Anna David's Blog, page 4

Keep Working That Book. (Not "Working on" It. "Working" It.)

When I decided to write a new, tamer version of a book I first wrote in 2004, a part of me worried what people would think. Can’t she just let that f-ing book go? I imagined someone saying to another someone who wouldn’t care or know who “she” was or what “f-ing book” She 1 was talking about.

But I only gave that a few seconds of thought because the truth is: no. No she can’t let it go. Not because she’s clinging to the past but because even though it was her first book, she thinks it may be her life’s work. And she also thinks may be the most pretentious person alive for using the phrase “life’s work” while talking about herself in the third person.

I could, of course, count on my former email list—a list that I’ve explained included some bizarrely combative assholes1—to assure me that I wasn’t being entirely paranoid about being judged. Several responded to the newsletter where I told them about the PG version of Party Girl that the book didn’t sound like it was their kind of thing, PG or not.

One subscriber took it a step further, asking me why I couldn’t just come up with a new idea. She even had suggestions: a cookbook, for instance! I wrote her back thanking her for her creative suggestion.

This woman seemed to believe that the only reason one would go back to an earlier book would be because one lacked new ideas. That is certainly not the case for me. I have 16 ideas by breakfast, 14 of them usually bad and 12 of them often forgotten by lunch. I don’t lack ideas and I don’t lack motivation.

Here’s the marvelous thing about publishing a book you love: you never have to let it go if you don’t want to. If our work means something to us (and we own the rights)2, we can all do our own version of Taylor’s Version any time we want.

I’ve made Party Girl into a journal, a clothing line, a podcast3 and a screenplay.4 I even talked a guy who owns a sober bar into making it into a mocktail. (I don’t think he did it in the end, though I stand behind the belief that it would be a hit.)

The idea to do a PG version of the book came to me a few months after my son was born. Because becoming a mom made me insantly5 more conservative/boring than I’d been my entire life, I suddenly couldn’t believe there was a novel sitting in our house that opened with a threesome. The fact that I’d written said novel—and had been all over TV telling people it was loosely based on my own experiences—left me almost speechless6.

I’m an act first, think-later type of person, which has served me as many times as it hasn’t. In my 20s and 30s, I did all kinds of things—posed for Playboy, answered sex questions on TV, dated men that could generously be described as losers—without thinking. I smoked two packs of a cigarettes a day until I was 31, let a French photographer take nudes of me, told bosses to f*ck off…you get it. Not thinking.

That doesn’t mean I regret writing Party Girl. Not at all. In fact, it was the purest book I’ll ever write.

I wrote it before I knew anything about the book business, let alone agents and publishers. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the “Big Five” or that even when your book is acquired by one of them, it’s more a nightmare than a dream. I didn’t know what it was like to spend every bit of your book writing energy obsessing over the book “hitting” or making you your publisher’s favorite or getting Oprah’s attention or inspiring a Times review. I was a naif who wrote from my heart, and while, yes the writing included threesomes and all sorts of other salacious things, the book was completely untainted. Writing Party Girl was like emptying my veins onto the page and having it be bizarrely pleasant.

The four books I wrote after Party Girl were tainted. I wanted to please GoodReads readers who could never be pleased, make my publisher and agent into my mom and dad and finally get the attention I felt I deserved or just MAKE MY DREAMS COME TRUE, DAMNIT, even though by then I’d forgotten what the dreams were. By my fifth published book, I concluded that I hated writing. It took me years to see that I didn’t hate writing at all; I hated what I’d allowed the publishing business to do to me.

Even though I escaped traditional publishing, the books I’ve written since—Make Your Mess Your Memoir and On Good Authority—had motives behind them. I wanted them to attract clients—and they have. I love them, and worked hard on them, and am proud of them, but they are not as pure as Party Girl. (Being pure and attracting clients are NOT mutually exclusive; the majority of the books we publish at Legacy Launch Pad are both.)

My point is that your book can live for as long as you want it to. I meet people all the time who talk about how they just want to have a #1 bestseller or their book doesn’t need to be good because they’re just using it as a lead magnet or “who cares what’s in it because no one even read anymore, right?”

My God, no. Quality matters. Having your heart in it matters. Our books will outlive us so do it right. And if, like me, you don’t want to let go of a book you first published a decade-and-a-half ago, you don’t have to. Hold onto it as long as you want to.

Or you could just take the advice of my newsletter subscriber and write a cookbook.

1

Please explain to me the disorder that causes someone to sign up for a newsletter list and then send the person writing it passive aggressive covertly hostile correspondence under the guise of it being helpful feedback? Because a good 10% of my old subscribers could perhaps be helped by this diagnosis!

2

I had to get the rights to Party Girl back from HarperCollins, a process I talked about a little in this Wall Street Journal piece.

3

I had a podcast called AfterPartyPod in 2011. I’m relaunching a new version of it next month. See, I can’t let go!!

4

The book has been optioned for the umpteenth time. The current producers say we’ll go into production this year. I’ve heard that before.

5

Truly, though, isn’t all change sort of the Hemingway thing about going broke “gradually and then all at once”?

6

The PG version still has the threesome. It was too big a plot point (no pun intended, Jesus Christ, haven’t I told you how conservative I am now?) But it is significantly toned down.

Never Read the Comments (But You Can Read the Reviews)

Last Friday, I had a super awesome thing happen: The Wall Street Journal covered the relaunch of my first book, Party Girl, which I decided to PG-ify and re-release. (I also went on Access Hollywood to promote the relaunch, which was also fun.)

Anyway, I was very proud of the WSJ story—less proud to be written about than I was proud of how I handled it, which was with sheer appreciation.

As I wrote about last week, I have ruined so many gifts I’ve been granted. When I had an essay published as a New York Times “Modern Love,” I didn’t do a happy dance. Instead I read every single comment—and there were hundreds—that attacked the quality of the writing and me personally. I was in Idylwild with a friend the weekend the story came out but instead of exploring, I sat in a cabin with a sporadic wifi connection and obsessed about the comment someone made about how I had to be sleeping with someone at the New York Times for them to agree to publish my trash.

But for this WSJ story, I only focused on what a blessing it was that my book that I’ve loved so much got this attention. Not all aspects of the article were positive but I didn’t care. And when I saw the comments pile up—creeping into the hundreds and then the two hundreds—I didn’t glance at them. I mentioned that I wasn’t reading the comments to a friend who went and looked at them, smiled and supported me in my decision not to take a gander.

“Bad?” I asked.

He nodded.

“About me having been a ho?” I asked.

“That and about being self-absorbed.”

I swear to you, dear reader, I did not and do not care. Why yes, I am self-absorbed. Name a writer—nay, a human—who isn’t.

My point is this: if you’re lucky enough to have your book receive attention, you will attract negative comments. And I say that’s a sign that you’re doing something right: you’re triggering the shit out of someone. And I can guarantee that the someone you’re triggering is not living their best life. My guess is that a person compelled to criticize a stranger being written about would like to be putting themselves out there but is paralyzed by fear. Why else would they spew hatred on a stranger? Honestly, the writing part of writing a book is the easy part. It’s the willingness to put yourself in the line of fire that requires the real courage. It’s much easier to sit on a couch and write a nasty comment.

Now, when it comes to reviews, this is easier said than done. You can’t just not read your reviews. I mean, you could but it would be hard. Harsh commentary from strangers about something you killed yourself on sucks. But again, it goes back to their fear, best summarized by Jay Z in “Already Home”: And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it. Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it.

I’ve handled this better some times than I have others. When I released a children’s book I wrote about my son and it was mercilessly attacked by Amazon readers, I felt punched in the gut.

One woman wrote that she taught analysis of children’s books for a living and that made reading Bennie the Brute painful.1 Now, pain sucks but I have to say, her profession reminded me a bit of the joke in Airplane about the “magazine” on famous Jewish sports legends that was only a leaflet. While I have no idea who takes a class in the analysis of children’s books, my guess is that it’s not the masses.

So I say keep putting yourself out there and ignore the basement dwellers who want you to suffer for your courage. The more you ignore them, the more powerful you become.

  1

Lucky for her, the pain was ephemeral; it’s a very short book.

 

The Secret to Having an Amazing Book Launch

I’ve had miserable book launches and joyous ones. And the amount of misery or joy had nothing to do with how well the book did.

It had to do with making the decision to enjoy it, rather than to try to control it.

It took me six books, and an escape from traditional publishing, to finally understand this.

There’s a lot out there about post-launch depression. Story after story after story. And for good reason: it’s real! I know that all too well.

The first time I experienced it was, of course, on my first book, Party Girl. No matter how many times I heard that it was incredibly rare for a book to be a breakout success, I put my figurative fingers in my ears and ignored it. Sure, that was true for most, I figured, but not for me. My book had sold to the biggest publisher in the world. Producers were after the film rights before the book even came out. The guy who started GoodReads, when he was asked what book had the most buzz at the time that GoodReads launched, said “Party Girl by Anna David.”

And then, well…it got TONS of press but due to the fact that my publisher was fired a few months before its release in the biggest scandal to hit publishing1, weak sales. No one explained to me, when Regan Books evaporated, that It was Over. Party Girl was not going to be the monstrous hit we’d all hoped. There was no company to support it. Instead, I was told, I was lucky that the book was getting released and wow, look how much press it’s getting!

And then, well, nothing. Press is great but if you don’t know how to capitalize on it by selling a service, it doesn’t do much of anything. And so, despite the fact that I had hundreds of people at my LA book party, I was miserable. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing did. I felt like a filmmaker who’d had a studio hire them to write, produce, direct and star in a movie and were behind me the whole way, until it came out. And then they disconnected their phones. People would ask me how the book was doing and I wouldn’t know what to say, but I knew the honest answer would have to be something along the lines of: “Not all that great.”

But hope springs eternal and when my editor at HarperCollins told me they felt terrible about how I’d been caught in the Regan cross fires on Party Girl, they would make it up to me on book two. So they gave me a (much smaller) deal to write my second novel, Bought. They were very encouraging—up until the time it came for launch.

“Unfortunately, because Party Girl didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped, bookstores aren’t as interested in Bought,” my editor told me. (This was 2008; bookstores mattered more than Amazon.)

“But you told me it wasn’t my fault that Party Girl didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped and you’d make it up to me on this book,” I reminded him.

He shrugged.

But still, I thought, I will be the exception. I’d seen Down With Love and every episode of Sex and the City. It would all work out. How could it not?

Anyway, you get it. I went through this six times with HarperCollins, before eventually doing a book with Simon & Schuster that became a New York Times bestseller.

I have now seen the “I will be the exception” look on the faces of approximately 99,9999 people since then. I’ve tried to share my experience. I’ve explained that more often than not, we’re not the exception; that’s why it’s called “exception.” I’ve said that most of us don’t buy lottery tickets and insist, when people explain that it’s a lottery, that sure, yes, but don’t they understand that I have the winning ticket?

Every one of those Harper launches, no matter what I got, I wanted more. I got on The Talk but why not The View? My friend’s book got reviewed in the New York Times. Why not mine? I never took a second to enjoy and appreciate what I was getting. And I got desperate; I’m not going to say my publisher made me feel desperate because no one can make us feel anything but they sure did always remind me that my book wasn’t selling very well so anything I could do sure would be great. I remember, for my fifth book, Falling for Me, being on the phone with a producer at Anderson Cooper’s then talk show. My friend worked there and he said they could do a segment about my book IF I WOULD COME ON THE SHOW WITH AN EX-BOYFRIEND AND DISCUSS GETTING BACK TOGETHER. It shows just how desperate I was that I called several men I hadn’t spoken to in years, and had no interest in getting back together with, to see if they’d join me in this televised conversation. The fact that I couldn’t get any of them to agree is only, of course, Desperation Frosting.

My point is this: my launches were miserable because I thought I could make them successful in exactly the way I wanted to. But since I can’t—since none of us can, except, I guess Glennon Doyle—now I just focus on what I can control.

Say, making it the best possible book it can be—from the writing to the editing to the cover.

Say, reviews. I can ask people to review my book on Amazon.

Say, media attention. But rather than looking at it from a who-can-have-me-on-their-show-or-write-about-my-book perspective, to look at it from the point of view of how could I (or my book) serve their audience?

I get to decide if a launch party would be fun for me. For my last book, On Good Authority, I had an amazing opportunity to do an event at Book Soup. But then I thought about recruiting people to go there. It was the same week as my baby shower and I was already getting all my friends to show up for that. So I assessed what the event would take out of me vs what it would give me and was proud of myself for passing.

So it’s really that simple. You can have a great book launch simply by deciding to and remembering you can’t control any of it so just appreciate every single moment in the sun your book gets. Publishing a book is an amazing accomplishment and too many of us have managed to take this amazing accomplishment and make it into something terrible.

If you have a service you sell that your book is going to attract clients to, then the launch really doesn’t matter anyway, because the book is going to be serving you for the rest of your life.

So You Want Your Book Made Into a Movie or TV Show.

Let’s start with the bad news: your chances aren’t great.

Let’s move to the good news: it IS possible.

Books are made into TV shows and movies so often that this New York magazine story lists over 115 adaptations that came out in 2024 alone.

They included Nightbitch starring Amy Adams, Here starring Tom Hanks, Disclaimer starring Cate Blanchett, The Perfect Couple starring Nicole Kidman and Lady in the Lake starring Natalie Portman. Then there was the Blake Lively movie It Ends with Us, which got more PR for the drama around it than the actual movie but was based on one of Colleen Hoover’s many tomes.

Oh and who remembers that Bridgerton was a book before it was a Shonda Rhimes show? Also, anyone else lose 90 minutes of their life they’ll never get back watching The Idea of You, which was originally a piece of Harry Styles fan fiction? (Just me? Ugh.)

Point is: books are made into movies and TV shows all the time.

They are also optioned about a million times more often than they are made.

So how does this work? The best way I can explain it is through the journey I’ve gone on with Party Girl, which has been optioned half a dozen times.

My Magic/Tragic Hollywood Story 

The first time it was optioned, right as the book came out in 2007, I was naive enough to think I had it made/it would just get made. I was represented by CAA and my agent fielded a bunch of offers. One of them was from Melanie Griffith, who was then married to Antonio Banderas. They had me over to their mansion and treated me like I was one of them. Antonio told me in his lovely accent that he was “jealous” of me, since I could create art and have full control over it, the way someone working on a movie never could.

A maid walked in and announced that Jeffrey Katzenberg was on the phone for Antonio. As he left to take the call, Melanie yelled after him, “Tell him about Party Girl!”

But then their offer came in and it was very low and I was broke so I met with a mother-daughter production team my agent told me would really pony up.

The mother and daughter took me to lunch at Michael’s, then the chicest publishing restaurant in Manhattan. Tina Brown was at one table, Anna Wintour at another. (I may be making that up. It’s how it seems in my memory.) The mother and daughter had a deal with Sony and they told me that if I went with them, I could pick any screenwriter I wanted.

As a staunch member of Gen-X, I knew there was only one answer: Helen Childress, the woman who wrote Reality Bites.

Mother and daughter said they’d make it happen. I cashed their $20k option money and believed them when they told me they’d circle back.

Months passed. I called them. (This was pre texting days, when I actually called people.) They never returned the message. I emailed them. No response. This could seem odd only to someone unfamiliar with the ways of Hollywood, the town that invented professional ghosting.

Some time later I received an email from CAA: Congratulations, it read. Your book rights have reverted back to you!

I responded, “What does this mean?”

I received no response and then slowly wised up to the fact that this meant It Was Over. The mother-daughter production team never got back to me. I had no idea if they’d ever gotten my beloved Reality Bites screenwriter involved.1 

Second Time’s a Charm?

My fourth book, Falling for Me, also attracted interest. By then, I was at WME (then still just William Morris) and my agent told me the producers of Community wanted to make it into a TV show. By this time, option money had dried up. In other words, no one else wanted the rights so they didn’t have to pay me.

I met with one of the producers and a female writer he wanted to create the show. I sat in on a bunch of meetings where the writer explained her concept, which was the same as the book but different. I didn’t understand what she was bringing aside from changing someone’s gender or job. The producer explained when I asked that she was a big name and TV networks wanted to work with her. (I have no memory of her [big] name, not to mention the name of the Community producer or the name of the mother-daughter team. Repression or early-on set senility? You tell me.)

I had one request for the Falling For Me crew: don’t make me go to the pitch meetings. I had been depressed when Party Girl didn’t happen and I explained that I took rejection hard; also, since I wasn’t involved with the show beyond providing the source material, I probably didn’t need to be there and they could just call me with good news if there was good news?

They agreed but then, when they set up the pitches, they decided it would help to have me there: authenticity and all. So I went with them to meetings at ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox where the Writer with the Big Name pitched the story of my book but with characters with different genders and jobs. A few hours after each pitch meeting, the Community producer called and told me it was a pass.

While that was the end of Falling for Me’s Hollywood story, the Party Girl one continues and I have this bizarre faith that it will happen. At one point, Aaron Kaplan—then Darren Star’s producing partner—had the rights. During the pandemic I actually wrote the script and it’s actually good. (Not false modesty; I’ve tried writing scripts before and they weren’t good; this one is.) Last year, an actress who could have gotten in made wanted to star in it and the producers who had given her the script had the money to make it. We could have gone into production. But I didn’t think she was right so I passed.

Did I make a mistake? Maybe. I think the producers are now ghosting me.

I still think the movie will happen. Delusion or early onset senility? You tell me.

OMG Enough About Me

If you skipped ahead because you were like, “OMG I just want to know about my own book being made into a movie,” hi.

I actually happened to have interviewed two of the world’s leading experts on this topic: Warner Bros president Mike DeLuca (who’s been nominated for multiple Oscars for movies he’s made based on books) and Ben Mezrich (who’s had zillions2 of his own books made into movies). Because I know I’ve already gone on too long, I just asked my best friend Claude to summarize their points. Here they are:

Based on these fascinating interviews with Mike DeLuca and Ben Mezrich, here are the key insights for authors hoping to see their books adapted for the screen:

Reality Check:

- The vast majority of optioned books never become movies

- Options are often low-paying or free unless it's a major bestseller

- Without A-list talent attached (writer, director, actor), projects rarely move forward

- Movies can take many years to get made, even with strong backing

Paths to Hollywood:

- Some producers and executives specifically scout self-published/indie books

- Book scouts at studios are constantly looking for material

- Having a high-profile agent can help get your book in front of the right people

- Creating buzz through sales and press coverage can attract Hollywood attention

From both interviews, the key takeaway seems to be that success requires a combination of great material, strategic timing, right relationships, and often a good amount of luck. As Mike DeLuca says, writing something commercial with a clear target audience in mind can help, but ultimately the story needs to grab attention and have strong potential for visual storytelling.

So Will Your Book Get Made?
 

I’m not sure. I do know that it’s easy to watch a movie or TV show, particularly a bad one, and think that your book would be better than whatever you’re watching. It probably would be.

But there are so many factors at play. It’s really not about how great your story is. It’s about attaching movie stars who can get it made and/or knowing people who can finance it. Because my boyfriend is an indie movie producer, I’ve had a front-row seat seeing how it tends to work: there are a few people whose names mean so much overseas that if they’re in your movie, even briefly, you can get investors who know they’ll earn their money back. Think Anthony Hopkins, Nicolas Cage. You can pay them a sh*tload for a day’s work.

And look, any author can get an account to IMDBPro, which lists every actor’s rep. If there’s an actor that you think is both get-able and would be interested, reach out. If you have a connection to someone who can finance the movie (it’s a great business write off for someone with millions to spare), that means you can pay up front for that actor. Your chances just improved EXPONENTIALLY.

You just have to be realistic. Netflix probably isn’t going to make your book into a movie just because it’s a great idea.

But it can happen. I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again.

Though I still don’t know if Antonio told Jeffrey about Party Girl. I’m thinking not?

1

Crazily, years later, Helen Childress saw something I’d written about this, found my email address and emailed me out of the blue, asking if it was true that I’d never seen the script she wrote. IT EXISTS? I responded. She wrote back, attaching it. And so I had the surreal experience of reading the woman who’d written my then favorite movie doing a take on my book from half a decade before, which had been a take on my life from half a decade before that. Surreal, to say the least.

2

More like four but that’s still a lot

Having 15 Amazon Reviews is Worse Than Having No Book At All

It amazes me how people—smart, dedicated people who’ve spent a significant amount of time or money or both on their book—will allow their book to sit on Amazon with 15 reviews.

They live in today’s world. They use Amazon to purchase socks and protein bars. They know that before they decided to buy their Knit Cuffed Beanie Warm Winter Hats Unisex Skull Knit Cap Fashion Ski Hat or Wall Mounted Lamp, they considered other beanies and lamps.

They give Amazon more of their time, attention and money than they know they should.

They know that as their brains calculate prices and other details on the things they buy, there’s one factor overriding their ultimate decision: how many reviews the product has.

And yet they let their beloved books sit there with 15 reviews.

Why do they do that?

There’s one reason—or two.

One: they’re focused on the wrong thing. They think the number of books they sell matters. It doesn’t. I’d rather have 100 of my ideal readers read one of my books and have their lives transformed, and hire my company, than 10,000 people whose lives won’t be impacted at all. More people get rich from Lotto tickets than from book sales and publishing a book is a lot harder than buying a Lotto ticket. So why play those odds?

The star rating, when it comes to books, matters far less than the number of reviews. It’s not a blender that either works well or it doesn’t. We all know that different humans like different books and some humans are a-holes. And having variety in the ratings, as opposed to just a succession of a few five-star ones, actually looks far more authentic. Fifteen five-star ratings screams “I just asked 15 friends to review this.”

This is a numbers game. And reviews stay on Amazon, literally, forever. (I’ve heard of people trying to get purposely sabotaging reviews removed and it’s impossible.) Yes, you’re missing the opportunity of having FREE PUBLICITY FOREVER.

There’s a frame store I go to that gives you 20% off some rather pricey frames if you’ll do a Yelp review. They don’t do it because they like giving hundreds of dollars in discounts but because reviews are crucial for every business today. Like it or not, as an author, you are a business.

Of course, we can’t give readers 20% off our books in exchange for a review. So we ask our friends or followers—sometimes several times.

Here’s what happens: our friends or followers say, “Oh yeah, I’ll do it,” and they don’t.

So we post or send out emails stressing how important reviews are to us, and maybe a few reviews trickle in.

We start to feel desperate and lame. None of us like asking for help. So we abandon the project and the book that we loved so deeply into existence sits there with 15 reviews.

But there is, as the recovery saying goes, an easier and softer way. At my company, we gather what we call Review Squads made up of the client’s friends and followers. We also have an Internal Review Squad that we put on the case. And then we nudge them. Because we know they need nudging—from someone who’s not the author.

Here’s the thing: they mean to review your book. They have every intention of doing it. But then their kid comes home crying or the chicken burns or the dishwasher breaks and logging onto Amazon to review a book they probably haven’t finished reading is the last thing on earth they want to do.

I beg you to forge ahead anyway. The first way you can do that is to tell people they don’t need to finish—or even read—your book to review. While I appear to be advocating for dishonesty and in fact I guess I am, it’s really just making it easy for someone to support you by asking them to do something that will take five minutes and not five hours. You can even tell them they don’t need to buy the book since Amazon allows people who haven’t purchased a book to review it.

While a review written by someone who hasn’t purchased the book is considered “unverified,” it still sits there. You can also price your ebook at 99 cents when you’re doing a push for reviews so that your people can both purchase the book for less than, well, anything today but a few Tootsie Rolls at the newsstand. Amazon allows you to change the cost of your book so you can just switch it back after your reviews come in.

Why? Because studies show that nothing makes people feel better than being of service. Writing a review for an author is an act of service, especially when it’s a person who doesn’t have the 10,000 reviews of someone like Tim Ferriss or Glennon Doyle.

I can’t bear your hard work being dismissed because of those 15 measly reviews.

If You're Going to Use AI for Your Book, Work With People Who Know What They're Doing

Publishing people have been rightfully up in arms about a new start up called Spines which aims to “disrupt” publishing by having AI write and produce books. The company charges between $1500 and $5000 to do “everything” professional publishers do. And clearly people think this is a good idea; the company recently raised $16 million.

My issue isn’t with AI. AI is here to stay and can be incredibly useful when used appropriately. The problem is when people who know nothing about book publishing are charging money to create completely unprofessional slop.

 

Hopefully, this is obvious to anyone who visits the Spines site. It promotes “How Easy It Is To Create A Stunning Book Cover With Just One Prompt” and then provides this as an example: 

This is nothing against Jannati or her Journey but WTF? And speaking of titles, there’s a testimonial from an author of a book called “Biological transcendence and the tao” who raves about how amazing Spines was to deal with after his book had been rejected by 17 publishers.

(Couldn’t ONE person and not 17—or at least someone at Spines—have told him that the title doesn’t make sense and also that titles should have capital letters in them?)

The Spines site takes pains to show that it is not JUST a bot farm. And it does that by telling you that you can have a “human” proofread your manuscript for a “small fee,” alongside a bunch of stock photos of “humans,” like this one:

 

(Awesome side note: when you drag that beautiful “human”’s photo to your desktop, you can see that it is titled Human-06. If Human-06 doesn’t look like your average proofreader, that’s because she’s not. A reverse image Google search reveals that she has lots of other jobs—as a travel specialist, immersive sports & education expert and more.)

Of course, Spines isn’t the only AI book publisher coming out of Silicon Valley: Microsoft has launched 8080, a new book imprint that aims to be “faster and better” than traditional publishing. And its first book, No Prize for Pessimism, by Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer Sam Schillace, is available now. Sam Schillace appears to be a terribly accomplished individual. His LinkedIn (where he has over 11,000 followers) lists him as a CVP and Deputy CTO at Microsoft and he is credited as the “father” of Google Docs! He probably knows a lot of very intelligent people. So why on earth did no one tell him that his Amazon page looks like sh*t?? Now, No Prize for Pessimism may be an excellent book. Its title has nice alliteration. But why couldn’t one of the intelligent friends have told him that people DO judge books by their covers?

 

Also, why didn’t someone say “Sam, no one wants to slog through a book description that unwieldy! Couldn’t you break it up with some bullet points or shorter paragraphs?”

Also, couldn’t someone have said, “Sam, you created Google docs, you deserve an Amazon page, man!”

And couldn’t another someone have said “Yo Sam, author bios tend to refer to authors by their last name?"

Finally, couldn’t he have gotten at least one or two friends to review? This man gave us Google Docs, people!

Also, while being connected to Microsoft is cool, it doesn’t really make sense to list that assocation in the Publisher section. When a book is published by Ballantine, it doesn’t list it as Ballantine, an Imprint of Random House.

This is meant as no disrespect to Sam or Microsoft or Spines, just a comment that millions of dollars along with no knowledge about how to make a book look professional doesn’t get you very far.

Hire a Podcast Booking Company and Risk Getting Banned Forever

Following up on introducing NAME REDACTED as a potential guest. Her story aligns perfectly with "Fail Your Way to Success," where embracing setbacks leads to remarkable growth.

In "TITLE REDACTED,” NAME unravels the intricacies of digital creator life, mirroring your approach to understanding the success stories of business leaders. Her frank discussions on creator life and mental well-being could offer refreshing perspectives to your listeners.

NAME could undoubtedly provide substantial insights on redefining success in today's digital age. Excited about the prospect of her sharing on your platform.

Warm regards,

This is the kind of message that arrives in my box daily—sometimes three or four times a day. And this is one of the better ones! The bad ones say how inspired they were by the interview with FILL IN RANDOM GUEST WHOSE EPISODE THEY CLEARLY DIDN’T LISTEN TO, and how much it reminds them of THEIR RANDOM CLIENT.

EG: I recently listened to your conversation with Jon Small about how sharing failure can help your business. His ideas on embracing vulnerability and learning from struggles really stood out to me, and I’m excited to apply this mindset to my own work. Great episode! 

If there’s one thing I know about this person, it’s that they very much did not listen to this episode and if there’s another thing I know, it’s that they will not be applying this mindset to their own work.

They’re doing the “spray and pray”: spamming podcast hosts across God’s free world with slop. What amazes me is that they do not give up. If they’re going to email over and over and over, why not just take the time to email once but in an effective way? It’s usually by the third follow-up that I take action—not by accepting the guest but by blocking the sender.

Being pitched this way is worse than not being pitched at all. When I’m pitched someone and that publicist follows up three or four times, there’s a chance I may remember the name of the person being pitched. And if I ever met or encountered them, I’d definitely be turned off.

And yet people—lots and lots of people—are paying to have themselves pitched in this way. Why? Well, I just looked up some of the companies doing this pitching and they look super legit. Articles about them in big publications. Famous-ish clients, including New York Times bestselling authors. If I wanted to go on podcasts and saw their sites, I might think they’d be the ticket.

Of course, the sad truth, for the pitchers, is that most podcasts want to feature guests who don’t have to be pitched.

I have, on rare occasions, accepted guests who were pitched to me. A few times it’s worked out okay. One time, it worked out excellently. (More on that in a second.) Two times it resulted in such obnoxious male guests that one I cut off a few minutes in when I realized I couldn’t tolerate the experience any longer (something I posted about, still shaking from the experience) and the second time, I wish I had. (Instead I finished the interview and just never posted the episode.)

(The time it worked out excellently was when the person pitched himself, in the most thoughtful way that showed how closely he’d listened to the show. His name is Alex Strathdee and he’s become a friend and one of my favorite people to follow when it comes to book publishing; listen to the podcast he hosts here.)

I’ve learned a lot from Alex but one of the things is that you can get on a podcast if you approach it correctly. It was through the pitch he sent me that we developed the Legacy Launch Pad “can’t miss” podcast pitch template we use to get our clients booked on podcasts.

It’s not hard. It just takes actually knowing who you’re pitching, listening to the show and approaching the pitch from a point of view of how you can serve that host’s audience and not how that host can serve you.

As we amp up marketing and PR services at LLP, we’ve been exploring working with various companies. One of them is billed as the greatest software for getting booked on podcasts. My team and I did a Zoom with them and they showed the “most amazing” part of the software: that it will pick a random episode the show has released, build a pitch around it and then follow up three or four times. The guy showing us the software thought this was amazing while I realized that it was this feature that had caused me to block so many senders.

So what’s an aspiring podcast guest to do? Podmatch is my suggestion. I interviewed the founder Alex Sanfillippo and really like him but more importantly, we’ve used Podmatch for our clients and booked them on shows. Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss certainly aren’t seeking out guests there but if you want to dip your toe in the podcast world and haven’t been on any shows before, it’s the perfect way to enter the world. Either that or work with professionals who aren’t going to make you look bad.

So please avoid the podcast booking companies and software that allows you to follow up and follow up until you’ve driven the host or producer batty.

Taylor Swift Doesn't Care About the NYT Bestseller List (And Neither Should You)

As a New York Times bestselling author, I can 100% tell you that it does not guarantee fame and riches.

When I had a book hit the list, I was so broke I couldn’t afford cab fare to the party.

I have a friend whose book sat at the #1 spot on the list for weeks on end—who watched that book be made into a hit movie, who sat on Oprah’s couch and all the things—who has been broke for years.

And I know authors who have sold several hundred copies of their book, having it hit no list whatsoever, who have been set for life as a result of that book.

So what does that have to do with Taylor Swift?

Well, her long-awaited book—The Eras Tour Book—was on sale exclusively at Target.

In some ways, you could say: who cares? It’s a photo book, hardly a tell-all about how her feelings for Travis are so much deeper than her ones for Harry and what she really thinks about Karlie Kloss.

On the other hand, celebrity memoirs see publishing houses through seasons and seasons of failures. While not all of them succeed (hello, JT and Billie), when they do, they realllllly do.

Most celebrities—and when I say most, I mean everyone but Taylor—do the standard thing: have their agent let a publishing house know they’re ready and accept, sometimes, up to $20 million. Taylor is not, as we all well know, most celebrities. She famously got her songs back from evil producers, re-recorded them to even greater success and released her concert documentary exclusively through AMC (who needs a movie studio?)

In some ways, this was annoying. My friend and I saw The Eras Tour twice in the theater and the second time, she paid for tickets online that somehow didn’t show up on her phone. When she complained, the ticket person at the theater said there was nothing she could do as it was all controlled directly through Taylor Swift’s production company and not AMC. We ended up just buying another pair of tickets.

In some ways—if you’re a Swiftie—it was cool. Popcorn, for that show only, was $19.89, and came in a special Taylor Swift popcorn holder.

When Swift decided to release her first book, she went to no agents or publishing houses. Who needs them when you don’t even need to talk to the New York Times Sunday Magazine for their cover feature?

She and her team instead made a deal directly with Target. That means that she is cutting out the Big Five publishers and making a deal with one company: Target. Which brings me to my point: Every time someone tells me they want to sell their book to a big publisher rather than pay to have it published, I try to explain that if you do manage to succeed at selling your book—which isn’t easy—you will pay. And pay. And pay. You’ll pay in terms of your time…waiting years for the book to come out. You’ll pay in terms of your soul—being forced to go along with titles and covers and words you don’t like. You’ll pay in terms of your energy, when you see that your publisher isn’t doing anything for you because you’re not, like, Taylor Swift (or someone else who doesn’t need the help). Now that Taylor gets this, maybe other people will, too?!

The Eras Tour book will be on sale exclusively at Target on Black Friday—and nowhere else. No Amazon. No Barnes & Noble. No indie stores. Yes, that sucks for the indie stores but is it Taylor Swift’s job to keep indie bookstores in business? Isn’t the girl shouldering enough responsibility?

The most interesting part of this to me is that because Swift is distributing solely through Target, her book cannot hit the New York Times bestseller list.

AKA the most coveted cap feather, AKA, the list I hear people want daily.

I seriously cannot count the number of people who tell me that’s what they want for their book. At least every day I encounter a new one and when I tell them how broke I was when I hit the list, how broke my friend who was on the list for a year remains, how little it means when who reads your book matters so much more than how many, their eyes glaze over. They have stopped listening. Perhaps they’re even planning to have a “New York Times bestseller” tattooed on them as an act of manifestation. (Someone told me about this and said it’s online somehere; I can’t find it. If you do, tell me!)

Here’s the thing about the list: it’s sort of like the way meditation teachers talk about achieving happiness. Meaning: you can’t fixate on it in order to achieve it. It’s based on book sales, yes, but also on the editorial taste of the NYT editors. If that seems wrong—that a bestseller list should be based on number of copies sold and not whether or not an editor likes your book—you can take it up with the courts, as Exorcist writer William Blatty did.

Once upon a time, the list could be gamed. You could pay a company around $200,000 to have people go to the bookstores that report to the NYT list and purchase the exact right amount to make you hit the list. Then a guy from American Pie helped royally screw that up and everyone caught on.

People tend to believe that hitting the NYT list means you’ve sold the most books. But it doesn’t; it means that you’ve sold more books than other authors in a given week (and that the editors deem your boook NYT-worthy). The Bible has never been on the NYT list. And yet it has a few more sales than, say, Handbook for Mortals.

Point is: you’re much better off forgetting about the New York Times list and focusing on something you can control: like writing the best possible book you can for your audience.

And, of course, grabbing a copy of The Eras Tour book at Target while they still last.

Why There's Nothing Wrong with Paying for Media Attention

You can pay for any media attention you want today.

You can pay to go on a podcast.

You can pay this guy to come on your podcast.

You can pay to be in every publication from Rolling Stone to USA Today to the Village Voice to Paper magazine. You can pay to be on the cover of magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and GQ (but it will be in some other country).

I know people who can make all of those happen.

But should you do it?

That depends. It depends on your goal and how you do it.

A lot of entrepreneurs I know have the same contact at LA Weekly that I do. They know how to pay to get an article in there. So they write a totally self-serving article and then use Canva to create an image that makes them look like they were on the cover of LA Weekly, which they then post on their Instagram.

Why is this not a good idea?

1) A self-serving article is going to sound self-promotional. Good promotion doesn’t sound self-promotional. If you’re going to write an article about yourself, showcase your knowledge, not your awesomeness. I don’t know this person but here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about; no one has ever read an article like this and believed it was legit.

And that brings us to…

2) No one actually believes that an entrepreneur that’s not well-known is on the cover of a magazine. Even if they do, what if they go to look for the publication and realize that you doctored it? You kind of seem like a kid at the fair who got their photo taken to be put on a fake cover of a magazine. (Did they only do that at fairs in California? I have a distinct memory of doing this.)

Also, many of these publications mark these articles, LOUDLY, as “Sponsored Content”—AKA “This person paid to be here.” Obvious point but you don’t want that. You need to know which publications make it obvious and which don’t.

Now any journalism professors would be horrified by all of this. Thankfully they would never subscribe to this. But legit journalists would also be horrified.

Thankfully, during my years as a journalist, I was never all that legit. Or you could put it another way and say that I always saw it as a money play. When I worked at People, Us Weekly and Premiere, it became clear to me that the people who weren’t incredibly famous but were still getting featured were the ones who had the best (that is, most expensive) publicists.

When I became an author, that got even clearer. If you could afford to shell out $15k a month for a publicist, you could get in top tier publications. This doesn’t seem all that different—just more honest and efficient.

In the end, my advice is this: if you have the budget, go ahead and do this. Just please don’t be cheesy about it. Have it professionally written. Don’t do it if it screams I PAID FOR THIS. Don’t make the article into a fake cover. Don’t do it if it’s a site that will bury the post so no one can find it.

But also know that the media attention is not the thing; it’s what you do with it that’s the thing. You need to share it, draw attention to it, tell people that it’s there. Apparently, 402.74 million terabytes of data are created every day and while I have no idea what that means, I understand that there’s a lot of noise to break through and you can’t just pay someone, write a self-aggrandizing press release and wait for everyone to ask for your autograph.

Here’s what you can do today:

Ask yourself if you feel weird paying for media attention. If you do, forget this. If you don’t, move onto…

Research which publications (or podcasts) you can pay to be in or on. Check your budget and…

Time it right. If you’re working on a book, peg it to your book launch or at least until after your book is done.

Figure out what you’ll do with that attention when you have it. Yes, you’ll post it on whatever social media platform you use but can you have friends with bigger followings post it? Can you send it out to your newsletter list? Can you use it in an ad or to draw more people to your offer? Don’t let something you paid a lot for (because these opportunities do tend to be ) just sit there languishing.

Oh and don’t run this by a journalism professor because they’ll be horrified. Run it by a realist instead.

 

 

Remaining Behind-the-Scenes with 16-Time NYT Bestselling Author Hilary Lifton

 

Hilary Lifton is not one to boast, and I write that with more understatement than you can imagine.

I was introduced to her recently at a party by someone who said she was a big ghostwriter. When I asked her about her career, she mentioned working on a self-help book.

It was only when I Googled her later that I learned she has written 16 New York Times bestsellers and is one of the most sought-after ghostwriters alive. (While she chooses not to name her bold-faced clients, you can find out who some of them are by going to her site.)

I've never had such an interesting conversation about ghostwriting and I challenge you that you've probably not heard one. I know that's setting expectations quite high but I'm ready to meet them!

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