Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 116

How Do Books Become Bestsellers? (Can Authors Increase Those Chances?)

As longtime readers know, writer Kristen Tsetsi is the host of a regular author Q&A at this site, 5 On, that asks 5 questions about writing and 5 questions about publishing. (You can browse them here.)

Recently, Kristen sent me questions related to book marketing that she wanted answered, but didn’t know the right person to ask. As I reviewed them, I decided that I myself might be the right person to address them.

Thus, in a strange turn of events, I am running an interview with myself at my own site. My thanks to Kristen for sparking what I think is an important—and I hope useful—discussion.

Kristen: Authors published by a Big Five publisher are often responsible for much of their own marketing and publicity, and chances are slim that their novel will be the one that takes off and veritably markets itself. What, then, is the benefit of publishing with a major house versus publishing with a small press with decent distribution channels? An author publishing with Random House might have a better reason to at least hope for a Today Show or NPR interview, sure, but obviously most Big Five authors aren’t interviewed on the Today Show or NPR.

Jane: Much depends on what we mean when we talk about a “small press with decent distribution channels.”

First, and most critical to understand, is that the playing field is more or less even when it comes to retail distribution, or what I might call “availability.” Any self-publishing author, and any small press, can make their books available to be ordered or purchased in the same retailers as a Big Five publisher if they’re willing to use print-on-demand technology. It’s not logistically complicated or expensive. That doesn’t mean the author’s or publisher’s books will sit on the shelf of most (or even a few) bricks-and-mortar bookstores in the country—just that the book can look and appear like any other when viewed in an industry database.

Where the playing field is not even is when we look at how print books get sold and purchased in advance of publication, then stocked on physical store shelves. That’s an investment and risk on the side of the publisher, since it requires doing a print run of books that may not sell as expected, plus all books are returnable by bookstores at any point for a full refund. Retailers such as Barnes & Noble commit to purchasing hundreds or thousands of copies of book, prior to knowing how successful it will be, and their commitment is based on how persuasive the publisher’s sales pitch is. When you’re playing that kind of game, the Big Five publishers have a huge advantage—their sales teams pitch books for placement at bookstore accounts, big-box stores, specialty retailers, and so on. It’s part of their job to get the biggest sales commitment possible in advance of publication.

When considering a small press, you should figure out how their books get sold into stores. Do they have their own sales team? Does a larger publisher sell their books for them to store accounts? Do they not even try—do they just make the book available for sale on Amazon or available through Ingram, and call it a day? That’s not a deal breaker (and the majority of all book sales are through Amazon any way!), but for authors who place a great deal of importance on seeing their book stocked in physical retail stores, then the bigger your publisher, the more muscle they probably have to get that nationwide store distribution, and possibly pay for displays or other merchandising during your book’s launch.

Next time you’re in a chain bookstore, study carefully the front-of-store tables and look at the publishers. Those publishers have paid for that placement. You won’t find many “small” presses. You’ll find that Big Five and mid-size houses or strong independent houses (such as Sourcebooks or Chronicle) dominate.

But here’s the other side of the argument: most Big Five publishers, after your book has been out three months, they’re done with you. You won’t hear back from the publicist or marketing team unless your book has gained traction and the publisher sees an opportunity to build further sales and attention. A smaller press may have more time and bandwidth to spend with you both prior to launch and after, in order to find the audience. The approach may be more thoughtful and customized. A Big Five publisher does not have time to take a customized approach to every title on its list; as you say, only a few get the attention they truly deserve, and it tends to be based on who received the highest advance, because that’s where the most risk resides. So a Big Five author is more likely to see a cookie-cutter approach to their book’s launch unless they’re an “A” title (one of the most important titles that season) or otherwise selected for special treatment.

So is it worth the trade-off? There’s not one answer to that question. Partly I think it depends on the author’s personality and how they’re best complemented by the publisher, and maybe even who their agent is. (An agent can play a role in getting marketing support from the publisher!) At some point, money usually speaks loudest, and authors go with the publisher that pays the highest advance, which then can help ensure sufficient attention. If your advance isn’t much of a risk (let’s say $20,000 or below), then you may be better off with a small press if they offer more personalized marketing attention or support, or better and more informed reach to your particular readership. (Here’s my post on evaluating small presses.)

People scoff at debut authors who want to negotiate with publishers over, for example, conditions related to film rights: “It’s your first novel. Don’t even worry about film rights and just be happy to have a publisher. Have three books and a following before you start thinking about film rights.” However, debut novels are optioned: Melanie Raab’s The Trap, Michael Hodges’s The Puller, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. Because it could happen, then, however unlikely it may be, shouldn’t each contract be approached with that potential in mind?

My rule of thumb is always “Assume everything is negotiable.” However, in every industry, there are some things that basically are not negotiable, especially if you have little or no leverage over the publisher. The 25% ebook royalty rate is not negotiable, no matter who you are. Granting ebook rights along with print: it will be demanded. This is where having an agent is invaluable, because they know from experience where and when a publisher is willing to negotiate. They also know why things might not be negotiable. For example, the ebook royalty rate isn’t negotiable for now because every single author with a decent agent has a clause that says as soon as another author at the same house receives a higher rate, they’ll get the higher rate, too. To ameliorate that, an agent can say, “We know you’re not going to budge on the ebook royalty rate, but that means you need to do better on these other terms.”

It never hurts to ask for what you want, to ask “Can you do better?” and to get an explanation for why your requests aren’t reasonable or standard. But the truth is that unless you’re a highly desirable author, or unless you have an agent who is able to leverage their influence on your behalf, sometimes you have to accept terms that are less than satisfying.

Do authors have any more negotiating room these days simply because there are so many publishing options available? Do publishers (typically) fight for manuscripts these days if they’re not written by someone well-known, or could they take or leave most authors?

Little-known or early-career authors don’t have any more negotiating room than they did before. Authors with a track record—who represent reliable, ongoing income to the publisher—do have the ability to make demands or threaten to walk away, switch publishers, go to Amazon Publishing, self-publish, etc. But it’s interesting that we really haven’t seen that happen; most authors develop a close relationship with their editor, whom they’re loath to separate from. When high-earning authors do part ways with their publisher, it’s often because of editorial restructures that affect how their work is handled, marketed, or championed. So they jump to another house. (See Nora Roberts.) Furthermore, well-established authors always have an agent who is probably not enthusiastic about seeing their clients divest themselves of traditional publishing.

People who think traditional publishing will die underestimate how difficult it is for a successful author, who has built her career on that system, to go about the process in a different way, with a different team. It’s a different skill set that’s required and it’s a different kind of career. You can read John Scalzi on this to get a sense of what I mean.

Publishers do still fight over manuscripts from “hot” authors and you still see agents taking projects to auction, with advances being paid that may never earn out because of over-exuberance. If anything, it happens less than before, given ongoing consolidation and risk aversion among publishers. Also, publishers more actively go after deadbeat authors for advances when no manuscript is delivered. I’d say there’s more attention paid to making good business decisions. Imagine that!

One of the complaints I’ve heard and read about traditional publishers is that if they buy the book, sell it for a year, and determine it isn’t doing well, they’ll pull it from stores. But the rights won’t revert to the author, who might want to find his/her own way to make it available. Why does this happen—that is, how does it benefit the publishing company? And is there a way around it?

Because authors get so concerned about seeing their print book in stores—it’s the “dream” and offers validation of their status—they’re unfortunately blind to the truth of the industry: Physical bookstore sales aren’t where most trade books sell; they constitute maybe 30-40% of sales. The other 60-70% are happening through online retail—primarily Amazon, whether in print or ebook form. That’s why the rights aren’t reverting to the author.

But to talk about that bookstore space for a moment: a year of availability on a shelf is probably too generous! Maybe four to six months? If your book doesn’t establish itself as a decent seller in that timeframe, it will be marked, fairly or not, for return. But it’s not the publisher who pulls the book. It’s that the retailers return stock that doesn’t sell quickly enough or they stop ordering it. Stores can only stock so many books; the shelves continually have to be cleared, to make room for new titles or old titles that backlist well—there always has to be room for evergreen bestsellers such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

How does a publisher decide which books they’ll devote full marketing energy (assuming the author isn’t a known entity), and does their active promotion determine which book will become a title everyone has heard of? Or is it strictly a matter of good luck and word of mouth when a novel becomes the novel everyone is talking about, making the possibility of this happening the same for a Big Five author as it is for even a self-published author?

I’ve mentioned the role of the advance earlier—that’s a significant factor, but not the only factor. Your relationship with your editor, and how much of a champion that editor is for your book inside the publishing house, well, that can be just as huge. It’s up to the editor to relay their enthusiasm for your book to the sales and marketing team. They have to be continually drumming up support, or demanding attention. If you become someone your editor doesn’t like—if you become the “difficult” author—that may dampen their enthusiasm, and thus their motivation to talk you up to the rest of the company. More generally, whether it’s your editor relationship or no, publishers do more for authors they like. If you’re easy to work with, they’ll be more inclined to work with you.

Early on, authors need to figure out where they’re at in the publisher’s pecking order, preferably after signing the contract. You need to figure out if you’re an “A” title, “B” title, or something further down the ladder. And this is not to dispute the issue or throw a tantrum, but to be prepared and set your expectations accordingly. You have to take the role of proactive author especially when you’re not an A title, and let the publisher know what you’ll be doing to support your book, many months in advance of publication—before those sales calls happen. That way, when the publisher calls on the buyer at Barnes & Noble, they can say, “The author has this fabulous thing planned, and it’ll help sell books because…”

If you wait on your publisher to do stuff or tell you their plans, you may be waiting a very long time. If you present them with your plan—what you can accomplish on your own without their help—they will often look for ways to amplify what you are doing, and combine forces. If their response is tepid, this is not the time to strut, make demands, or pout and ask, “What have you done for me lately?” Publishers are more inclined to help authors who can first help themselves. Or, if your publisher is truly dropping the ball, and you need someone to hold their feet to the fire, talk to your agent—they should have a good idea of what can be reasonably asked for, and when, and how to make a request that maintains a good working relationship.

After the book’s launch, within that three-month window after release, if positive things happen, whether on purpose or by accident, the publisher will revisit the situation and decide if more investment would bring greater rewards. So it is possible for an author who is not initially “A” list material to quickly become the focus of the marketing department if they break out in some way.

About the last question: What inspired it was a conversation my husband and I had after I told him I had no idea what to do with what I’m writing once I’m finished. Try to get an agent? Query smaller (university) presses directly? Query Amazon’s traditional imprint? Self-publish?

While I had some success earlier on with marketing (podcasts, WNPR, local TV, newspapers), those features and/or interviews did nothing at all to sell the self-published book I was promoting at the time.

So, my husband asked, “How does a Jonathan Franzen book become a Jonathan Franzen book? [A title everyone knows about.] How did Eat, Pray, Love become a hit? What steps did publishers take to make that happen? Because whatever you were doing didn’t work. WHAT WORKS? When you find out, do that.”

I tried explaining the combination of commercial appeal, word of mouth, and luck, but I don’t think he believed me. But all of that did make me wonder about the overall effectiveness of any marketing. Is it the marketing that pushes a book into everyone’s hands, or is it really just that perfect, unpredictable, magical combination?

I also wondered whether an individual small press or self-published author, absent publishing house funding, could replicate what publishers do—contact these people, get this kind of interview, make a video, etc. Is there a formula? What is it that makes a hit of the book the publisher pays the huge advance on? Is it ads in the New York Times? Buying enough copies to call it a New York Times bestseller and doing TV commercials? Interviews on daytime talk shows? All things inaccessible to the tiny writer?

And how do publishers decide which books—excluding those by famous people, and specifically fiction (nonfiction seems like an easier sell)—will get the larger advances and the subsequent marketing push?

This feels like many questions, but I think the TL;DR version is probably, “Is a book’s success all luck, even if ‘luck’ includes hitting the right subject matter at the right time, or is it marketing—and can an indie author in any way compete with a publisher?”

I don’t want to make it sound like a crapshoot, but to some extent, yes, we’re talking about something that is unpredictable and perhaps magical. It has to be the right book at the right time with the right attention.

So far, I haven’t addressed the subjective issue of quality or how certain books excite people more than others. Agent Donald Maass, in his various fiction writing books, tries to discuss why some books capture people’s imaginations, and result in tremendous word of mouth (“You must read this book!”), while others—most others, in fact—receive a more tepid response. We tend to hear about and focus on the successes, but it’s important to understand that the New York Times bestselling novel by a relatively unknown author that suddenly everyone knows and talks about is pretty rare. I think the most recent one we’ve seen is Girl on the Train, and that was released over two years ago. I recently browsed the Publishers Marketplace deals database for major deals for debut authors ($500,000 advance and higher), and most of the books and authors I had never heard of.

When publishers invest a lot in a little-known author’s advance, it’s usually because they think they’ve got something amazing—it sets off their “quality” or “commercial appeal” radar. Editors and agents are exposed to thousands of projects every year, so they have a sense for when something special or different comes through. That said, editors and agents can also be out of touch with what pleases the average reader, and here 50 Shades of Grey is always trotted out as the stereotypical example. Unfortunately, the books that agents and editors fall in love with and champion—and that receive superlative marketing support—are about as likely to sink as those books that receive little support. But you don’t hear about the failures; everyone would prefer to forget them. I distinctly remember a couple years ago hearing about a debut novel by a high-profile editor who worked in New York publishing, and it received all this pre-publication attention and publicity, as you would expect. But it completely fizzled. That speaks volumes.

So, you need two things: a great book that inspires readers to evangelize for it and press it into the hands of friends and family, and some amount of marketing to help get the ball rolling. (As novelist and marketer MJ Rose often likes to say, no one buys a book they haven’t heard of.) When lightning strikes—as it did in the case of a self-published book such as The Martian—you can’t replicate that process, step by step, to create another success just like it.

We can take this partly as a comfort: writing and storytelling aren’t so formulaic and by-the-numbers that you can engineer a bestselling title. It sounds like your husband must be an engineer or a programmer, but we’re talking about something that’s distinctly unquantifiable. While there are books that have tried to break it all down into a formula—what are the universal qualities of a bestseller?—the results are disappointing.

One thing I’ve noticed about many breakout authors, though, is that we’re rarely seeing an overnight success. In most cases, that author has labored for years on projects that failed or were mediocre in their reception. But those failures were necessary to produce a work that would wildly succeed. It’s that old cliche: luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity.

The great marketing advantage (and curse) for today’s author is the incredible social graph and reading behavior available to them: that is, the online breadcrumb trail left by people as they buy books, review them, tag them, and talk about them with each other. That can help an author better understand where to find their readers and to be smarter about finding and targeting them, whether online or offline. (For people curious about this, I have a free 30-minute discussion that gets a little tech oriented.)

Brand-name writers with instant recognizability in the market should and will be marketed differently than the debut novelist who doesn’t have any name recognition with readers. The former is likely to have a more mass-market, advertising-driven approach; the latter should probably use more high-touch and targeted approaches (whether to independent booksellers, book clubs, librarians, specific blogs and online communities, etc). Favorable (lower) pricing and promotions also encourage people to take a chance on a new or unknown author. Positive reviews and media appearances help, too, but for someone who is an unknown in the market, it usually requires many instances of exposure—the old “seven impressions” rule—for someone to remember and then make a purchase. This is why word of mouth—the recommendation of someone you trust—is so often talked about. That’s usually more powerful than seeing an ad or reading a professional review.

Professional indie authors effectively compete with traditional authors, in every way, but they have a different approach, since they mainly reach their readers online, don’t devote much energy to the physical bookstore market, and mostly eschew mainstream media coverage and reviews. Readers are their focus and they know how to ensure their books rank well and are visible on Amazon. The ones who compete best are typically prolific and succeed financially by having a considerable amount of product on the market, usually one or more series. You’re not going find Jonathan Franzen–style indie authors out there, taking five or more years between books—not any making a living. You have to be in front of your audience pretty consistently as an indie author, with new stuff to offer, at least once a year if not several times per year. So indie authors compete in a different way, and their visibility is different, too. You can’t measure them by New York Times bestseller appearances, because that list is biased against lower priced ebooks that sell primarily on Amazon—but indie authors may end up earning far more money than a traditional author.

For authors who are worried about whether they’re doing enough to market (or if they’re doing the right things), it’s best to consider it a long game. You can’t do everything, but you can focus your energies on what’s sustainable over a long period of time and what helps nurture readers who will evangelize on your behalf. Rather than trying to cast the widest net possible, focus on those people who are loyal and devoted to your work and can help spread the word. Focus on building your immediate network; in-person local and regional touch points help lead to national opportunities over time. Word of mouth is more likely to be sparked through cultivated relationships, directly with readers, as well as with influencers, rather than through efforts that involve mass outreach or loose targeting, where you don’t have any idea of who you’re reaching or if they even care.

For more information on book marketing and publicity, check out these posts by Jane:

Book Marketing 101
Book Marketing Resources for Authors: The Best of 2016
3 Things Your Traditional Publisher Is Unlikely to Do

Classic Story Structures and What They Teach Us About Novel Plotting

Photo credit: quapan via Visualhunt.com / CC BY

Today’s guest post by Jess Lourey (@jesslourey) is adapted and reprinted with permission from Rewrite Your Life, published by Conari Press, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser. It’s available wherever books and ebooks are sold or directly from the publisher.

We’ll start at the beginning. The gold standard definition of plot comes from fourth century BCE philosopher Aristotle, who believed plot, or what he called the sequence of events, was the most important component of a drama, even more important than the characters.

He believed that the events must be related to each other, and more than anything, that the plot must arouse emotion in the audience.

He broke plot structure into three acts, coinciding with the audience need for intermission. The first act includes the story setup, popularly referred to as the “inciting incident.” The stakes continue to rise in the second act and include a false victory, that point where you think the story is over but it turns out it’s not. The false victory is referred to as a major reversal because the trajectory of the story reverses. The climax comes in the third act, followed by the denouement, a French word meaning “to untie,” which perfectly describes the cleaning up of any loose ends that happens at the end of a narrative.

The first Star Wars movie is a great example of Aristotle’s three-act structure in action. The inciting incident occurs when Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed, which pushes him to leave the planet with Obi-Wan and sets the story in motion. The stakes rise in the second act when Luke rescues Princess Leia but loses Obi-Wan. The false victory comes when Luke, Leia, and Han escape the Death Star, but it’s not over yet. Darth Vader is gathering power and knows where the rebels are hiding. Luke destroying the Death Star with his one-in-a-billion shot is the climax, and the denouement is the awards ceremony at the end of the film.

Inciting incident. Rising stakes. False victory. Denouement.

Freytag’s Model

In the late 1800s, a German writer, Gustav Freytag, came up with a modification of Aristotle’s model. (Because those with German blood are controlling and can never leave well enough alone; at least that’s what my first live-in boyfriend told me. Coincidentally, my ancestors on my mom’s side are from Germany.) Freytag’s main changes were to allow for more setup of the main character’s motivation in the beginning and to put the climax at the dead middle, which gives as much time to the untying at the end as to the setting up at the beginning.

The film version of The Wizard of Oz is the standard example for this model of storytelling. We learn about Dorothy’s dissatisfaction at home, much as we learn of Luke’s in the beginning of Star Wars, but Dorothy has the added motivation of needing to save Toto from being euthanized, escaping an incoming tornado, and squishing the Wicked Witch of the East, all of which weight the front end of The Wizard of Oz more heavily than was Star Wars’ first act. In addition, The Wizard of Oz climax appears in the dead center when Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch. There is still the Wizard to deal with, and the Scarecrow’s brain, the Lion’s courage, and the Tin Man’s heart to acquire, as well as Dorothy to get home, which counterbalances the longer beginning. So, where Aristotle’s three-act structure is more of a steadily rising line with a sharp drop at the end, Freytag’s structure can be visualized as a triangle with no bottom.

Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey

Both Aristotle and Freytag’s methods of organizing plot have remained the standard bearers, with few alterations, until the 1960s when mythologist Joseph Campbell began to gain an audience for his theories of the hero’s journey. According to Campbell, stories are not only the binding agents of culture but also what binds our souls to our bodies.

In other words, humans need stories to survive.

Campbell went on to say—pulling in an impressive library of examples—that every myth, whether scratched on a cave wall or uttered by a holy priest or typed by a college freshman, comes down to one basic structure, or plot: the transformation of consciousness via trials. He broke this transformation into three steps, or acts: departure, fulfillment, and return.

Every single story, from the prehistoric to the biblical to the modern.

Departure. Fulfillment. Return.

I do love the elegance of Campbell’s model, as well as the universality. So did and do many. You’ll recognize this departure-fulfillment-return structure in many movies, including The Matrix, O Brother Where Art Thou, The NeverEnding Story, and Lion King. I also appreciate Aristotle’s point about plot needing to affect the reader and scenes needing to be causal rather than episodic, and damn if most compelling narratives can’t be broken down into a three-act structure. And Freytag is right on the money when he points out that we need to feel an emotional connection at the beginning of the story.

But on the whole? Don’t feel married to anything you just learned about the academic models of story structure. The only reason I even mention them is that they might come up in a conversation, and I want you to sound smart. Some other words that are good for that are “schadenfreude,” “epitome,” “pulchritude” (it doesn’t mean what you think), and “recalcitrance.”

But actually trying to follow one of the academic models of narrative structure feels like donning a crown and elbow gloves to dig a ditch. Real writing, in my experience, is blue collar work, and that’s all there is to it. You have to dive into the heart of yourself and subsequently your characters, uncover what they want more than anything, throw obstacles—like life has done to you—into their paths, and follow them as they overcome them (or not) and get closer (and sometimes farther) from their goals. Every event has to lead directly to another event—it’s a cause-and-effect daisy chain.

It’s not just me who believes that the key to good plotting is to figure out what your character wants and follow them. Scratch a writer, and you’ll find out that very few of them use one of the classic structures when they craft. Writing professor Matthew Jockers conducted an interesting study that stylishly illustrates this point. Jockers designed a computer program that charts the emotional silhouette, or plot, of any book.

Jockers used best-selling novels for his study, including The Secret Life of Bees, The Lovely Bones, Gone Girl, All the Light We Cannot See, The Da Vinci Code, and The Notebook. When he programmed the narrative arc for each of these novels into his computer program, it spit out lovely data that resembles the spiky, random readouts you see in a heartbeat monitor. In other words, the plots of these best-selling novels have nothing in common—no clean three-act structure, no triangle without a bottom. Most novels do not follow the classic models. They adhere to their own internal pulse.

Turns out there is only one universal rule of plot, and it goes back to what Joseph Campbell uncovered: every single story worth telling is about transformation via trials. There is no pattern to that because each character’s evolution is as unique and as individual as your transformation or mine.

So, the good news—and the bad news—is that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for plot. The only certainty is that your character must somehow depart from their regular life to seek out what they want more than anything (love, justice, understanding, etc.), undergo transformative trials, and return to a different life than they lived before.

This is beautiful, right? Crafting plot is where the real transformation of self begins, and where the blood-and-guts of writing gets a test drive. You already have an idea of your genre, your novel idea, and your protagonist and antagonist. The next step is to decide what your protagonist wants more than anything, to throw obstacles into their path, and to follow them through their transformation. And you’re going to make sure that what your protagonist wants is also what you want so that you can put the authenticity and energy into it that best-selling fiction requires.

There Isn’t a Formula, But There Are Some Rules

Also, when you’re choosing a goal for your protagonist and subsequently structuring your story, it might be helpful to know while there isn’t a formula for plot, there are some hard-and-fast rules.

Begin your story as close to the end as possible, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut. Dive right into the heart of it and start unpacking. The same is true of scenes, which are the building blocks of plot. Start a scene as close to the end as possible, and end it as early as you can.
The opening of the book must establish an emotional connection with the protagonist. The poignancy doesn’t need to happen on page one, and the character doesn’t need to (and shouldn’t) be a saint, but readers need to feel something for them. In screenwriting, this is called saving the cat. The protagonist can yell at old ladies, steal from a blind man’s cup, and cheat at cards, as long as they go out of their way to save one creature from discomfort. Start watching for it in movies. You’ll find that in the first ten minutes, the lead character will enact some version of saving a cat.
The novel’s opening (somewhere in the first five chapters) must establish what your protagonist wants more than anything.
The rest of the novel should consist of a series of trials and conflicts, keeping the protagonist from reaching their goal, snatching away victories. These trials cannot be episodic. In other words, they can’t be of equal value, one after the other—first, your protagonist encounters a lion, then a bear, then a flood. The trials must instead be somehow connected, one inextricably leading to another, with ever-increasing stakes. First, your protagonist encounters a lion, then hides in a cave to escape and discovers a bear, but can’t leave through the rear of the cave because there is a flood and can’t dash out the cave’s mouth because there’s a hungry lioness crouching nearby, so they are forced to escape through a hole in the cave’s roof, where they discover a world they never knew existed. Every action must have a consequence, must be necessary. You’re weaving a chain, and if some action isn’t a result of something that happened before it and doesn’t affect what comes after it, it doesn’t belong.

The character needs to reach a point where all seems lost.
The character needs to end the story with a different consciousness than they began it, and most of the loose ends must be tied up.

That’s it. The rest of the narrative is your canvas to explore.

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend Jess Lourey’s Rewrite Your Life.

Going Beyond Truth-Telling in Personal Essay

Photo credit: Darron Birgenheier via Visualhunt / CC BY-SA

When I was a teenager, I had braces, but quickly stopped wearing my retainer after the braces came off. Now, twenty years later, I’ve sorely regretted my lack of diligence. It turns out that teeth have a long memory about where they used to be, and wander back to their original starting position. So I visited an orthodontist for a consultation, and sheepishly alluded to my vanity-oriented goals. The orthodontist gave an answer that was immediately empathetic: This wasn’t a superficial concern. It was one of well-being.

In his answer—in the practiced manner he delivered it—I could tell this was an issue he had to address with many patients, a shame that adults in particular may have in seeking non-essential treatment. It reminded me of how I find myself addressing student writers (of all ages) who are often reluctant to write about themselves—they believe they have led ordinary lives that would bore others.

In an essay at Glimmer Train, writer Katherine Vaz tackles this issue in part, when she discusses an assignment that is given to every student at her university: to write about “the most important thing ever to happen to me.” Immigrants may have breathtaking and heartbreaking stories, she notes, but what about the average student, a “So Cal surfer guy”? Vaz asks:

What’s the nature (or even the point) of truth-telling here? [One student] wrote that the most important thing ever to happen to him was…the night he and his pals got drunk and knocked down the mailboxes in the neighborhood. The easiest thing would have been to dismiss him out-of-hand. But I asked him if this was indeed what he wanted to write about—he did—so I asked him to tell me more about that night.

What Vaz discovers is that the act of writing each story can be a vital exploration about the nature of truths you might not even know you carried. Read the entire essay.

Also this month in the Glimmer Train bulletin:

Why I Shouldn’t Be a Writer by Courtney Knowlton

How to “Write Science” Without Becoming a Lecturer by Stefani Nellen

Daily Momentum: A Little Progress Goes a Long Way by Andrew Roe

Author Marketing Collectives: An Increasingly Important Component of Book Promotion

Note: Today’s post is an extended version of an item originally published in The Hot Sheet, a subscription newsletter I run in partnership with Porter Anderson.

Last month, industry analyst Mike Shatzkin wrote a long and essential post discussing how authors still need help with their digital presence (and related marketing), the kind of help that traditional publishers are rarely providing.

While he advocates that publishers devote more resources to “author care” functions (something I encouraged in a 2012 industry talk), Shatzkin also discusses the potential for authors to collaborate amongst themselves to improve their situation, without the involvement of agents or publishers.

Certainly in the self-publishing community, authors have been helping each other from the very beginning, and you can see active examples of it through Kboards and countless Facebook groups. But in the traditional publishing community, that kind of activity is harder to find, with the best example probably being Binder Full of Women Writers and all of its attendant subgroups.

But Shatzkin pointed to an excellent example—on the traditional publishing side—of an author marketing co-op that’s becoming highly visible: Tall Poppy Writers. Its founder is Ann Garvin, who started the group in 2013 by asking other women authors if they wanted to be part of a collaborative marketing effort. The group now has about 45 members and specializes in books by women, for women, especially women in book clubs. Everything they do is reader centric: their group email newsletter reaches about 20,000 readers and their new book club has 3,500 members.

Recently, Garvin and members of her group—including Amy Impellizzeri and Kelly Simmons—were kind enough to answer some of my questions about how their group operates and what success they’ve achieved. They claim to be the only national author marketing co-op in the United States, and as far as I know, that’s true. (If you can point to other examples, please comment!)

Jane: As Mike Shatzkin recently wrote, groups like Tall Poppies are filling a need that publishers and agents aren’t meeting. Could you see a publisher doing something like this as successfully—establishing a collective among its authors—or do you think the power of this group grows out of it being author-managed and author-directed?

Kelly: A publisher’s group will always have a pre-determined agenda: There are books they want to succeed, and books they know will have short lives. So, yes, Tall Poppies is author-managed, but more importantly, we are reader-centric. Everything we do, and everything we succeed at, is done through the prism of a reader’s experience, not a writer’s, not a publisher’s.

Ann: Because of this, our goals are different from a publisher’s goals. Of course, we would like to sell books but our primary objective is to give our readers access and personal interactions with authors. To that end, a Tall Poppy Author is invested in relationships and not only the kind of relationships where money changes hands. We want our stories to resonate and getting to know our readers help us do that. If a publisher has like-minded, committed, generous authors who enjoy social media it’s possible they could mimic what we do.

Have you or group members received any feedback from your publishers/agents about your efforts? I’m wondering if they’re largely excited about your collaboration, or if they might be a little anxious!

Kelly: Being a Tall Poppy has been a boost to many of our authors—it’s like a Good Bookkeeping Seal of Approval! It signals to agents and publishers that we have that author’s back and will help her succeed. When an author goes forward in search of an agent or a publisher she is not alone and this is all part of the platform that we hope helps authors build their careers.

Ann: In conversation with agents and editors, it’s clear that they think that the Tall Poppies is a great idea. Long have they heard authors’ frustrations with efforts to get their book in front of readers and the Tall Poppies is trying to channel that frustration into an organized system. It works on several levels. We see immediate changes in ranking on Amazon when our Poppy network get behind a title and that eases the mind of the author. When we work together, we know we are giving it our best effort. There is no anxieties related to wondering if we could or should do more. The Tall Poppy network helps us control a small part of the process and this can be wonderful for the entire publishing experience.

What feedback have you received, if any, from readers, about this group and your activities?

Amy: In recent years, the Tall Poppies have become increasingly visible to readers through live events, press features, the various Tall Poppy pages on social media channels, and regular giveaways with one-time marketing partners including Storiarts, Grace & Heart, and Vacay Style, just to name a few.

But for all the advances of modern technology, we have long lamented that it is still so darn hard to connect with readers the way we writers crave doing. So in 2017, we have focused our collective social media efforts on an interactive and innovative Facebook group called Bloom, and we have been so gratified by readers’ responses in the short time that Bloom has been live!

Bloom is like an all-day slumber party. Every week, a Tall Poppy Writer takes over the Facebook group (sometimes with the help of a guest celebrity author) and shares insider information, comical anecdotes and other conversation starters.

We’ve seen a direct positive result on sales figures, attendance at live events, social media engagement, and our fundraising goals for our charity partner, Room to Read, as philanthropy is an important part of the Poppy mission.  We hear from new readers every day that Bloom has become one of their favorite corners of the social media world, and that they have been thrilled to discover authors through the Tall Poppies that were not previously on their “to-be-read” lists.

Is there an organizational structure or hierarchy to your organization? How do you facilitate initiatives?

Kelly: The group is very democratic in that everyone is expected to work hard and everyone is listened to. Wait, is that socialism? We would be able to ask one of our historical writers to help with that. Because we’ve loosely assembled around our expertise—our goal is to have people do what they are good at—be it networking or computers or public relations.

Ann: We do have a core leaders who help with initiatives, organization, and general operations and in that way, we function just like any group with goals. I have a laissez-faire leadership style which is based on trust coupled with a strong framework and tools. Our authors enjoy a wide degree of latitude in making decisions and working on projects autonomously. We remain small and focused on our mission so that everyone has our goals in mind and a voice to manage their domain of interest.

What is each member’s responsibility to the group, or what requirements do members have to meet in terms of marketing and promoting each other?  

Kelly: Authors help the group efforts daily, and help each other individually whenever a book is launched or there is major news. We don’t have requirements—we all do that we can, in  between driving kids to school, working, teaching, and wiping mud off our dogs’ feet.

Ann: Our writers must be fairly savvy regarding the use of social media to foster relationships. We utilize online administrative tools and have real estate in several of the major social media networks: Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and Goodreads. This takes a lot of organization and self-monitoring and our authors are committed to making this work.

To that end almost every Poppy has a “job” but we don’t monitor that job. We know that everyone is bringing their best to the table when they are able. We all have many commitments and we try to be the kind of place that is understanding and fosters autonomy.

What’s the most successful initiative you’ve launched thus far—where you’ve been able to see or measure progress or sales?

Kelly: One of the most gratifying things that’s happened is that we are now working with celebrity authors and high-quality national sponsors. Cool brands who will add tremendous value and fun to the Tall Poppies & Bloom community. They were drawn not just by our numbers, but also by our style, influence, and genuine relationships. That is extraordinary progress.

Ann: We have All Hands On Deck emails that go out when a Poppy has a launch. This email provides everything we need to promote an author’s big day. We have a schedule of launches and a buddy program so that the author with the book coming out doesn’t have to also coordinate the Poppies. We are friends and we do this for each other.

As this group becomes more well known, I have no doubt many authors will want to join. What’s the criteria or how do you add new members? I’m also wondering how big the group can grow while still being manageable and effective.

Kelly: For now, we’re holding at the 50 mark. But even though we’re technically not adding members, we’re still adding friends and doing initiatives with other female authors all the time. You don’t have to be a Poppy to play with the Poppies!

Ann: I have to stop myself from inviting everyone to be a Poppy. There are so many wonderful authors who we wish we could bring in. It’s torturous for me because building community is where I get all my energy from. But, I do know my limits. I’ve found that I can keep about fifty Poppies organized in my mind and probably because I’ve been a professor of very large classes for many years. That said, we are always on the look-out for like-minded, generous authors to interact with. If an author continues to interact with us, we notice it and try to help them as much as we can.

How to Pitch the Media (Without Even Sending Your Book)

Photo credit: floeschie via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

Today’s guest post is by author Dave Chilton (@wealthy_barber), who offers a course on nonfiction book marketing, The Chilton Method.

Way back when I was young (100 years ago), I initially self-published “The Wealthy Barber.” But after a year in the marketplace I partnered with Stoddart Publishing, Canada’s biggest publisher at the time. I ended up getting the rights back, but that’s another story. Anyway, the Stoddart deal used a very unusual structure. They controlled retail distribution but I controlled the special-sales market (i.e. corporate sales) and could either print my own version of the book or buy copies from them at just above their printing cost.

One of Stoddart’s key people was a guy named Angel Guerra, and he was very sharp. Authors often criticize their publishers for not thinking like marketers, but that was certainly not the case here, as you’re about to see.

One day, not long after signing the deal, I was in the Stoddart building for a meeting of some sort and Angel called me into his office and announced, “We’re doing a mailing to key radio stations across the country trying to book you some interviews.” The first words out of my mouth were, “Are you including a copy of the book with the press release and the cover letter?” I was worried they were going to be too cheap to send the book in each kit. I felt “The Wealthy Barber” had such an unusual title and unique format that the book itself  was a more effective marketing tool than any pitch letter we could possibly write. “No, I’m not including the book,” Angel bluntly answered. Oh no. Before I could even start arguing, he added, “And I’m not including a press release or a cover letter either.” Okay, what the heck was I missing? He then finished, “This is all that I’m sending out,” and he flipped something at me. It was a thick-stock card, sized perfectly to fit in a standard business-letter envelope. In big font in the middle it read: “How can a small-town barber help the average person become wealthy?” Then in smaller font below it added: “For an answer to that question and to set up an interview your listeners will truly love, call Angel at …”

I honestly didn’t know what to make of all this. The card didn’t even mention my book’s title! Or my name! Is this guy nuts?

Apparently not—we had an over 25% response rate. With no follow-up calls. That’s truly unheard of.

I learned so much from this experience. You have to stand out. You have to intrigue. And to do that you have to produce marketing materials that have a very good chance of actually being noticed. It’s amazing how often even some professional PR people don’t think about that point. The most persuasive sales copy ever written is of no value if it’s not read. Think how many email pitches and physical-package pitches a media member gets in a typical day. Overwhelming. But if even an ultra-busy person receives just a single large card with only two sentences printed on it, he or she is reading it. We all would. It’s too tempting not to.

We’ve had dozens of authors successfully use this simple idea over the years, including in the corporate-sales arena. And don’t tell me it won’t work in the digital era—it’s still kickin’ butt.

When you’re wooing the media, what you’re really trying to do is to intrigue them. To whet their appetites. Sometimes the best way to do that flows from remembering that less is often more.

Note from Jane: For more nonfiction book marketing advice, see Dave’s course, The Chilton Method.

Are You Clear About Your Writer Persona? Going Public by Design

Photo credit: Sébastien Barillot via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s guest post is by creative coach, writer, and editor A M Carley (@amcarley). Her company, Chenille Books, is offering a guided self-study course for writers, 30 Days to Becoming Unstuck, during May 2017.

You looking at me?

Back in the day, ancient Roman theater introduced the persona, or mask. Some say it was used as a means of protecting the anonymity of influential citizen-actors who didn’t want the public to see them on stage.

As writers, we don’t always know how much of ourselves to share with the public. I believe it behooves each of us to create and curate an author persona—the public face for our work. When we become published authors, get our first podcast interview, our first guest post on a well-regarded writing blog, our first press interview, our first book event—somewhere along that path the thought occurs: Who am I? Who do I want to be? What am I telling the world about myself and my writing?

Wise choices count here. On the one hand, if we don’t reveal anything, we may curtail our exposure and success. However, if we splatter too much personal information in too many places, we confuse our potential audience.

In other words, just like the Roman aristocrats, you have choices about what the public sees. Not a fake mask to hide behind, your persona is a filtered subset of the great array of attributes, quirks, and appetites that make up the person you are, along with the characteristics of the creative work you produce.

Doing our best creative writing is not our only mission. Why? Because most of us want readers. And if that’s the case for you, then you’ll benefit from considering how you present yourself to others. We’re in the world, surrounded by other writers who want to be read, and readers hungry for cues about whose work to read next. We need to keep an eye on the marketplace for our published work. How will these new readers know who we are? How will we tell them enough about ourselves to make them want to know more?

Are you clear about your writer persona?

For starters, your writer persona is not as comprehensive as your entire self. Your writer persona is a bit like a character you craft in your written work (nonfiction or fiction). It’s not as comprehensive, or confusing, as the totality of you. It’s your public face, formed from carefully chosen aspects of your whole identity. How do you narrow it down?

Here are some considerations:

Who does your reader connect with? What aspects of you do they care about?
Look at your published work and works in progress. What traits and narratives about you fit with those written works?
In light of your work, what tone of voice, degree of formality, use of vernacular, popular culture references, and clothing choices do you adopt for your public self?
Does your author bio note that you are skilled at inhabiting characters who are quite unlike you? Or do you prefer that your readers not know how different from your protagonists you actually are?
Do you prefer podcasts over video interviews, even if the conventional wisdom stresses video’s superiority as a marketing and publicity tool? Is it that you have something to hide, or is it more that you guard your privacy?

Choose based on how you want to be seen—on a really good day. Your public persona isn’t a fun-house mirror. It’s you at your best. And it’s a member of your staff, so to speak. As Steven Pressfield puts it in Turning Pro, “Madonna does not identify with ‘Madonna.’ Madonna employs ‘Madonna’.” (Emphasis added.)

Your persona helps you cultivate ongoing relationships with your readers. You’re still you, still the creative person who wrote these stories, books, and articles. And, recognizing that you’re a producer of content for an audience, you come to accept that there’s nothing sleazy about this process of definition.

Curating your author persona

As writers, we have choices about how much we share about ourselves. An introverted author is likely to want to direct focus elsewhere: Read the book! Listen to the interview! Why look too closely at me? A more outgoing person may have other concerns, like: Yikes, photos from every party I ever went to are all over social media already! I’ve made too many enemies! My outspoken political opinions may narrow my reading audience.

Does all this remind you of dating sites? Me too.

Being specific helps. Once you know how much privacy you’ll protect, consider which good details are shareworthy. For instance, does your author bio tell the world you enjoy walks on the beach? Great. Here are some follow-up questions to ask yourself.

Choices, choices

Do you add that you live in the mountains and see the beach once a year for your annual retreat near Cozumel? Or is it the Alabama Gulf Coast or Lake Ontario? Or Lake Como with your good bud George Clooney? Or Haiti where you volunteer in an orphanage every year? Do you want people to know any of those details? Why?

If you’re in a primary relationship that you choose not to publicize, how much do you reveal in your author bio? What if you’re single, live alone, and don’t want creepers stalking you?
Are you shy and introverted? Or is everyone drawn to you when you walk into a room?
Does writing comes easily to you? Or do you struggle for every paragraph?
Do you write to understand the world; to advocate for a cause; to explore a lousy chapter in your life; to donate the proceeds to hungry children; to further your career in business?
What about your headshot? Do you want to be smiling and open? Half-obscured by shadows and a long-brimmed hat? If you have medical issues that just added forty temporary pounds to your normal appearance, do you want a recent headshot, or one without the puffiness from your meds?

 

Ask the experts

A time-honored technique for building your public face involves consulting the people who know and love you—your close associates, friends, and relatives. It can be as simple as asking them for a handful of words that describe your work, and you as a writer. From those lists, you can do a lot to create the overall mood, tone, and look of your writer persona. For instance, if you hear words like sharp, classy, glamorous, witty, and urbane, you’ll probably want your author photos and book covers to feature night skies, high-contrast Deco architecture, and evening dress, rather than galoshes and a sun-dappled cow pasture.

What does your reader already know?

If you write fiction, you can share only the likes, dislikes, and causes that point in the direction of your invented plots. Compare that to memoir. If your book is derived from your own life story, you are going to make choices as to which parts of your life you are prepared to share. Your private life, your family of origin, your schooling—depending on the focus of the memoir, all those and more facets of your history may become public. And if you want your memoir to succeed, you’ll benefit from coming to terms with your choices and keeping them well defined and consistent.

If you’ve been in the public eye for other reasons besides your writing—your career, a famous relative, a news item, an award, or your military service, for example—you won’t be able to erase those parts of your life. Do some searches for your name—all the possible versions of it—and incorporate into your author persona the awareness of these existing mentions. You don’t need to include all of them but you probably want to be consistent with them.

Damaged personae

Generally, once information about yourself gets into the great data flow in the ether, you can’t pull it back. Google and the other search engines will find any indiscretion you release into the public stream. Even if you wish you hadn’t.

The material you present to the public through social media, your email signature, your headshot, your blog entries, book events, promotional materials, the media kit on your website, the interviews and online book tours you engineer—and in every author bio you place on every book and reader website—all of that is within your power to create (if you make it) and curate (if someone else makes it). For instance, if an interview goes horribly wrong, you can leave it out of the links you list on your website and share on social media. You can’t eradicate it but you can choose not to publicize it.

Do you cultivate your persona?

If you already have a working version of your public face, revisit it and check to see how recent events have changed anything. Have you won an award, published something new, given a presentation, joined an organization, spoken on a panel, written about a recent illness, become a parent, or been in the news? Do you need a new headshot? Your persona will be in evidence online, in person, and in all your direct communications, by phone, video, email, letter, and decoder ring.

Keeping up with your public face is a great work-related distraction when you’re not writing. It can also be an effective pattern interrupter. If you’re struggling with feeling unconnected from other people, this work grounds you by reminding you of your role in the larger community and your part in the shared human experience. Maintaining your public persona brings you home. On the other hand, if you’re overwhelmed with connectedness, this work reminds you of the importance of defining and maintaining your own unique identity as a writer.

Once you’ve formulated your writer persona, use it and keep it current. Whatever news you decide to share, run it past your defined writer persona. Is this new information consistent with your carefully defined writer persona? Does it add to the impact you and your work are making in the world? Does it protect your boundaries, and those of your close family and friends? Or is it time to update your persona to fit these recent changes in your life and work?

The big time?

If you ever want your book to become known by people outside your immediate acquaintance, you’re no doubt already aware that you’ll be doing your own marketing and promotion. This is true even if you have a contract with a major publisher, and is essential if you do not.

Each time you do an interview, each time you appear in a newspaper or blog, each time your website is linked from the website of an influencer you admire, you are building the infrastructure you’ll need for the rest of your writing career. Remain conscious and keep track of your intentions. Then, when you and your work do hit the bigtime, you’ll have it made in the shade. You and your public persona will be ready.

For all these reasons, it matters how you present yourself. And because the internet remembers everything, it’s smart to make the decisions as early in your writing career as possible. I call it going public, by design. It happens bit by bit. It’s not just for celebrities, either. Here’s a personal story on that last point: A few months ago, I launched a handbook for writers about becoming unstuck, and yet, when it came time to draft this blog post, I realized I had gotten stuck on this very topic—going public as a writer.

I’m not well-known, outside my community of clients, colleagues, fellow writers, and friends, so it’s presumptuous of me—I told myself—to advise anyone else about going public, right? If I were world-famous, I might have credibility on this point, but until then, not so much. Then I saw things more clearly, and realized that I’ve been gradually going public for some time. Each of us benefits from cultivating and curating our public persona as a writer. This is true whether we’re just starting out, somewhere in the great middle, or established in the public eye. You’re the curator of your writerly identity. Take your responsibilities to heart, and you’ll enjoy adding to this identity as you build your career and your creative life.

Note from Jane: Anne’s email course 30 Days to Becoming Unstuck is free this May with the purchase of the paperback edition of FLOAT • Becoming Unstuck for Writers. Register here. In August she’ll offer a new guided self-study course called Going Public: Creating and Curating Your Author Persona. Portions of this blog post are adapted from FLOAT.

Pantser or Plotter? Deciding Which Can Save Your Writing Life

Photo credit: eilonwy77 via Visual hunt / CC BY-SA

Today’s guest post is by novelist Jess Lourey (@jesslourey), author of the critically acclaimed Murder-by-Month mysteries.

I’ve led over 50 creative writing workshops across the United States, and I start each one by asking everyone in attendance to raise their hand if they’ve written a book. About 75% of the attendees usually indicate they’ve penned a complete novel.

“Great. Keep your hands up if you have published that book, either traditionally or self-published.”

About half the room still has their hands in the air. I then ask them to keep them up if they are a plotter, i.e. someone who outlines their book before writing it. Fifty percent of the remaining hands drop. Those whose don’t sit up a little straighter, their hands a little higher (we plotters have an inclination to also be brown-nosers).

“Awesome. Drop your hands, plotters, and let me see the pantsers’ hands.” Pansters are writers who prefer to create by the seat of their pants. In other words, rather than outline their novel, they hop in their concept like it’s a car, letting it take them where it takes them, only seeing as far ahead as their headlights allow.

The plotters drop their hands so the pantsers can tentatively raise theirs. In general, I’ve discovered that pantsers are shy about the way they create, worrying on some level that they should maybe be more organized. But here’s the point that I’m always trying to make with this activity, and it’s undeniable: about half of published writers are plotters, and about half are pantsers. One is not the right way or the wrong way; there is only the way that works best for you.

But how do you know which that is?

I agree with my friend Shannon Baker, author of the upcoming Kate Fox mystery, Dark Signal, who says it depends on the project, but regardless, “The plot is the toughest job in novel writing. I love creating characters and relationships, the setting, the premise, the general idea of the book. The nuts and bolts and twists, reversals, keeping the middle from falling like a failed soufflé, creating an ending no one saw coming? That is hard.”

My personal preference—to find my way through that mess—is to outline. With my first eight novels, I created a very structured writing map, consisting of a table where the lefthand column contained dates and the righthand column was scene summaries. I would summarize a scene in two or three sentences, just enough so that I knew what direction I was going but not so much that it took all the fun out of writing the scene. This level of outlining allowed me to make sure I wasn’t making common plotting mistakes before I’d gotten too far into the book to correct them.

However, when I wrote The Toadhouse Trilogy, my young adult novel about kids who can travel inside of classical literature, that method failed. I spent weeks trying to fit the story into that table, but I simply could not cram it in there. I was so dependent on what had worked for me before that I almost gave up on the novel all together. Only the frustration at the amount of time I’d devoted to it drove me to try a new method of outlining. I grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a small circle in the middle, and the drew ever-larger circles around that. It looked like the top of a pond after you’d dropped a rock into it. I wrote the inciting incident in the center circle, and then the resulting conflicts in the outer circle, one leading to the other. This was a simplified version of a plot planner that worked for me.

When it came time to write The Catalain Book of Secrets, my magical realism novel which features multiple points of view, though, neither of those methods would work. I ended up pantsing for 10,000 words, then physically printing out those pages and cutting the paper into scenes. Once I had a stack of crazy notes, I bought a roll of butcher paper, moving around the scenes, adding some and deleting others, and finally pasting it (with actual Elmer’s glue) onto the butcher paper once I had everything where I wanted it. I sketched pictures where it was helpful.

My point is, don’t trap your creativity in a label. Shannon backs this up: “Write the book how it works for you. If you typically write three chapters, stall out and quit, then try a more detailed outline. If plotting makes you feel confined, freewrite the sucker. Don’t let anyone tell you how you should work, but keep your mind open to what might help you do it better. Don’t stop writing, no matter what.”

In other words, if you are pantsing, and it’s going well, pants on! If you are outlining and feel safe and creative, then keep outlining. If your go-to used to work but isn’t for this project, try something new. It’s called “creative” writing for a reason, after all.

If you want to explore other methods of story planning


Story Engineering by Larry Brooks


Save the Cat by Blake Snyder


Story Magic (workshop) by Laura Baker and Robin Perini

The Writer’s Journey by Chris Vogler

Tell us in the comments: Are you a pantser or a plotter? What methods have you devised for planning or structuring your work?

If you enjoyed this post by Jess, take a look at her TED talk, Use Fiction to Rewrite Your Life.

How to Optimize Your Amazon Author Central Pages (Don’t Forget the International Pages)

Today’s guest post is by Penny Sansevieri (@bookgal), CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts. She recently released 5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors, from which this post is adapted.

Most authors have learned by now that it’s critical to have a great Amazon book description and metadata. But incredibly often, authors don’t take the time to also leverage their Amazon Author Central Page as a sales tool. And it could hurt your sales, especially as you develop your reader base. Readers tend to use Amazon to look at an author’s complete list of books, so by optimizing your Author Central page, you’ll find that you draw in more repeat readers than before. Perhaps exponentially so!

Every author, regardless of when or what they’ve published, has an Author Central page. But many authors have not claimed theirs. If you’re not sure you’ve claimed yours yet, head on over to Author Central. You can access it using your usual Amazon login credentials. Even if you are traditionally published, you still have an Author Central page.

To claim the page, you must sign in and add content. First, make sure that all of your books are claimed under your author page. It’s easy enough—simply list them in Author Central by inserting their ISBNs and posting them to your page. Amazon will double-check your entries for accuracy. Once they do, you’ll find a library of your books on your Author Central page.

In addition to your Amazon US page, also check out your Amazon UK page. (I don’t know why Amazon keeps these separate.) If you grab this page as well, it’ll help drive attention from Amazon’s UK site. You can find it here. There are also Author Central Pages for other countries, which you’ll also want to claim; I’ll offer more detail on that later.

Not sure what a standard Author Central page looks like? Check out Jane’s.

As you can see, she has added her bio (under her photo), listed her books, and has fed in her blog posts. Amazon allows you to add these types of items to your page:

RSS feeds—such as those from your blog or Tumblr account
Events, including speaking engagements and bookstore appearances
Up to 8 images of yourself (which you can update any time) — this is a great opportunity to feature new books, upcoming promotions, or even awards won! Readers love seeing things like this on your page.
Multiple videos of yourself — you can use anything from you talking at an event, a book trailer, or a video customized for the page.

Amazon Author Central also offers you important sales data (for free!)

One of the bigger benefits of accessing your Author Central page is getting a look at your book sales data. Let’s take look at this page. Below is the top bar you’ll see once you log in.

From here you can get sales data, rankings for all of your titles, and customer reviews. Your sales data is supplied by BookScan, a reporting agency previously only accessible to publishers or agents. Subscriptions to this service cost a fortune, but Amazon now includes BookScan data in your Author Central page. And even though it’s only data for your own books’ sales, it’s incredible. You can view data for all of your books at once or just one at a time. You can also view data by month and year. You’ll want to track this carefully as you do promotions. (Note that the BookScan data only covers print editions, though.)

You can also check your author rank. Unlike Bookscan data, your author rank encompasses both print and ebooks. The rankings can be viewed by month, week, or year. This helps you to see how your rank aligns with copies sold. The mystery remains as to how many copies must be sold to bump up your sales rank, but this information is still helpful.

Don’t forget your international Author Central pages

As I referenced earlier, in addition to US and UK Author Central pages, these great features also exist in other countries. And this facet of Amazon may be the single most overlooked sales tool! One of our clients recently noticed that she’s been selling lots of books in Japan and wondered how she could capitalize on this trend and sell even more books there. It really doesn’t take much time or effort to claim your international Author Central pages. The best part is that all the international Author Central pages are the same. Before we dig too far into this, countries that do not (yet) have Author Central pages set up include:

Brazil
Canada
China
Mexico
Netherlands

These countries all list your book, but don’t have a page connecting all of your titles. And, unless your book is specifically connected to one of these countries, either in terms of subject, setting, or plot, you probably won’t sell as many books. Still watch for future developments, because once Amazon debuts Author Central Pages for these countries, you’ll want to hop aboard that train!

Aside from the US and UK, the countries that offer Author Central pages at this time are:

France
Japan
Germany

In order to know what to expect on these pages, we’ll take a look at a few of them, starting with France.

It is slightly different than your USA Amazon Author Central page, albeit in a different language. Of course, your author bio will remain in English, but if your books are in English too, this works just fine.

The German version of Amazon Author Central looks more like the version you’re used to seeing, once again in a different language.

Japan’s Author Central Pages work slightly differently. But only slightly. First, you have to first register yourself there. So you’ll use your same username and password as you do for the US site and it takes just a few clicks, so don’t let the “new registration” deter you. It’s still quick and easy to do. From there, you’ll need to verify your email—in fact, the other countries’ sites request this too—and afterward, you’re good to go.

When you’re optimizing your international Author Central pages, you may want to use the Chrome browser and its quick “translate” button. This is far more accurate than any other web translation tools I’ve tried. It allows you to quickly translate a Japanese website into English in a single easy step.

Once you’ve claimed your pages, you’ll need your bio. Feel free to use the bio you created for yourself on your US page. Just keep in mind that it might be beneficial to enhance and/or update it for each country. You might feature any story lines or research in a particular country: Did you fall in love with an area on a visit? Have family there, or another great personal connection? Use it to help build your reader base in that country.

Here you can see one of my client’s Author Central Pages across several countries, they’re robust, engaging and keep all of the author’s books in one place so the readers can spot them easily. I’m including the US and UK in here too so you can see how they compare!

France: https://www.amazon.fr/-/e/B00AB0CHJQ

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/-/e/B00AB0CHJQ

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/e/B00AB0CHJQ

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00AB0CHJQ

US: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00AB0CHJQ


Handy links to all Author Central pages

To make it simple for you, here are the links to access and update each of your pages.

France: https://authorcentral.amazon.fr/

Germany: https://authorcentral.amazon.de/gp/home

Japan: https://authorcentral.amazon.co.jp/gp/home

UK: https://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/home

US: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/


But does it sell books?

Yes. In fact, authors we’ve done this for have seen a substantial sales uptick in international markets as they’ve updated these pages. Keep in mind that if you already selling books in these markets, this will help you a great deal. If you aren’t, let’s say, selling books in Germany, you may not see any immediate effect there. But it’s still a fabulous thing to have, update and optimize!

The bottom line

Amazon’s Author Central Pages are key to boosting your sales. And since they’re so quick and easy to optimize, it would be a huge missed opportunity to not take advantage of them. Even if you only touch it occasionally, say when you have big news or are publishing a new book, it’s absolutely worth your time to optimize these pages. In a perfect world, you’d take a look at them at least quarterly, but it’s most important that you claim them and take advantage of the benefits.

If you enjoyed this post by Penny, be sure to take a look at 5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors.

4 Methods for Developing Any Idea Into a Great Story

Photo credit: -Visavis- via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Today’s guest post is by Elizabeth Sims (@ESimsAuthor) and is excerpted from The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, an anthology compiled by Writer’s Digest. (I’m a contributor to the anthology as well!)

A while ago I attended an inventors’ club meeting. Some of the members had already launched successful products and were working on more, while others were merely beginners with great ideas. The beginners were commiserating about how hard it is to deal with financing, raw materials, manufacturing, promotion, and all the rest, when one of the experienced inventors suddenly stood up. “Look,” he said impatiently, “ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the development that puts you over the top. Do what you have to do to make it real and get it to market.”

I was surprised, because I’d always thought that a brilliant idea could make you a fortune. But I quickly realized my new friend was right: Idea is just the beginning.

Fiction writers have a lot in common with those inventors. It’s not hard to get inspired by a great concept, to take it to your table or toolshed or cellar and do some brainstorming, and even to start putting the story on paper—but eventually, many of us lose traction. Why? Because development doesn’t happen on its own. In fact, I’ve come to think that idea development is the number one skill an author should have.

How do great authors develop stunning narratives, break from tradition, and advance the form of their fiction? They take whatever basic ideas they’ve got, then move them away from the typical. No matter your starting point—a love story, buddy tale, mystery, quest—you can do like the great innovators do: Bend it. Amp it. Drive it. Strip it.

1. Bend it

Chuck Palahniuk is on record as saying he drew heavily from The Great Gatsby to create his novel Fight Club. I’ve read both books (multiple times) but would not have perceived that parallel. He said, “Really, what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby updated a little. It was ‘apostolic’ fiction—where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death.” Palahniuk transformed a traditional love story set in the high society of America’s Roaring Twenties into a violent and bloody tale of sexual obsession, cultism, and social disruption set in a rotten world.

He bent the ideas behind Gatsby into something all his own. The next time you get a great idea for a story, don’t stop there. Bend your initial concept, making it more unique—and more powerful—with every turn:

Get our of your head and into your pelvis. Give your characters inner yearnings (sexual or otherwise) they don’t understand and can’t deal with cognitively. Palahniuk gave his apostolic main character an unnamable urge, a gland-level longing that drives him to pretend to be a cancer patient and participate in support groups where hugging and crying are not only okay but expected. Breaking the taboo against exploiting nonexistent pain does more than give the character relief: It moves the story forward in huge leaps.

Brainstorm who your characters might be by reimagining their motivations. Let’s say you’ve come up with the idea that your main character is an insomniac who needs chocolate to fall asleep. Bend that urge into something that is totally disquieting to anybody but your protagonist. Wouldn’t it be more compelling if she has to, say, shoplift an expensive item precisely one hour before bedtime?

Break away from familiar parameters. Most authors write characters with backgrounds similar to their own, at least with respect to class, education, and money. Throw that out. Write billionaires, bums, addicts, the hopeless, the heroic. Give them crappy, selfish habits, resentments, grudges. Mix traits. Make feral creatures out of urban sophisticates and urban sophisticates out of feral creatures.

Add insanity. The key to making a character believably and compellingly crazy is to give him a way to rationalize his behavior, from the slightly weird to the outrageous. Is your character actually nuts, or is there something else going on? How can anybody tell? Crazy characters need a lot of resources to keep them out of trouble—and can have a major impact on everybody else. Have fun with that.

2. Amp it

Brief Encounter is a British film adapted from Nöel Coward’s play Still Life. It’s the story of two quiet people who meet and fall in love in spite of being married to others, but then, conscience stricken, break off the relationship before it really gets going. The small, exquisite tragedy resonated with the genteel, romantic codes of conduct valued in prewar England.

But then along comes Tennessee Williams with his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a love story that has similar themes at its core but rips us away from any semblance of civilization. Could Williams ever amp drama! For one thing, he knew that a story about noble ideals wouldn’t cut it anymore. Setting his play in the emotionally brutal mélange of the postwar American South, he slashed into the secret marrow of his protagonists and antagonists alike, exposing the weaknesses and delusions that bind people together on the surface while tearing them apart below decks.

Take the essence of your story, and amp it:

Add characters and pile on the emotion. Playwrights used to limit the number of characters in their stories, not wanting to overcrowd the stage. But when Williams crams six or eight people onto the scene at once and sets them all at one another’s throats, we get a chance to feel their emotional claustrophobia and unwanted interdependence. Amp up your action by adding cunning, vindictiveness, jealousy, fear of exposure, stupidity, even death.

Expose internal bleeding. The deepest, most painful wounds are the invisible ones humans inflict on one another and themselves in a hundred ways: betrayal, selfishness, abandonment. Strive to write characters who feel vulnerable to pain, whose secrets are so close to the surface that they can’t afford to be polite. Put in a truth teller and watch the inner flesh rip and sizzle.

Create blood ties. Kinship is story gold. Take your pick of, and take your time with, its darker aspects: scapegoating, favoritism, jealousy. A blood link can instantly heighten any conflict, because kinship is the one thing in life you can’t change or walk away from. Make your characters learn this the hard way.

3. Drive it

Many great modern stories spring from the same seeds as old folk tales. The subjugation of young women, for instance, is not only one of the oldest oppressions, it’s one of the most pernicious—hence, it still resonates with audiences of all sorts. We first meet Cinderella in the scullery, a slave to the rough demands of her stepmother and older stepsisters. When Cinderella tries to take some initiative to improve her situation, she’s squelched and punished.

Margaret Atwood, in her landmark dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, steers the Cinderella archetype away from any home whatsoever and from any relationships, besides. She multiplies Cinderella a thousand times, and all the Cinderellas are kept alive for the sole asset they possess that can’t be synthesized (at least, not yet!): their fertile wombs. Their purpose is to procreate a society that would be better off dead. And there are no handsome princes to come along and change anything.

Atwood drove Cinderella to a point almost—but not quite—beyond recognition. And that’s the power.

You, too, can make gut-wrenching magic out of your fiction by driving your tale to a conclusion further than you ever thought it could go:

Start at the crux of your premise and hit the gas. Agents and editors often tell new writers, “Don’t start at the beginning, start in the middle,” which usually means, “Don’t waste pages setting up the core of your story.” Wise advice. Try starting at your knottiest point, and then drive it forward using the same techniques that got your concept there.

Make it bigger than the individual. How would an organization intimidate and subjugate? Make it legal; go step by small step. Lawlessness isn’t as frightening as a breakdown of the social order with the wrong people in charge. An organization can be as small as a truck stop, a fraternity house, or a bridal party. Let everything seem normal at first, and then gradually let things deteriorate and go wrong.

Add the complicity of a victim. Polite, politically correct society isn’t at all comfortable with a victim being complicit in his own oppression. Good! The discomfort comes from the fact that everybody knows but doesn’t want to know that such perversion of the human spirit exists; it’s real because self-deceit is real. Break the taboo and use it to make your tale breathtaking, like a ship breaking apart on a reef.

Put in an impossible choice. The women in Atwood’s novel live an impossible choice every day: Do they go along, or rebel? To go along is to destroy yourself from within; to rebel is to invite certain destruction from without. An impossible choice can confront someone who’s being black-mailed, or someone who absolutely must have two conflicting things, or any number of other possibilities. And it can steer your story in new directions like nothing else.

4. Strip it

War has been the seed of innumerable creative works. In developing War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy put in everything he could think of because war is so big. To represent the French invasion of Russia and the accompanying Napoleonic era, he wrote an epic that followed dozens of characters. The sheer, pounding weight of detail in War and Peace helps us understand the impact of war on individuals and the institutions they thought to be unshakable.

But Ernest Hemingway, a young man reeling from his own experiences in World War I, stripped away everything he could think of because war is as small as one man. Confronted with the realities of war, he wrote what came to him, then stripped it and sanded it until nothing but hard, bright pieces were left. The result, In Our Time, is a collection of vignettes and short stories that evokes the immediate horror and lingering pain of that most awful of human activities.

When it starts to seem as if no number of words can truly represent the reality of anything, explore what might happen if you strip down your idea to allow the miniature to suggest the infinite:

Convey emotion through action, not description. Inexperienced storytellers often try—alas, unsuccessfully—to do what Tolstoy did well: to not only show what happens but to tell in deep, ruminative detail how everybody feels about it. To Siberia with that! Do like Papa Hemingway: When Joe’s dad in “My Old Man” gets crushed to death on the horse track, Hemingway simply lets Joe tell us that the cops held him back, and what his father’s dead face looked like, and that it was pretty hard to stop crying right then. You, too, can present life-and-death emotion without saying a word about it. Adopting this approach from the outset of your idea development can save you a lot of writing and rewriting later.

Use small particulars to bring big things to life. A mushroom cloud, or a burned, crying baby? A wedding with a cast of thousands, or the intimate taste of a lover? A travelogue, or the feel of acceleration down a mountain road? It’s not too early to start thinking about your details. Be choosy. What makes your heart quicken? Those glancing moments may offer up all the description you need.

When you implement these techniques, don’t bear down hard on any one; take a light, relaxed approach and allow idea to build on idea. If you do that, your innate creativity will take over. It knows what it’s doing! At times when you’re really rolling, your ideas will seem to develop themselves; they’ll pop brighter and bite deeper.

And like the best inventors, who combine brilliant ideas with the guts and drive to make them reality, you won’t be stuck drumming your fingers on the drafting table. You’ll be producing well-developed stories with the optimum chance of success.

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Elizabeth Sims’ book, You’ve Got a Book in You. Or, take a look at The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, with more than 70 articles by expert writers and teachers.

Today’s Publishing Landscape: Two Generations of Literary Agents Speak Out

Today’s guest post is a literary agent Q&A by Sangeeta Mehta (@sangeeta_editor), a former acquiring editor of children’s books at Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster, who runs her own editorial services company.

How do agenting styles vary within the same family? Are there generational differences when agents approach opportunities such as self- and hybrid publishing, which didn’t exist until a few years ago? Or in how they define their role, which in some ways is continually evolving, and in other ways hasn’t changed at all?

I asked legendary publishing veteran Robert Gottlieb, who founded Trident Media Group, and his son Mark Gottlieb, who is growing his list and has been groomed to work in his family’s business from the start. 

SANGEETA MEHTA: What is the primary role of the agent today, and how has it changed during the course of your career?

MARK GOTTLIEB: A literary agent exists primarily to provide services to authors who are clients of the literary agency. Some of those services might include, but are not limited to:

submitting manuscripts to publishers for their consideration
negotiating deals
handling contract review
accounting
editorial review of manuscripts
book-to-film/TV deals
audiobook deals
foreign rights deals

Literary agents today cannot merely do a deal for a client and walk away from the author’s publishing experience. It’s now more important than ever for a literary agent to take a bigger and active role in a client’s life with their vested interest.

At the Trident Media Group, we perform additional services for our clients such as publishing management, as well as commenting on a book publisher’s marketing/publicity plans, or even commenting on cover design, among many other services in going far and above what a literary agency would normally offer a client.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Agents are more involved in the business activities of an author’s career beyond making the initial deal. Trident as a firm is set up to support the activities of our clients and as agents we are results oriented for our authors.

Would a debut writer be better served by an agent who is just starting out—or an agent with many years of experience? Which agent is more likely to have the right contacts? To give the writer the attention they might need?

MARK GOTTLIEB: Usually a debut writer will be best served by the right type of literary agent specializing in authors trying to make their major debut. It won’t have too much to do with the age of a literary agent, how established that literary agent is, nor how full a literary agent’s client list is already. A literary agent’s client base and type of deals will be a good indication of whether or not they are particularly strong in the area of working with debuts.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: The good news for a debut author is they don’t have a track record. The bad news is they don’t have a track record. Debut authors can get lost in a house’s publishing program. The agent has to have the right connections in order to convince the publisher to invest in the marketing of a debut novel, as opposed to relying primarily on reviews of books by previously published authors.

The release of Lee & Low’s  Diversity Baseline Survey  last year revealed something that many in the field already suspected: That book publishing is predominately white. Publishers Weekly recently suggested that it may be  too liberal . Do you think there is much diversity among employees at literary agencies? How can literary agents address this issue?

MARK GOTTLIEB: Compared to publishers, literary agencies are much smaller in terms of the number of employees at an agency, so the picture of the diversity at a given literary agency will look much different than that of a publisher with thousands of employees. It has to be viewed on the scale of the size of a company. A lack of diversity is more of an issue for a publishing house to think about addressing, in terms of who they employ and the type of books they acquire from literary agencies submitting diverse books. That said, I am always open to diverse voices.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: Publishing has always been a welcoming environment for anyone who wants to make a career in the field.

What is the general attitude toward self-publishing and hybrid publishing at Trident Media? Are attitudes toward self-publishing are changing among the editors you typically do business with, or does a stigma remain?

MARK GOTTLIEB: Many literary agents at our agency have taken on clients from the self-publishing sphere, us both included. Bestseller status from a self-published writer is usually what prompts a literary agent to approach a writer in the self-publishing space. Were a self-published book to have sold 50,000 copies or hit the USA Today, Wall Street Journal or New York Times list, then that would usually prompt us to reach out to a self-published writer. Many editors are now open to self-published authors where they have met that bestseller threshold at a decent price. The stigma of snobbery toward self-published authors is waning.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: It’s all about giving our clients options that feed the root system of their career. Hybrid publishing is a wonderful way to cross market and at the same time hold ground in a format of self-publishing. If you are an author with contracts with a publisher, you can still write e-books that have different characters, story lines, and genres, and let us help you broaden your brand.

The New York Times recently asked if the  fresh crop of doomsday novels are channeling the country’s collective anxieties.  Considering the popularity of dystopian fiction today, would you nudge any of your established clients to write in this direction? Most agents advise their clients not to write to trend—but should they write with the country’s cultural climate in mind?  

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: I’ll let Mark answer that one.

MARK GOTTLIEB: The rise of doomsday books are likely a direct result of the country’s collective panic over the nation’s selection for president, rather than the reverse, since it was a deeply divided election and Trump is a highly controversial figure. Particularly in fiction, we usually encourage clients to pursue whatever they are interested in writing about, rather than doling out writing assignments. It’s still valuable for an author to be aware of current trends in book publishing, but not to merely pander to trends. It’s better for authors to be making waves than riding out behind them.

At this point in your career, how likely are you to take on a project that resonates with you personally but probably won’t receive much more than a modest book deal? Are you able to pursue passion projects?

MARK GOTTLIEB: The occasional passion project is good for every literary agent’s sanity. With that being said, there’s likely to be fewer passion projects from more highly established literary agents than with literary agents in the process of building their career.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: All of us at Trident want to make sure that when we take on an author it is for the long term. If we make a modest deal for an author it’s a start to something bigger down the road.

Can you demystify any other aspects of agenting for writers who are hoping to secure representation with you? To become a part of Trident Media’s client base?

MARK GOTTLIEB: Not every literary agent is a hotshot—some just put on airs to seem important in the eyes of others. Many literary agents are actually very down-to-earth, so writers shouldn’t be afraid to approach a literary agent at a conference or event. Too many authors get themselves psyched-out over that and miss opportunities to find literary representation as a result.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB: It all starts with a great book. Agents are only as good as the authors they represent.

Read more of Sangeeta’s industry insider interviews.

Mark Gottlieb (‪@Mark_Gottlieb) attended Emerson College and was president of its Publishing Club, establishing the Wilde Press. After graduating with a degree in writing, literature & publishing, he began his career with Penguin’s VP. Mark’s first position at Publishers Marketplace’s No. 1-ranked literary agency, Trident Media Group, was in foreign rights. Mark was EA to Trident’s Chairman and ran the Audio Department. Mark is currently working with his own client list, helping to manage and grow author careers with the unique resources available to Trident. He has ranked No. 1 among literary agents on PublishersMarketplace.com in overall deals and other categories.

After graduating from Elmira College, Robert Gottlieb ‪(@Trident_Media) began his career in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency as part of the company’s agent-in-training program. After 24 years at William Morris, where he rose to Executive VP, he founded Trident Media Group, LLC, where he currently serves as Chairman. Robert explains, “I started the Trident Media Group agency in 2000 so that I could inculcate the entrepreneurial spirit into the DNA of the firm from inception.”