Anna David's Blog, page 18
June 16, 2021
How to Land a Book Deal With Rea Frey
Oh, do I have a great guest for you today. Rea Frey is the award-winning bestselling author of three suspense novels and four nonfiction books with St. Martin's as well as the CEO of Writeway, a multiple six-figure business that helps connect authors to agents so they can land publishing deals (Writeway does proposal writing, query letters...the whole shebang.)
Frey also knows her way around a book launch, having built up an active Instagram through a very specific strategy and landing herself in publications like US Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, Popsugar, Hello Sunshine, Marie Claire, Parade, Shape and Hello Giggles (spoiler: this also involves having a very specific strategy).
Listen to her share her top launch tips, her journey through the web of publishing and find out how you can get a free 30-minute consultation with her by listening to this episode.
RELEVANT LINKS:
CLICK HERE TO GET THE SHOW ON ALL THE PLATFORMS OR CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
[IF YOU LIKE THE SHOW, I'D BE SO GRATEFUL IF YOU'D GIVE IT A REVIEW; ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CLICK HERE!]
June 9, 2021
How Long Does It Take to Publish a Book?
I've talked about this extensively but it takes a long time to get a traditionally published book released—often two years between acquisition and release. You're competing against all the other books on their slate. Of course, publishers can rush highly anticipated books, which is why you see some come out quickly.
So Let's Talk About You Doing It Yourself
Okay, first things first: the writing. Oh yes, the writing. Of course, everyone varies; I know people who have written massively successful books in a weekend! But the rough statistic I've heard quoted is that if you’re going to write it yourself, expect to spend about 300 hours on the first draft. The reason many entrepreneurs look at that and then hire a ghostwriter is that they'll calculate what they make an hour, multiply it by 300 and then say, "Whoa! This is just not a good use of my time."
Obviously, this isn't true for people who have grown up always wanting to write a book; this is for people who want to use a book to grow their business.
Another number I've heard thrown around regarding the writing is to take a year writing a first draft and another year to polish. While I wrote my first book faster than that, I had a decade of journalism experience—writing quickly to make deadlines—which helped me prepare.
But the Time Frame is Different For Everyone
William Faulkner wrote Light in August in seven months and As I Lay Dying in less than six weeks (while working the night shift at a power plant, no less).
And then there's Anthony Burgess, who was diagnosed with a disease, told he was going to die soon and wanted to provide for his family so he wrote A Clockwork Orange in three weeks. (This story is widely debated.)
Then there's Junot Díaz and Margaret Mitchell, who each took a decade to write, respectively, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Gone With the Wind.
Once You're Done Writing
If you're publishing on your own, once you're done with your final draft, your book will need a developmental edit. How long that takes is entirely dependent on how busy your developmental editor is and how many other books they're juggling but plan for a month or two. You may be going back and forth with that editor or they may deliver a final product; clarify that upfront.
The Cover
I would recommend researching cover designers once you've finished your first draft. Of course, any time before that that you see a cover you like, save it so you can give it to your designer for inspiration. Expect the cover to take a month at least. It depends on your designer's experience and how many other books they're working on (over designers range in cost—anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand but you can also create your cover yourself [see below for a link to my class that shows you how]).
The Bio and Book Description
It shouldn't take long to create a bio and book description (if you already have a bio, reframe it however you need to as a writer's bio). Book descriptions are an art form unto themselves (my course also gets into how to do those).
Blurbs and Feedback
Leave yourself plenty of time to get feedback from trusted friends and colleagues. And perhaps some of them will be providing your blurbs, or endorsements (a practice I heard about from Jay Abraham when I interviewed him.) Speaking of endorsements, give anyone you're asking plenty of time to read the book—at least a month or two. (My course also delves into blurbs, as does the episode I'm linking to below.)
You can put blurbs on the front or back cover but you don’t have to.
Typos
After your book has gotten a developmental edit, hire a copy editor to fix grammatical errors and typos—give them about two weeks. Then get a proofreader to scan for mistakes the copy editor missed—another two weeks. I highly recommend giving your book to about five trusted friends when the copy editor is working on your book because they can also help you catch typos. You can also use software to have your book read aloud to you and if you're recording an audiobook, now would be the time (so you can catch even more errors and bits you want to change). This continuous editing process can take a month or two. An audiobook is a whole other project unto itself, which I got into in another episode (link below).
Layout and Uploading
Layout designers can cost anywhere from $5 (on Fiverr) to thousands of dollars. If you're uploading directly to Amazon, they can lay it out for you for free. That is pretty instantaneous. Your layout designer will take at least a week, I would guess. There's also Vellum software (Mac only), which costs $249 for lifetime access for paperback and ebook. That's pretty instantaneous though you'll have to go in and make adjustments to spacing after. Once it's laid out, I would go through it again to scan for mistakes. Give that another week.
If you're publishing exclusively on Amazon, you'll load your book and description and cover and all the other elements into Kindle Direct Publishing. If you want to also have your book published on Barnes & Noble and other outlets, you'll also upload it to Ingram (Ingram also can distribute to Amazon so you can upload just to Ingram, though there are advantages to uploading to both). This should take a few weeks to figure out.
Then There's the Launch
Know this: none of what I'm about to suggest is required. I break down all of these strategies in my Launch Your Book class and in previous episodes but my main suggestions are: figure out the news hook for your book and contract press when you do. Scan Help a Reporter Out (HARO) for the months before your release so you know journalists and can be quoted as a source on your book topic. Put together an Advanced Reader Team that can read your book before it's released and post reviews during your launch. There are all sorts of other strategies—I broke down everything I did for Make Your Mess Your Memoir in the post I link to below. A launch can take anywhere from a year to a week to a day; it all depends on what you want to put into it.
If you publish traditionally, you’ll have to do all the same launch plans but they will take care of the editing, copy editing, cover design and release for you.
RELEVANT LINKS:
How Do I Get Blurbs for My Book?
How Do I Get Media Attention From My Book?
How Do I Avoid Hiring the Wrong Editor For My Book?
How Do I Get Reviews For My Book?
What Do I Need to Know to Record an Audiobook?
Link to Vellum software (affiliate link)
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"I know people who have written massively successful books in a weekend. But the rough statistic I've heard quoted is that if you’re going to write it yourself, expect to spend about 300 hours on the first draft."
June 2, 2021
Do People Look Down on Self-Publishing?
One thing I need to tell you right off: there was no bigger snob about self-publishing back in the day than the person writing this post. If someone told me they published a book, I would raise an eyebrow and ask, "Traditional or..." and then let the sentence trail off. If they answered "Self," I looked at them with sheer disdain and wondered how they had the audacity to call themselves the author of a published book.
All of that changed around 2012.
Self-Publishing Used to Be Called Vanity Publishing
Self-published books used to be those things that were put out by your great aunt who thought she had a great story to tell but no one else did. They were never sold in bookstores and never got reviewed.
Today, there are more self-published than traditionally published books and schools like the University of Central Lancashire offer programs in self-publishing. Self-published books are reviewed in Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus and everywhere else.
That being said, some people are committed to going traditional and about that I'll say the same thing I always do: if you want to put in a year—sometimes two—into finding an agent and then wait another six months or so to see if that agent can sell it, you could get of anywhere from $2000 (my lowest) to...well, the sky's the limit when there's a bidding ware. Just know that it will be another year or two before publication, that very few books represented by agents even sell and that those that do often sell struggle to find audiences, with no help from the publisher.
Obviously, to get a traditional deal, you need an agent and for that agent to be able to sell your book, you need to be able to show you can sell that book (with, say a social media following of over 100k, a newsletter list of over 50K) or something of the sort. One thing that can help sway publishers is if you offer to buy, say, 5000 copies but you have to already be someone they'd be interested in giving a deal to; they're not going to make a deal with anyone who offers to buy their own copies.
The Cons of Traditional
Of course, with traditional publishing, you're giving up your rights. That may not seem like a big deal but if you're sitting where I am—trying to wrestle the rights for Party Girl back from HarperCollins and even though the contract stipulates that they are mine after a decade, Harper won't sign off on that so I can't republish—you'd see it is.
With traditional publishing, you really have no say over the title and cover. Now obviously if you're a well-known writer with a lot of power, you have say but I remember with my fourth book, Falling For Me, the cover they created was so awful. Everyone I showed it to felt bad for me. So I paid another designer to do a great version of what they did. There was no way you could like the bad one and not like the good one but for reasons they never clarified for me, they went with the first one and it really made the book dead on arrival.
You also have no control over what happens. When my publisher was fired a few months before Party Girl came out, the entire division dissolved so there was no marketing team, no sales team—no anything. And I had never published a book before so I didn't know how unfortunate it was to have no one advocating for the book in the media and at stores.
But here's the reality about your publisher advocating for you in the media: they don't. They advocate for Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle and those other authors that don't need advocating for—because those authors are their big moneymakers.
Case in point: I always wanted to go on Good Morning America for my six books with HarperCollins. Harper always told me GMA wasn't interested in me. When Make Your Mess Your Memoir was released, I reached out to GMA directly and got on.
Did GMA care that I had published my book and that a company like Harper hadn't? Absolutely not.
Of course, the prestige of traditional publishing is unparalleled! So please ignore all of that if it's what you want.
What Traditional Publishing Expects
There was a widely circulated story recently by a traditionally published author named Kacen Callender about the pressure she feels from her publisher. I'm pasting a quote from it below but I highly recommend going and reading the entire post here.
“There’s an expectation by many that authors give more of themselves: to come up with their own marketing schemes, to search for as many opportunities to publicize themselves and their books as possible. There’s an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) suggestion from publishing companies and professionals that, if the book doesn’t do as well as the author might’ve hoped, then it’s actually the author’s fault.”
I found that to be true X1000.
The Reality: Self-Published Rates Are Better
With a traditional publisher, after the agent's take and the publisher's take, you end up with maybe 10% of the profits. If it's a massive book, that's a lot of money but most books, alas, are not massive.
Advances are paid out in either two or three installments and so usually you get the first third when you sign, and that's what you use to live on, spend on research or whatever else. Then you tend to get the second part when the manuscript is approved and the third when the book is released. Since it can be a year or two between acquisition and release, you can end up waiting for a long time for those second and third installments.
If you earn out the entire advance, you begin to earn royalties but the often cited percentage is that only 15% of books tend to earn out.
With self-published books, however, you get to keep anywhere from 50-70% of your book’s profits. The only expense that's subtracted is the printing and shipping. And you own all the rights!
But let's be real: almost no self-published author makes a lot from book sales. That's why so many have businesses connected to the books they publish; through those, they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they would with a traditionally published book. (See link below for an episode that gets into that.)
Another Reason People Choose to Self-Publish
A traditional publisher's goal with each book is to get that customer to buy more from that publisher. It's why the publisher's and not the author's contact information is in the front and back of the book.
With a self-published book, you have the opportunity to attract that reader to you and not the publisher. Many self-published books have calls to action in the beginning, the end or throughout the book that are designed to get the reader to sign up for their email list. You can put a QR code at the beginning for readers to scan and be led to a page on your site. You can put your email address. You can virtually do anything you want; it's your book.
Biggies Now Go The Self-Published Route
People like James Altucher, Jeff Goins and Pat Flynn could easily sell their books to traditional publishers. But they don't, for all the reasons I've broken down above. And when there are success stories like The Martian (Andy Weir self-published it and it ended up selling three million copies and being made into a movie that made $630 million) and 50 Shades of Gray (100 million copies sold and you know the rest of that story), more big writers are going this route.
While it's hard, if not impossible, to make the New York Times bestseller list as a self-published author, you can make the USA Today and WSJ list, though you usually have to sell a minimum of 6000 copies.
How Much Does the Publisher Matter?
Let's play a book: Name a book you love. Now name the publisher.
Exactly.
And here are some of the divisions of Simon & Schuster: Adams Media, Avid Reader Press, Emily Bestler Books and Free Press. If you saw any of those names on the side or back or front of a book, would you even know if it was a traditional publisher?
So my final answer is no, people do not look down on self-published books. And if a self-publishing book snob like me can come 180 degrees, anyone can.
RELEVANT LINKS:
Do I Need an Agent and If So, How Do I Get One?
How Do I Make Money From My Book?
How Do I Use My Book to Get Email Subscribers?
How Do I Get Clients From My Book?
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"I always wanted to go on Good Morning America for my six books with HarperCollins. Harper always told me GMA wasn't interested in me. When Make Your Mess Your Memoir was released, I reached out to GMA directly and got on."
May 26, 2021
What Do I Need to Know to Record an Audiobook?
First things first: the audiobook market is exploding. It is now a $1.2 billion business when ebooks are a $983 million business. In other words, for the first time ever, US audiobook sales have outgrown ebook sales. The most popular genres are mystery/crime, suspense, science fiction and fantasy, personal growth and career and money and longer books often do better since Audible works on a credit system and it makes more sense to use a credit for a longer book.
Another thing to know upfront (and forgive me if this is obvious): you need a different cover than the print and ebook because it has to be square.
So what else do you need to know?
Anyone Can Do It
Before 2011, Audible had to acquire your book and only 3% of books were acquired. This meant that they set you up with a booth and engineer, handled the cover and uploading and owned the rights. In 2011, they opened up Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) which made it so that anyone can upload their book and sell it on Audible, provided it met their requirements. As of now, over 100,000 authors have uploaded via ACX.
But be forewarned: ACX doesn’t have nearly the customer service Audible has; when my company was having trouble getting through to anyone at ACX, we had contacts at Audible who told us they were entirely separate companies and couldn’t help us.
It's Harder Than You Think
I know the fantasy of recording your audiobook; I had it myself!
But here's the reality: you’re stuck in a booth for hours upon hours (I highly recommend breaking it up so you give your voice time to rest; spread it over a week if possible). And it takes practice. When I recorded Make Your Mess Your Memoir, I had screwed up the levels so I had to re-record the entire book. And you'd better believe I was much better the second time. This isn’t to say you need to read it through one full time before recording but the practice is going to make it better.
You may want to consider getting a narrator but of course, there are serious pros and cons to that. Many nonfiction authors want to narrate their own books because they’re so close to the material and many listeners want to hear them read by the authors because it’s a way to really get inside an author’s head. It is the ultimate connection – as the author, you’re with your reader while they walk, drive, clean and do whatever they do when they listen to books. But if you do want to work with a narrator, you can get one through AC and even split profits with them so you’re not paying anything up front. If you have zero audio or entertainment experience, this may be your best bet. So be honest with yourself. Don’t trick yourself into thinking it’s just a glamorous fun thing because it’s really not.
If you have a podcast, you probably should read it because you have audio experience and also because people know and hopefully love your voice.
Programs like one in beta at Descript.com will allow anyone to create a digital voice double, so that “you” can read your book, without really reading your book. In other words, those hours you would spend reading it could become maybe an hour as you set up the program.
You Need the Right Recording Space
You need a quiet, sound-friendly place to record it. A sound studio is best but otherwise, if you just record in your room with your iPhone, ACX will not approve it. Worst of all, they can take months to approve and then, if you need to fix something, you have to resubmit it, which means it takes even longer.
This means that if you have a book launch planned, you can miss making it because of Audible's approval process and you never know how long it's going to take. We once waited 6 months for them to approve one of our books while Make Your Mess Your Memoir was approved right away . To make sure you don’t cause yourself unnecessary anxiety, I suggest planning to launch your audiobook months after your paperback and ebook release. Then you can only be pleasantly surprised if it's ready in time.
You Need the Right Help
If you can get a director/engineer– someone who will tell you that you didn’t sound impassioned enough on a certain line or could do better - you’re going to be better off. Ideally, that person has read the book ahead of time and is familiar with the material. Of course, you can improvise; I had my boyfriend sit outside my sound booth and note whenever I made a mistake. You definitely don’t want to do it alone because it will be way more work for the sound editor, which you’ll be paying for!
Your sound editor may be the engineer or someone else. This person will listen to the entire recording, compare it to the text and note when phrases are unclear or something needs to be redone and then give you the lines to re-record and then splice those in.
After editing, the book needs to be mastered. Possibly your editor can do it, or someone else can.
You Need to Decide if You’re Selling on Audible Exclusively
To be clear, Audible means Audible, Amazon and Apple. Audible counts for about half of audio sales and that's a significant portion but, of course, some people are vehemently anti-Amazon.
An advantage to doing it just on Audible is that your royalties are higher: for an exclusive contract, your royalties are 40% while a non-exclusive contract means your royalties are 25%. Audible requires authors to sign a seven-year contract for exclusivity but that really doesn't mean anything because you can change it to non-exclusive after one year.
A popular option for many authors is Findaway Voices (FV), which gives you a higher royalty rate. FV is a reasonable option as they get your audiobook on numerous bookstore and library sites.
Another advantage to FV is they have a partnership with Chirp, which is the audio version of BookBub—a site that can blow up your sales if they select your book for a featured deal. (Note: the selection process is extremely competitive so this is only relevant for a fraction of authors.)
An advantage or disadvantage to FV, depending on your point of view: When a book is kicked back for not meeting audio requirements, FV will automatically fix the issue without telling the author. Still, the quality usually isn’t as high, and that can affect the author's ratings and reviews.
All that being said, I tried FV and didn't have a good experience. While I could get support from actual people (as opposed to ACX, where you're stuck in an endless customer service hole that feels like it's run by bots), none of the people were ever helpful. And they did a major screw-up in my case: even though I'd made it clear that Party Girl was already published on Audible, they re-published a new version there and that new version showed up instead of the original version, which had several wonderful reviews (the FV version had one one-star review).
Because of my personal experience, my plan is to go strictly Audible. To me, some of its other selling points are that you can earn up to $75 each time a new Audible listener becomes a member by purchasing your ACX audiobook through your unique link with the Bounty Referral Program. $75!! That's insane. But the reality is most people who want Audible subscriptions already have Audible subscriptions so the number of conversions may be low. Still, I think it's pretty cool.
Going exclusive with Audible also means you get promo codes—10 freebie copies of your audiobook to give away to readers, whom you can then ask to promote your book. (Once your first 10 codes have been redeemed and your catalog of titles has reached 100 qualified sales, you can request an additional 25 codes.) Supposedly FV offers the same sort of promo codes but I never could access mine and my attempts to get that information from anyone there failed.
But one important thing to note: I'm not in this to make money off of audiobook sales so the royalty rates don't concern me. I like my books being available in audio because it makes the whole publishing process feel complete and because it will attract some readers it wouldn't otherwise.
That's why I'm less concerned about the endless controversy over how Audible pays its authors. (See the link below for more on that than you may want to know.)
RELEVANT LINKS:
Audible audiobook requirements
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"The audiobook market is exploding. It is now a $1.2 billion business when ebooks are a $983 million business. In other words, so for the first time ever, US audiobook sales have eclipsed ebook sales."
May 19, 2021
What's the Difference Between a Ghostwriter, Editor & Coach?
A Ghostwriter
A ghostwriter is not a co-writer. A ghostwriter is interviewing you, shaping what you say into a book and presenting it to you for you to approve.
Usually, with a ghostwriter, you are getting the sole byline and there is nothing that is considered dishonest about this. The assumption for many successful people is that they did have a ghostwriter that they are not crediting.
A co-writer is someone who gets credit. When I wrote a book with the actor Tom Sizemore and I was represented at William Morris at the time, they negotiated this whole thing where my name had to be as big as his on the cover.
The idea with a ghostwriter or co-writer is that it's built around what's best for the "name" person—the person paying the writer. I had Adam Corolla on this podcast and he talked about how he "wrote his book" by talking to the writer while driving to comedy gigs.
Everybody is going to treat this relationship differently. I don't even think Tom Sizemore read the book that we wrote together whereas some people are going to be very meticulous. At Launch Pad, we have some clients that are very involved and want to read pages every week and we have some clients who just have full faith, are hands-off and just sort of approve the book at the end.
I would just say it's safe to assume that most celebrity biographies were not written by the celebrity, even if it says otherwise.
If you have sold your book to a publisher, the publisher may pair you with a ghostwriter. Oftentimes the author picks who they want beforehand. That's what happened with Sizemore. In fact, I'm the one who got the agent and got it sold. If you're working with a company like Launch Pad, we will pair you with one of our ghostwriters. We will figure out who would be the ideal person for you.
If you are publishing on your own, you hire that ghostwriter and editor.
An Editor
I did a separate episode on different editors (see link below) but the short version is that editors are either going to be very involved or not at all. My editor at HarperCollins never changed a thing. At Launch Pad, we really get in there and tend to change a lot.
Editors can be really expensive. I just heard about one that charges just $45,000 to edit a book! I do know editors that charge more like $2000 and I'm sure you can find editors that are more in the $1000 range, but you may get what you pay for—although you do not need the $45,000 editor.
Your editor is there to make you sound even better than you are. And I know from my own experience that it is easy to come to resent your editor. I was very lucky when I wrote for magazines; I had editors who made my writing so much better; I had one in particular at Details magazine who just made me sound amazing. And I had one experience with one book where the editor was very insistent on changing something that changed the meaning in a way that made me uncomfortable. When I told him that, he basically said "Either do this or we're not publishing your book." But that only happened to me once in many, many years of being a writer.
A Writing Coach
A writing coach is someone who is just your cheerleader throughout the process. And every coach has a different method.
So when you start working with one, you will establish the role and the boundaries, how often you want to talk and what you need from them. The range in cost can be wide.
I'll tell you that I don't love being a writing coach so I have what I call a "go away" price that's really, really high. And most people say "No way." I have one person who said "Fine."
So I have one client and our process is very it's very malleable. I am there to provide accountability. I do read pages. That is something to clarify with a coach: will they be reading and editing or just reading or not reading at all?
We offer coaching at Launch Pad and our coaches read and provide feedback for clients, but they do not do editing. So everybody's got a different way. But for the most part, a writing coach is not going to do editing.
RELEVANT LINKS:
How Do I Avoid Hiring the Wrong Editor for My Book?
Adam Carolla on Why Having a Great Book is the Best Launch Tip of All
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"The idea with a ghostwriter or co-writer is that it's built around what's best for the 'name' person—the person paying the writer. I had Adam Corolla on this podcast and he talked about how he 'wrote his book' by talking to the writer while driving to comedy gigs."
May 12, 2021
How Can I Use Social Media to Promote My Book?
Pick Your Platform(s)
Do not try to be everything for everyone. I've found that Instgaram, Facebook and LinkedIn work best for book promotion, though I know people who swear by Pintrest (links to that below).
Instagram: Top Tips
Use Canva. The easiest thing to do is to take quotes from your book and make them into Instagram posts on Canva; use the same font and the same color as your book cover and short ones are going to work the best.
Put multiple links in your bio. Use LinkTree or another platform that allows you to put multiple links in your bio because links are not clickable in Instagram captions and you only get space for one link in your bio. If you use something like LinkTree, you can link to your Amazon page, to a book page on your website, to media interviews and other things that you're doing for your book.
Tag other people. Don't abuse that by tagging strangers all the time because it's annoying, but do tag other people that you want to see and ideally like and comment on your post.
Encourage interaction. You can always urge people to take action by writing something like "give a heart if you agree" or "tag a friend who needs to hear this." When people comment on your posts, comment back. When they like your post, go and like some of their photos.
Encourage people to save your posts. Apparently, the Instagram algorithm loves it when people save posts. So if you are posting a quote that is teaching something useful, why not encourage your followers to save it?
Post multiple photos in a series. Instagram also loves carousels—having a series of photos in a sequence, which keeps people on your post.
Put excerpts from your book as captions. You have 2200 characters on Instagram, so you can definitely take excerpts from your book and paste them. See below for a link to a website that makes your captions have pretty paragraph breaks because if you just paste paragraphs into your captions, the layout is pretty ugly.
Do Stories. If you have over 10,000 followers you can do stories that say swipe up and you can put a link. If you don't have 10,000 followers, still do stories. I recently heard an Instagram expert say that if you really want your audience to fall in love with you, do 10 stories a day but dear God that's a lot of stories.
Do Reels. Reels are all the rage and I'll link below to an expert who teaches about Reels. A lot of people do Reels videos where they're pointing different words. I even did one before I realized I think we all look ridiculous doing that. Lately I've been experimenting with making funny Reels that don't actually teach anything.
Post reviews. You can post screen grabs of people's reviews of your book. You can grab the screen grabs from Amazon and post them or you can take little bits from them and make them into quote cards on Canva.
Post cool graphics of your book cover. I recommend using a site called Adazing because it can make your book cover into really cool graphics—it can create an image of your book cover on a tablet or show a cat with your book. (I'm actually an affiliate for them so you can get this SUPER AWESOME DEAL if you click here or at the link in the Useful Links section)
Use Instagram Live. Go onto Instagram Live and talk about your book, possibly doing interviews with other people about your book. Or even better, go on an Instagram tour. We had a client who spent a month after her book release doing Instagram takeovers, where she took over literally the friend's account. She just introduced herself to that person's audience and talked about her book and it was really effective.
Use hashtags. Hashtags are, like it or not, important. You can use up to 30 hashtags in a single post and the most effective way to use them is to come up with a list of ones that are relevant for your content and then search Instagram to see which of those are the most popular. Your goal is to rank in the top post for that hashtag so if that hashtag is used millions of times, it's going to be impossible to rank high. So you're looking for hashtags that are used hundreds of thousands of times or less, depending on how many followers you have. I'm linking below to a class on hashtags that breaks this process down.
I got my very first client because he was searching hashtags. This was back when I posted a lot about addiction and recovery; he was searching like recovery hashtags. He found me, he came to me and said, "I would like you to write and publish my book." Instagram may feel like just an ode to our vanity but I've gotten plenty of clients from it.
Facebook: Top Tips
Change your main images. I recommend changing your Facebook cover, your Twitter cover, your LinkedIn cover, your YouTube cover and any other cover you have to an image that includes your book cover.
Take advantage of the opportunity to pin posts. Make a link to your book sales page a pinned post on Facebook and also on Twitter and in your email. Put it everywhere you can.
Create a Facebook public page. Don't be self-conscious about calling yourself a public figure. A public page is not going to have this same reach as a personal page because Facebook just doesn't prioritize the public page in terms of the algorithm, but it's something that professional writers should have.
Share personal stories, photos and long captions. On Facebook, the posts that are going to perform the best are personal stories related to your book. People love stories of triumph. They love stories of success, and they love photos. Facebook really wants to keep you on and everybody else on Facebook, so links that take them out of Facebook are not going to perform as well. Longer posts are better.
Run Likes campaigns. To get people onto your Facebook public page, you can run Likes campaigns. Facebook advertising is pretty complicated but running Likes campaigns is the easiest kind of Facebook advertising to do.
Invite people to Like your page. Whenever somebody likes one of your posts on Facebook, you can then invite them to like your page and you will over time build up the number of followers on that page.
LinkedIn Tip
LinkedIn is definitely the more professional of all of these. So I recommend, if your book is about something where you're teaching something, if there's anything relevant for people who are interested in building their business in any way, that's what you post on LinkedIn. Hashtags are also are important there.
Finally, Don't Be Afraid to DM
When your book comes out, you can direct message people on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. I've DM'd people videos of me saying, "Hey, my book comes out tomorrow. It would mean so much if you would go and get it." You can do voice notes, whatever you can do to get people excited.
It's really easy to assume, "Hey, if I post this, everybody's going to know to go get my book." You'd be amazed how much more likely people are to do something if you ask them directly to do it.
RELEVANT LINKS:
ADAZING SPECIAL DEAL [NOTE: AFFILIATE LINK!]
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"It's really easy to assume, 'Hey, if I post this, everybody's going to know to go get my book.' You'd be amazed how much more likely people are to do something if you ask them directly to do it. "
May 5, 2021
How Do I Get My Book Made Into a Movie?
My Experience In the Book-to-Movie World
When my first book Party Girl came out in 2007, it was a different time and there were numerous offers. I took the highest-paid option offer, which was $20,000, which didn't seem like a lot compared to what other people were doing and getting, but now books are optioned for zero so my opinion has changed.
I naively thought the movie would for sure get made so I just figured I’d cash the biggest check until then. And I was thrilled when the producing team that acquired the book hired the screenwriter from Reality Bites, which was my favorite movie at the time. It was super glamorous. I would go to New York and have lunch with the producers and everything was so exciting—until the day they stopped returning my calls. Emails went unreturned and nobody called me back. I was represented at CAA at the time and one day I got an email from my agent at CAA and it said, “Congratulations. The rights to Party Girl have reverted back to you.”
What Happened After the Flurry
What that email meant in non-Hollywood speak was that nobody wanted to make the movie anymore. I never even saw the script. I never even knew if they were telling me the truth about a script being written. And so I wrote back and said, “What do you mean?” and I never got an answer. And I gleaned over time that this option was dead so I went back to the other people who had been interested in making the movie and they were long gone. Years later, I wrote a piece for a website where I talked about this experience and Helen Childress, the Reality Bites writer, saw it, emailed me and said, “Are you serious? You never saw the script? Let me send it to you.”
So she sent me the script. So there I was reading my favorite screenwriter’s take on my book based on my life from 10 years or 12 years earlier; it was so surreal. She and I decided we should try to get the movie made. But it had been put into something called turnaround, which means, essentially, good luck getting the script back. But I own the rights to the book.
Then It Happened Again
On my fourth book, which was called Falling for Me. I was represented at William Morris. And I got a call that the producers of the TV show Community, which was a big show at the time, were interested in developing it. So I went and met with them. I quickly gleaned that option money was a thing of the past.
But they brought in this writer and she started developing the book into a TV pilot. It was bizarre to me; developing meant just sort of changing things a little; instead of the character having a female friend, it was a gay best friend and instead of working here, she would work there. I figured they knew what they were doing.
I told them, “I am very sensitive when it comes to rejection. So what I would like is for you to go take it and try to sell it. And if you get nowhere, just tell me that. And if you get somewhere, tell me that.” Instead, they said, “Your book is about you. So why don't you come to these meetings?” So I went with them and sat in the room while this woman and these producers pitched this TV idea based on my book. I smiled as we pitched to ABC and NBC and CBS and all the places. And then every day after one of those meetings, I’d get a call from the producer saying, “Hey, I'm just letting you know they passed.” So that wasn't super fun.
So What Should You Do?
If you think your book is perfect for a movie, here is what I suggest: go get an account at IMDB pro account for $12.50 a month. Think about who you’d want to star in it; of course, don't shoot too high. It’s probably not going to be Charlize Theron or Brad Pitt. But don't shoot too low, as in that random girl in that indie that you saw late at night on Hulu.
Think: who is big enough to get it made and not so big that they’re being inundated?
The Current Status of Party Girl
For Party Girl, which we're in the process of packaging right now, my friend who was a big producer for many years said, “You know who you want as a lead If you're looking for a young girl in an edgy movie? Go look at former Disney stars who then did a dance movie because afterward they often want to break out and do something wild.” It seemed like a good theory. There was Vanessa Hudgens and there's this woman Sabrina Carpenter and others.
How to Approach the Rep
Figure out who you think would be good for the role and glean everything you can from social media about them and their rep. Then reach out to the agent or the manager and pitch them.
Jeff Garlin, who's on Curb Your Enthusiasm and is a friend of mine and a producer on Party Girl was on a Clubhouse room I hosted recently. And somebody said to him, “How does this work?” And he said, “If anybody sent a book to my manager and said, ‘I would like Jeff to read this,’ I will read it. I'm a reader. I have respect for authors.’” But he suggested sending something that will really get their attention. Cause not everybody is a mensch like him and going to read it. He jokingly said, he loves gefilte fish. So if somebody sent that, even though that's just kind of gross, it would get his attention.
So figure out what you can from social media that could make you and your book stand out.
Make a Deck
A deck is a roughly 20-page document with images. And we just did it for Party Girl where we took the book cover, all the interesting blurbs and reviews and facts, wrote a logline on one page and picked visuals of what we wanted the look of the movie to be, and picked actors and actresses—not to say that they’re attached but you would most like or who fits the role and do a character description on each page with the image. For Party Girl, we put Dakota Johnson as the lead.
And then you put bios for you and the producer or anybody else who is involved.
Understand Budgets
Movies can be made on all sorts of different budgets. For Party Girl, we're talking to one producer who wants to make it for $300,000. There's someone else who might want to make it for 3 million, it could probably be made for 30 million.
Budgets are really determined by the actors. Certain names mean a lot overseas, which means that if you are going to go the indie film route, you can attach an actor whose name alone will guarantee a certain box office result and your investors will earn their money back. The best thing is if you can get a huge actor who could do a one-day role and get all their scenes shot so then the movie could be billed as a Bruce Willis vehicle or as a Robert DeNiro vehicle or whoever it is.
It’s a Rough Road But IP Is King
Everyone says that the best way to sell something in Hollywood is to have IP or Intellectual Property. Well, a book is IP so if you have a book, you have that but of course, Hollywood is not just going to come banging down your door unless you have a crazy number one bestseller that everybody wants.
But if you want to make this happen, it is within the realm of possibilities. And if you have a book you got out, you are a hustler extraordinaire so you could do it.
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"Everyone says that the best way to sell something in Hollywood is to have IP or Intellectual Property. Well, a book is IP so if you have a book, you have that. But of course, Hollywood is not just going to come banging down your door unless you have a crazy number one bestseller that everybody wants."
April 28, 2021
What Does an Author Website Need?
First Up: You Need a Website
It's necessary in 2021 and so easy to do. Back in the day, used to have to hire somebody who would do something that was super complicated, that you didn't understand. And usually, that person would take forever and be an incredibly frustrating person and all of these things. Now, then there was WordPress, which is doable for the non-techie but not ideal.
Now you can just so easily create your own site without any tech skills whatsoever on sites like Squarespace and GoDaddy. I do mine on Kajabi where I have my courses, my newsletters, my payment system, my blog. You can use my affiliate link below to set up your own Kajabi site.
I would highly recommend starting with GoDaddy. Buy your domain name on GoDaddy—with privacy, which I highly recommend having—it's roughly $20 a year and privacy means they're not putting your address and contact information out there so you're not contacted by all these random people that you don't want to be contacted by who are all going to try to sell you something that you do not need.
It Does Not Need to be Your Name
If you're buying it now and your name is unique and you can get it, do. I actually beat a more famous Anna David, a German singer, by getting annadavid.com early on. But if your name is taken, there are all sorts of variations. Let's say your name is Jane Smith. itsjanesmith or janesmithwrites or janeelizabathsmith or whatever your middle name is. So don't sweat it but I do recommend doing .com over.org., .club, all the different dot whatevers that are available today.
Why not try to have the name be the same as it is across all your social media? So if your domain name is "itsjanesmith.com," why not have that be your Instagram, your Facebook and everything else?
Instead of creating a separate site for your book, you can buy the domain name for it and just have it redirect to a page for your book on your site.
A domain name and hosting are different and you can do both on GoDaddy, where the hosting is roughly $100 a year, which is a great deal.
What Kind of Bio Does Your Website Need?
First off, you need a bio and I say keep it short and sweet. Don't pack it with random things that just make it look like you're that student who's trying to make your essay fit two pages. I have short and longer versions and the bio links to different pages on the site—a book page, a press page or whatever. But putting that you've appeared on a podcast no one's ever heard of is not going to help your bio.
Get the most impressive facts upfront and if you want to have a personal thing—say, she lives in Los Angeles with her nine cats and her husband—put it at the end. Those long jokey bios don't help anyone. And do it in first and not third person.
Don't say "I don't have anything too impressive to put in there!" Work with what you've got and use that as an incentive to try to get published online before your book comes out so that it can say "Jane Smith has been published in the Huffington Post, Thrive Global" and that kind of thing.
You can also put a link to your Amazon author page and ask people to follow you there. You obviously have to wait until you have an Amazon author page but the way these work is that everybody who follows you on Amazon is going to get an email from Amazon when your next book comes out. And that is so valuable. Imagine if Instagram sent out an email every time you posted something on Instagram!
How to Display Your Contact Info
Put your email address there. When people have a contact form, I have had many times where I wanted to offer an opportunity to be featured in a book or to be interviewed and I see one of those forms and think it's not worth it. Who are we to be so important that we can't put our email address there? We want readers and potential promoters to be able to reach us!
A lot of people worry that putting their email on a site means they're going to be added to all these spam lists. I say we all get tons of spam without that which we delete. But if you are worried about it, you can always put "Jane" and then "at jane smith dot com" so it's not clickable.
What Should Go on Your Book Page
Obviously, if you're creating your author page now there's no book yet so just be prepared to do that. But recommend having basically a sales page for your book that breaks down WHY someone should buy your book rather than just a page that summarizes your book and has the cover. You can see a link to the one I did for Make Your Mess Your Memoir in the Related Links section below.
On your home page or your book page, put links to the places you've been featured on. If you haven't been featured in any media, here's a great way around that. You can create a press release for your book and then send it to a press release company (there's a link to my favorite one in the Related Links section below).
For a couple of hundred dollars, they will circulate the release to thousands of outlets, then once that's up and they send you the links to them, copy the icons of those sites and put them on your site. Voila, you've been featured in or on those websites.
Cool Idea: A "Start Here" page
I heard about this on Stephan Spencer's podcast and if you want to find out about SEO, he's your guy (see link below). He talked about how if you have a page that says START HERE at the top of your site, it will be the most popular page on your website. People will do things they're told to do. On annadavid.com, I did that and have a long timeline of my writing career, starting with when I was five and I include photos and links. And at the top it just says, "Here's a link to a regular bio" for people who don't want to go through this whole thing (see a link to my Start Here page below).
You Can Have an Excerpt From Your Book
Once your book is on Amazon, go to the right side of your book's page, click where it says <Embed> below Add to List, click on Embed on your site and then copy that code. Then go to the backend of your website and create a section called Custom Code. If this sounds complicated, it's not. On GoDaddy, for example, the option is right there. And then what shows up is this glorious image of your book cover and a large preview of the book. And then when the reader gets to a certain part of that preview, it directs them to buy the book. You can see what I mean by scrolling to the bottom of this page.
If You Have a Blog...
This isn't required at all but it's an option that will greatly increase Search Engine Optimization when it comes to your site. You can copy and paste blog posts onto Medium to try to use the content to also attract a new audience but make sure you use canonical links so that the web crawlers direct people to your site first. (I have a link that breaks down canonical links in the Relevant Links section below.)
RELEVANT LINKS:
My Favorite Press Release Distribution Company
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"You need a website and it is so easy to do today. Back in the day, you used to have to hire somebody who would do something that was super complicated that you didn't understand. Now you can do your own for a few hundred dollars."
April 21, 2021
Can I Get Sued for Writing About Someone?
My First Bit of Relevant Advice: Don't Punish Through the Pen
While this is not about getting sued it is related so let me just say that It’s so important to do the internal work that's required before writing about people you resent. And one of the main reasons is that you're not going to come across as very likable. If you are hammering us over the head with how horribly you've been treated and how horrible the people were, the reader won’t have sympathy for you. However, if you are describing things that people did that are horrible and you are just merely talking about how you reacted, you are going to come across as a much more sympathetic character. And as Mary Carr said on NPR when she was asked how she handles writing about other people: “Other people are not my problem. I'm my problem. So when there's a jerk in the book, it's usually me. I mean, I'm the one that I'm wrestling with.” And that is a great thing to keep in mind.
What I Learned From Lisa Smith
I recently interviewed my friend Lisa Smith, who is a former practicing attorney as well as a best-selling memoirist. And I don't think I should need to say this, but what I'm about to say does not substitute for legal advice. You cannot run into a court of law with this and say that Anna said this was okay.
Still, defamation, which includes libel and slander, is probably your greatest concern. But there's a defense against it and it is the truth. Lisa gave this example; if you say in your book that someone stole money from you, and then the person comes out and sues you for writing that and says you damaged their reputation, you can say, "But you did" and that is a defense.
But we live in a society where anybody can sue anyone for anything and often they do. So I highly recommend erring on the side of caution. You have to ask yourself, Do you really want to have to resort to that kind of defense? Do you really want to have to get a lawyer and deal with that hassle? A person can say “I got fired from my job and cost me all this income.” And it is going to be such a headache that if there is somebody who is particularly litigious that you're writing about, do everything you can to not write about them, or at least to protect yourself.
How to Protect Yourself
The easiest way to protect yourself is to change descriptive characteristics, change the facts, maybe change what someone does for a living, change the color of their hair, change things so that these people will not be identifiable. When Party Girl was going for its legal review, the lawyer said to me, “Make sure there are more than five people that fit this description so that nobody can come forward and say, Hey, this was me.”
I highly recommend, if possible, talking to the people who are going to be in your book and letting them know, “Hey, I'm writing about this. I want you to know.” If you are comfortable, share the pages with them in advance. It’s really shocking how people respond. You just cannot predict how people are going to respond to how they're written about—the people you think are going to be thrilled are horrified. The people you think are going to be horrified are thrilled. And I have had times where I have not shown people pages ahead of time because I was scared to and they didn't like the pages and I would have been far better off sharing those pages with them when it was possible to sort of get their feedback on them.
When it comes to people who are really good friends, just give them the option to have their real name or a fake name in the book.
You Can Always Get a Legal Review
This means hiring an attorney and having them read your book before it's published to let you know if they think there are things that you should change. There’s an organization called Volunteer Lawyer for the Arts that will do legal reviews pro bono but otherwise, it will cost at least $1000.
There’s also something called media perils insurance you can look into if you are concerned.
There's Never a Guarantee You'll Be Protected
A lot of people will say, “Well, if I write it under a fake name, then I don't risk upsetting these people.” Well, that's not entirely true. A pen name does not protect you.
And even if you change the names, you can still get in trouble. Augusten Burroughs wrote about his adopted family AND he even had a different name as a kid and yet three years after the book was published and a year before the movie based on the book was released, the adopted family came forward and sued him for $2 million. Apparently, he’d identified them by name in interviews. So they felt that they had a legitimate claim and he ended up settling and part of that settlement included renaming the genre of the book—calling it a “book” and not a “memoir” and changing the acknowledgments page in future additions to say that the family's memories of events he describes are “different than my own” and expressing regret for any intentional unintentional harm.
Another way to protect yourself is to put a disclaimer in the beginning. If you want to copy the one we put in our books, here you go:
This work is non-fiction and, as such, reflects the author’s memory of the experiences. Many of the names and identifying characteristics of the individuals featured in this book have been changed to protect their privacy and certain individuals are composites. Dialogue and events have been recreated; in some cases, conversations were edited to convey their substance rather than written exactly as they occurred.
Someone Can Object Even if They Don't Have a Case
We published a book where the client wrote about an affair she had and even though everything was out in the open, the ex-wife of the guy she had the affair with found out it was in the book when we were doing her advanced reader team and she got a lawyer and the lawyer said that this was going to hurt this woman's reputation. And so at the 11th hour, we took it out.
We also ran into a bump when we did a book for somebody on The Real Housewives and Bravo had to get involved; they had us take out the word Housewives in the title of that book and then they objected to these totally innocuous things we never would have thought they'd care about.
We had another book where the author mentioned dating and doing drugs with all these celebrities. And we just sort of said, Hey, get a legal review. Celebrities are probably too busy to care about a random book but they also have deep pockets and are somewhat unpredictable as people. So you never ever know.
Still, Tell Your Truth
I’m not saying that you can't write about people that have done terrible things. As Annie Lamott famously said, “If the people in our lives wanted us to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” But I am saying that you don't want to get hurt twice by them—the first time for what they did and the second time for getting in trouble by writing about it.
So proceed with caution.
RELEVANT LINKS:
NPR Interview with Mary Karr on Writing About People
Vanity Fair Story on the Augusten Burroughs Lawsuit
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"You don't want to get hurt twice by someone—the first time for what they did and the second time for getting in trouble by writing about it."
April 14, 2021
Do I Need an Agent and If So, How Do I Get One?
First Off: If You're Doing Traditional Publishing, You Need an Agent
There are exceptions but for the most part, Big 5 publishers aren’t going to work with writers who don’t have agents. And even if one will deal with you, you’re not going to be protected in a way that an agent can. Fifteen years after my first book Party Girl came out, we are trying desperately to wrestle the rights back and I can’t imagine how hard it would be if I hadn’t had an agent negotiate a great contract for me in the first place.
Know That Agents Want to Find Talent
The fact is that it is very hard to get an agent. But just like publishers, agents want to find the diamond in the rough. It's just that they're hammered with a lot of potential diamonds. Still, if you’re a diamond and you want an agent, see below for some links to places where you can find different agents that accept unsolicited submissions.
The Process
I recommend compiling a list of 100 agents on an Excel spreadsheet and then methodically going through them; if they accept unsolicited submissions, send a one-page query where you say what your book is about, who your audience is (as in, number of followers on Instagram and newsletter numbers) and essentially why you are worth considering. Also, explain why you're writing them—meaning make it clear that you've done your research and maybe you’re a fan of an author they represent. I think everybody responds well when they know someone writing them gives an F about who they are.
If you don't get anywhere after querying 100 agents, I say you've done it. If you say “I've queried 20 agents and I haven't heard back,” I don't think you've tried hard enough. But if you’ve tried 100, that’s an effort. If you don’t hear back from your initial query, I would say wait a month and follow up again. And if you still don't hear, then give it one more shot and assume no response is the response.
Unfortunately, that is going to be the case most of the time. And don't resent them. Agents are hammered with queries and massively overpaid underpaid in a lot of cases.
How Some Writers I Know Got Their Agents
I got mine because I had been writing for magazines for 10 years and going on TV so I was lucky enough to have two different agents contact me. But I had really put in the time when it came to getting my name out there, which is why I always highly recommend trying to get published—trying to get blog posts and articles and all of those things, even if you're just publishing them yourself on Medium and building up an audience that way—before reaching out to agents.
A writer I know named Jason Smith built up a profile on Medium. A hundred thousand people saw a story of his that went viral, Warner Bros. contacted him and they connected him to an agent at ICM. But that is not the standard way—it’s somebody who got really, really lucky.
Jillian Lauren, who is the massively best-selling author of a bunch of books, told me that she just did it the old-fashioned way, which is she looked at the acknowledgments sections of books that she liked, saw who the agents were that were thanked and cold submitted to them.
Mark Ebner, who is an old friend of mine, said he had he read about this agent named David Vigliano. He decided that's who he wanted to be his agent and he cold-called him and said, "Hey, are you Big Vig?” And David laughed and ended up signing him. David is actually a friend of mine and sold one of my books.
And my friend Ryan Hampton, when he wanted an agent, literally just Googled literary agents and called everyone on that list. And this is exactly what he told me he said: “My name is Ryan Hampton. I've spent the last two years watching my friends die from addiction. I'm sick and tired of reading the same old addiction memoirs. I have a story to tell, and I think if the rest of the world could see what I did through my lens, they would be outraged. I'm writing a book, not just any book, and it's not my story on how I got sober. I want people to be as outraged as me. I'd love to work with you, but if you aren't interested, please let me know. I'm going to get this published.
And of course, he did get it published. And now he's doing his second book. But I don't have balls like that. I could never do that.
Finally my friend Amy Spencer who was a magazine writer—she and I actually used to co-host a radio show on Sirius called Sex Files—reached out to the agents of authors she admired but didn't get very far. But when she told a magazine editor friend that she had written a proposal, the friend said, “Hey, I can connect you to my friend who's an agent. They don't really represent stuff like yours, but why not?” So Amy sent her book to that agent and then got an email from a different agent at that agency, because the agent who didn't represent books like hers had passed it along to that agent.
The point is there's no one path.
RELEVANT LINKS:
Sites that list agents:
www.agentquery.com
www.pw.org/literary_agents
www.querytracker.net/
www.writersmarket.com/cms/open/agent
Previous podcast episode: Should I Give Up on Traditional Publishing?
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"Agents want to find the diamond in th rough. It's just that they're hammered with a lot of potential diamonds. You need to stand out."
