Mary Carroll Moore's Blog, page 14
October 20, 2023
How To Be in the World with Your Book
Welcome to the last post in my six-part series “Behind the Scenes of My Book Launch.” I’ve been exploring a different topic each week, designed to illuminate the six different big lessons I learned these past months as I prepared my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), for publication this coming Tuesday, October 24. I hope it’ll be interesting to veterans of publishing as well as writers just exploring the idea.
The methods work because my novel became a bestseller and Hot New Release on Amazon in three categories, much to my astonishment, just from pre-orders. Still time this weekend to join the fun and pre-order your copy before my book releases on Tuesday. If you like stories about women heroes, aviation, or complex sister relationships, check it out at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org. And thank you!
Photo by David Thielen on UnsplashWhy does travel fascinate creative people? Why do we get that urge to leave the safety and known territory of home to steep ourselves in new vistas and experience the risk and invigoration of being completely out of our normal lives? As routine and predictability recede with each highway mile, there’s a sense that anything can happen.
Not always a welcome feeling in today’s world. Especially right now.
Yet creative people still pursue this particular risk. And this week, I am doing my share of that.
Travel in my childhood was limited to away-camp in summer and occasional holiday visits to relatives. I envied my school friends whose families spent vacations crowded in a car touring national parks or visiting historical landmarks. As soon as I hit my college years, I took off solo to Europe. Came home, packed my VW bug with guitar, clothes, and books, and headed to California.
Road trips still hold an allure, despite their total lack of control. When I risk letting go of knowing what’s going to happen five miles down the highway, there’s an emptiness created inside. A kind of waiting. Creative ideas might come unexpectedly. We pass exit signs for towns that sound like character names.
My painter’s eye also opens: to new landscapes like the endless cornfields of the Midwest and its big skies, so different from where I live in New England.
I’ve been preparing for months for my book publication next week, and part of the preparation was our road trip to Minneapolis for my launch party. We left a week ago, my spouse, two dogs, and I, traveling in our camper van for 1000 miles of new experiences.
Minneapolis is home to the Loft Literary Center, one of the best writing schools in the US. My literary landscape for over two decades when I lived there. Even before the book was printed, I knew I wanted to celebrate there.
It’s been a long wait for this party. Ten years of achingly hard work. More revisions than I want to count up. A good amount of money spent on classes, freelance editors, publicists. Some days, when I’m watching the endless stretches of highway through the Midwest, I wonder how I ever got here. Right? We all wonder that. How we got here. And what we’re doing.
A good musician friend was talking with her music buddy, both lamenting about unsold CDs—they’ve each released two, excellent, by the way—and the conversation wove around the huge challenge of creating and releasing art into the world. All the feelings that come along for the ride.
Some writers feel guilty about how much they love their books. Some keep their celebrations quiet so they don’t inspire ill will or professional jealousy. Some divorce themselves from community and make it all about one person—them. When there’s always a crowd who helped make it happen.
I think that’s one of the main things I’ve learned through these months of bringing my novel out into the world: how many people actually step forward to help.
Driving gives me time to ruminate on this. Why did this book make it into the world with such success (so far, it’s reached bestseller status, been reviewed a lot, received great trade reviews, and sold well in pre-orders), when others I’ve written didn’t?
Not just quality of writing; yes, this is my best work so far, because I’m a better writer now. I worked harder on it. And I asked for and got tremendous help from my launch team of family, friends, and fellow writers.
But in the final moments of whether this book would successfully launch into the world or not, it came down to (1) how much I believed in the story, (2) what it meant to me, and (3) what I wanted it to communicate to readers. When these beliefs were conscious and clear in my mind and heart, I knew I could make it a success without betraying myself.
Although I’ve learned so many things this time around, this has to be the hardest, ongoing lesson: Staying true to myself while I release a creative work. Keeping grounded and true to my chosen life. Staying aware of what brought me here and the people that supported me. Making choices along the way that felt right to me, not because I was pushed by others’ expectations or my fears.
When I get to Minneapolis, I’ll have more than the party to look forward to. Because I love the Loft Literary Center, I’m offering a workshop as a benefit (fundraiser) for their education programs. It’s a new workshop, one I’ve never taught before, because until now the topic was foreign. It’s called “Writing and Risk: Aligning Your Creativity and Your Life,” and we’ll be exploring a series of exercises and steps to learn ways to stay true to yourself while you create. The point is to keep the narrative of your book and the narrative of your life on the same road.
The workshop is sold out, and many of you won’t be in Minneapolis on Tuesday (although if you are, drop by Open Book’s Performance Hall at 6:30 to join the celebration, pick up a signed copy of my novel, and say hi). So I’m going to share some thoughts today about this topic of aligning creativity and life. Why it’s close to my heart. Why so many of us find it terrifically hard when putting their creative work out into the world. Why competition is the disease that eats at the soul.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on UnsplashDid you see the animated film, Up? One of Pete Docter’s brilliant creations. Here’s a great conversation he had with NPR about the film. You may remember Dug, the dog who wears “cone of shame.” Why do many of us feel like Dug with that cone of shame when standing up for our creative work? I believe it comes from our comparison-based society.
Poets & Writers magazine featured an article by Benjamin Schaefer in the September/October issue. “What Is Meant for You Is Always Meant for You: A Mindful Approach to Writerly Competition” explores how Schaefer was haunted for years by another writer who always seemed to get the MFA acceptance, the prize, the fellowship ahead of him. The sense of comparison, and eventually competition, grew in his mind each time he saw this writer’s name on a list that he wanted to be on himself.
He was finally released from this cone of shame (my words) not by his own wins or the other writer’s failure, but by realizing truths about himself, his creative work, and the world.
“The logic goes something like this,” he said. “If I am not awarded a creative opportunity, whatever that creative opportunity may be, it isn’t because someone else has won what I’ve lost. It’s because the opportunity was not meant for me.” He also acknowledges that his way of deconstructing “stories of competition” doesn’t take place within a social or cultural vacuum—the publishing industry does privilege certain “storytellers to the diminishment of others.” But much of our attitude is our responsibility, primarily.
“When I deconstruct the construct of competition and return my attention to what I truly care about, which is the work, rather than the success and validation of that work, or how that success measures up to that of my peers, I experience a shift,” he concludes.
I do too. And it’s been perhaps the most valuable lesson learned in the past months as my new novel, a little jet plane compared to my very slow-burner earlier books, gets closer to publication.
My other books got only a handful of reviews; they achieved slow but steady sales over a long period of time. I got used to not seeing my book in bookstores or libraries (no matter if it was traditional or indie published). But this jet, which has soared to the Amazon bestseller level? I almost don’t know what to do with it. I guess I’ve been wearing my own cone of shame for decades.
How do you make sense of this kind of cosmic shift in your creative work? I don’t say this to brag, to point to me as better in some way than another writer, because I know that’s not the core of this. I have to go back to Schaefer’s theory that what is meant for me, is meant for me. With the other books, the same was true.
Perhaps I wasn’t ready to be out in the world this fully—and success with a book does take that. I was and am a very private person, so being on social media, making videos of myself, sending reminders to buy my book are hard actions. I had to choose them deliberately and educate myself on ways to do them that felt aligned with my life and my nature. I’m watching another author release her book with daily Tik-Tok videos, promoting nonstop, and I admire her ability to be out in the world this way. It suits her, she’s a serious extrovert. I am not. So I had to find a way to give my all, to be present with the process, while staying true to who I am.
I also had to be OK with how other writers did their book promotion, to face the reality of how I’m different. I had to trust that everyone is NOT out to get me or make me suffer for what I put forth in the world. I don’t believe that anymore—although there were times in the past when I did. I believe, now, that what we earn comes from our own efforts. With this book, I decided to make a huge effort, to give it all I had. I see other writers doing a lot better, but my result is mine. I don’t need to push against them. I’ve learned that these past months.
I’ve also learned that we’re all in community together. Because of our instinctively competitive society, creatives are falsely taught to see other artists as the ones to push against for what we want, an action that can take us far from our organic reasons for creating. Whatever we define as success becomes the marker for whether the creative work is working. The world becomes our mirror for its worth. Not how much we love what we create.
In adopting this, we’re buying into the idea, subtly or overtly, that we need to set aside our truest direction for our work in favor of conforming to certain narrow guidelines and expectations to gain approval from the world. That’s terribly demeaning, in my opinion. It negates the beauty and individuality of what we are putting forth. We’re also taught that readers count more than we do—I definitely believe readers need to be part of the conversation, but they are not the only ones talking. We are sharing our voices too.
We don’t even realize we’ve contorted the creative process, making the outside world the thing that drives our work, rather than our innermost beliefs, values, desires, expression.
What if this was reversed? What if we wrote to honor ourselves, to love the work itself, to please that part of ourselves that needs to create, then found others who resonate with that expression?
Elissa Altman writes a wonderful Substack newsletter, Poor Man’s Feast. In a post last month, she talked about” why we write what we write and why we hide what we hide, why we are inevitably bound to James Baldwin’s belief that Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, and how truth and fact are moving targets—the latter being empirical and the former, subjective.” (Read the entire piece here.)
I find the best writing, the writing that seems unashamed of itself and stands tall, contains a meandering towards truth that is unique to that writer.
Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on UnsplashYour Weekly Writing Exercise
This is adapted from a well-loved exercise in Julia Cameron’s classic, The Artist’s Way. I’ve reread that book every year or so since it came out in 2002. My original penciled responses to the exercises are still there, like bird tracks reminding me who I was and where I’ve come to. More writers and creative folk are heading back to its wisdom, working through it with friends or writer’s group, as I have many times.
If you are unfamiliar with this book and its effect on writers, check out this article in the New York Times or this one in Huff Post about Cameron and her “morning pages.”
This exercise is a chart and it’s very self-revealing. I use it every time a sense of competition and shame overwhelms my ability to create. As I said, it’s not verbatim from Cameron’s book, but morphed over the years to suit my needs. Adjust as you wish!
On a page in your writing notebook, journal, or laptop, list five people you envy. It can be envy for their way in the world, their writerly success, the new book that’s getting so many accolades, their youth or looks, their money. With each name, honestly describe what it is, exactly, you envy. “He got the award that should’ve been mine.” “Her story is in The New Yorker this week.” “I’m fifty-five and she’s thirty, so of course she’d get that job.”
Then write down what you most admire about this person. What’s the story behind the achievement, the thing you most envy? Maybe they’ve worked years for that award, that job. Maybe they work out and their great looks have something to do with that. Try to be un-spiteful as you list these qualities. If you don’t know anything about them other than what sparks your envy, do a little research online.
In a third column—and this is the hardest part of the exercise—write about you. What qualities do you have that are worthy of note, that align in some way to the object of your envy?
An example: when I did this exercise the first time, I was smarting from an agent rejection. That agent had signed a good friend. I felt our writing was equally strong—so why not me? So I wrote the friend’s name, described the win, then described her good qualities (there were a lot!). One of them was persistence. As I wrote, I realized that’s what we shared. She was about a year ahead of me in the agent search, and as I did the exercise, this also came to light—she’d persisted a year longer. When I wrote down my good qualities in connection, I saw that I was persistent in the same way but where she hadn’t given up, I had.
It was illuminating. It dissolved the feeling of competition (and the almost-loss of a good buddy to unneeded envy). I could be genuinely glad for her and get myself to work again. About a year later, I signed with my agent.
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
Tammy Dietz, Falling from Disgrace (Cynren Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
October 16, 2023
Between My Usual Friday Posts
Living through loss, trauma, and other life-changing events can be terrifically challenging. Writing about them, sometimes an important part of healing, can be hard in another way.
Patty Wetterling came to one of my weeklong writing retreats with her co-author, Joy Baker, to work on a memoir about her her son Jacob, who was abducted in 1989. We met by Zoom, this being the middle of the pandemic, and I “met” Patty during our classes and our private consults. I noticed her courage and determination to write this story, and I also saw how hard it was to relive what had happened to Jacob as she did so. Her advocacy work for children is well known in her home state of Minnesota and beyond; it culminated in passage of the federal Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act.
In September 2016, the remains of her son Jacob were discovered and positively identified.
Tomorrow, on October 17, the Minnesota Historical Society Press will publish her memoir, co-written with Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope. Below is my interview with Patty, where I learned more about how she created her memoir and what she went through in the process. More information about ordering her book follows the interview.
How did this book begin?
Patty: Over the years, several people suggested I should write my memoir. Some even approached me and offered to help write it, but I just didn’t trust that anyone else could possibly tell this deeply personal and painful story except me. The problem was, I had no idea how to write a book or even begin the process.
In 2013, I met Joy Baker at a charity gala in Willmar, Minnesota. That’s when I first learned about her blog. After reading it the next morning, my husband Jerry and I were both blown away by her writing and the amount of research she had done on Jacob’s case. But, I didn’t know Joy and the whole thing felt a little creepy. Who was this woman and why was she so obsessed with finding Jacob?
Jerry and I had a two-hour phone call with Joy later that same day. She and I followed up with a few more phone calls and exchanged emails for almost a year before we finally met in person. I think a sad side effect of being a victim of crime is the hesitancy to trust. It would be another two years of really getting to know Joy on a personal level before I finally felt comfortable enough to ask for her help in writing this book.
What was your purpose in writing it?
Patty: When we started, I envisioned this not only as a personal autobiography for my family and friends, but also as a legacy piece for Jacob. I wanted to share the profound impact that his kidnapping had on Minnesotans (and beyond), including how we parent our kids, new concerns over child safety, the push for a national sex offender registry, and how we look at crimes against children. There were so many people who supported us along the way, and I wanted a chance to recognize those who were such a meaningful part of our journey.
And how did that change over the time you worked on it?
Patty: When Joy and I first started writing this book, we didn’t know what the ending would be. And then, suddenly we did. When Jacob was found, everything changed. We took almost two years off because I was so lost. I had been a searching parent for almost 27 years. Now who was I? I wasn’t sure I even wanted to write my story anymore. My purpose had changed and I hated the ending. But, just like when Jacob was first kidnapped, people sent cards and letters of support, often telling me it was my strength and conviction that had helped them survive their own life challenges. I found hope in their words and, once again, it was the fuel I needed to pull myself up and keep going.
What was your biggest challenge in writing this book?
Patty: Trying to determine a workable structure was probably our biggest challenge. Joy had been teaching me the basics of “three-act structure” in storytelling, but this story was so big, it was often hard to wrap our arms around it. In July of 2020 (right in the middle of the pandemic), Joy convinced me to take a 5-day virtual writing retreat with Mary Carroll Moore to help us finish the book. We rented a VRBO in Winona and both agreed to quarantine ahead of time so we could stay together and make it feel like a “real” writing retreat. Mary’s class was both enlightening and exasperating. We thought we were looking for insight on how to end the book, when in reality we learned we needed to start over and completely rewrite the beginning of the book. This really sent us into a tailspin for a bit, but Mary was right. Her recommendations led to a much tighter and more riveting story. [A surprise gift: Ten of us from Mary’s virtual writing class have continued to meet bi-weekly to share writing, comments, suggestions, and guidance throughout each stage of the book-development process. These fellow writers contributed greatly to making my memoir stronger.]
As we worked together, I learned to trust Joy in putting order to what I was trying to tell. We hit a groove—me writing chapters and sending them to her for editing, she replying with clean up and comments.
What do you feel is your biggest success with this memoir?
Patty: Finishing it! In the beginning, Joy kept encouraging me to “just write,” and often followed up with “tell me more,” so I did. Our first draft came it at over 220,000 words, so cutting it by half to get it to a marketable size was a big task. For me, this was so very painful. Many anecdotal stories, personal reflections, and interesting life experiences just couldn’t stay because of space, so I often had to rely on Joy to determine what should stay and what should go.
What was it like to work as a team of authors?
Patty: Because Joy played such an integral part in helping us find answers at the end, she had great insight and was contributed a fair amount of ghost writing to help me tell my story, which was different from where we had started. It was confusing at first. The whole process got difficult and there were times when we had to pause and regroup. She created a detailed timeline and would hold me accountable to dates, times, and places as I wrote. I often got so frustrated I was hard to work with. I needed to accept massive corrections at times, which I didn’t always accept gracefully. I had to admit that my traumatized memory was often wrong, and I had to learn how to accept suggestions as improvements, not criticism. I am so grateful that Joy didn’t just walk away from me and my outbursts. This is such a personal and traumatic story, our deep collaboration created a closeness that few friends share. Joy is truly amazing and I am proud of the book we created together.
Patty with her soon-to-be released memoir
Can you share your feelings, hesitations, concerns about writing about your terrible loss, if you have any?
Patty: I was so scared that by sharing this personal side of our journey, it might add more trauma to our kids and grandkids. I was terrified to let them read our first draft, but I knew they needed to see it. We printed three copies of the 163,000 page manuscript (still way too long), and placed them in 3-ring binders for each of the kids. Carmen and Trevor were both supportive, and Amy read the whole thing in one weekend. Their spouses also read it and I got great feedback from them. They all encouraged me to keep going with it.
What do you hope this book will do in the world, for readers?
Patty: I was so driven throughout all the years of searching for Jacob. I talked to him, wrote to him, and believed in him. I still do. His spirit lives on and continues to encourage me. I want readers to feel that power of hope. Hope is a verb, and each of us has the capacity to do something to make things better. Big somethings and small somethings all matter.
I have never wanted to be “just a sad story.” I believe with all of my heart that children have the right to grow up safe and follow their dreams. I also know there are way more good people in the world than bad and when good people pull together, amazing things can happen. I hope readers find the book empowering, and I hope they will commit to creating a world that is safer, friendlier, more respectful, and more caring. It can happen if we all do our part.
Do you have any advice for writers working on their first memoirs, from what you learned with yours?
Patty: Follow your heart. Dig deep into your core and don’t be afraid of what anybody else thinks when you’re writing. Things can be tamed or softened later if need be, but don’t be afraid of the raw truths that you know. Have a trusted writing partner or coach who can encourage and support you along the way. Take care of yourself and, for sure, get a dog. They get you away from your desk, take you for walks, make you laugh, snuggle up to you when you’re having a tough day, and they love you even on days when you may not love yourself. My best advice for writing is the same as it is for living: be fair, be kind, be understanding, be honest, be thankful, be a good sport, be a good friend, be joyful, be generous, be gentle with others, be positive. And never ever lose hope.
Follow Patty and Joy on Substack at www.dearjacobbook.com or Facebook at www.facebook.com/hopeologist. Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope is available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller or online retailer, including Minnesota Historical Society bookstore, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Amazon.
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
October 13, 2023
Finding a Voice for Your Book
Welcome to the next post in my six-part series “Behind-the-Scenes of My Book Launch.” I’ll be exploring a different topic each week, designed to illuminate the six different big lessons I learned these past months as I prepared my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), for publication on October 24. I hope it’ll be interesting to veterans of publishing as well as writers just exploring the idea.
The methods are working because my novel became a bestseller and Hot New Release on Amazon in three categories, much to my astonishment, just from pre-orders. Still time to join the fun and pre-order your copy, if you like stories about women heroes, aviation, or complex sister relationships, at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org.
Audiobook has been on several of Amazon’s bestseller lists/Hot New Release lists for the past few weeks, and it’s on sale across most audio platforms this month.
Photo by Andy Makely on UnsplashWhen I lived a two-hour commute from my teaching job, I also lived on audiobooks. My ancient Saab had a CD player, but no way to hook up my phone, so I stopped by the library each weekend to check out more books on CD. I got very opinionated about the voice of each of these recordings. Even though I could love reading a book, a narrator’s tone and dramatization meant everything to whether I would listen to it.
Voiceover is an art. I feel, now that I’ve been through a sometimes-onerous journey getting my own audiobook produced for the novel that will be published next month, we writers need to know about it, realize how big the audiobook world has become, and look for ways our own books can be voiced as well as read.
I knew so little about it when I began in April of this year. I didn’t know that voiceover artists are actors, that they specialize in what kind of books they record. They may do commercials, business, or education presentations, but there are those who only do books and who do certain genres and voices well.
I was picky, from all my years as a listener. I wanted a narrator to accurately represent the voices in my head—these were the characters I’d lived with for ten years, and I wanted to do right by them.
Publishers sometimes collaborate with writers on this part of a project. Mine never did. But I haven’t had a book out in twelve years, and the world of audiobooks wasn’t that big back in 2011, compared to now. I paid for and managed the creation of one audiobook before this, for my writing-craft Your Book Starts Here, using ACX’s profit sharing platform via amazon. But I wanted wider distribution this time, and truthfully, I was even more picky about the voice.
I remember the first time I watched the film version of one of my favorite stories. I was a teen, in love with a novel—I don’t even remember its name. I was so shocked and dismayed by the visual and voice of the character on the screen, who didn’t at all resemble the person I’d formed in my mind as I read each chapter, that I walked out of the theater. Dismay that the world I’d created in my head as a reader was not even close to the author’s.
For this reason, this memory, I wanted control over the choice of who would read my book aloud. I wanted the narration to perfectly match the voices of the characters living in my head.
Good narrators are hard to find. Many are well respected for their work. A favorite for my commute was Robert Bathurst, who became famous for narrating the voice of Inspector Armand Gamache in Louise Penny’s cozy mysteries about Three Pines. Bathurst discusses his experience in this interview from Lit Hub.
Another joy to hear was Meryl Streep brilliantly narrating Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake. Streep is unsurpassed in her range of voice skills: tones, accent, pacing.
A friend runs a company in the Twin Cities that specializes in voiceover narration. He met with me on Zoom to educate me about union rates, how actors charge for a project, and where to look for lower-price but still excellent voice I could audition.
Photo by Jen Theodore on UnsplashVoiceover narrators charge by PFH, or per finished hour. Union rate hovers around $250 per finished hour, and the average number of hours to record, edit, and revise (if needed) an 80,000 word novel came to 8-10. An audiobook for my novel would cost around $2000 to produce. This was before distribution. Not a small expense.
I sat with this new information for a few days. I could only imagine what uber-pros like Streep or Bathurst charged; would I be able to find someone for what I could afford?
With that kind of pricing, no wonder many publishers I’d worked with in the past declined any requests for an audiobook.
But times change. Publishers do too. Audiobook sales skyrocketed during the pandemic, becoming the fastest growing format in publishing, according to Writer’s Digest magazine. Good E Reader predicts even more astonishing growth by 2027. More and more people are listening rather than reading, it seems. We’re a culture wed to our iPhones, and it makes sense we’d listen to more than music. Podcasts are also a fast-growing element of audio entertainment. No surprise that audiobooks are too.
But it wasn’t for the stats, the marketing benefits, that I couldn’t let go of the idea of an audiobook. It was that extra electricity I’d experienced as a listener on my commutes, engaging with a story in a new way.
So I made a list. What did I require if I were to go ahead with this project?
The narrator would be a woman; although there are male characters, the three women run the story.
The narrator would have to be versatile, since a good twelve voices, between the major and minor players, appear onstage.
I dislike overly dramatic voice narration. I didn’t want a narrator in love with her own sound, every adjective inflected and dramatized. I wanted the story itself to shine forth.
Secretly, I wanted a narrator who loved the book. Who would bring heart and passion into the narration, making it come alive in a new way with her voice.
My voiceover friend recommended I check out Fiverr. Fiverr is a wonderful resource for anything you need to hire out, and often the results are excellent too. Fiverr offers scores of audiobook narrators for hire, both male and female. Each specializes in a certain type of story: kidlit, sci-fi or fantasy, mysteries and crime, business and other nonfiction book, memoir.
To use Fiverr well takes time and vetting. Each narrator offers a short video of their credentials, a sample of their voice.
My friend advised narrators who were Top Rated Sellers or Level 2 Sellers to weed out beginners and those with bad reviews. Also, he advised, read the reviews carefully—did the narrator deliver on time? were they easy to work with?
Hours later, I had six to audition.
Photo by Jason Rosewell on UnsplashI messaged each of them, asked if they’d record a sample. Most said yes—standard practice—but one refused. Off my list. For the yesses, I prepared three chapters, one for each of the point-of-view characters in my book, Red Nelson, Kate Fisher, and Kate’s daughter Molly Fisher, and sent each narrator the first chapter in Red’s voice, the opening of the story.
This first chapter is a plane crash—Red’s Piper is caught in crosswinds before a storm and she has to make an emergency landing in a mountain gorge far from the sanctuary she’s running to. A good test. I felt the written chapter contained plenty of drama; I wanted to see if the narrator would also recognize this and leave it alone, not push the intensity more than was necessary.
My first reply was from a narrator in Europe, a native-speaker of English, who mostly records young adult books. A great voice but she couldn’t resist adding on even more. Plus a faster pace than the chapter required. I’m proud of the quality of the writing in my novel, I’ve worked hard to get there, and my endorsement from Caroline Leavitt, a New York Times bestseller, called it “gorgeously written,” so I wanted the language to be savored by the listener, not raced through. Overly picky, less than humble, yes, but that’s the artist in me coming out and taking a stand.
Three other samples came in; also good contenders until I noticed my inability to slip into the story itself. The person behind the voice took precedence. Wearying at best, annoying at worst.
I’d just about given up when a narrator in California sent me her sample. Good voice, not overly dramatic. She trusted the words, the language, and let it stand for itself. Pace was a bit fast, but when she revised, it worked beautifully. I sent her the other two chapters, to see how she’d vary the two other character voices, and I loved the result. I had my narrator.
Alex Furness was also incredibly easy to work with, a true professional. She sent me finished chapters every few days, our goal to complete the project by August 11 to upload to Findaway, the audiobook distributor. And we made it.
An amazing thing happened as I listened to my book read out loud for the first time: I heard things in the story I’d never noticed. I always knew that pacing was best “heard” from reading aloud—most writers do this, at some point in revision, just to catch things their eye never noticed. But the emotion that Alex was able to bring in, via subtle changes in her voice as she read each scene, touched me deeply.
At one point, I found myself in tears. Alex was reading my favorite chapter in the story, a culmination point of the three women's journeys to freedom and how they finally become family to each other. Somehow, combining the visual, the light, of words on a page, which had touched me as a writer, with the audible, the sound of the words being spoken aloud, was a thousand times more powerful than I expected. It was as if I’d never encountered the story before and it was a wonderful surprise.
Here’s a sample of the finished audiobook, read by Alex. Enjoy!
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This week, learn about the dramatic intensity of your own book (published or in process) by using a voiceover recording tool and your listening ears. I always learn so much when I hear my own story read aloud, rather than just reading it on the page.
First, listen to the audio above, to enjoy chapter 1 from A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, but also to hear a professional voiceover artist. Notice how Alex backs off to let the story itself shine, while not losing any of the drama of the plane crash, explosion, and escape. Share your thoughts here. What did you learn, notice, like, experience?
If you’d like to try narrating a chapter or scene or a few pages from your own published book or work-in-progress, check out Voice Record Pro, a voiceover software I’ve used for podcast recording on my iPhone. Amazing quality for a free app. See how much you can let your own words shine without overly dramatizing them.
If the language doesn’t wow you as you listen back, ask yourself where you might upgrade it, raise the natural drama of the scene, or tone the action down to let the character emotion shine through.
Although the print and ebook aren’t available until release day, October 24, the audiobook of A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue is ready now!
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
Tammy Dietz, Falling from Disgrace (Cynren Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
October 6, 2023
What I've Been Learning about Outreach
Welcome to the next post in my six-part series “Behind the Scenes of My Book Launch.” I’ll be exploring a different topic each week, designed to illuminate the six different big lessons I learned these past months as I prepared my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), for publication on October 24. I hope it’ll be interesting to veterans of publishing as well as writers just exploring the idea.
The methods are working because my novel became a bestseller and Hot New Release on Amazon in three categories, much to my astonishment, just from pre-orders. Still time to join the fun and pre-order your copy, if you like stories about women heroes, aviation, or complex sister relationships, at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org.
Photo by Juliana Romão on UnsplashCongratulations! Your book will be published! Now: What do want to do, to make sure it gets into the hands of readers?
That’s the question I started asking myself about a year ago, when my pub date of October 24 was set. I knew some answers from previous book launches, but not all of them. And the world was vastly different now in 2023 compared to my last launch in 2011.
Authors find readers in vastly different ways too. Book bloggers, podcasts, social media, YouTube, versus print and television and radio media. I knew I needed help, not just in the physical promotion but in learning the new landscape.
If you’re facing publication, you may also be facing your lack of knowledge about, energy for, or clear path through the maze of opportunities that keep springing up. Always new, the methods of sharing our work (like certain social media platforms) that were our go-to are now our gone-by. It’s exhausting to keep tightly aware of everything out there, so we can choose wisely. In the past, I leaned on my publisher’s ability to keep current, but that didn’t always work either—my book might not have been top of list for that season, so it didn’t get a lot of publicity effort. In the end, I was often left on my own, learning as best I could.
This time, this book, I promised myself I’d treat marketing like a new study course. I’d try to be enthusiastic. I’d spend at least the six months, April to October, absorbing everything I could, trying as much as I had energy for. I warned my family that I’d be taking it on like a new full-time job. We had a serious orientation talk, agreed to dive in together, and check in along the way if things got too stressful.
Today I want to share with you what I learned, what I tried, what worked and what didn’t. Results surprised me. Even if you’re a veteran of publishing, you may be surprised too.
I decided to specialize in five different kinds of marketing help—not try to find an all-in-one helper or method as I had in the past. I’d heard that combinations were also more effective today. So I’d research different key marketing pathways, find out what each required, and test them out.
Photo by Yaron Cohen on UnsplashThe first thing I learned: The author is what gets promoted today, not just the book. On all my podcasts so far, hosts want to know the story behind the story. They want to discuss the journey as much as the result. They ask deeper, more personal questions—What in my life prompted me to write a story about female pilots? (My mom was one.) Why did I write about sisters being estranged? (My older sister and I grew far apart before her early death, a regret I still carry today.) We talk about the book, yes, but only peripherally, as a backdrop to the life that created it. And I am sure it’s much more intense for memoir writers!
How comfortable are you—or will you be—talking about yourself, to promote the story behind your book?
Perhaps a result of our culture’s love affair with reality shows, where you get to see normal people succeed or fail in front of you, promoting a book nowadays means mining your own thoughts and feelings about it first. I never connected my mother’s story or my distance from my deceased sibling with my novel’s characters or plot when I was drafting or revising. But when I came up empty, trying to answer podcast hosts’ questions, I got to work. It wasn’t super comfortable, but I did discover much more about why I wrote this book and why it might matter to others.
In order to resonate with a podcast listener or a reader today, a story needs to come from articulated purpose.
Why did you write your book?
Because I wanted to show this. Share this. Explore my own history with this.
I didn’t come to such answers easily. Dan Blank, the first marketing helper I hired, led me through a series of important exercises that took me months to think through, as I’ve shared in past newsletters. Once I had enough of the answers in hand, I was more comfortable discussing the inner story of my book journey. I now had a sense of how my own life aligned with my book’s narrative.
We authors are private folk. We spend a lot of time in isolation with our words and images. We may love people, but we write alone. Bringing forth these very personal thru-lines, to connect readers with our books, can feel hard, even painful. I appreciate British author Katherine May’s writing—she writes astonishing books, Wintering and Enchantment. Wintering won the hearts of many, but I imagine it changed Katherine’s personal life as it got well known. In this wonderfully thoughtful video from her Substack, The Clearing, she talks about self-promotion, what she’s learned, and how to do it so it doesn’t hurt so much!
As I went through my interior research, I thought longingly of the days when outreach was solely a publisher’s domain and your do-all publicist handled all aspects. I remember one young, energetic publicist who worked with me on a book released back in the mid-nineties. She was so sincere and transparent, she could sell snow in winter to those living above the Arctic Circle. She was electric with her belief in my book. She successfully landed me on over 100 radio and television shows, as well as in a good handful of print interviews. I wasn’t that great at sharing my inner writing process back then; I used outer research to fill the interview time and came away knowing something was missing in the way I connected with both host and audience. Now I understand why.
There’s actually relief in closing the gap between private author and public persona. It feels authentic to be more transparent with how I talk about my books now. Not everyone agrees, I know. And there is plenty in my life that I keep sacrosanct—I believe in healthy boundaries, too. But I am willing to be more myself these days, where before I thought I didn’t need to be—I just needed to sell books.
Photo by Quino Al on UnsplashWhen I knew I would be releasing my current novel in fall 2023, aside from hiring Dan and working on that difficult interior research, I talked to author friends who had published recently. I wanted to find out what worked. How much had they done? Several had published with Big 5 imprints and told me they relied on the publisher way too much. They should’ve been more proactive but they hadn’t the energy, it seemed, after the long years of writing, revising, pitching, and finally getting the book in print. They still hoped their publisher would back them, miraculously getting their book into readers’ hands.
Some did. But those who hired their own publicists, navigating a careful dance between the publisher’s publicist and their own, succeeded across the board.
I followed a few of these fellow authors on social media, noting daily posts about blogger reviews, podcasts, articles, bookstore presentations, and book club visits. I listed the choices that repeated with a good response for the energy and effort. That list, culled over three months, narrowed the best actions to five. I explored these five for another few months. Kept even more ideas in my back pocket in case one of the top choices didn’t work. So far, they’ve paid off big, all of them, in unexpected ways.
Please note: social media posts aren’t one of the five. To me, it’s a given that they’d be part of the program.
Pre-orders, Amazon goals, and blogger tour
After a lot of research, I decided to set my book up for pre-orders about two months before the October 24 pub date. I wanted to see if I could achieve Amazon bestseller status in any of the many ranking categories, with a second goal of being listed as a “Hot New Release.” Great exposure, if you can get it; you can also use the success to pitch other publicity, like podcasts.
I found out a week later that while Amazon used to accumulate pre-orders and total them on pub day, a big reason pre-orders were sought after, they’d changed their policies. Total pre-order sales were counted as they came in. Too late to change plans, I figured there was still a small chance I could get a burst of interest and achieve one of my Amazon goals.
A past student had hired a blog tour organizer who placed her novel with bloggers (mostly on Instagram). The bloggers posted a mention, sharing the cover and a blurb at minimum. Some of the bloggers had tens of thousands of followers. I could pitch these bloggers myself, yes, but I decided to hire the work out. I paid Suzy’s Approved Blog Tours $75 for the first blast—a “cover reveal” blog tour on August 18 and 19. Suzy emailed my ebook and the book cover to 18 bloggers.
To see if the timing would help, I also gathered names of anyone I knew who I felt comfortable approaching in an email blast, to ask their help by pre-ordering, explaining what it would mean to me, a little about the book, and the links. I sent that on August 20.
On August 21, my novel became a bestseller in three Amazon categories. On August 23, it became a Hot New Release, which meant it was featured in a special section on the bestseller page. My goals were met, because of the cover reveal blog tour and the generous friends who pre-ordered from my email blast.
I am both amazed and grateful for such results in such a short time—but I also know that my journey has been long and full of trial and error. These methods may work for others, they may not. My sense is that they are cumulative. No one will do the trick, but together they are potential gold.
Trade reviews
I always wanted to have trade reviews for my books, but rarely did this happen with my publishers. The times I went indie, I was a bit scared of reaching out and getting a negative review. This time, I sent ARCs (advance reader copies) to Kirkus, Booklife/Publisher’s Weekly, BlueInk/Booklist, and Library Journal. I received reviews from the first three, good reviews, very positive and encouraging. Kirkus even included their review of my book in their August magazine, exposing me to 15,000 librarians, booksellers, and readers.
Such reviews make great promotional tools since they arrived early in the process. I also solicited reviews from a few other places: Independent Book Review, Midwest Book Review, and Foreword/Clarion which I found through lists on Reedsy and elsewhere.
Blurbs
I still believe in the importance of book blurbs, despite this recent criticism in The Atlantic, so I knew I wanted about 8-10 stellar ones. I had a few in my pocket already from when the book went out on submission from my agent. Most were requested when the ARC became available from my editor.
I have cultivated a community of writers I respect and I choose carefully who to ask. I knew I would supplement the author blurbs with trade reviews for my cover and back cover and “advance praise” front of book. I also created an email signature for my correspondence that listed two blurbs, added it to my media kit, used it in everything I pitched to other media, and included it on bookmarks I made up.
I buy books based on recommendations from other readers who love books. So why wouldn’t I want to get blurbs for mine?
What’s your experience getting trade reviews and/or blurbs for your book?
Photo by Elia Massignan on UnsplashStreet team
A writing friend told me about street teams, also called launch teams. They are a hand-picked group of friends or family who agree to help spread the word about the book before its launch date. They post reviews, share news of the book on their social media, request it at libraries or local bookstores. I send them a weekly email request for five weeks pre-pub and one week after. I created a Facebook page for them to exchange writing and publishing ideas—since many are writing friends. I post news on the Facebook page, as well as in the emails.
I sent each a free advance copy of the ebook so they’d be able to share their honest reactions to the novel in reviews and with friends. I curated a list of about 100 people I felt I could ask. Of those, 55 said yes to being on the street team, and 21 have already shared on their socials or posted reviews. To make this fun, build a community they’d enjoy being part of, I encouraged each person to only participate according to their interest and time. Some don’t like social media, so they do other things instead.
Not only is it fun to have an enthusiastic cheerleading team—especially fun to hear how much they love the book!—it’s giving my novel pre-publication exposure. Others are hearing about it, sharing to their friends.
Podcast tour
My son loves podcasts. I’m not a great podcast listener—or I wasn’t when I began my book launch promotion. And last time I published, podcasts weren’t the hot thing. Now podcasts rank high in promotion value. There are thousands. In every subject imaginable.
Like with blogger tours, I first thought I’d research and book these myself. Two months later, I didn’t want to. I’d booked myself on two, realized I needed help, so I looked for a podcast tour host.
Similar to blogger tour companies, podcast tour hosts do the research and bookings, and some log pitches on Trello, create a Spotify playlist, and send the author social media quotes for promotion after the show airs. You are responsible for listening to a few shows ahead of time. Some companies also create a media kit (very useful for other pitching) and coach authors on how to be a good podcast guest, which I needed. I read about Michelle Glogovac and her collective, decided to book her for my tour. So far, she and Allison, her coworker, have been a dream to work with.
I’ve had several interviews, have six more booked. I find them terrifically fun now that I know how to answer “the story behind the story” of my book.
Although these are my five most important self-promotion activities, I’m still exploring and testing others. I’ll share more as we get closer to the pub date of my novel, and beyond.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
All author-generated publicity costs money, time, and effort. And patience. Another author’s plan may not work for you. You may want to pay in time versus hiring help. You may know the avenues that worked for your last book or your friend’s book that are different than mine.
It’s old school to believe that books can be well-received without self-promotion, according to Katherine May in the video mentioned above. She talks about how to make the process less daunting, and I learned a lot from watching.
For your weekly exercise, watch her video. Assess your ability, with your current or recent book project, and what you want to do with your self-promotion.
What attracts you and what puts you off about being your own adjunct or main publicist? What might you need to start working on now—or soon?
What resonated with you from these five steps that I tried? Which one might you try?
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
Tammy Dietz, Falling from Disgrace (Cynren Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
October 1, 2023
Celebrating 3000 Subscribers and My Book's Birthday Month with 20% Off Paid Subscriptions
Photo by Arina Wong on UnsplashOctober is here. I have two major milestones to celebrate. I want you to join me on top of this amazing mountain and celebrate too.
I moved Your Weekly Writing Exercise to Substack exactly six months ago. Some of you have been with me way before that move, some of you are new to this newsletter. I’m grateful for each of you—especially since this week, we reached 3000 subscribers!
So awesome, so welcome. It tells me you value this newsletter and writing practice and the little community we’re building here.
Many of you also know that this month is my book’s birthday. On October 24, I’ll be celebrating the launch of A WOMAN’S GUIDE TO SEARCH & RESCUE. It’s been an Amazon Bestseller and Hot New Release since August, just from pre-orders. I can’t wait to see how far its jet engine will take it after it releases to the world.
To celebrate these milestones, I’m reducing the paid subscription to this newsletter by 20% for the month of October.
It’s already a deal: A yearly subscription costs $45 (for 52 newsletters! less than a buck apiece to inspire your writing each week). With the 20% off it becomes a ridiculous $36 for 12 months.
What else could you spend $36 a year on and get weekly inspiration, ideas, and community for your writing?
As a paid subscriber, you get:
this newsletter every Friday, full of great ideas, interviews, tips to keep your writing practice alive and well, help you get your books out in the world successfully, and deepen your understanding of why you write
access to ALL the archives of this newsletter, over 700 of them going back to 2008. Substack keeps only the most recent two months available for free subscribers, but you will get them all when you upgrade. Think of it as a marvelous online library of writing inspiration! (Only available to paid subscribers)
my NEW Sunday Q&A that I’ll be starting later this fall, only open to paid subscribers, answering all kinds of writing and publishing questions (Only available to paid subscribers)
In addition, you get my thanks for acknowledging the time and effort and creativity I spend each week on these newsletters, looking for what in my writing life might inspire yours. Your paid subscription tells me, It’s worth it.
Thank you for reading, for caring about writing and the creative life! I’m grateful to spend this time with you each week.
September 29, 2023
Writing Outside "Accepted Boundaries"
Welcome to the next post in my six-part series “Behind-the-Scenes of My Book Launch.” I’ll be exploring a different topic each week, designed to illuminate the six different big lessons I learned these past months as I prepared my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), for publication on October 24. I hope it’ll be interesting to veterans of publishing as well as writers just exploring the idea.
The methods are working because my novel became a bestseller and Hot New Release on Amazon in three categories, much to my astonishment, just from pre-orders. Still time to join the fun and pre-order your copy, if you like stories about women heroes, aviation, or complex sister relationships, at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org.
Photo by Joshua Hicks on Unsplash“When I sit down to write, I am often plagued by that old question: ‘Why me?’ But then I remind myself of all the words that made a difference in my life—on love and grief and fear and triumph—and how they were all penned by people. You have a story to share, and you needn’t have experienced an alien abduction or won Olympic gold or scaled Kilimanjaro to be worthy of telling it. You are a human appealing to humans. That is more than enough.”— Caroline Cala Donofrio (interviewed in “Beyond”)
As a reader, I’m fascinated with literature that crosses accepted boundaries. Although sometimes I need the predictable, I’m more bored than soothed by it. I crave narrative that forsakes the known and narrators who face challenges to their security or accepted beliefs. Do you?
And as a writer, do you push your writing towards a similar edge?
We are driven by passion for a subject, a desire to explore the unknown. But what if it takes us into potentially dangerous territory?
Back in 2009, I wanted to write a story about a young woman crossing her personal boundaries of love. For many, even librarians, booksellers, and publishers, diversity was just tiptoeing in as a desirable aspect of our literature—or so I perceived. I tried to sell my novel to mainstream houses, but I heard back from publishers that it was too niche. Gay literature was listed by gay publishers. End of story.
I did find a publisher but I didn’t like the niche separating me from readers who might have seen a larger story than sexual identity—as I did. Traveling and exchanging chit-chat on a plane, I’d mention my novel.
My seatmate: What’s it about?
A young woman who discovers she’s gay when she falls in love with her best friend the same summer her brother is in a serious accident.
A pause, then: Sounds different/ interesting/ like something my weird niece might read. Not my kind of topic.
Privately outraged, back in 2009, I changed the way I described the novel. I described it as a family saga (which it was). Even now, it was not unreasonable to “sneak” my beautiful story under the radar, make it appear palatable to those who’d brush aside it because of one of its topics.
In 2023, things are different—or are they? Consider the success of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid which has 200K ratings on Amazon. Published 9 years later—maybe an indicator of how times have changed, that so many mainstream readers embrace a narrator who is a bisexual Hollywood star. Is it the Hollywood aspect? Is it the author’s fame? Is it times changing?
When my new novel, out next month, began its pre-publication journey and reviews started coming in, I felt a tiny flinch of dread. Would I be “punished” again for sharing one aspect of a character’s life—their sexual choice? Three women narrators, one hetero, one lesbian, one bi. Readers, and reviewers, came back with universally positive responses, so far. Amazing responses, by readers of all races, sexual identities, and class divisions. Have we evolved as a reading culture? I hope so. Maybe people just want a good story.
My outlier topic entered the book because I wanted to write about a belief—love is love—that runs strong through my life. It’s my story to share, as Donofrio says in the quote above.
But being an outlier, even in this small way, is not always comfortable. Now that my book is out in the world, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So this week, I interviewed two other authors, Jean Hey and Suzanne Dewitt Hall. Both have broken out of accepted norms with their writing, driven to write topics they feel they must share. I wanted to hear how much they felt times have changed—and what kind of risk us outliers still face.
What risks do you face in your writing today? Do you avoid writing topics you need to write, to keep the risk low?
Jean Hey comes from South Africa where she was a journalist. She’s published personal essays about living in South Africa under apartheid as a white woman, what that system of racism does to a person, and her experiences living in the U.S. as a white African American. She writes book reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which she says works an entirely different part of her brain. But at the moment all her energies are going into rewriting a family drama set in South Africa.
Jean: In 2019, I landed an excellent agent on the strength of my novel manuscript. But she wasn’t able to sell it. Publishers didn’t want to take a chance on a book about race written by a white woman. My agent actually said that had I been Black we would have had a far greater chance of success.
The whole issue of race had become such a lightning rod at that time. Publishers were afraid of selecting a book that might backfire on them.
Working on it again, I’ve made several improvements, including a key character recast as an American woman who can reflect on race from an American perspective. The novel is certainly stronger in this version, which shows the value of setting work aside for a couple of years and revisiting it.
Is writing about race a topic that specifically interests you? What’s it like writing about race in your life, as a South African?
Richard Russo once said at a conference that a person’s first eighteen years will influence what they write about for the rest of their life.
In my case, what I experienced growing up in South Africa was a culture steeped in the most blatant form of racism, and I struggled with how to live as a white person in that environment and how best to push against the system, which led ultimately to my coming to the U.S.
So I wouldn’t say that race as a topic specifically interests me, but rather, race is the hand I’ve been dealt. I write about it because I have to write about it.
There are so many topics that would be easier, particularly as a white woman, because how can I claim to truly understand a Black person’s perspective and what he or she has gone through? In my personal essays, I’ve wrestled with the insidious ways racism infiltrated me at a young age, and have had to do my own reckoning.
In your novel, which I’ve had the privilege of reading in draft and revision, you write very skillfully from the pov of black women. Does this cause any feeling of unease or risk for you? Why or why not? Why do you want to include the South African black pov in the book?
The first draft of this novel did not have a Black person’s point of view because honestly, I didn’t feel I had the authority or ability to write from a Black African perspective. But then I realized that to write a novel that deals with race and only have white voices made no sense. Now the story is told from several points of view, including a Black domestic worker who witnesses the fracturing of the white family that she works for and goes through her own crisis. The hardest part for me is portraying this woman in her own life away from the white family. I’m always apprehensive that I’ll get something wrong because I haven’t lived this woman’s life, or that I’ll stray into some sort of stereotype.
I’ve spent a lot of time in South Africa observing, and talking to people, and also have done a sizeable amount of research into Black township life. Then, as with all character development, I used my imagination and skills of empathy to get inside this particular person’s experience. There’s still the risk of the publishing world turning down the manuscript (again!) because of concerns about appropriation. We all know what happened to American Dirt. But I know this story needs her voice, so I’m willing to take the risk.
I also find myself bristling at questions of who has the right to tell what story, because fiction is all about imagining lives that aren’t ours, and the more we all imagine lives not our own, the more likely that we can have empathy for one another.
How have you personally broken past the accepted boundaries for writing about another race, especially in pov characters?
I’m not sure I have broken past the boundaries for writing about another race, but I’ve tried to convince myself that it’s no different than writing about someone of another social class or gender, or someone whose belief system is very different from mine. Another character in this novel is a white supremacist, although he’d never use that term, and I’ve had to imagine my way in to him. Having said that, race is certainly a fraught issue in the U.S. because we’re finally grappling with the country’s ugly past. I’m hoping there is space for different voices, including mine, to reflect on the complexities of race.
Photo by Simon Hurry on UnsplashDoes race feature into any of your stories? Is it a challenge to write characters of other races—do you shy away from doing this?
Race is one complex issue, certainly, front and center in our lives today. Gender identity is hot topic on many of our community stoves. Suzanne Dewitt Hall writes about transgender people and the hate crimes committed against them in a way she hopes will shine “a light on a key issue of our day: the politicization of transgender identity, and the resulting (often faith-fueled) violence against trans people.”
In Suanne Dewitt Hall’s recent novel, The Language of Bodies, the wife of a murdered trans woman of color sets out on a journey of revenge as a way to survive her grief and guilt. She moves to the Midwest to run a wax museum which stood as a monument of vengeance and violence, and plots how to get back at her spouse's murderer, by harming his wife.
Suzanne: This book began with setting. I came across a western-themed wax museum from the 1960s which was so remarkably unaware of its kitsch that I knew it needed to appear in fiction. I also knew the engine for forward motion in the story would be revenge, and when a young transgender woman named Ally Steinfeld was murdered not far from where we lived in Missouri, something clicked. That event and the reality of violence against trans people became the axis around which the action spins.
Did you encounter any times of feeling at risk, creatively or otherwise, when you were working on it or releasing it into the world?
Creatively it felt risky because it was critical to handle the violence in a way that didn't glorify or center it. And I wanted to center the wife (Maddie) rather than using a transgender character's first-person point of view. I identify as non-binary, and my husband is trans, but it didn't seem appropriate to speak as a trans voice, because trans voices need to be uplifted and centralized. So all of that felt risky.
As far as getting the book out, there was a lot of risk. The novel is odd, dark, and deals with a subject many agents and publishers don't want to touch. There's always the risk of writing something which comes from your very soul, but no-one wants it. Author life in a nutshell!
There was also the risk of personal backlash, but that's nothing new. I've been getting death threats and online assaults due to my advocacy work for a decade.
Tell us about your writing history in terms of topics you choose. Do you gravitate towards topics outside the mainstream, in any sense? Why or why not?
I wrote a devotional series over the course of years which always focused on outlier topics. Queer affirmation. Transgender identity. Abortion. Sex. Faith deconstruction. In each of these, I sought ways to get people to question things they may have absorbed through "traditional" Christian teaching. Those books have tended to be at the front edge of a wave, and were written because I saw the need rising.
My fiction rarely follows the common plot arc for novels, because when I read, I want to be surprised. And I think other readers do too.
What do you hope your reader will get from this novel?
I want them to find it immersive and page-turning. Then I hope they'll be drawn in by the power and passion of Maddie's love for her wife.
One of my goals was to recognize the demonization of transgender people by many Christian streams without demonizing Christianity itself. I want readers to be warmed by the care of Maria, the cookie-baking Italian Catholic mystic, shocked by the caustic effects of lingering guilt, and moved to a deeper understanding of the impact of discrimination and bias against trans people.
Any advice for writers who are taking risks in their creative work?
Be brave. Smash molds. Your uniqueness and vision has the power to change the world. We live in an era of change, and expectations about literature are shifting. So go for it.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
If you are attracted to writing about outlier topics—whatever that might mean to you—and you feel risk-reaction in your body or heart or mind as you write, assess whether it’s coming from internal or external risk. Create two columns on a page and label one Pro, the other Con. Under the Pro column write all the reasons you have to/want to write about this topic. Under the Con column write all the risks.
Next, weigh the two. Are the Pros strong enough to validate moving forward? Do they outweigh the Cons in your mind? Why or why not? Spend a little time freewriting or journaling about this.
Finally, consider the Cons for their location in your life. I like to highlight with different colors—pink for external risk, green for internal risk. Both are important but action for dealing with them differs.
For any external Cons, brainstorm what you might be able to do to alleviate them. Change the way you talk about your story, as I did, unless it feels like a betrayal? Refocus the storyline itself—maybe you can change the steepness of the risk by making it less a feature (again, if it doesn’t betray your purpose)? Find a community to share your work that’s completely safe and accepting?
For an internal Cons, decide where these might come from. Are they from past fears or trauma that could be moved towards healing with good help? Are they false beliefs, which time has made less useful?
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Linda Dittmar, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging. (Interlink Press, July release)
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
Tammy Dietz, Falling from Disgrace (Cynren Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
September 22, 2023
Making a Movie of Your Book
Welcome to the next post in my six-part series “Behind the Scenes of My Book Launch.” I’ll be exploring a different topic each week, designed to illuminate the six different big lessons I learned these past months as I prepared my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), for publication on October 24. I hope it’ll be interesting to veterans of publishing as well as writers just exploring the idea.
The methods are working because my novel became a bestseller and Hot New Release on Amazon in three categories, much to my astonishment, just from pre-orders. Still time to join the fun and pre-order your copy, if you like stories about women heroes, aviation, or complex sister relationships, at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org.
Photo by Jakob Owens on UnsplashNine years ago, one of my students, Juliann Rich, published her debut novel—a YA story, Caught in the Crossfire, about a gay teen struggling to figure out his life within his religious community. I loved working with this writer and cheered her on when she signed with an agent, then a publisher. But I really admired her when she made her first book trailer.
Juliann did the trailer herself. She used iMovie and purchased a one-month subscription to Shutterstock ($479 now) and a license to use the music (she used AudioJungle as the most affordable option since she could buy the song she wanted and skip a subscription). For not much money but a good amount of effort and skill, here’s what she came up, a mini-movie that tells the book’s story and communicates its emotional essence.
The trailer intrigued me—it captured the conflict of this teen and how he’s torn between his inner and outer lives. But it takes a lot of effort—and often a lot of money—to create such a trailer. One publicist told me book trailers weren’t worth the money. But now that my book is available for preorder, I find myself craving the ability to convey the essence of the novel in a dramatic visual of 30 to 60 seconds.
Compared to movie trailers for the big screen, book trailers are small potatoes, but how do they work to get an audience engaged? Do they convey the emotion that just words can’t? Juliann says yes. Although her first attempt was simplistic—still pictures timed to transition with the music—it met the goal of an emotional experience.
Here’s another trailer, for her YA book, Gravity, which feels, to me as viewer, more intricate.
Both were effective, Juliann says. “One of the best things I discovered was that creating a book trailer required me to sum my book up in one to two sentences. So helpful in identifying the heart of my story. By my fourth book, I'd learned to use book trailer creation as a way to clarify my vision for where my book was going.”
She created about ten different versions of the book trailer for Gravity before both the book and the trailer were finalized. “It's a great exercise,” she adds, “but one that could be simplified as well by writing the script alone.” A cool way to bring the book to life visually for her readers, and especially appealing to young adults.
Another former student, Jeanne Blasberg, created trailers for both her novels, Eden and The Nine. Jeanne felt her novels would translate well visually and that a trailer might also “inspire those thinking about a book-to-film adaptation.” An efficient way to communicate mood and character, she says: “People get what the story is about instantaneously.”
Her cinematic trailer cost around $20,000—way more than Juliann’s—but Jeanne felt it was worth it, as video makes up a big portion of her website. “The trailers are cut up into episodes which I used in social media drops leading up to the launch,” she told me. “I have a digital media package which includes link to my Vimeo page which houses all my trailers and I believe that made an impact on several decision makers.” She also says the process was “very creatively satisfying.” Here’s hers, for The Nine:
Elizabeth Hutchison Bernard is a third author who believes in book trailers. Like Jeanne Blasberg, she wanted a higher quality, cinematic trailer for her historical novel, Sisters of Castle Leod, so she worked with Electrafox. That turned out to be a great choice,” she says. Bernard chose a 60-second trailer that cost her around $1200, including prepared files for social media, closed captions, thumbnail, etc.
“I could see the results in increased sales whenever I boosted the video,” she says. “I believe it really helped the book to stand out among the crowded field of historical novels.” Here’s hers:
A very different kind of book trailer was created by Cindy Angell Keeling for her just-released historical novel, Dream City Dreaming, about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition. Her husband, a filmmaker, put over 100 hours into creating it, using public-domain artwork and music from Premiumbeat (license $49) which reflected the time period. After much research into book trailers, Cindy wanted a “succinct, un-narrated trailer” that just gave “an intriguing hint of the story rather than a long description of the plot.”
“Our goal was to portray the magnificence of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and give a hint of the main character and her story,” she says. “The trailer is posted to my author website, author Facebook page, and my YouTube channel. It was a good way to create buzz on social media, and my website is a good place to send book reviewers, librarians, and other interested parties. It’s too early to see the impact on sales, but I’m convinced that a book trailer is a good publicity tool to have in my author pocket.” Here’s her trailer:
I liked all four of these trailers; I wanted to try one for my book too. Something a bit more complex than Cindy’s, with movement scenes, music, and words. I didn’t have the budget for a high-end cinematic trailer, and I didn’t have Juliann’s or Cindy’s husband’s filmmaking skills. But after watching more trailers online (see below for more links if you’re searching too) I was hooked on the short blast of sound and light, movement and action, scenery and setting that a book trailer provided.
It transmits much more than just words, in such a short time.
I was talking with an artist friend who recommended looking at Fiverr. I loved using Fiverr for my audiobook narration, but it wasn’t cheap. But browsing the pages of book-trailer ads on the site, I decided to test out a filmmaker in Germany with a sweet sample. 30-second trailers ran around $60, nothing close to Academy Award level for that price, but maybe something better than my feeble attempts with iMovie.
Here’s the first result. It’s not quite what I want, but it made me feel quite emotional about the story when I first watched it. (Turn up your volume—there’s music behind the images.)
Then Julia Rust, one of my former students, a fellow author, and a skilled creator of more cinematic trailers, offered to put one together for me. (She charges $200-300.) Focused on the suspense, it’s much shorter and punchier. I like it a lot.
Which is your favorite?
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Re-watch the trailers above and post in the Comments below which is your favorite and why. Check out these links to see more examples:
Best 10 trailers of all time (Film 14)
Epic Reads favorite trailers for YA books
Goodreads list of book trailers (rabbit hole, there are a LOT so be prepared!)
Next, imagine your book trailer, using these prompts:
What main points of the plot would you’d need to tease?
What mood do you want to convey?
What’s the primary image or images of the setting?
If you were to write a script for the trailer, where would you start and end?
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community.
(If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)
Linda Dittmar, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging. (Interlink Press, July release)
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres, an artist, and a lover of freedom and creativity. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available in early August). For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
September 15, 2023
Breaking Out of the Box: Options for More Control in Publishing Today
Welcome to the first in my six-part series “Behind-the-Scenes of My Book Launch.” I’ll be exploring a different topic each week, designed to illuminate the big lessons I learned these past months as I prepared my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), for publication on October 24. I hope it’ll be interesting to veterans of publishing as well as writers just exploring the idea.
The methods are working because my novel became a bestseller and Hot New Release on Amazon in three categories, much to my astonishment, just from pre-orders. Still time to join the fun and pre-order your copy, if you like stories about women heroes, aviation, or complex sister relationships, at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org.
Photo by Erda Estremera on UnsplashI have bad news and good news.
Bad news: as of the 2023 stats, four million books are published each year, or about 11,000 every day.
Good news: the options for HOW you publish—how you physically produce a finished book—have also grown. A publishing avenue exists for almost any writer who is ready to release a work into the world. Imagine—beyond traditional print books there are now serialized books (here on Substack!), audio or video books, zines, blogs, interactive, even games.
We’re trained to the mindset of traditional only. Or Big 5 traditional only. Of ceding control of the production of our book in exchange for vast outreach and career enhancement. Writers worry: if my book is not traditionally published, does it still count? Will I get to do another one? Will readers find me?
I can say, having been published both traditionally and indie, that glory did not equal where I published, only how. What mattered, to me, to sales, was how the book looked, felt, and read. Did it still contain my original passion and vision?
I felt this was the first step in a long journey towards understanding the publishing world: what I lost when I gave up control of my book to a publisher. I want to share some of what I learned along the way, since many of you are looking outside the box for your future books too.
Let’s explore your options today. How do each of them weigh in cost of effort, money, and time? I like to divide this into two decisions: production and outreach.
Production is the physical process of making a book. It determines how the book is received and how effectively it can be marketed to the readers that will resonate with what you write. Outreach is the marketing itself—how you and the publisher find those readers and spread the word.
I believe most of us want our stories to affect readers. To keep them turning pages. To even change their lives with the meaning of our narrative. To make them regret finishing, because the story took them great places. To tell their friends how the book made a difference in how they saw the world.
Many writers feel book production is a mysterious process. Only publishers know about it well enough to guide a book. My aim here is to illuminate some of the behind-the-scenes mystery of how a book is produced, learned from decades in the publishing industry as editor and author. I’m also not here to dis any publishing avenue: each has a legitimate purpose. But each also promotes their way as the best, as all businesses do.
So it’s helpful to understand the pros and cons of each book production option, what you can control and decide during the physical making of a book and what you need help for.
First, a word to those authors who choose their publishing platform for career enhancement. I did that in the beginning. But as many published writers know well, a big-name publisher doesn’t automatically equal big sales. You can swim (and get the next book offer!) or you can sink (nada) based on a small window of time your book needs to attract initial buyers. We writers believe that once we land a big publisher, they’ll do the work for us. But stats say that only 10-20 percent of books earn out their advances. If you aren’t gearing up to self-promote—and publishers across the board nowadays expect authors to self-promote, whether small indie publishers or those 5 big ones—your hoped-for career may not blossom.
Publishing is a business, no matter how we writers romanticize it into creative expression and others “getting” the soul of our work. Books are basically a sellable product; and they compete with podcasts, audio, video, news, Netflix, you name it for readers’ attention. We all LOVE books, though, which is why we persist. But it comes down to choice. And how much work we want to do for our book.
That’s what I’ve been learning since my first book was published in 1988. And what I’ve been learning even more since my current novel went into its pre-publication journey in April.
OK, so that’s the bad news. Now we’ll get to the good stuff: all the options you have, once the mystery is dissolved.
What are your biggest questions right now about publishing? What still seems unknown or mysterious to you?
Photo by Ian Schneider on UnsplashI like to start with passion. Because good book production is all about passion. Booksellers and book publishers start with passion for a great story, right? And readers want that passion to be communicated via the the printed book or ebook or audiobook—how it looks and feels, how the pages flow, if the cover pulls you into the story.
You control the passion in your work during the manuscript stage. When you begin the publishing journey, you often turn that control over to others. Manuscript goes to an agent, who changes it. Then to an editing team who make more changes. Then to the production team who decide paper quality, interior layout, cover, type style. Then to the marketing team who choose how much they’ll help you promote it.
This group vision guides the physical production of your book.
Not a bad decision, if you’re new to publishing. Authors learn a lot from working with a good professional team, especially if they are collaborative. Many are not, though. As a debut author back in the 80s, I didn’t care—I knew nothing about what makes a good book, other than what to write. I was happy to let them decide everything. And they did. The passion and purpose I’d felt at the start, the hope I held, morphed into someone else’s vision. Again, not always a bad thing, if my book got into readers’ hands.
This varies by author, of course, but that was my experience. Titles got changed. The cover was chosen by others. Interior layout, paper quality, how crowded the text felt on each page, the end pages where the publisher might advertise other books were completely out of my control.
About half the time, I didn’t actually like the way my book felt, read, and looked when it finally appeared in print. I can say this now, looking back on a long history of 14 books published. At the same time as I realize my privilege at even having one book published, I feel regret over what was lost in giving over my vision to others. A little disappointed by the ways I “appeared” in print.
If the books sold well, and overall they did, if they got into readers’ hands, that is what mattered most.
But as I learned more about the publishing industry, my goals changed. I still wanted readers, but I realized that much of the outreach—how readers were located and told about my book—was up to me now anyway. The production was something I wanted more control over. It was a risk, though. Could I design the production journey myself? I decided to test it out. For the thirteenth book, Your Book Starts Here, I went completely indie. I created my own imprint and hired an editor, a typesetter, a cover designer, and a proofreader.
I became my own contractor of the production, or building, of my book. The risk was not losing control; it was keeping too much, stupidly. I chose well, though. My team gave me good advice, I made good decisions. That book is still earning royalties 12 years later. Except for one typo I found a few years ago, it pleases me every time I open it or tell someone about it. I have no regrets and no hint of shame about how it looks, feels, reads, or helps writers.
Have you ever considered producing your own book? Why or why not?
Photo by Alexis Brown on UnsplashA third option exists for writers today: the hybrid publisher. Hybrids are collaborative teams, within a collective, that allow writers more control. The writer funds the production and gets the professional help of a real publishing team, without having to become the contractor. Most hybrids also “vet” the manuscripts, so there’s a certain standard held to. Vanity press has changed its name to indie, but it still attracts “basement” authors, self-producing a book without skill, a book not yet ready for other eyes. I buy a few each year, just to keep current. My 2023 choices (mostly on weird gardening topics) are so poorly typeset, only sometimes containing useful information, they rarely feel worth the ten bucks I pay. But I know how hungry writers are to see their work in print, and I wish them well.
I also wish they’d at least hire a copyeditor.
If you have the bucks and you want to keep more control, though, hybrids are definitely worth looking into. When I read a recent Substack by Cheryl Strayed interviewing a She Writes Press author, I felt even more certain that hybrids are here to stay and becoming more respected in the industry. In fact, this recent article in Publisher’s Weekly and this post by Barbara Linn Probst on Jane Friedman’s well-respected blog tell me hybrid publishing is an accepted way to get a book into readers’ hands.
Why does production matter so much? If I am proud of my printed book, if I love the cover and the layout of the ebook, if I am totally engaged as I listen to the audiobook narrator’s voice, there’s a much greater likelihood that I will eagerly find readers who resonate with my story. I won’t hold back promoting it because my passion for it is still intact. I recognize the book, it’s mine. It’s something I love.
Successful outreach, to me, leans heavily on the author’s love for their work. Today most publishers, trad or indie or hybrid, expect the writer to self-promote. You may get assigned a publicist by your trad publisher, but how much will they do for you? Many writers hire their own, to supplement. I hired three: a publicist that specialized in book blogger tours, another for podcast tours, and a coach for overall marketing advice. Some hybrids offer supplemental marketing help; She Writes Press has a strong marketing arm, according to three of my students who’ve published with them.
I’ll be exploring outreach in another newsletter. It’s a big topic and I learned so much.
Being happy with your published book matters. It’s not enough to just have your name in print. You deserve to love the end product. And your choices now allow this, more than ever. With all those millions of books competing for your reader’s attention, you want to be so proud of your book that it shines though every time you talk about it, no matter what production path you take to publishing.
I feel pleasure and satisfaction when I see my past published books on my bookshelves. But with some, I feel regret—the choices I made, the passion I lost in the process, still affects how I feel about the book now. Working with an agent or big name publisher versus no agent and a small indie didn’t make a difference. Some were bestsellers, some were quiet; some got many readers, some only a few. All of them taught me, so now the process is less of a mystery.
There’s so many ways to play this game. It comes down to what you most want.
When a writer asks for advice on how to publish, I ask them this, the same question I asked myself with each new book. You’ll work for your book today, no matter the publishing avenue you choose.
Stay tuned for a post in the next few weeks about outreach, the other side of the publishing equation. I started out a newbie and now I have a LOT to share.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Read the PW and Probst articles on hybrid publishing. See how the ideas sit with you. Are the risks smaller than what you’d need for a success with a traditional publisher?
Use the questions at the end of Barbara Linn Probst’s article to free write about what you ready want for your book and what work you’re prepared to do towards that end.
Want to read more on writing practice, publishing, and the writing life? Over 700 posts are available in my newsletter archives, accessible to paid subscribers only. If you want to browse them for a year, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45. I’m keeping the price low on purpose for my first year. Thank you for helping me continue to write this newsletter!
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Linda Dittmar, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging. (Interlink Press, July release)
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available here!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
September 8, 2023
Playing the Agent Game
Soon my new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press, October 24 release), will be available. A few weeks ago, preorders put it on the Amazon bestseller list, #5 Hot New Release in Sibling Fiction. Help keep it there? Join the fun and preorder today!
Photo by Praveen Thirumurugan on UnsplashMy first “yes” from an agent came along with a nonfiction project I was asked to join in the late 1990s. A Men’s Health editor was looking for a writer. As a side project, he wanted to pitch a book on health and eating. I just so happened to be featured in USA Today on the very topic, thanks to my Bay Area cooking school making the news. Mostly a cook, I’d also worked as a part-time food journalist, collaborating on two cookbooks that sold well.
The agent, whom I would never meet except by phone, had worked with the Men’s Health project editor on other books. The editor and I drafted the proposal, the agent revised it, then sent it out on submission. Success! We got bids from publishers, settled on a medium-sized press that distributed with St. Martin’s, and had great direct-mail sales. The advance was lovely, the rights even better.
Agents were gods.
That book sold well. Royalties continued for ten years post-publication. The publisher offered me contracts for three more books. The agent negotiated reprint rights. My relationship with him was pleasant. Years passed. Then one day I got a call—my agent was retiring. He offered to refer me to a colleague who was a principal in a large NYC agency. A star signer. I’d heard of this man. By then I knew how hard it was to get an agent—so once again, I felt lucky to be lucky. My second yes.
But I didn’t know enough yet to be anything but thrilled, to look beyond this new agent’s credentials to his particular communication style or his interest in my career. I received his contract, signed it, and waited. I sent him ideas for the next book. I waited. I thought another yes was all I needed to pave my golden future in publishing. After time passed with zero response, I realized this second agent had just done his friend a favor, took me on because of my first book’s good sales. I fired the guy.
Writing friends were aghast. “Do you know how hard it is to even get in the door of an agency at that level?” I didn’t care. Not seeing eye to eye, not experiencing the communication I believed should happen between agent and author, felt like reason enough to part ways.
I decided I was done with agents. Who needed them? I could sell my own books. And I did. I sold two more nonfiction books to the publisher who’d backed my first. Two more in a different genre were bought by a small Midwestern press. My first novel was picked up by a Florida publisher. None of these contracts required an agent. I had had books traditionally published, I got good reviews, the books made money, readers liked them. I was on track.
Photo by Drahomír Posteby-Mach on UnsplashDuring the pandemic, though, I began to question my certainty. I was working on my second novel, a bear of a book, and it was in its tenth revision. The Florida press wanted first refusal, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted a broader readership. I wondered if that meant finding an agent again. A writing friend who took a class from an industry professional told me querying required 75 attempts for one yes, an average querying time of one year.
Even with these facts, I grossly underestimated the research and time required: reading articles (“How I got my agent”) and listings on #MSWL (Manuscript Wish List) and agent interviews, checking titles from each agent’s list, following their Twitter threads, looking up sales in Publisher’s Lunch. A mountain of work. How lucky I was to get two agents handed to me, without any effort! But I like goals, I like new challenges. So, I set an objective of querying 50 agents in nine months, as a test. If my experiment flopped, I’d keep selling my own books, sans.
A friend suggested I pay an editor to refine my query letter. Even more work, money too! But I saw the wisdom. The paid editor helped me enormously. I sent it to the first ten agents on my list, then created a wall chart—50 names listed along the left margin with columns for agency name and contact information, date queried, date sample chapters sent, date full manuscript sent, and end result.
The first batch elicited requests for sample pages and full manuscripts. Great! But the first ten full requests came back no’s. I stopped the process. If the query worked, but the manuscript didn’t, could I revise even more? Some of the no’s included feedback that made sense; I wanted to make use of it before I sent out more queries. Further revision took more money (editor) and more time. I attended conferences, like Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace, and refined my agent list. I studied acknowledgements pages in books I loved (where agents are often thanked), scoured Twitter for agent threads, read more books on my chosen agents’ lists.
My wall chart helped. Over 50 percent of my queries resulted in requests for samples; about 50 percent of those resulted in requests for a full. That cheered me; I was doing something right. In month nine, the last month of my test, I received my first real hope: a positive response from two agencies that read the full, plus an email from a third agent who read it and wanted a phone call. I gave her my cell number and we set a time.
That morning, I went shopping—I was in a daze of hope and pushing down that hope. When I got home, I realized I’d left my cell phone at the store. I raced back. Luckily, someone had found my phone. I got home just in time to breathe a little, then receive the agent’s call. She made the offer. My third yes—but one I really worked for this time.
My past experience had clarified what I wanted. I wasn’t willing to sign with just anyone to say I’d achieved a goal. I knew I could publish on my own. I’d done it before. But I wanted partnership now, I wanted someone who could help me shape the rest of my fiction career, educate me on the changing industry, champion my books.
My current agent and I have worked together on two novels now. Today, I know it might take more than one or two or three yesses to get the agent best for you and your writing career. I know I was lucky at the start, and I learned what it meant to not be lucky at the end. The third yes took me a year and the work of a part-time job. But it was worth it.
Do you need an agent? Today, it’s hard to say, Absolutely, yes, you do. It depends on what you’re after as a writer. Like me, you can go it alone. Like me, you can try playing the agent game. It changes often, it doesn’t have clear rules much of the time, but it does feel great to get each yes.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This week’s exercise is designed both for those way into the agent game or just starting out.
If you’ve already begun your agent search, try an organization chart to keep your research in one place—like a spreadsheet or my wall chart. Follow my steps above. Also, check out the various places I looked online, also listed above, if you haven’t already—they can be gold.
For those of you just starting out, think about these small ideas and whether they make sense to you.
Plan for a marathon instead of a sprint. One of my students queried ten agents and got all no’s. He came to me, ready to give up. I told him with the 75-agent rule, he was only one-seventh of the way there.
Expect rejections—they are part of the game, so flow with them as best you can. Print them out and paper your bathroom wall. Circle good things agents say in their rejection emails; accumulated, those comments can mean a lot. (I made a list of the positive feedback and kept it next to my wall chart.)
Don’t query your top choices first. You’re still learning the ropes, you may find you have more revising to do, and you don’t want to blow your one chance. Wait until you’ve gathered the rejections, gotten a feel for how it goes. (I didn’t heed this advice and blew my chances with someone I’d courted for years.)
The query is the first gate you have to pass and you can, with great results, if you get help to make it as strong as possible. Think about it: If an agent gets 1,000 of these a week, what stands out in yours? Get feedback from writer friends, take a class, hire an editor to hone your query until it sings. You’ll be glad you did!
An earlier version of this post first appeared in the wonderful online writing blog, “Dead Darlings,” from Grub Street in Boston. Check it out here.
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!)
Linda Dittmar, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging. (Interlink Press, July release)
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
September 1, 2023
Tapping into Your History to Create Great Characters
My new novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press, October 24 release), is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble, amazon, and bookshop.org. It hit #5 on the Amazon bestseller list last week as a Hot New Release in Sibling Fiction. Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen! Join the fun and preorder today!
Last week, I took my first flying lesson. I flew in a Cessna 152, a sweet little plane, and I was introduced to all her parts and abilities. I’ve wanted to fly since I was very young. My mother flew everything from Spitfires to four-engine B-29’s in World War II as a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot. She promised to teach me, but four kids and two full-time jobs got in the way.
My instructor was very good but the information came in a flood. The cockpit felt crowded with the two of us; he put me in the pilot’s seat immediately. It was also hot—I propped open the window with my elbow. A calm but overcast sky. The plane smelled of fuel and all the other scared bodies that occupied that tiny space. There was a yoke (like a steering wheel) instead of the stick my mother would’ve used in her planes this size. So many dials to watch. By the end of the hour lesson, I knew some but not all of them. I have lots of studying to do.
One of the last conversations I had with my mother was about flying. She was nearly 98, her mind going fast, but she remembered the plane stories. We sat in the cramped cubicle of the nursing floor, a curtain pulled around her bed, the window looking out on the next building's brick, and she talked about the afternoon she buzzed my grandmother’s house when she and my dad were dating. The time my dad tried to keep the radio tuned to a jazz station and she couldn’t listen to the control tower. The weekend she got lost over the Hudson Valley and had to land at West Point. The many weeks she ferried bombers up the East Coast from airbases to Montreal.
Stories ran loops in her head, weaving round and around, locations she's lived in and flown from: Sweetwater, Texas; winter in South Dakota; Michigan; Georgia. Past visits, we brought out her WASP scrapbooks from the bottom drawer of her dresser, pointed to the photos, asked her to tell us again. Now I just pressed Voice Memo on my phone to capture her laugh.
In the sky, she especially loved chandelles, their circling climb. She'd worked as a secretary for PAN AM after the war, married my father, got pregnant and had my older sister. Never returned to flying.
"Mom," I asked on that last visit, "why did you give it up?" I’ve asked this many times, always hoping for a different answer. "When you loved it so much."
She looked small in the bed, shorter than in her flying pictures, shrunk by age. Her voice was still strong, no nonsense. Sure of her decision. "I loved you kids more." She began to drift again. There were four of us, only three now, and losing my older sister still hurt her.
I recalled when I was small, and she took us flying, not in planes she flew as a wartime pilot or a commercial pilot after the war, but in regular planes where we bought a ticket and got an assigned seat. If something happened in the cockpit, she always told us, they could call on her services. I laughed at this, thinking of it now, but her eyes were closed. I talked a little louder, offered the family legend of sitting next to her as she muttered instructions to the pilot, from our seats to the cockpit, advice only I could hear. "Put your flaps down," she'd say. Or "coming in too steep!" She categorized each airport for its trickiness in landing and take off. Boston's Logan was one of the worst, she said.
Right over water, I said now, right, Mom? But she was somewhere else, staring blankly out the window at that brick wall.
Photo by Wolf Zimmermann on UnsplashI was the second kid of the four. By the time my brother was born and my father was fighting to stay in his job, she was saving us all through her paycheck. Exhausted most of the time, borrowing a dollar from my allowance to cover the groceries, she never spoke about either the poverty or the nonstop work. So I didn't understand, as a child, why there was neither money or time for the sky.
My own life put this dream on hold too. So this week, as I took the first lesson, I remembered all she put aside to raise us, to work. What it must take, inside a person, to go through the process of giving up a dream, of that small death? She accepted most of what she had to deal with, in her life, in that facility at the end, in her very reduced state. Yet she once flew a B-29.
Do you have this histories you carry with you, which end up in your writing in some form or another? Memoir obviously traces those lines. Fiction too, but less directly. I didn’t realize, when I started writing my novel about women pilots, that I was retrieving memories of my mom’s life, in an attempt to know her better. I remember during revision I thought of asking her to read the draft then thought better of it—to her, at least from how she dismissed our questions, it wasn’t alive any longer. Perhaps it would be an annoyance to remember, perhaps even a sadness I didn’t want to cause. She was a child of the big wars, trained to not linger on lost hopes.
It wasn’t until the novel went into publication that I saw clearly its purpose in my life, and that clarity came from my publicity coach, Dan Blank, the guru of “human-centered marketing.” Dan asked me in one of our earliest sessions to find the key messages in my story—the meaning or message behind the characters and plot. At first I didn’t have a clue what he meant. I wrote the book because I had a fascination with flying—many of my short stories are about pilots, my first novel carried that thru-line as well, but I never stopped to ask why. I came up with some lame responses to Dan’s question, he urged me to dig deeper, and I began realizing the novel was about my history, my desire to get to know my elusive, charming mother on paper. I didn’t want to write her actual story, because she was a very private person, putting aside her achievements, making the conversation about someone else. Even as a child, she was a mystery to me, and I stayed sensitive as to how much she’d share and when the curtain closed on questions.
In the writing exercise below is an article Dan wrote about his theory of key messages and why they are worth researching.
As I explored more about my pilot characters, who they were, what they longed for, what they’d left behind, I began to see such parallels with my mom’s life. Not in the specifics—my narrators are pilots, yes, but they also do other things she had nothing to do with in her day, like singing in an indie band or work Search & Rescue after a mountain plane crash. But under those specifics ran the thread of similar character, the woman who busts through the artificial limits of her time and becomes something different than her peers. The hero, in fact, that all of us could become.
That became one of my key messages—women are heroes of their own lives, and they end up saving themselves by saving others.
My mother was a very early riser, as I am. When I visited after college, we’d often wake early before the weight of the day descended. I slept in a room off the kitchen in their last house, and I often heard her up around 5:30 a.m. She fell asleep early at night so mornings were about cleaning up any detritus from the evening meal, having her first cup of coffee, and making her endless scribbled lists on the backs of used envelopes. When I was a guest at home, many of those lists held things to talk with me about: questions about my first job, my new boyfriend, my life in California, where she’d never traveled.
If the exchange was mellow, if we had time before she felt she was on duty again, I could ask her about the war, about flying. About the planes she knew. The brutal routine of each day of those two years in the WASPs. I took notes for the novel, then in its early stages. But she remained a mystery, even then, usually tolerating only a little of my digging, becoming brisk and practical and moving on fast. A trait I’ve noticed with other pilots, some alertness to surroundings that is necessary in the air.
Photo by Jessica Podraza on UnsplashBefore my first lesson, I found her student pilot handbook, copyright 1943. I read it like a favorite novel, each evening letting some of the information be absorbed so I wouldn’t sound completely ignorant with the instructor. Among those who fly, I’m learning, the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots rank up there with Amelia Earhart in legacy and contribution. The WASPs were finally honored with veteran status in November 1977 by President Carter, although this decision was opposed by the American Legion and veterans’ groups. Mom got a shiny medal in a velvet-lined case and limited benefits. Even though Hap Arnold, the general who backed the WASPs during the war, said they flew just as well as any man.
Do we all dig into our history to find material for our writing? Dan’s questions about key messages were the startle, the wakeup call, I required to see the connection between my ten years with this story and why I spent those years.
My key message, “Women are the heroes of their own lives and others’,” certainly applied to those female pilots in the war, even if they were not recognized as such for more than 30 years.
Dan also had me explore the subtext behind each key message. For women heroes, I came up with:
The heroine's journey might mean losing everything to find what you really need and want and love.
the downside of being a hero—and one of its fallacies—is the belief that we are better heroes when we handle everything ourselves, stay strong alone.
In the end, we can realize how we grow faster and become stronger when we risk opening ourselves to love. We overcome the fear of being vulnerable with others, as we grow into a truer awareness of heroism, willing to show weaknesses and fears.
My mom wasn’t without her flaws, of course, but I always saw her as a very loving person, devoted to her kids and her husband of many decades. So when I wrote these, I was not thinking about my mother at first. But now I see her, and so many other heroic women I know, in each statement. She did have a sense of being alone, not showing weakness. She did lose so much along the way. But she also had a good, satisfying life. She demonstrated, to me, the personal evolution of heroism in everyday life.
After she died, as this book neared publication, I explored more of her history as a WASP. I learned that only 1800 some women were accepted into the program and just over 1000 ended up graduating. There were 25,000 applicants. Mom had to apply twice; she was turned down the first try. She was already a commercial pilot with hundreds of flying hours but the competition was fierce.
“I loved the thrill of those chandelles,” she told an interviewer from the Library of Congress for a documentation on the WASPs. I imagined her combining the 180 degree turn with a climb high into the blue. Once she landed dead stick at LaGuardia after her plane’s engine caught fire. She was a squadron leader. A hero.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Read Dan’s explanation of key messages, why they are a potential opening to realizing the connections between your history and your writing.
Then, review my newsletter from May which I wrote on how your personal narrative and the book’s narrative intersect, to learn more about how to determine your key messages.
Finally, brainstorm on paper about the meaning and learning behind the facts and people on your literary stage. I spun my mother’s experiences into fiction, her history as a pilot taking root in me and making me want to write my three women narrators, even without my being aware of it. And now that I am, much more fully, I can develop those characters in a new, more realized way.
Here are two questions I’ve found helpful in this interior research:
What has your history done for you?
What is your book’s message to the world about what means the most to you? How can you develop that even further?
Over 700 past posts are available in my archives for this newsletter—lots of great tips, interviews, publishing info, and more. The archives are accessible to paid subscribers only, so if you want to join the fun, consider upgrading your subscription! It’s only $45 a year, a bargain for what you get. And I will thank you forever for helping me continue to write this every Friday.
Shout Out!A hearty shout out to these writing friends and former students who are publishing their books! I encourage you to pre-order a copy to show your support of fellow writers and our writing community. (If you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months, email mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out!). I’ll share your listing for three months.
Marianne C. Bohr, The Twenty: One Woman’s Trek Across Corsica on the GR20 Trail (She Writes Press, June release)
Linda Dittmar, Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging. (Interlink Press, July release)
Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam/PRH, August release)
Cindy Angell Keeling, Dream City Dreaming (Petite Parasol Press, August release)
Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope (Minnesota Historical Society Press, October release)
Maren Cooper, Behind the Lies (She Writes Press, November release)
I’m the author of 14 books in 3 genres. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue (Riverbed Press), will be published in October 2023 (preorders available soon!). For twelve years, I wrote a weekly food column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate before moving to fiction. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner and a Lambda Literary award in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
