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5 On: Patrick Walsh

In this 5 On interview, book publicist Patrick Walsh discusses effective social media promotion, what it takes to make the same old book-marketing advice work for you, questions to ask yourself when trying to decide whether your story should be a book or a screenplay, and more.

Publishing Push founder Patrick Walsh has a BA (Hons) degree in law from the University of Surrey. He began his career in the film industry by producing a feature film that was taken to the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. After that early success, he traveled to the vibrant city of Toronto and spent time with Trend Hunter, then returned to London, where he founded Publishing Push. Since its formation at the start of 2012, Publishing Push has worked with clients across the UK, Europe, Asia, and the USA.

5 on Writing

What area of law did you study, and did it in any way contribute to your passion for marketing and innovation?

I studied for my LLB (Bachelor of Laws), and the first two years consisted of mandatory modules in a variety of areas. In my final year I chose to focus on commercial law, company law, intellectual property law, and media law.

At a young age I realized that you can have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, you won’t sell it. The true light-bulb moment was witnessing the effect technology can have on supercharging your marketing efforts.

After completing university I traveled to Toronto, Canada. I arrived to -20°C temperatures. The reason for plunging myself into these arctic conditions was to spend time at Trend Hunters, a young but rapidly growing digital magazine that focused on the latest trends in a variety of industries. They were incredibly passionate about delivering excellent content. Everything had to be well written. Such an editorial touch was lacking at that time from many digital publications.

But the main reason I made the journey was to learn more about PR and marketing. They had grown their digital magazine to billions of views using online advertising, social media, and PR.

Before founding Publishing Push, you were an associate producer on the movie Breaking Down. What inspired you to make the switch to book publicity?

Breaking Down was an amazing experience. Any movie production is based very heavily around the script, and this was my introduction to professional writing.

To give this some context in terms of my journey, the film project was underway before I traveled to Toronto, but that was really where the attraction to marketing began.

We devised an incredibly creative campaign for the release of the film. This was around the same time Paranormal Activity was taking the world by storm, a film made on a micro budget with a great marketing strategy that had made an astronomical return on investment. To coincide with this, Chat Roulette—a service allowing video chatters to be randomly paired with other video chatters—had gained a lot of notoriety. Our film had been shot in found-footage style, and the plan was to submit the feed to Chat Roulette, thus generating a viral buzz as people stumbled upon what may be a genuine webcam broadcast or, of course as it was, a movie trailer.

Despite the film never being sold for international distribution, we received some great feedback on the marketing plan from major studios. They said the marketing campaign was the reason they considered the film so closely.

So how did I transition from movies to books? Well, as mentioned above, I traveled to Toronto to improve my marketing and PR skills. After that I worked as a marketing consultant for a variety of companies. A client at the time introduced me to Toby Mundy, who was the CEO of Atlantic Books. We were asked by Atlantic to run a campaign for one of their bestselling authors, Robert Fabbri, to augment his presence and increase sales. Results had to be produced rapidly. We had six months.

We went out and found social media profiles with large followings that would appeal to his target audience. “The Romans” Facebook page catered to his demographic and had a very large following. After talking with them and introducing them to Robert’s books, we discussed content. They agreed the books would be of interest to their fans and happily shared a post about his latest book at the time, which was Rome’s Fallen Eagle. Essentially, we took a traditional PR approach but applied it to social media.

In addition, we wanted to grow Robert’s own following. Twitter in particular was a big focus and critical to Atlantic at the time. It was an important way for Robert to communicate with his fans. His feed hadn’t been sticking, so we tested a variety of content. The most popular was a live Q&A. We announced a time when Robert would be online, and he answered questions from fans. This was incredibly popular and boosted followers. A lesson learned that may surprise readers is that sharing content urging people to buy his book was well received. It surprised us, as well. Tweets recommending that followers make a purchase were shared profusely, which was a surprise to the whole team. That’s why you must always collect data and test.

We ended up increasing Robert’s weekly sales by 500 percent. Needless to say, his publisher was thrilled and Publishing Push was born.

What book released within the last five years do you wish you’d had the opportunity to promote?

This is a difficult question, as we have had the opportunity to work with a whole host of talented authors. We have been trusted with the launch of some very important sequels. Robert has taught us a great deal through how he approaches writing—his dedication to his craft is inspiring and is evidenced by the success of his books. Michael Grais is also an extremely accomplished writer, and it was an honor to be a part of his latest project.

I would have liked to have had the opportunity to work with John Harding on The Girl Who Couldn’t Read. (He is traditionally published, but we are often approached by authors who have traditional deals as well as those who are independent.) There are a couple of reasons I would have liked to work with him.

The first is that I enjoy his writing. We spoke with John prior to the release of The Girl Who Couldn’t Read, and he kindly sent me a copy of his earlier novel, Florence and Giles. Chilling literary thrillers are something that, when done well, are sublime to read. Especially if you like something that is a little creepy. Given the success of Florence and Giles, I knew there would be a captive audience for John’s new book.

The second reason is that I feel we could really have contributed to helping John build a larger platform for future releases. Given the success of his earlier writing, I know we could have amplified the success of The Girl Who Couldn’t Read.

In the end the collaboration didn’t go through, of course, but here is what we would have done:

Build more of a hub for John on his own website to pull his community there. Social media is also being underutilized by his team. There is a great opportunity there. Essentially, many of the methods used to promote Robert Fabbri would have worked well with Harding. His team did do a great job of obtaining reviews on blogs, however. There are a number of excellent results.

Do you read more fiction or nonfiction for pleasure, and what did you read most recently?

I read a lot of nonfiction for pleasure, currently. This is because my focus is on improving my business knowledge and growing Publishing Push. As I have a business to apply the lessons to, I can immediately implement the tips I am reading. Biographies are also incredibly interesting, and having played tennis competitively, I am always reading players’ books.

Say an unrepresented writer has a story idea that would work equally well as a novel or a screenplay. Based on your experience marketing both, what format would you advise as the better choice?

My experience in the film industry is brief in comparison to my experience with publishing. Additionally, we weren’t looking to have the screenplay optioned. One of the producers wrote the script, and we raised financing to have it made. We were selling it to investors and other production companies to secure a co-production deal.

But to compare these two options, we have to assume that the author is looking to secure a traditional publishing deal. That sets the scene which should give my answer context.

In selling a screenplay you have to focus on the following items:

Is this a hot genre currently? Are films in this genre making money currently? At the time we were pitching our script, found-footage films were huge, so we ticked that box. The same applies to those promoting a book. If the genre is currently popular, you will have an easier time.
Who are the stars? Who do you plan on casting for the roles? What is the likelihood you can secure them for the parts? These questions have to be answered, because it is about pulling in the actresses’ or actors’ existing fan base. This is an issue that doesn’t exist for a novel.
Where will you be producing the film? Many countries have co-production deals which allow for tax reductions and other benefits. Again, not an issue with a novel.
The team involved. Who is directing the movie? Who is coordinating the stunts? Who is your director of photography? The list goes on.

The easier route is to write an excellent novel. Build a presence online. Secure a publishing deal. Sell a large number of books and have a production company produce the film for you. Easier said than done, but it certainly is the lesser of two evils to get your story in front of people.

5 on Publishing

Most articles or blogs on book marketing say essentially the same thing: contribute a guest post to popular blogs or relevant magazines; use social media; get book bloggers to review your book; host giveaways or reduced-price promotions; build an email list and send regular (but not too many) updates; be persistent, but polite. Etc.

The result is a rush of authors trying to compete with the professionally pithy on Twitter, book bloggers being bombarded by review requests, an overwhelming selection of free Amazon ebooks that may end up on a Kindle but won’t necessarily be read, and people scrambling for the “unsubscribe” link after they receive their fifth, “What’s New With My Book? I’m Glad You Asked!” email.

All of this leads to the inevitable moment when the author thinks, “I just need an idea that stands out. That’s it—one idea. Like Tucker Max’s ‘hate me’ campaign, or Seth Godin’s milk carton book-delivery system. So simple! But if it’s so simple, why can’t I think of something like that?”

What do authors need to know about what I’ll call the Unicorn Campaign, and what should they know about how to use the currently accepted model in order for it to work for them while they wait for that scathingly brilliant idea to hit?

You’re absolutely right. Same old advice repeated over and over. There is a better way! After nearly 300 book marketing campaigns, we can certainly shed some light on what works. I will pick up on the key points from your question which need to be addressed.

Reviewers are bombarded by review requests. Especially those with a good social media following and a healthy email list. I have seen some of the approaches authors make to book bloggers. Here are a few key points:

Avoid too much detail. Of course you are passionate about your project, but you need to be concise. The bloggers, as we have already established, are bombarded with requests. They do this in their free time, after getting home from their busy job and settling the kids down for the evening. They want to understand quickly why your content is relevant to them and their audience. Focus on the book blogger. This leads me to my second point.
Do your research. You can be concise by studying their blog and understanding what they care about. What they enjoy. What they have read and enjoyed in the past. Limit your approach to no more than five lines and make it personal to them.
Provide links. Make it easy for them to view more information, if they wish. Reel them in with the concise pitch and then provide more value.
Grow your relationship with the bloggers. If you can develop a strong relationship, the approach will be much easier. Ideally start building a relationship in advance of asking for reviews. Intelligently comment on recent posts and share their content.

“Use social media” is advice everyone wheels out, but how you use social media is going to change constantly. We have always advocated using it like traditional PR. Building your own following is time consuming. Cut it short by having your content featured by social media accounts that are already established and relevant.

Email list growth is the most important thing you can do as an author. In fact, it is the most important thing you can do as any online business selling something. There are a couple of points to make, here.

Initially, how do you attract new subscribers? You write appropriate content. Here is an example. The content you write needs to be completely focused on your audience. This about who is going to buy your book. What interests them? What would they like to learn about? That isn’t enough, though. You need to promote your content. Promote it on forums, Facebook groups, Reddit, Google+ Communities, etc.
Stop people from scrambling for the unsubscribe link by providing relevant and personal content. Introduce them to you. People still buy from people they like. Be vulnerable and honest. James Altucher is an incredible example of that. Introduce them to your unique story and, again, valuable content. Your goal should be to create an email list of extreme value. If you don’t send out an email for a few months and people contact you to make sure they are still subscribed, you have succeeded.

Unicorn campaigns are a product of the basics done well. Seth Godin and Tucker Max have been building followings for years. Seth comes from a tech background, and Tucker is also part of that scene. They do the basics well, and the rest falls into place. A stroke of brilliance here and there just amplifies the results.

Another common piece of advice is to start promoting a book three years before its release by creating an online (or other) presence.

People seem to think about hiring publicists close to a book’s release, but would it make sense to hire one to promote the writer as a figure long before the book’s first draft is even finished, especially in the age of reality TV, in which people become famous simply because they’re successfully exposed to the public? (No pun intended.)

If you have started a blog or built a following online prior to the release, you do have a huge advantage—both in achieving initial sales if you self-publish or in securing a traditional publisher if you choose that route. This is why you see many celebrities (and that term is used loosely) secure book deals. They have an existing audience.

In terms of when you should hire a publicist, I would still say this is crucial as you approach your publication date. You want to hire them ideally three months prior to ensure the best result. Publicists will help you secure targeted PR with influential bloggers, journalists, and broadcast media.

Your time is best spent growing your audience organically in the run-up to release. Hiring a publicist too far in advance would be an unnecessary expense. A good example is Mark Woods’s Planet Parent, published by White Ladder Press. Mark Woods and White Ladder Press have an established audience that has grown over the years. They hired us three months before the release to secure print media coverage in the Guardian, the Sun, Daily Mirror, Express, and on BBC Radio. This ensured the maximum impact was generated on launch.

Seth Godin writes in his advice for authors that authors are “way better off spending the time and money … going after the little micromarkets” they already have access to than hiring a publicist. He reasons that with 58 percent of the public never reading another book after high school, the overwhelming number of new books releasing every year, and the slim chance a publicist can get an author on an influential TV or radio program, it isn’t worth the expense. What’s your response to that?

Seth Godin spends an inordinate amount of time on publicity and book marketing. He does talks, interviews, social media, guest posts, and writes for many online sites. He may not have hired a publicist, but he is his own publicist, and he is very good at it.

You have to publicize anything you want people to know about. You can do this yourself, but a publicist is going to shortcut the time it takes.

There is a newsworthy element to every author and to every book that is released. You have to dig deeper and find out what that is. This is where a publicist can help you with your book marketing campaign. Publicists are very good at finding the story and pitching it in the correct manner. We will often write articles in advance for various publications and then pitch them the finished piece, essentially showing them the story and how it will align with their audience.

What does it take for an unknown author to have a successful book launch—and what is “successful”?

What we would view as a successful launch for a new self-published author is as follows:

A return on the investment they have made. This means the cover, editing, proofreading, marketing and all other associated costs have been covered by the book sales.
Profit. Even a small profit should be celebrated. Of course there are some self-published books that go on to do very well.
If book sales and reviews allow the author to sign a deal with a reputable agent.
 If the author has an agent already, it allows their agent to use the data and social proof to secure a traditional publishing contract.
The successful launch allows you to build a fanbase and tribe that will buy your next book.

So how can you launch successfully?

To promote your new book I would recommend the following:

Influencers. Find influential online blogs and communities. Give them advance copies of your book in return for a review. Give them as much value as you possibly can. Write articles for them that their audience will find valuable. Social proof is key to launching a book from an unknown author.
 Your own online presence. Start building a tribe through a blog. Make sure your content lines up with people who will buy your book.
Treat social media more like traditional PR as we have discussed throughout this interview.
Start to source local media coverage. Local media are always very helpful to local authors.

What opportunity for publicity or attention do many authors undervalue or underutilize?

Local press coverage. This is always one of our first targets when working with a new author. Local media want to support local authors. There is often a lack of interesting stories for local media to cover. If you can weave the article to include local references they will usually be receptive to your story.

Many people locally will also of course know who you are and take even more of an interest in your story than will those who have no connection to you. Local press coverage, our data show, always helps to shift more print copies.

Perhaps the reach of local media is underestimated, but it shouldn’t be. Larger national outlets will look to see if the story has been featured by smaller outlets. If it has, this can then open larger doors.

Thank you, Patrick.

How Writers Can Optimize Their Book’s Description on Amazon

by Trey Ratcliff | via Flickr

Note from Jane: In today’s guest post, author and editor C. S. Lakin (@cslakin) of the award-winning blog Live Write Thrive offers guidelines on crafting your Amazon book description to maximize sales.

If you’re an author, you may not like thinking about your published books as products, but that’s what they are. And the description section on your book’s product page is the most important selling tool you have.

Once a potential customer lands on an author’s product page, that description has to be written in a way that entices. Sure, some customers may have already decided to buy a particular book, so they may not even bother to read the description.

But most shoppers are on the hunt for their next read or cookbook or exercise guide. They’re going to consider a number of books, and the one with the best description—that fits closest to what they’re looking for—is the one they’ll buy.

What Your Amazon Book Description Needs to Accomplish

With this in mind, you need to have more than just a nice description of your book. It needs to be terrific. Similar to back-cover copy, this description copy should accomplish a few essential things:

It needs to quickly summarize or hint at what your story or topic is about in a way that tantalizes.
It needs to define the genre and subgenre (even though it’s assumed the shopper has already picked the genre as part of her search, that’s not always the case).
It needs to sound and look similar to the bestselling books in your genre.
It needs to integrate the main keyword phrases you’ve chosen that you believe potential readers will type into the Kindle search bar.
It needs to be riveting and hook your customers, just as your book’s opening page should hook them.

Whether you are publishing a fiction or nonfiction book, you will have the best success if you study and emulate the description style of top-selling books in your genre or category. This may sound obvious, but few writers do this.

In fact, shockingly enough, a lot of writers don’t bother to put in more than a few brief lines of description. This section is valuable real estate, and on Amazon Kindle, you are allotted 4,000 characters to make that great impression and get a sale. Use them all.

How to Research Your Amazon Book Description

Go to the Kindle store and click on the Kindle ebooks tab. Then choose your category on the left sidebar (such as Science Fiction and Fantasy). From there, choose a subgenre that’s closest to your book. Let’s go with Fantasy ~ Myths and Legends, for example. That cuts down the search results to 3,610.

If you don’t have the KDSPY Chrome tool, this is a great time to use it. If you click on it first, then navigate using the link that comes up on the KDSPY screen, then follow the above process, you’ll get this:

Guess what? You’re looking at the top twenty bestselling books in that genre in the last thirty days (real-time data).

Now what? I’d ignore the books that are set at $0 right now. Why? Because they’re free books, and they may only be “selling” big right now because they’re free. Rather, take a look at the top ten paid books. They are going to give you the best examples of description.

Yes, some are going to have lousy descriptions. Some bestselling authors aren’t going to need as much help to get discovered as you might.

But, to have every advantage so you can get to the tops of those bestseller lists, spend time crafting terrific selling copy.

Here’s what you do next:

Open up each of those ten or twenty paid bestselling books in your niche genre (the subgenre or subcategory that more specifically fits your book).
Copy and paste their description into a blank document. Each one. Just put them all in there, one after another.
Read them all. Highlight similarities in the writing style, layout, what words are used, what keywords pop out, and what special formatting (bold, italics, etc.) are used.
Make some notes about the features that are recurring and popular.
Write a rough draft of your description copy using the same basic ideas as these bestselling books.
Get some feedback from critique partners, savvy readers, or a professional editor, and then polish your description.

Be sure to have someone proofread your copy if you aren’t a stellar copyeditor. The last thing you want are mistakes in your description. Yes, readers will notice them (and of course, you want to have your book professionally edited before you put it up for sale. That should go without saying).

How to Write Your Amazon Book Description

1. Start off your description copy with a blurb about one or two sentences long. Make this bold. Why? Because now Amazon sticks the annoying “read more” tag after just a couple of lines—meaning that almost your entire description is hidden! You need to have a super compelling first line to get the potential customer to click on that “read more” tag. It’s disappointing, but that’s how it is. Think: hook.

2. After your awesome book description, put in some top reviews of your book. If you don’t have any yet, leave space to add them so you can use up that 4,000-character allotment. At some point people will review your book. One way to get started on this before you publish is to ask friends to read and be ready to post a review. You can tweet for #bookreviewers with your genre hashtag (#mystery #fantasy #romance) or post your need on your Facebook page. All you need is a handful of honest, good reviews up as soon as your book is published. Don’t bribe (bad, bad), but do appropriately thank those willing to read and review for you.

3. You can also make a nice simple list of Amazon categories at the end of your description. This is another tasteful way to add in the keyword phrases that won’t feel like spam.

Remember: You are selling a product to a consumer. That consumer may or may not be looking for a book exactly like yours. In fact, with riveting description (which, I hope, means you have a riveting book), you can draw in buyers who may not have considered a book like yours. Because of your awesome description, they are now intrigued, and might toy with the idea of buying your book.

That description is the first step in the purchase. But it’s the most important. So take the time to write some terrific description copy. It’s one of the best ways to optimize your book on Amazon.

Note from Jane: C. S. Lakin’s new online course teaches self-publishing authors how to target genre to sell more books. Register before Feb. 20, 2016 to get $100 off the course.

What Does It Mean to Read Like a Writer?

What does it mean to read like a writer?

Over at the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, Anthony DeCasper offers a few tips about seeing and reading the world in terms of narrative design. He says:

Narrative design is the art of perception. By unpacking narrative design through reading, and rereading, we reveal not only an author’s way of seeing and thinking about the world but how the author collects their perceptions into an immersive story.

He goes on to argue that reading is writing if done with authorial intention. Read the entire essay.

Also this month at Glimmer Train:

Writing Back Story by Abby Geni
An excerpt from an interview with Karen Russell

Traditional Publishing: What’s It Good For?

When I first started working in publishing, no one questioned the value of a publisher.

Now they do.

When I tell nonfiction writers they need to demonstrate to the agent/editor they have a big enough platform—enough visibility—to sell books without the help of a publisher, they’ll ask, “What’s the publisher for then?”

When I tell fiction writers that their work needs to be compelling, polished, and ready for publication before they query, they’ll ask, “What’s the publisher for then?”

For first-time authors who have no readership, the answer is easy. Quality considerations aside, a publisher raises your profile and makes you look bigger than you’ve ever looked before. Someone is taking a financial risk to launch your work into the world and make your name recognizable, and the risk can be taken only for a finite number of authors, so people make quite logical assumptions about quality that are in your favor.

Of course, publishers fail at launching authors every day. But authors promoting themselves tend to fail at it more dramatically. It’s not that publishing is hard. It’s the ability to spread the word about your work’s existence at the right time to the right people that’s crazy-difficult. So far, most publishers are still better at doing that.

So far.

If you’re an author who can make influencers jump when you ask, or have a siren call that lures readers to your door, then all bets are off on what the publisher is for. You’ll have to decide.

The Complete Guide to Query Letters: Nonfiction Books

Note from Jane: This post is part of a series on how to get published. The earlier posts in the series:

Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published
Start Here: How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal
How to Find a Literary Agent

If you’re looking to land an agent or publisher this year, I’m teaching a 90-minute class with Writer’s Digest on Thursday: How to Get Published: Land a Book Deal in 2016.

For years, I’ve offered a lengthy guide on how to write a query letter for a novel. When you’re pitching fiction to an agent or publisher through a query letter, your ultimate goal is to get your manuscript read. Therefore, the query is a sales piece, and it’s all about the art of seduction.

A query letter for a nonfiction book isn’t all that different from a fiction query: you’re still trying to get an agent or editor interested in looking at your work, but that may mean a book proposal and sample chapters, rather than the full manuscript. (Nonfiction is often sold on the basis of a proposal.)

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of complication when querying a nonfiction project; it’s not as straightforward and formula-driven as querying a novel. With a novel, you’re always trying to craft the perfect hook that encapsulates the essence of your protagonist and the conflict—and it doesn’t matter what type of novel it is. All novels are narratives with character, plot, setting, conflict, and resolutions (of some kind).

With nonfiction, you may be pitching:

a narrative about yourself (memoir)
a narrative about someone else (biography)
a narrative about some thing (broadly called narrative nonfiction; think Seabiscuit)
a prescriptive book (a book that helps the reader learn or do something better, such as a how-to, self-help or business book)
a reference book
an illustrated book

… and so on.

There isn’t a single formula that can cover all these categories or types of books. But for our purposes, to provide some kind of roadmap, we’ll split up nonfiction queries into two types:

Narrative-driven nonfiction (including memoir, biography, and narrative nonfiction)
Information-driven nonfiction

Before you begin the query process: you should have a finished and polished book proposal ready to go, which should include at least one sample chapter, if not more. It should be the best you can make it.

It’s also important that prospective authors give some thought to their author platform, or their ability to market and promote their book to an existing audience they can reach, without the publisher’s help, through online or offline activities. I discuss platform here. Your query and book proposal not only have to present an effective argument for why your book should exist, but also should reflect your authority and platform as a book author. (This is not the case for novelists.)

Query Letter Elements: Narrative-Driven Nonfiction

The query for this type of nonfiction may end up looking very similar to a novel query, especially if you’re writing a memoir. Include these elements, in no particular order (except the closing):

Personalization: where you customize the letter for the recipient
What you’re selling: genre/category, anticipated word count, title/subtitle
Hook: a compelling description of the narrative
Target readership: who will buy this book and why? (it cannot be everyone and anyone)
Your bio, platform and credentials to write the book
Thank you and closing

Query Letter Elements: Information-Driven Nonfiction

If you’ve written a book proposal (and you probably should), then your query letter is often a more condensed version of your book proposal’s overview or summary—those first 500 words (or first one to three proposal pages) should summarize the most important and salable qualities of your book. Your query and your proposal overview should both answer three questions: (1) So what? Why is this book unique, special or needed in the current marketplace? (2) Who cares? Who is the identifiable and specific audience who will spend $20 on this book? (3) Who are you? Why are you the best author for this book—what are your platform and credentials? It’s okay if your query and proposal include the same or similar language.

Whether or not you’re starting from scratch, include these elements, in no particular order (except the closing):

Personalization: where you customize the letter for the recipient
What you’re selling: genre/category, anticipated word count, title/subtitle
What makes your book unique—or its unique selling proposition
Target readership: who will buy this book and why? (it cannot be everyone and anyone)
Your bio, platform and credentials to write the book
Thank you and closing

What’s in the very first paragraph of the query?

Put your best foot forward—lead with your strongest selling point. Examples:

Personalization. Let’s say you’ve been vouched for or referred by an existing client of the agent’s—or if you’re querying a publisher, you might be referred by one of their authors. Put that first! Or maybe you heard the agent/editor speak at a conference or you read something they wrote that indicates they’re a good fit for your work. Mention it.
Hook. If you have confidence about the compelling nature of your narrative, start with that. Example: “When I was eighteen years old, I moved from my hometown in Oregon (population: 7,500) to live with the most powerful man in Hollywood and be a nanny to his three children.” (See the full query here.)
Platform or credentials. If your blog receives 100,000 visits a month, if you have an email newsletter of 20,000 readers who can’t wait to receive your updates, or if you’re a YouTube star, then you mention your powerful reach up-front. If you’re a previously published author, experienced professional, or highly regarded authority in your field, you can start with that. Example: “As the former CEO of three successful startups …”
Target readership. If your book will address a timely or emerging demographic, or if it solves the problems of a specific audience, then you can open by discussing the compelling market for the book: “Between 2000 and 2013, births by women ages 50 to 54 rose by more than 165 percent. This book tells the story of [or tackles the problems of] …”

The Most Difficult Challenge for Narrative Nonfiction: Pitching a High-Quality Story for a Big Enough Target Audience

For most narrative-driven nonfiction, the writing and storytelling matters as much as it would for a novel, and your hook plays an important role in conveying the quality of the story. But the publisher has to envision a sizable audience for that story, too. It’s instructive to look at the rejections that Rebecca Skloot collected for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, now an award-winning work of narrative nonfiction. Skloot had trouble convincing editors that her story was marketable to a wide audience. Here’s what those rejection letters said:

“She has done a wonderful job presenting the personal and scientific dimensions of this unusual and often eerie story. Unfortunately in the end I really see this as an extended magazine article, and not a full book.”
“Skloot is a first rate stylist and explainer, so I’m sorry to say I can’t make an offer. I believe her story, though it throws a bright light on issues of race and science, is better suited to an article than book length.”
“I’m sorry to say that I’m not entirely confident that the approach taken here to tell us the story is the kind of treatment which will reach the broad nonfiction readership that we’re looking for.”
“Though the proposal breaches a timely and interesting topic in light of renewed interest in genetic research, it does not seem to be right for [our] list.”
“She’s a graceful writer with a real talent for presenting scientific material in a lucid and very human way. That said, though, I have to admit I can’t quite imagine how a book on this chapter in science might reach more than a very limited audience. To me, the real heart of the story is somehow too short-lived to create a strong sense of narrative tension, and its repercussions, I think, may not spark the interest of a wide enough readership for [our] list.”
“I think this is an amazing story and perhaps an important one to be told. What I’m less certain about is the eventual angle that Skloot will be telling it from. It is entirely clear that she is passionate about her subject matter; however, until more of the story unfolds, I remain uncertain of the power of the narrative.”

Some of the more common rejections you’ll encounter: this book should be a magazine article, the book’s audience is too small, or the story or approach is not distinctive or unique enough.

Writing a Narrative-Driven Hook That’s Not a Tired Storyline

Whether you’re writing memoir or nonfiction narrative, you need to boil down your story to these three key elements:

Protagonist and her conflict
The choices the protagonist has to make (the stakes)
The sizzle

If you’re writing a memoir, then write the hook in first person—meaning you are the protagonist.

What does sizzle mean? It’s that thing that sets your work apart from all others in the genre, that makes your story stand out, that makes it uniquely yours. Sizzle means: this idea isn’t tired and hasn’t been done a million times before. When it comes to memoir, there are a lot of tired storylines out there. In this agent roundtable on memoir in Writer’s Digest in 2010, you can get a feel for what makes agents’ eyes glaze over:

“On some days it seems as though every therapist in the country who is dealing with addicts of one kind or another has told them to journal their recovery and then turn it into a book. Quitting booze or drugs is a good thing to do, but it isn’t the triumph of the human spirit.”
“I’m sick of dysfunctional family stories, but I’m a big fan of memoirs by people who have lived lives the rest of us only dream of.”
“Though books by cancer and disease survivors are prevalent, I find them very tough to sell to publishers unless the survivor has some kind of name recognition.”
“I try to steer [writers] away from, ‘I was born in a big/small town, and I liked listening to punk music, and I hated my mother and blahdee blahda blah blah.'”

Sometimes great hooks can be botched because there is no life, voice, or personality in them. Sometimes so-so hooks can be taken to the next level because they convey a liveliness or personality that is seductive. You want to be one of those seductive writers, of course.

The Most Difficult Challenge for Information-Based Nonfiction: Having a Sufficient Platform

You may have a killer concept or method to share with the world, but for information-based nonfiction, unless you have platform muscle, it’s unlikely that New York publishers will be interested in your book. Platform basically equates to visibility, or the ability to sell books. You should have visibility to the specific target audience you expect to buy your book. And it’s not enough to say you have visibility—you have to be able to point to it, quantify it, and show how you’re ready to lift off into the stratosphere of book sales.

A secondary challenge is having a unique enough selling proposition to set your book apart from the competition. You’re likely entering a crowded field, and especially if your platform is on the weaker side, you need to nail the concept and make it irresistible.

So how do you do this?

It’s very powerful to claim that your book will be the first and only book to do X. Or you could discuss how your book offers a compelling solution to a problem faced by your target audience. Ask yourself the following questions:

What special features or content does your book offer?
What special research or investigation does your book include that can be found nowhere else?
What proven systems, methods, secrets, or lessons do you share?
How will readers benefit from your book? How will their lives change for the better?

How to Describe a Meaningful Target Audience

Most authors have trouble identifying their target audience—and the most common sin is to go way too broad. Here are two examples that miss the point entirely:

“Anyone who has children will be interested in this parenting book.” Really? Will parents of two-year-olds and parents of twenty-year-olds both be interested? Will rich parents and lower-class parents both be interested? Will urban and rural parents both be interested?
“Anyone who’s had a friend or family member with cancer will be interested in this book.” That probably describes nearly every person in the United States—this is not a meaningful target audience.

You should also avoid citing meaningless statistics, such as “Google returns more than 152 million search results for the term climate change” or “Amazon lists more than 10,000 titles in the environmental science category.” Neither of these figures indicate or describe the target audience for your work.

Here are examples of a meaningful target audience:

This book targets the 2 million corporate employees who quit their jobs every month.
This book targets degree-seeking students in the more than 500 creative writing programs in the United States, as well as those who have graduated within the last five years.

If you’re wondering if this is like a case of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, yes. Even inside publishing houses, there’s always disagreement about the ideal target audience for a book and its size.

Sometimes it can be helpful to point to other titles similar to your own, or competitive titles, to give an idea of the target audience you’re after. Just be careful: mentioning the latest New York Times bestseller or the latest book to be made into a movie won’t be very helpful. (Agents quickly tired of memoirs being pitched as the next Eat, Pray, Love or Wild.)

What You Should Mention in Your Bio

Publication credits or publishing history—especially if you’ve previously published any part of the work at a major website, magazine, or literary journal. (Your own site does not count unless traffic is in the six figures.) Be specific about your credits for this to be meaningful. Don’t say you’ve been published “in a variety of journals.” You might as well be unpublished if you don’t want to name them.
Any professional background or experience that’s relevant to the content of the book and your authority to write it
Any professional recognition or awards you’ve received—or positions that you hold—that give you visibility to influencers or to your readership
Relevant national or mainstream media attention you’ve received.
Any ongoing gigs that put you in front of the target audience (columns, podcasts, radio/TV shows, and so on)
The size of your current audience through online or offline media.
Any major personalities or influencers who have agreed to write a foreword or blurb your book

Many authors ask if they should mention any previously self-published work in the query. That’s totally up to you. Sooner or later this information will have to come out, so it’s usually just a matter of timing. Lots of people have done it, and it doesn’t hurt your chances. If you do mention it, it’s best if you’re proud of your efforts and are ready to discuss your success (or failure) in doing it. If you consider it a mistake or irrelevant to the project at hand, leave it out, and understand it may come up later.

Do not make the mistake of thinking your self-publishing credits make you somehow more desirable as an author—unless you have really incredible sales success, in which case, mention the sales numbers of your book and how long it’s been on sale.

Other Tips for Your Query Letter

The appropriate length for a nonfiction query is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 pages, single spaced. Usually the shorter, the better. If you can send the book proposal along with the query, you should. In such cases, the query really ends up being a cover letter and doesn’t have to be labored over that much. (The good news: just about every agent/editor will flip through a book proposal if it’s in front of them.)
If your book’s estimated word count is much higher than 100,000, you may be courting rejection before an agent has read a word of your proposal or manuscript. Eighty thousand words is the industry standard for a narrative nonfiction work. Information-based nonfiction varies tremendously, but still, high word counts will raise a red flag for most publishers and agents.
You don’t have to state that you are simultaneously querying. In today’s environment, everyone assumes this. I do not recommend exclusive queries; send queries out in batches of three to five—or more, if you’re confident in your query quality.
Don’t mention your “history” with the work (e.g., how many agents you’ve queried, or how many near misses you’ve suffered, or how many compliments you’ve received on the work from others).
Resist the temptation to editorialize. Don’t directly comment on the quality of your work. Your query should show what a good writer you are, rather than telling or emphasizing what a good writer you are. Editorializing is whenever you proclaim how much the agent will love the work, or how exciting it is, or how it’s going to be a bestseller if only someone would give it a chance, or how much your kids enjoy it, or how much the world needs this work. On the flip side: don’t criticize yourself, or the quality of the work, in the letter.
There’s no need to go into great detail about when and how you’re available. Simply put at the bottom of your query (unless using letterhead) your phone number and e-mail address. Include a self-addressed stamped envelope for snail mail queries.
Do not introduce the idea of an in-person meeting with the agent or editor. Don’t say you’ll be visiting their city soon, and ask if they’d like to meet for coffee. The only possible exception to this is if you know you’ll hear them speak at an upcoming conference—but don’t ask for a meeting. Just say you look forward to hearing them speak. Use the conference’s official channels to set up an appointment if any are available.
Email queries can lead to faster response times. However, I often hear writers complain that they never receive a response. (Sometimes silence is the new rejection.) This is a phenomenon that (regrettably) must be accepted. Send one follow-up to inquire, but don’t keep sending emails to ascertain if your emailed query was received.
While you should list your website or blog as part of your contact info, there’s almost never any need to tell agents in the body of the query to visit your website for more info. Most of them will Google you anyway and check out your online presence to get a sense of how you might be to work with and if you have a meaningful platform.

More Informational Resources on Query Letters

QueryShark (opportunity to get your query critiqued and read others critiqued)
AgentQuery

How to Identify Agents to Query

PublishersMarketplace (for in-depth info on agents and publishing deals, costs $25/month)
WritersMarket.com (requires monthly or annual subscription)
AgentQuery: a free online resource
Don’t forget to look at agency websites to help you customize your queries and submissions for each agent appropriate for your work

The Self-Publishing Checklist: Editorial, Production, and Distribution

Whether you’re completely new to the publishing process or an old pro, it can be helpful to have a to-do list to guide your self-publishing project to completion, to ensure you don’t miss any important steps, and also to help you plan well enough to hit your target pub date.

I’ve created both a downloadable PDF handout and an interactive worksheet that you can customize for your book project.

Below I detail the distinct stages of the editorial, production, and sales/distribution process. My goal is to help you understand some of the assumptions I’ve made about the publishing process (which follows a traditional model), as well as where you can save time and expense.

The Editorial and Production Process

This process can be broken down into roughly three stages:

Editing
Design
Proofing

1. Editing

My checklist begins at the point where you have a reasonably final manuscript that does not require higher level editing or significant revision. While much depends on what level of editing your manuscript has already undergone, for most authors, I recommend seeking a formal copyedit: you send the manuscript to a professional freelance copyeditor, who will focus on style, grammar, and consistency issues—and might possibly do light fact-checking if needed (very useful for nonfiction).

A typical copyedit for an 80,000-word manuscript takes two weeks, but good copyeditors usually need to be booked a month (or more) in advance. Authors should give themselves at least a week, if not two, to review and make changes after the copyedit is returned.

2. Design

Depending on your project, you’ll have several stages of book design.

Front cover design. While the manuscript is being copyedited, you can begin on the cover design. Some authors are able to put together their own cover designs using tools such as Canva, but since your cover is often the number-one marketing tool for your book, hiring a professional designer is wise.

Before you hire a cover designer, I recommend doing some research and studying bestselling books similar to your own in genre, theme, or audience. Find at least two or three covers that you like, and write fifty to a hundred words explaining why these covers look good to you. This serves as the start of a creative brief you can give to your freelance designer, to help them create an appropriate cover for your book.

If you haven’t already, you should also finalize the title, subtitle, and book description that will be used at all retailers and on the back cover (for a print edition). It’s ideal if you have two or three versions of the book description: a very short one (25–50 words), a short one (50–100 words), and a longer one (250 words).

Obviously, it’s possible to produce a front cover for your book long before the editing is complete; all you need is a final title/subtitle, a final decision on your book’s trim size, and confidence in what the cover should look like.

Back cover design. Most ebooks only have a front cover design and no back cover design. If you’re producing a paperback or print-on-demand edition, then you’ll also need a back cover and spine. (Hardcovers will require yet another cover design to account for the flaps and increased spine width.)

Traditional publishers typically produce the front cover design first, and they don’t complete the back cover and spine until much closer to the pub date. It’s not possible to design the spine until the exact page count is known, and the page count may be in flux until the book’s interior is designed and laid out. The cover’s measurements are also affected by the printer you’re using, as well as the type of cover and interior paper.

However, if your page count is firm and unchanging, and you know which printers or POD services you’re using (e.g., CreateSpace or  IngramSpark), you can have the entire cover designed as part of one process.

Important note: Many authors like to include advance praise or blurbs on the cover. If this is your intention, then you’ll need to start gathering these blurbs before the cover design process begins. Otherwise, you’ll need to instruct the designer to use dummy text in place of the actual blurb, and swap it out later.

Print interior design. If you’re planning a print edition and you have the time and money to invest, you may also want to hire a designer for the interior of your book. This may or may not be the same person who designs the cover—it depends on the freelancer and their skill set. Here are some considerations when deciding if interior design is worth the investment:

Books that are predominantly body text and nothing more (such as novels and memoirs), often do fine with very basic or template designs. Joel Friedlander’s Book Design Templates are an inexpensive way to produce a good-looking print interior using Microsoft Word or InDesign. His templates can also be used to generate your ebook files. Using a template system will dramatically cut down on the amount of time needed for book production—usually by one month.
Books that have a lot of elements or styles (usually nonfiction) may require a custom interior design. Especially if you have illustrations, graphics, or any color elements, you’ll want a designer who knows how to properly set up the file and ensure decent reproduction values.
When producing both a print and ebook edition, always keep in mind how you’ll ensure that both editions have the same final text if you’re using InDesign to produce the print edition. InDesign can export EPUB files, but it’s not necessarily a straightforward or simple process. A professional interior designer who knows how to export EPUB files from InDesign can be indispensable, or you can hire an independent ebook formatting professional to do it for you.

Usually, before the interior design process begins, the author comes up with a list of all the design elements that occur in the book. It looks something like this:

Chapter title and chapter opener

A head

B head

Bulleted list

Numbered list

Block quote

If you’re not sure how to come up with a list like this, your designer should be able to help or anticipate your needs for you. It’s best if they show you a sample of the design—or lay out a single chapter—before continuing with the entire book, so you can ask for revisions or adjustments to the design. Once the full book is laid out, the designer will send you the entire file to review for any final changes or tweaks. Once you’re confident none of the text will shift between pages, then you can send the file to an indexer (if you want an index prepared for the print edition).

Ebook design (EPUB file preparation). There’s not really an ebook design process—at least not for typical, reflowable ebook files (EPUB files). If your title has lots of special illustrations or visuals—or needs to have a fixed page layout—then you’ll want to hire a professional to prepare your ebook files for you. You’ll likely go through a process similar to the print interior design process—be sure to budget extra time in your schedule for this.

However, many authors do not hire out this work—and sometimes it seems there are as many ways to prepare an ebook file as there are authors. Some manage by using only Microsoft Word and the auto-conversion process applied by Amazon, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and others. Some use software such as Calibre, Sigil, or Jutoh to prepare the files. This resource list offers a range of tools to consider.

If you’ve never before prepared an ebook file for publication, give yourself plenty of time to do so—at least one week. If this isn’t a process you want to handle yourself, some ebook cover designers will handle preparation of your ebook files.

3. Proofing

As you reach the end of the design process, you’ll have to decide how thorough your proofing process will be. Some authors proof their files themselves, and others send them out for a formal proofread. If you think your files are very clean, and very few errors have been introduced during the production process, then you might skip hiring someone. However, if you skipped the copyedit, and you’re the only person who has ever looked at the files aside from the designer, then it’s a smart idea to pay for a proofer before publishing.

The Sales and Distribution Process

This process can be broken down into roughly two stages:

Preparing your metadata
Uploading your files and going on sale

1. Preparing Your Metadata

Before you head off to CreateSpace or Amazon KDP to publish, it’s best to do all your research and legwork in advance as to how you will describe the book, how it will be categorized, what pricing you will use, and so on. That way, when you reach the publishing interface, you’ll have all the data at your fingertips and you won’t have to stop, think, go searching for missing information, or feel pressured into making a decision.

2. Uploading Your Files

This is perhaps the easiest and quickest part of the entire publishing process: making your book available for sale. In most cases, it won’t even take you an hour to get your book into the system and under review. With Amazon in particular, your book is often available and on sale in twenty-four hours. If you’re not ready to go on sale, then you can set the book as a preorder and input whatever pub date you want. (Amazon allows preorders up to ninety days in advance; Smashwords and others allow for one year.)

You should have the following files ready to upload for your print-on-demand edition:

Full cover layout file (PDF): if you’re using both CreateSpace and IngramSpark, you will need a different cover layout file for each, since they each will provide different measurements for you to use
Full interior layout file (PDF)

You should have the following files ready to upload for your ebook edition:

Front cover image: JPG, PNG, or other image format
Ebook file: EPUB will result in the best quality, but most retailers/distributors allow you to upload a Word document, among other common file formats

What’s Not Covered in This Checklist?

My checklist covers all the steps involved in creating your book and making it available for sale. However, it does not touch on any marketing concerns, such as sending out advance review copies, using social media prior to release or afterward, collecting endorsements, promoting a preorder, etc.

The interactive version of my checklist allows you to set any pub date you want, which will then automatically generate suggested deadlines for each step of the process. If you’d like to produce official-looking advance review copies (ARCs), then simply change the date to when you’d like to have ARCs. Alternatively, you can send out early, unproofed digital copies of your book to people who you’d like blurbs or publicity consideration from while you begin the production process.

Click here to download the PDF checklist for printing on letter-size paper.
Click here to access the interactive checklist and download/save it for your own files.

For More: My Most Popular Posts on Self-Publishing

Start Here: How to Self-Publish Your Book
How to Publish an E-Book: Resources for Authors
10 Questions to Ask Before Committing to Any E-Publishing Service
The Key Book Publishing Paths in 2015

5 On: Ashley Scott Meyers

Screenwriter Ashley Scott Meyers (@AshleyMeyers) discusses the critical writing lesson he learned over time, what it takes to make a living as a screenwriter, what it felt like the first time one of his scripts was produced, and more in this 5 On interview.

In his first three years after moving to Los Angeles, Ashley Scott Meyers wrote or co-wrote eight feature-length screenplays, earned his first few dollars as a screenwriter, and saw two of his original screenplays get produced: Meyers sold Dish Dogs, co-written by Nathan Ives and starring Sean Astin, Matthew Lillard, Brian Dennehy, Shannon Elizabeth, Maitland Ward, and Richard Moll, to 7.23 Productions. Independent producer/director Douglass DeMarco produced Meyers’s screenplay Reunion, which eventually found distribution in some art house theaters around the world. Over the years he has continued to option and sell screenplays.

Meyers has a master’s degree in mass communications with a screenwriting emphasis. His writing credits are listed on .

5 on Writing

CHRIS JANE: You have twenty-one loglines for completed, available scripts on your website. They range in genre from teen sex comedy to noir mystery to sci-fi to drama to romantic comedy to horror. Where do so many ideas for so many different kinds of stories come from?

ASHLEY SCOTT MEYERS: You know, I’m not sure. I like a ton of different types of movies, so I’ve written in a ton of different genres. It seems like some ideas are more appropriate for a given genre, so when I have an idea, I’ll work with it to find the right genre for it.

Which of your screenplays is closest to you or would mean the most to sell, and what inspired the story?

I think my baseball comedy is probably closest to my heart and would mean the most to see it get produced. It’s the story of a guy who loves baseball and wants to be a professional player but has zero athletic talent. So he has to compensate by working extremely hard. I often feel like this as a writer. It’s currently optioned, so I am hopeful.

When you finish the first draft of a screenplay, what’s your editing process like? Do you have trusted readers who offer feedback, or a hired editor? How many revisions does one of your screenplays typically go through before you feel it’s ready to present?

By the time I’ve finished a screenplay, I’ve already gotten a lot of notes on it. I am in a writers group where each writer puts up about twenty-five pages once a month, so I will be putting pages up as I write them. Keep in mind, too, I’m big on outlines, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time on an outline well before presenting any pages. Lately, once I’m done I will do a full read with actors and writers giving me notes to make sure it all works as one coherent screenplay. I will usually start sending it out shortly after that.

What I’ve found is that every producer who options a script will want some revisions, so rewrites will be done, but usually a little later, once I’ve found some interest.

What is it about screenwriting (vs. other forms of storytelling) that appeals to you?

I have always loved movies, and I’ve never really read a lot of fiction novels. So screenwriting seemed like a good fit for me. Even as a kid I loved movies and always thought it would be cool to write them. At some point I found Writer’s Digest’s Writer’s Market, and they used to have a section on production companies who would read unsolicited material. Once I found that, it all seemed possible, so I started writing almost immediately after that and started marketing before I was even done with my first screenplay.

What were some common writing mistakes you made in your early screenwriting days, and what challenge(s) do you experience now?

Early on I spent little time really considering the potential market for a script. I just had an idea I liked, and I would go write it. Starting out, I don’t think this is a bad idea because you’re not going to sell any of these scripts anyway. But as I matured and became more serious about actually being paid for my writing, I spent more and more time really trying to understand what scripts sold and why, and then I tried to let that influence my own writing as much as possible.

5 on Publishing/Selling

Your first attempt at selling your work was to send early material to listings you found in Writer’s Market. You later submitted query letters to ads in the back of trade magazines, which ultimately led to your first sale. But you also managed to get writing assignments through those ads. What was the nature of the assignments?

Typically what I would find in the back of trade magazines in terms of writing assignments were pretty low paid. Which was fine when I was starting out. For instance, in the late 1990s I was hired by a fairly well-established screenwriter to work in a group setting quickly writing up some of his leftover ideas that he didn’t have time to write.

I’m still in touch with this screenwriter, and he still has a script that I worked on that he likes. We often joke about trying to get it going again.

Tell me what it was like for you to experience, for the first time, one of your screenplays being produced.

It was bittersweet. The first screenplay I sold had been rewritten substantially, and I didn’t think that it was very good. So it was exciting, but some of the luster was taken off because of the extensive changes that had been made, which I thought really detracted from the piece.

I would say the greatest moment of pure, unadulterated joy was actually when I first optioned that script. My writing partner and I were paid $500 for the option, and we were young and naive enough to think that it was certain that this script was going to get made. At that point the producers were all compliments, saying it was perfect the way it was. It did get made, but as I mentioned it was so rewritten it was barely recognizable as our screenplay. But looking back at it now, the producers were very lucky to actually get the project going. Since then I have optioned dozens of scripts with very few actually getting made.

I will say this: the producers were a bunch of really cool guys, even though we didn’t see eye to eye on the script changes. My writing partner and I were on the set numerous times, and it was everything I thought it would be: exciting, fun, and mingling with celebrities.

In the book world, an agent is almost required. Do you have a screenwriting agent, and how beneficial (or not) is it to have one?

I’ve had several agents and managers over the years. None of them have done anything to help me sell or option any of my screenplays.

If you can get a good agent, then sure, they can definitely help. But I think screenwriters spend too much time on this and should spend their time trying to sell their scripts. I’ve found it easier to get producers to read my scripts than agents or managers. So that’s what I spend my time on. Perhaps one day a good agent will approach me.

How do you advise screenwriters with no credits to their name—but a screenplay to sell—to set themselves up online?

Try everything. There are tons of online services to help screenwriters—try them all. And don’t worry about spending a few bucks. It’s just money. You can make more. You need to find a marketing channel that fits your talents and skills. There are lots out there. I also have a free guide that is a nice primer to helping writers (with or without credits) sell their screenplays.

Someone says to you, “I want to make a quit-my-day-job living as a screenwriter.” What would it require to achieve that goal? How many hours a week would be devoted to it overall, on average, and how would you break it down in terms of the writing, building contacts, networking, etc.? What kind of person is least and most likely to succeed—not get rich, but pay bills?

I think before you quit your job you need to get into the routine of writing every day. I would recommend one hour of intensive writing per day five days a week. That’s realistic for most people, and if you stick to it you should be able to write one or two feature film scripts per year. Do this for a few years. Then you should have a few decent scripts. Once you have a script you feel is ready, I would start to spend twenty to thirty minutes per day (half of your one hour) marketing your screenplays.

Again, it’s going to take a little bit of time, but this one hour per day will add up over the course of years.

When it’s time to quit your job, you’ll know it. You’ll have optioned screenplays and be making some of your income from writing. You’ll know you’re close.

I think the type of person who is most likely to succeed is the person who has the discipline to actually do this. To me, that’s probably the single most important factor. Can you sit in a room by yourself for one hour per day, five days per week for several years without missing many days?

Thank you, Ashley.

5 Industry Issues for Authors to Watch in 2016

Over the summer I launched an email newsletter for authors, The Hot Sheet, in partnership with journalist Porter Anderson. We track the most important publishing and media industry news, and offer analysis specifically for an audience of authors. We include only what you need to know to make the best business decisions for your career.

In today’s post, I’m rounding up some of the most important headlines and stories that we reported on that every writer should keep an eye on in 2016.

If you’d like to receive my perspective on such issues (and more) on a biweekly basis, then consider becoming a Hot Sheet paid subscriber.

1. We’ll need to learn how to market books in a mobile-reading future.

A Wall Street Journal trend piece, “The Rise of Phone Reading” (Aug. 12, 2015), discusses new research from Nielsen showing a growing number of people read on their phones—leading to the conclusion that the future of digital reading will be on the phone, not tablets or e-reading devices.

A range of publishers, authors, and retailers—including Amazon and Apple—went on the record to share impressions of what the data (and anecdata) means. Some of the implications:

Apple and the iBookstore benefit greatly from mobile reading growth—for example, Kindle customers are increasingly reading books through their respective iPhone apps;
Publishers are thinking about phone display when designing covers;
Marketing for mobile readers means focusing more on email, Facebook, and websites—or anything that’s most often accessed through phones;
Emerging marketing strategies focus on places where people might download something while in transit (airports, hotels, and trains).

All this isn’t to say that print is going away. In fact, Judith Curr of Atria was quoted saying that the future of reading will be on both the phone and in print. But such trends may inform how your next marketing plan comes together, and they may also call to mind the increased sales of digital audio—see the next item below.

2. For optimism in publishing, take a look at audio storytelling.

Digital audiobooks are the biggest growth area for the book publishing industry. According to the Association of American Publishers, in 2014, the category grew about 27 percent in terms of units and revenue over 2013.

Similarly, podcasting is enjoying more popularity than ever. In 2014, the podcast Serial marked a renaissance for audio storytelling, with an audience of 40 million; last year, Apple reported podcast subscriptions had reached 1 billion overall.

And The New York Times just reported on a book deal that resulted from the fictional podcast Welcome to Night Vale. The creators of the show were drawn to podcasting because of the low barrier to entry and minimal cost.

However, earlier this month, MarketWatch published a misleading article reporting that audiobooks are outselling print. Well, yes and no. It is possible to find specific books that sell better in audio than print, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. Furthermore, the MarketWatch article looks at a very specific phenomenon: the growing fame of audiobook narrators and their impact on sales.

Both publishers and authors are putting more time, energy, and consideration into the creation of audiobook editions—and narrators of bestselling titles are becoming recognized and highly sought after. (Celebrities are also getting called in for high-profile projects.) Savvy authors treat audiobooks as unique and valuable creations in their own right, not as an afterthought.

3. Expect more tinkering with Amazon KDP, KDP Select, and Kindle Unlimited.

Amazon KDP is Amazon’s ebook self-publishing service, and KDP Select is their distribution option in which authors choose exclusivity with Amazon for ninety-day intervals in exchange for availability through the Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) programs.

Over the summer, there was a lot of anxiety around announcements that on July 1, Amazon would begin paying KDP authors on a per-page plan for KU and KOLL borrows. Up until then, authors were paid if a user read 10 percent or more. Many writers had gamed that system, some with infamous fifteen-page erotica. Others broke larger works into smaller ones, all to get paid for “books” that weren’t.

Now, authors are beginning to see how the change to being paid per-page plays out. Hugh Howey and J.A. Konrath have posted their conclusions, Konrath with dollar figures. Both writers are supportive of the results. Konrath and Howey have sizable backlists, of course, and are in a special “indie bestseller” category. They’re called outliers by some for this reason. But if you consider one or both of them representative of indie author business practices, then the new payment model appears to reward quality (which sustains readership).

Then, for November, there was yet another change to KU and KOLL payouts—Amazon announced that per-page payments would differ based on the country in which the book was borrowed.

In other words, there’s not as much money coming from a subscriber in India as from one in the United States, and Amazon says that market factors “such as exchange rates, customer reading behavior,” and subscription prices are now to be reflected in how its per-page payouts are calculated for authors.

Last month, Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch analyzed Amazon’s payout changes between July and October 2015: “The total pool of money paid out has grown $900,000 since July (+8 percent)—while pages read have gone from $1.99 billion up to $2.58 billion (+30 percent).”

Expect more changes to come to KDP and KU payouts for self-publishing authors. When the ebook subscription service Oyster folded in September, we all saw a lot of “I told you so” going around because the all-you-can-read-plan has long been called an unsustainable business model by publishing insiders. You don’t have to be good with numbers to see how a $9.99/month subscription plan could become unprofitable with even moderate reading or sampling.

Keep in mind Big Five publishers do not currently offer their books through Kindle Unlimited (with extremely rare exceptions).

4. Sorry, but print book sales aren’t surging.

No doubt you’ve already seen the New York Times headline “E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far from Dead” and encountered lots of speculation as to whether that story is accurate.

Not really. Hardcover sales are down more than 10 percent this year. As Michael Cader pointed out in Publishers Lunch, “Print sales are down more [than ebook sales] in percentage terms, and down more in aggregate dollars.” Across the board, overall sales volume hasn’t changed much: in 2015, print sales are up 2 percent, just as they were in 2014, according to Nielsen Bookscan data. 

Also, Barnes & Noble (B&N) is not exactly flourishing in the way you would hope if print books are making a comeback. Since August 2015, their stock has dropped 67 percent. In 2013, the bookseller said they planned to close about one-third of their 689 stores over the next decade. Industry insiders speculate that, over time, shelf space or title selection may decrease at B&N.

But aren’t independent bookstore sales increasing—isn’t that a bright spot? Independent bookstore sales have not made up for the declines sparked by the Borders bankruptcy in 2011, despite positive media attention on their resurgence. Also, while American Booksellers Association (ABA) membership has grown, there are lots of ways to be a member of ABA: you can be a used bookstore, a book fair organizer, a mail-order catalog, etc. So take those “increases” with a huge grain of salt. Instead, focus on the shift taking place on where print books are sold, and keep your eye on Amazon’s share of the print book market.

5. Independent authors will focus more on international markets for growth.

At writing and publishing industry events alike this year, you’ll find growing attention and conversation on the growing global market for ebooks. For example, the leading organization for self-published authors, Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), has launched a Going Global campaign to search for meaningful international direction for authors.

There are three distinct types of opportunities for work in the global market:

Distributing English-language work in markets where English is a second language
Selling rights to a foreign publisher directly or using an agent
Translating English-language work and distributing directly to foreign countries

The first option is a no-brainer for self-publishing authors who use the major digital distribution services. Basically, authors only need to give the retailer or distributor permission to make their English-language work available for sale in other territories, assuming you hold the rights.

The challenge, however, is that ticking a box—for the Philippines or Cameroon or France—means only that your book appears in that country’s online store; it doesn’t mean that readers know your book exists. Visibility and marketing in another country remains a tough nut for authors to crack.

The second option (selling rights) takes time and energy without an agent, and is typically outside the ability or expertise of the average author. There are services like IPR License that are trying to make it easier.

The third option—paying to have work translated—is the highest risk. However, more and more services are emerging that help authors navigate the foreign rights and translation landscape (such as BabelCube and FibeRead). However, while there is opportunity, selling translations entails high risk and potentially low return on investment.

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Best Practices for Author Facebook Pages and Groups

by West McGowan | via Flickr

In today’s guest post, Kirsten Oliphant (@kikimojo) discusses how to effectively use Facebook pages and groups. Download her free Facebook workflow cheatsheet.

As one of the older students in my MFA program at twenty-seven, I was forced to join Facebook. Without it, I would have missed out on important communications with my fresh-out-of-college classmates. (Like what time to meet at the bar after workshop.) By the time I started utilizing Facebook as a platform-building tool, it was in the post-apocalyptic landscape after the algorithm change.

If you don’t know about this shift, Facebook stopped showing page updates in the newsfeed of those who Liked the page. Instead, Facebook created an algorithm that neutered organic page reach, supposedly to increase user experience. (Which not-so-coincidentally increased the use of paid ads and boosted posts.)

To get a real sense of the impact of the algorithm, here is a quick example:

I have about 2,600 Likes on my page, but the last link to my blog showed up in only thirty-one user’s feeds. This means about 1.5 percent of my audience saw my post.

With this kind of algorithm, is it worth your time to utilize Facebook for your platform?

Yes!

As of 2015, Facebook has 1.55 billion active users per month. You can still find and connect with an audience on Facebook, but you may consider using a Facebook group instead of—or in conjunction with—a Facebook page.

Because I think we are all exhausted trying to keep up with all the social media platforms out there, I will highlight the functions of pages and groups so you can see what might work best for your goals. Creating a streamlined time management breakdown is not as simple as it is on Twitter, but I will also suggest a workflow to help you manage both groups and pages. Even if you choose to do both, you can still effectively manage your time.

Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups

Many people expect authors, bloggers, or public figures to have a page. A page functions with the creator at the center. Interactions come from and return to her like spokes of a wheel. The currency of a page is the number of Likes, but that number isn’t necessarily a good metric of engagement or success.

To see growth and engagement, pages need consistent and frequent posts. That means pages are a lot of work with no guarantee that people will see it to appreciate it. Some people choose not to use pages for this reason, or they simply set up a Facebook page like a landing page with basic information, and send visitors to an email list, blog, or Facebook group instead.

A Facebook group functions more like a web, where connections don’t have to move in a linear way from the creator at the center. The moderator often initiates conversations, but members interact more with one another and can also be active contributors. Groups form around a topic, blog, book, area of interest, or even simply around a person. Groups are not (yet) affected by an algorithm shift, which means that your members will see more of your posts than people who Like your page.

Groups can be very effective even if they are small. My podcast’s Create If Writing group has under 150 members, but is far more active than my page. The last link to my content was seen by thirty-two people (about 20 percent of the group) and had several Likes and comments.

Rather than simple numbers, interaction and the sense of community is the metric for successful groups. Some writers utilize Facebook groups for book-launch teams, beta readers, or thirty-day challenges, and some use them as a private group exclusively for email subscribers.

Facebook Pages: Best Practices

To get the most out of your page, use the same profile photo you use on all social media and create a great cover image. If you aren’t a whiz with Photoshop, use free tools like Canva, which has a template size specifically for Facebook covers. Remember to look at Facebook first to see where the wording falls before you create the image. See how my site name gets hidden below by the buttons?

Tip: This post from Buffer has all the current social media sizes! But keep checking back, as they sometimes change.

Make sure you have a call-to-action button. (Mine is the “Sign Up” button above.) Facebook will prompt you as you set it up. A sign-up for your email list is a great option to connect in a more lasting way with fans.

Use keywords in your description and your bio so that your page will show up in search. You can also pin a message to the top by holding your mouse over the triangle at the top right corner of your post and selecting “pin post.” Create a post with a welcome and eye-catching image, or change it out as you have promotions.

Pages work best with lots of activity. Holly Homer from Kids Activities Blog found unprecedented success by posting upwards of twenty times a day. That’s unrealistic for most people (unless you have a virtual assistant or a clone), but the point is this: quality activity breeds interaction. Holly grew the QuirkyMomma page from a few hundred thousand Likes to over a million in a year without using ads.

Tip: A good start for a page would be to schedule six to eight posts per day if you want to grow your reach. An effective breakdown might be two links to your content, three or four to other people’s content, and one or two posts asking a question that sparks discussion. Try a mix of images, text, links, and video uploaded straight to Facebook.

Pages allow you to schedule posts, which makes frequent posting much more manageable. Many social media tools do this for you, but Facebook responds better to native shares from within Facebook itself. (And if you want to have better reach, do what Facebook likes!) Just click the little arrow on the Publish button and you’ll see this option.

Pages provide fantastic free analytics that can help you discover what works best for your audience. In the top navigation bar of your page you can view Insights or Publishing Tools to see how your posts have performed.

Another helpful tool is Pages to Watch, found near the bottom on the Insights page. You can choose other, similar pages and gauge how you are doing in comparison. Seeing how similar pages find success can give you ideas of what might work for your audience. In the screenshot below, notice how engagement correlates to the number of posts per week!

Facebook Group: Best Practices

As with your Facebook page, have a cover image that is easily recognizable in relation to you, your blog, or your books. The sizing is generally similar to that of Pages, but the words appear in a different place, and there is no profile photo.

One of the most important parts of setting up a group is choosing the right settings. You can choose to have the group open, closed, or secret.

Open means anyone who finds the group can see every post and member.
Secret means no one can even see that the group exists.
Closed means the group will show up in search and members are visible, but no one can see posts without joining.

Closed is a great option to allow for growth while also providing a safer space for people to talk. Here is a glance at my settings:

Note: The default setting allows any member to add or approve members, so switch this off. Otherwise anytime anyone wants to join, every member gets a notification, which you don’t want.

Group moderators set the culture and tone for the group, so be intentional. Pin a post to the top that talks about group expectations and guidelines. Sometimes groups can get spammy with members going overboard with self-promotion. One solution is to have share threads one day a week. I have seen other group moderators allow members to share links to their content, but only if it is specifically relevant to the group.

Be clear about the expectations. Don’t be afraid to delete comments or posts that don’t jive with the culture you want to create in the group. Remove users who don’t abide by your guidelines. You want to have a community where people talk to each other, but you also get to decide what should be included. The more intentional you are in communicating this, the better group culture you will create.

Suggested Workflow for Facebook Groups and Pages

The main bulk of time on your page will be scheduling shares. The main bulk of your time in your group will be interacting with people. Currently I probably spend 90 percent of time on my group and 10 percent on my page. Think about your goals, set a system in place, and stick to it. Here are my systems that work for my current Facebook strategy.

Facebook Group Workflow

Budget about twenty minutes a day over three or four separate time slots. Do all five steps each time.

Post a link, question, or image.
Respond to any interactions on older posts.
Approve any new members.
Check wall for member posts.
Respond to any comments on the link you posted in step 1.

I start every morning with a post in my group to promote discussion. I’ll sometimes ask for goals, what people are working on, what they think about a particular article, or something that gets people talking. I do this first, so while I do other group maintenance, comments come in and I can respond in that same time block. Images like the one below can be particularly effective at promoting discussion.

I post links to my own content usually once a day and sometimes will drop a quick link in to something I’m reading without taking the full steps above. At night I check back to see anything I’ve missed over the day. If I have any bonus time to spend lost in social media, chances are I spend it in my group, not on my page.

Facebook Page Workflow

Budget about five minutes a day, plus one twenty-minute slot once a week.

I typically schedule the bulk of my weekly posts in one sitting. Working in batches saves me time and ensures that I will have posts going up on my page. Each day I check notifications for the group and respond when I have interactions. Sometimes I will post additional content as I run across relevant links.

Tip: Use the Facebook app on your phone for pages so that you only see notifications for your page and aren’t tempted to respond to any personal interaction with your profile.

Because your fans will not see all your posts, you will likely have less interaction here than in a group. This makes it all the more important to interact when you do have comments to keep the momentum. Even a few likes and comments can organically boost a post’s visibility.

I look at my analytics before scheduling out my weekly shares. Generally speaking, posts that already have great reach (think Buzzfeed videos or popular news stories) will have good reach. It’s a best practice to share a link from that site, not just share the post someone else has shared on Facebook.

Because finding great content can also be time consuming, create a system for collecting links and content to share. Create a document in Evernote to drop links for later. Make a list of the top ten sites with quality relevant content. You can also use the Pages to Watch feature in your Insights to see what is working for those similar pages and share that content.

Another easy way to collect content for easy sharing is to create an interest group in Facebook. The far left column on your home screen has Interests near the bottom. You can follow someone else’s list or create your own with pages or blogs that post relevant content. Anytime you are looking for something to share with your group or on your page, you can scroll through to look for links.

To Facebook or Not to Facebook

Should you use Facebook? Yes.

Should you use a page, a group, or both? That depends on your goals.

It is not a bad idea to have both a page and a group, but I feel strongly that the platform-building aspects of social media should not replace our writing time. They can be an easy distraction when their function is to support our writing. Set your own system in place for how you will get the most out of your page and/or group without falling into the Facebook abyss.

Have you used both Facebook groups and pages? If so, which have been more effective for you?

Note from Jane: For more from Kirsten Oliphant, follow her on Twitter (@kikimojo), and don’t forget to download her free Facebook workflow cheatsheet.

Overcoming My Fear of Twitter

by Karen | via Flickr

In today’s guest post, Chris Jane (@chrismjane), who writes the biweekly Q&A series 5 On, discusses overcoming her fear of joining the Twitterverse.

Like many independent authors, I’ve long understood the value of Twitter as a networking tool. Even so, regardless of what I “understood,” and no matter what any experts said, I would not embrace it. I recently realized I can blame my child-self for that.

As a kid in middle school, I was the wrong kind of nerd. Skinny, big teeth, goofy-looking. I hated being looked at. The thought of walking into a crowded cafeteria at lunchtime was so unnerving it became my daily mission to be the first one out of the classroom when the lunch bell rang. That way, I could be one of the first to the lunch room. As the end of the class period drew near, I’d start watching the clock. At the first in the upbeat series of chimes (an unwelcome revision to the harshness of the straightforward bell), I’d launch out of my desk and fly through the hallway, take the stairs two at a time (I became a pro at this), and make it to the cafeteria hot-lunch line before even the sack-lunchers had had time to take their seats at one of the long tables.

A couple of decades later, I still have the same anxiety. It makes me very uncomfortable to enter cafeterias, cafeteria-style restaurants—and crowded classrooms and buffet lines and nearly full airplanes.

And, it turns out, Twitter.

Though I’ve maintained accounts over the years (if “maintain” means the same thing as “not deleting”) because they say that’s what writers are supposed to do, I’ve always been quick—even proud—to say “I hate Twitter.” But why? And what does that mean? My best answer is Yoda’s: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.”

It occurred to me that Twitter resembles an online cafeteria: a bustling environment crowded with an assortment of different-sized cliques, the amount of chatter upon entering so overwhelming a virtual cacophony that it seems impossible for any one person to be heard over any other one person.

What business did I have thinking I could add anything to that? I would never be the cool kid Neil Gaiman (@Neilhimself) is. I’m nowhere near as smart as popular “geek” Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson). And I’m no @GuyInYourMFA class clown.

Hitting the “Tweet” button after agonizing over what my 140 (or fewer) characters would say felt to me like calling across the cafeteria to get the attention of a group of kids I didn’t know and had never hung out with. I was afraid of being heard, being seen. (“Oh. My. God. She’s actually trying to talk to us, bless her heart!”) I was also afraid of not being heard, not being seen.

All of these factors combined to form a clear and simple truth: Twitter was not for me, and I was not for Twitter. I would use it occasionally to share links and respond to direct tweets, but that was it.

Then, one day in early December, I came across Engaging Audiences through Twitter in 15 Minutes a Day by Kirsten Oliphant (@kikimojo). I saw the headline, thought, “Fifteen minutes? Riiight,” and clicked the link. At the first mention of Hootsuite and Buffer, I was out of there. Forget the social anxiety synapses Twitter liked to tickle—anything requiring me to learn an entirely new category of social media language was something that would take far too much time away from …

Well, from what, really? Had I not spent two hours that morning not-really-listening to a political yammer show? Did I not have one little free half hour sometime between my writing quit-time of four o’clock and dinner at eight-ish? Yes. Yes, I did.

Still, what was the point? Millions of tweets fly at and past each other. What chance could I possibly have of being appealing to anyone when all the appealing people were already out there doing their own appealing things?

The answer to that, I think, is one of the early pieces of advice parents give their kids that’s too easily discarded or forgotten: there’s no reason to mimic or compete with any other person’s “thing,” which is effective precisely because it is that person’s own unique thing;  just do you.

Important for kids to know, and equally important, I think, for this emerging Twitter user to know. I’m not sure, yet, what my thing will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Not only because a second stop at “Twitter in 15 Minutes” revealed the overall process to be an intriguing challenge far less complicated than my defensive shutdown would let me see,  but because of the exceptional nature of the internet: in the real world, you can step outside of your house and smile and wave, and it will be known that you’re there, you’re alive, you’re a being in the world. But if you aren’t actively present and engaging online, in that world, you—your books, your businesses, your blog entries, your thoughts—simply don’t exist.

Join Chris Jane on Twitter (@chrismjane) and check out her 5 On interview series.