimen, and it’s turned over to marketing where…no one seems to even know who you are. What to do, what to do…

First, I would suggest you be sure to bring your agent onto the scene to nose around and try to find what the disconnect might be. Hopefully that will solve the problem, and soon you’re at work with a marketing dream team.

But sometimes the agent can’t figure out why there’s a disconnect either. That means it’s time to begin your own marketing campaign–not to sell your book to readers but to sell you and your book to the marketing team.

Authors seldom seem to think of this as the solution, but if you know how to work at marketing your book and contributing to what the publisher has to offer, let the right folks know that you’re plugging away right along with them.

I took on a new client earlier this year who had published five books. One of my first tasks was to sit down with the editor and the head of marketing to find out what they thought of my client’s marketing skills. They thought she sucked at it.

Oops. So I asked the author what she had done to promote her last book. Wow, it was impressive. From calling on local bookstores and asking them to carry her book to online zany book contests that brought a good response, my client was out there, working every marketing angle I could think of.

“Sandy,” I asked, “how much of what you did was communicated to the marketing team?”

“Well, none I guess,” she responded. “I just thought they’d check my blog or my website and see what I was doing.”

Hello! Since when does a publishing team have time to regularly check what each author is doing to promote his or her book?

I gave my client an assignment: Every week, just drop a friendly email to her editor and the person in marketing who was running her campaign. List (no paragraphs with tons to read, but a list the reader could just scan) everything she had done in the past week to market her book.

What a change has occurred. The publisher is no longer grumbling that Sandy doesn’t contribute to the marketing of her books. Instead, the publisher is stepping up what is being done for Sandy because they realize she’s investing her own time and money.

So what’s the lesson to be learned from my client? You are the most important participant in your marketing. Put together a marketing plan for your next book and tell your publisher what that plan is. Then go for it!

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

This week I’ve touched briefly on significant impediments to writers being able to produce quality work. Physical ailments, such as hand problems and blindness, can be frustrating for writers with the urge to create. Emotional impediments and addictions tossed into the mix of ailments can be nearly impossible to overcome. Yet for writers with an impelling voice or story to tell, such hurdles made a challenging life just a little more difficult; their stories still got told.

For those of us with less vexing circumstances, healthier lives, and fewer demons, writing still can be full of obstacles.

How do you encourage yourself on days of discouragement?

How do you keep the spark of creativity flowing?

What steps do you take to enable your body to physically handle the stress of sitting in a computer chair hour upon hour, day after day, possibly forever?

How do you get past barriers to the pure joy of telling a story in your unique voice?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

I grew up in a community of folks who knew how to party well on Saturday nights. Charming, funny, clever and lovely, they nearly all enjoyed a drink or two. And then they thought themselves  funnier, more clever and devastatingly attractive. I learned early to distrust alcohol and the words of people even “slightly under the weather.”

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter Thompson and Lillian Hellman all were famous for their “alternate reality” ingestion while creating literature. I’m sure we all know more authors who had a problem with drink and drugs. Did it help their creativity?

Hemingway notoriously said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Is it possible these talented writers needed the alcohol to get them past the personal horrors from which their writing came?

And is it only alcohol and drug abuse that’s the problem?

Kay Redfield Jamison detailed her life with manic-depression in her well-known book, An Unquiet Mind. I’ve never forgotten, however, how she described her reluctance to take lithium because while it moderated her “lows” it also took the edge off her manic “highs,” thus leaving her feeling less creative. (Nowadays she knows to take her medicine and feels she leads a more productive life.)

Hemingway and Fitzgerald succeeded in writing fine works of literature because they had an uncommonly devoted editor: Maxwell Perkins. Famous for his uncanny ability to find the glorious writing among the rough, Perkins nursed a generation of writers through their demons to produce quality work. Among other heroic activities, Perkins induced Thomas Wolfe to cut 90,000 words out of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

Where does creativity come from? Does it need a chemical “start?” What types of non-addictive behavior  have you observed or used to encourage your own creativity or writing life?

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Yesterday I wrote about my own challenges with writing; today we’re going to talk about what others have dealt with.

Prior to fifty years ago, blindness was a common problem in many parts of the world. You may not be surprised to know, therefore, that one of the greatest works of English literature  never actually was read by its author.

John Milton wrote his definitive Paradise Lost over a ten-year period in the mid-seventeenth century by dictating to  whomever was available to transcribe–most notably his daughters. They read back his work, and he edited by voice.

Other notable blind writers include Homer, Jorge Luis Borges and Helen Keller. To write blind in the past, you needed someone with a pen in hand or supreme confidence in your touch typing ability.

These days, however, better tools are available, and we can experience Scotty’s attempt to dictate to a computer in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. How many of us snickered when the engineer spoke to a screen and expected it to start typing? Today, such behavior is possible. My physician urged me to purchase voice-activated-software when I first visited with hand problems. “I use it all the time for dictation,” he explained. “It’s a life saver.”

I bought it, I read aloud into the microphone for several hours to acquaint the program with my voice and syntax, and then I went to work.

Forty-five minutes of slow, carefully enunciated syllables produced…three paragraphs. When I read through the work, tapping my toes in my urgency to get moving, nearly every other word was a homonym of misspelling. Obviously my dragon needs further training.

My personal engineer (i.e., husband) assures me technology should be harnessed to serve our needs. I can e-mail my own manuscripts to my Kindle and then listen to the machine read it back with expression commonly found in the most stultifying GPS voice.  Still, it enables me to hear when things don’t sound right and then return to the scene of the verbal crime. I need my eyes to do the work, but being able to listen can ease the strain.

The eye doctor also has weighed in on the use of computers. “Make sure you blink often. Stare into the distance frequently. Get special glasses if need be. And make sure your screen is at the proper height.” Both my Kindle and the computer will allow me to make the letters larger and thus easier to read. If it helps, who cares if the kids laugh.

What else do you do to enable your eyes to work well with your writing life? And hey, make sure you blink once or twice before you comment!

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Thursdays are often spent making phone calls to editors, clients, and potential clients.

I always have at least one phone conversation with a potential client before I’ll represent him or her. So, yes, that means I’ll represent someone I’ve never met. (I still have about half of my clients to meet.) While a phone call isn’t as good as meeting in person, I can get a feel for an individual’s personality and how he or she works with others. This is also a good time to discuss expectations and dreams.

When I talk with my clients, we brainstorm together or discuss schedules for deadlines, releases, etc. Sometimes we put together a plan of action for the author’s future. In our agency, an agent will help an author to figure out how many books  he or she can produce and market while balancing life.  We’ll also direct an author toward ideas within his area of expertise that we believe we can sell to a publisher. And sometimes we need to advise a client as to which publishing house we think is a better fit for her book, if two or more are interested in purchasing the project. We bring insider knowledge about the marketing department, editors, contracts, ability to create an effective cover, level of interest in maintaining strong relationships with authors, and more that we balance to make a suggestion to a client. (Notice that the decision isn’t always about which publisher is offering the most money. We view that as a shortsighted reason to use solely in choosing a publisher.) All of this falls under “career counsel.”

When I talk with editors, I like to discuss what kinds of projects they are looking for. This is a great way for me to get up-to-date information for my clients, and I also use this information when I’m requesting projects from my query pile.  I’ll also talk with editors about concerns my client or I might have about a project in the works with that publishing house.

When agents have “phone days,” it does cause the rest of the work to pile up, but these calls are so important!

Yes, I had coffee today.

Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Wednesdays are usually the days when I do a little bit of everything, with coffee in hand, of course! The email box and query box are full (always), so I pop into both of those; I often have Wednesday phone calls; and I catch up on sending pitches and proposals.

Wednesday is also a good day for negotiating contracts and book offers because, if a phone call is required, most people are in the office on Wednesday. Phoning the contracts department is necessary if some wording in the contract isn’t clear or if the two parties can’t agree on a few points.Typically, negotiations are done via email attachments using the track changes feature and the comments feature in Word.

Negotiations are a major part of an agent’s job. It’s important for us to take the time to read and review the contracts multiple times. Many contracts are changing drastically these days as publishers respond to the perceived threats of electronic publishing and print on demand, so there’s no assuming that a publisher’s contract  is unchanged from the last time we negotiated with that house. Even a few words changed can make a significant difference to an author’s ability to live with what we’ve negotiated.

We pay special attention to the out-of-print clause, the subsidiary rights that are claimed by the publisher, and the e-book royalty rates, among other things. The advance and trade book royalty rates usually are agreed on before the contract is pulled together. That happens in the “offer stage” while the sale is being finalized.

Negotiating a contract can go quickly, taking only a few hours; but then some contracts cause shivers to run down an agent’s spine. Some really messy agreements can take weeks–or even months–to finalize. Thankfully, I work in an agency with three amazing agents who are willing to teach me everything they know about contracts! I’ve learned so much in the last four+ years.

Thank you Janet, Wendy, and Etta.

Location: Books & Such Central Valley Office

Weather: 88º and sunny

So while you are waiting we’ve had you perfecting your craft, building your inventory, setting up your infrastructure and pre-marketing. Now comes one of the most important things for an author-in-waiting: connecting with colleagues. But wait! One of the reasons you love writing is because it is a solitary pursuit, right? Aren’t most writers introverts?

Why in the world do we have to connect with other writers?

You’ve heard the word networking used and overused until it has made us all cringe. I once heard Randy Ingermanson say that he hated the concept and felt it was manipulative. He called it not-working. It’s all in the motivation. We writers need each other. In this day when authors are expected to shoulder a portion of the burden for marketing their books, we need each other more than ever. We need to connect with our colleagues not so much to get them to help us get the word out about our books but to see how we can help each other. It’s much easier to talk up my friend’s book than it is to talk up my own book.

Plus, the publisher is going to ask you to help get published authors to blurb your books. This is the task we all hate but if we are helping to secure endorsements for their books they will help us secure endorsements for ours. We need each other. As I mentioned yesterday, we can even have a page on our website where we review and promote other books. We may want to host blog tours.It is fun to connect with other authors, especially those who write in our genre. We can trade brainstorming, critiques and research.

So how do we connect with other writers?

• Join Writing Groups. There are so many: ACFW, RWA, Mystery Writers of America, Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. Reader’s Read gives a list of dozens of organizations.
• Go to a Conference. Meeting fellow writers is one of the most important things you will do at a conference.
• Find a Local Writing Group. Check with your library, your Borders or Barnes & Noble. They will most likely know where to find the local writers.
• Comment on Author Blogs. When you leave regular comments on writing blogs, you are becoming part of that blog community. Watch the other comments. When someone interests you, follow them to their blog or Twitter. You may eventually decide to connect.
• Offer to Help Your Favorite Writers. Lauraine Snelling has a whole group of readers, writers and friends who help pass out bookmarks for her and get the word out about her new releases. I’ve watched this bestselling author reciprocate as well. She’s always helping debut authors get their start. Friendship is helping each other.

However you do it, now is the time to begin to develop the friendships that will last even longer than your books. How did you meet your writing friends?