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Writing Your Book’s Back-Cover Copy

by Todd Chandler | via Flickr

In today’s guest post, editor Jessi Rita Hoffman explains how to craft professional and compelling back-cover copy.

So you’ve written your book, you’ve chosen your title and cover design, and you’re breathing a sigh of relief. Now you have to decide what goes on the back cover. New authors sometimes rush this decision, writing the first thing that comes to mind. After all, it’s the back of the book. How important can it be?

A lot more important than a person might think. The hundred-and-fifty words you’ll place on your back cover are arguably the most important words in your entire book.

Here’s why. After the book title and front cover, the back cover is the next thing readers look at when deciding whether to make a purchase. The back-cover copy also functions as the primary ad for your book. Not only will it appear on the book itself, but you’ll probably use it as your Amazon description.

You have—at best—150 to 200 words to work with, because that’s all that will attractively fit on the back cover of most volumes. If the content is longer than that, you’ll have to make the font size so small that people will need a magnifying glass to read it. And that, of course, would not promote the sale.

Before sitting down to the task of writing your back-cover copy, examine the backs of other books in your genre for examples of how the copy should read. The examples you find will make everything you read in this article clearer.

What Novelists Should Say

If you are a novelist, your back cover should provide a short summary of what your book is about. Write only a paragraph or two, and include the hooks—the story’s most engaging plot points. If you queried agents or editors at any point, you might be able to start with the hook from your query letter.

Here is an example of back-cover copy for Loving Legit, a novel by my client Serena King:

Black businesswoman Monica Walker knows all about success. She’s transformed herself from broken-home victim to New York–magazine super-editor, and she’s only thirty at that. What she doesn’t know about is how to get a good man, a legit man who’ll put that ring on her finger. Her love life has been a series of romantic train wrecks. What disaster will her too-trusting heart lure her into next?

Monica wants to find just one good guy who will respect and love her the way she deserves—but is he out there? What’s she doing wrong, she constantly wonders. Finally, it looks like wedded bliss is just around the corner. But has Monica found true love at last or just made another mistake?

It often works well if the description ends on an intriguing question or a point of tension—something that will hook the reader on the book’s premise or the character’s central dilemma. The back cover isn’t the place to get bogged down in arcane plot details; rather, you want to sell readers on the big-picture narrative arc.

What Nonfiction Authors Should Say

Unlike novelists, nonfiction authors should make a list of bullet points about the book’s main features and actually put that list on the back cover. Use three to five bullet points only (an odd number is best, marketing research shows). With the bullets, tell what the book will do for the reader or what the reader is going to learn from your book.

Keep the syntax (style) of the bullet points consistent. This is important, or the list won’t read right. If you start out with participles, stick with participles; if you start with clauses, stick with clauses.

Example of inconsistent bullet points:

In this book you’ll learn that:

A rabbit can be litterbox-trained in a day
Feeding the right kind of diet
How to stop behavior problems

Example of consistent bullet points:

In this book, you’ll learn how to:

Litterbox-train your rabbit in a day
Feed a proper diet that extends your bunny’s life
Stop behavior problems in their tracks

See the difference? The second list sounds polished. The first one sounds like an amateur wrote it.

Put the bulleted list in the middle of the copy you write for your back cover. Above the list, speak directly to the readers, and give them the primary reason why they should read your book. This should be broader in scope than the reasons you put in your bulleted list. One way to write this primary reason is to present it as a question.

Here’s an example from It’s Your Party—Make It Epic!—a book by my client Robyn Scates:

Do you feel stuck in your own life? Are you just going through the motions and calling it living? Does chaos seem to follow you, and even know your address? In It’s Your Party—Make it Epic! motivational speaker Robyn Scates talks straight about why our lives spiral out of control and how to get back in the driver’s seat.

An attorney twice-honored as one of Maryland’s Top-100 Women, Robyn tells how she went from starring in other people’s mini-dramas to living authentically and regaining inner peace. Through stories, humor, and dozens of practical tips, she shows the way to anyone who has lost their joy and is trying to figure out why. In these pages you’ll discover:

How to identify and end your toxic relationships
How to stop saying “yes” when you mean “no”
How to get free from situations that own you
Why most people work at jobs that bore them
How to find and protect your inner peace

Your life is your party, but only if you control the invitation list. If you are a people-pleaser who wants to stop but doesn’t know how, this book is for you.

In this example, the back-cover copy ends with another appeal to the reader’s need, and with the personal and inviting statement, “This book is for you.”

Make sure that you aren’t the focus of the back cover. Make the focus your readers and why they should trust what you have to say. Unless you get in touch with your readers’ need for the book, and strike a chord with that, they will walk away and never open the pages, however excellent the writing and content might be.

Your Picture and a Bit about You

Besides those carefully chosen few words, your back cover should include a professional-looking photograph of you, the author. This should be a clear close-up photo of your face, and no one but you should be in the picture. You may have a cute spouse, kid, or pet, but this is not the place to show them off unless they are actually a part of the book.

Then, write a brief bio. For nonfiction authors, you should include two or three points to establish that you are an expert, with the training and/or experience that qualifies you to write about your topic.

What you say on your back cover about yourself will not take the place of your formal author bio, which should appear on a page inside the book near the back. You can go into some detail about your background there—but don’t do it on your back cover. (See my article “Writing Your Author Bio Page.”)

What Not to Say

What shouldn’t you say on your back cover? Essentially, anything not discussed above. Remember you have only 150 to 200 words in which to deliver your message. Keep it short, sweet, and focused. Cut out every bit of repetition so you can stuff lots of information into those few words.

Also, make sure the tone is understated. People know you wrote this ad for the book, and if you write about it in superlatives, it makes you look bad—either arrogant or desperate or exaggerating, depending on people’s perception. Write confidently but humbly, stating facts about the book and telling its benefits, rather than writing adjectives and adverbs of self-praise. This will win you trust rather than reap you derision.

Endorsements—or Not

The back cover is also where you can place endorsements, if you have any. If you have several, they can take the place of the book description. If you have just one or two, the endorsements can appear along with the description. An endorsement is a short, pithy statement—by someone well-known in your genre (if you’re a novelist) or your field (if you write nonfiction)—who recommends your book to prospective readers. (See my article “How to Get Endorsements for Your Book.”)

Don’t make the mistake of reeling in just anyone to write an endorsement for you. It truly does need to be a recognized name in your genre or field. Better to forego endorsements than to look like you tried to find someone important to recommend your book and no one would.

For Additional Help

If all of this sounds daunting, consider hiring an editor or marketing writer to help you craft your book’s back-cover copy in the most compelling way possible. And closely proofread the final version. Punctuation or grammar goofs in this highly visible spot broadcast the message that your book was not professionally written.

The words you place on your back cover are crucial to your book’s success. If they hook the reader, you’ve got a sale. If they don’t, then no matter how great the content is, the book will get passed over. Give your back-cover copy the time and attention required to make it the small gem it needs to be. The payoff you get will be worth it.

5 On: Mollie Glick

Literary agent Mollie Glick discusses what drew her to being an agent, what kind of query letter gets a quick delete, thoughts on chick lit, and more in this 5 On interview.

After graduating from Brown University, Mollie began her career as a literary scout, advising foreign publishers regarding the acquisition of rights to American books. She then worked as an editor at the Crown imprint of Random House before becoming an agent in 2003. Mollie represents New York Times bestsellers Jonathan Evison (West of Here), Carol Rifka Brunt (Tell the Wolves I’m Home), Sarah McCoy (The Baker’s Daughter), and Jessica Verday (The Hollow), as well as International Bestsellers Kimberly Rae Miller (Coming Clean) and Josephine Angelini (Starcrossed), but she also takes great pride in breaking out a number of debut novelists each year. Her list includes literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, popular science, memoir, and YA projects.

Mollie Glick only accepts submissions by email. For more information on submitting your project, please see the Foundry Submissions page.

5 on Writing

CHRIS JANE: I’ve seen a few interviews with literary agents who, when asked what they would be doing if they weren’t agents, say, “I’d be writing.” In the order passions fall, I think there are people who are readers first and writers second, and those who are writers first and readers second. You’ve said you were a bookworm as a child and that you later decided to get paid for doing what you love: reading. Do you think how you see manuscripts as first a reader is any different from what they might be if you were first a writer?

MOLLIE GLICK: No, but being in publishing absolutely does inform how I read books for pleasure! I’m always itching to get my hands in there and fix things.

You mentioned recently that you think it’s unfortunate chick lit has become harder to sell. What should detractors of chick lit, most of whom may or may not have ever read it, know about the value of the genre, and who are your favorite chick lit writers?

It’s not so much that I’d want to do chick lit, it’s that I like smart women’s fiction that is sometimes derided as chick lit, or relegated to the women’s-fiction ghetto when it’s really just literary fiction. And I believe in the power of a good plot!

What made you decide to leave editing for a literary agency?

I think I was always an agent at heart. The moment I found out there was such a thing as a literary agent, I knew that was the right path for me. It just took a beat to get the right job.

I absolutely love being an agent—I get to work on both the artistic side, helping editors to develop their craft, and the business side, wheeling and dealing and acting as a fairy godmother, making people’s dreams come true. Plus I get to take on whatever I believe in without having to consult a room full of people before I do so. And on top of that, I get to work across genres, repping both literary fiction and memoir and narrative nonfiction, YA and middle grade, rather than being hemmed in by the kind of book one publishing house represents? Done!

In almost every interview with you that I found online, you praise Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. What about that novel do you love so much, both as an agent and as an everyday reader, and what can writers learn from it?

Such a brilliant work! I just think it works on every level. It’s high concept, but beautifully written. It has characters who feel like lifelong friends. It’s got a complex but readable narrative structure. And the ending makes me tear up every time. I also really love and frequently reference Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. They’re all books I could read over and over again.

What was the first book you sold as an agent, what was it about the writing that appealed to you enough to pitch it in what I can only assume would be a nerve-racking first-time experience (or did having been an editor make you immediately fearless as an agent?), and how did you celebrate?

A really wonderful book on marketing for nonprofits! Not the kind of book I ultimately meant to represent—I rarely do practical books like that any more—but it was a book that could do some good in the world. I don’t remember how I celebrated, but probably by treating myself to a meal out, since I was scraping by on an assistant’s salary at the time.

5 on Publishing

A literary agent opens a query addressed specifically to her (not a mass email), sees X, and immediately hits Delete without reading further. What is your X likely to be, and is there a universal X agents might groan over together while out for coffee?

Over-familiar salutations or rants about how publishers just don’t see the value of a “guaranteed bestseller” send my fingers scurrying for the Delete key.

Can you think of novelists who published in the ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s who would probably not have much luck, as emerging authors, finding a publisher today?

I wonder whether someone like Ann Tyler would make it today, when she grew so much from book to book. Especially in an age like now when her books might have been dismissed as women’s fiction and not gotten the reviews they probably did back then. But I bet Judy Blume would have been an even bigger hit today!

Of the number of books an agent takes on in a given year, roughly what percentage are likely to find publishers, and of the books that do find publishers, what percentage of those authors will be successful enough to quit their day job?

There’s an old saw that if you sell every single book you take on, you’re not taking enough risks, and I absolutely believe that. I’ll always take a risk on something I really love. Sometimes those risks pay off bigtime. Sometimes they don’t. But I never regret taking a chance.

I’ve definitely got a few authors who live off of their writing, but I don’t encourage people to jump ship too fast. Sometimes people think not having a day job is a way to be more creative, but you never want to be in the position of rushing work out the door before it’s ready because you’re desperate for your next payday. That’s not the best scenario for creating great work.

Business strategist Benjamin Gilad writes, “[T]here are 313.8 million potential writers out of 313.9 million Americans. (The others have real jobs.) Defying odds lower than winning Powerball, those starry-eyed hopefuls keep sending their horrible manuscripts to the agents.…”

Obvious hyperbole, but it did make me wonder: in a list of a hundred queries, how many of the hundred writers submitting to you are professional-level writers, and how many are clear beginners who need more time working on their writing? Are you happy to take on beginning writers who will need a fair amount of editing if the story appeals to you?

I’m definitely looking for both polished writing and a great premise. I will absolutely work with an author to refine their craft, but the germ of a great product has to be there.

Gilad compares publishing to the lottery (don’t we all?), but adds that it’s also skewed toward women. Not only do women read more than men, but there are believed to be more female than male literary agents (I can’t find numbers on this, but in Query Tracker’s lists of top ten agents in terms of most queried, most accepting, most rejecting, and most non-responsive agents, the majority are women).

Are women more likely than men to find representation and ultimately be published, or, maybe, are people who are writing fiction that (statistically speaking) appeals to women more likely to be published? Is that just a harsh reality writers who don’t write to women have to accept?

Perhaps there are more women writing, and there are definitely more women buying books, but women are also much less likely to be reviewed in the New York Times and other prestigious publications. I definitely don’t pay attention to gender when reading my queries—I’m just looking for the next great project.

Thank you, Mollie.

Using the Fallacy of Memory to Create Effective Memoir

by S@veOurSm:)e via Flickr

“No memoirist writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.”  —Patricia Hampl

If you’ve ever written personal essay or memoir, you know about the memory problem. Even if you haven’t encountered it, you’ve seen the fallout, in the form of James Frey and Oprah, or Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea.

This weekend, I’m speaking at the first annual HippoCamp, a creative nonfiction conference in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I attended an excellent session by writer and professor Wendy Fontaine (@wendymfontaine): “Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: How Writers Use the Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir.”

She discussed the seven “sins of memory”—drawn from research by Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter—and how writers can use these sins to convey meaning in their stories, since they can reveal more truth when the distortion of memory is laid bare. In other words: The biological distortions of memory have the potential to open up personal, emotional truths on the page.

You read more about all seven sins here, but here are the particularly poignant ones that Fontaine discussed:

Transience. This is the decreasing accessibility of your memory over time—like the simple fact you can’t remember much—or any—detail from a Christmas or birthday that happened ten or twenty years ago. In such situations where you can’t access memories, Fontaine suggests you can either leave those parts out, or you can defer to someone else who does remember.
Misattribution. This is just blatantly getting an important thing wrong. Fontaine gave an example of recalling a difficult moment during her divorce, when she was walking outside, cold, in the snow. When she looked back at court records, she saw that moment occurred in August, when it couldn’t have possibly been snowing. Fontaine says uncovering misattributions like this point to larger emotional truths—in this case, that she felt cold and alone.
Suggestibility. This is when you incorporate misinformation into your own memory due to outside influence. For example, someone may ask you leading questions or deceive you in some way. Also, research shows that each time we access a memory, we change it, resulting in a big game of telephone. Memories aren’t static; they can change. Which brings us to …
Bias, or remembering through a filter. Our current self—our current knowledge and beliefs—create distortions in how we recall what’s happened to us. The classic example: If a relationship sours, we tend to have an overwhelmingly negative perspective on past states of the relationship.

Fontaine pointed out that perhaps the most important aspect of bias, for writers, is the element of hindsight, or when we apply knowledge held in the present to the past. (This is basically a definition of memoir!)

While science might call this the “I knew it all along mentality,” writers would call it “What I didn’t know then mentality.” By writing about our lives, we find some new element of awareness, knowledge, or clarity that allows us to see events in a new light. We uncover a dimension of understanding that we didn’t have access to at a certain time. 

If you’ve ever read The Situation and The Story by Vivian Gornick, this is exactly what she talks about. The situation is what happened, the story is understanding and reflecting on it—the hindsight.

Fontaine emphasized that if you find a memory that’s been distorted, the story often lies in exploring why it’s been distorted. Truth resides in both the facts and in the distortion.

To explore these concepts further, Fontaine offered the following reading list. I’m grateful for Wendy’s permission to share it with you.

The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L. Schacter
The Art and Time of Memoir by Sven Birkerts
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Embalming Mom: Essays in Life by Janet Burroway
Firebird by Mark Doty
I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl
The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr
The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid
Past Forgetting by Jill Robinson
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
The Tender Bar by JR Moehringer

“It still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know.”

—Patricia Hampl

Spellbinding Sentences: 3 Qualities of Masterful Word Choice

by Maureen McLaughlin | via Flickr

Note from Jane: Today’s guest post is excerpted from the recently released Spellbinding Sentences (Writer’s Digest Books) by Barbara Baig.

“She loved expressive words, and treasured them as some girls might have treasured jewels. To her, they were as lustrous pearls, threaded on the crimson cord of a vivid fancy. When she met with a new one she uttered it over and over to herself in solitude, weighing it, caressing it, infusing it with the radiance of her voice, making it her own in all its possibilities forever.”

—Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Story Girl

In a way, every word is like a precious stone, with its own particular qualities: Some words feel heavy, others light; some seem to glitter, others are dull. As writers, we need to know all we can about the words we use; in addition to getting familiar with a word’s denotations and connotations—its meanings—we also need to be able to recognize its qualities, so we can find the right word for our purpose.

Just as a cook needs to know, not just intellectually, but practically, the difference between, say, margarine and butter—the differences in taste and texture and melting temperature—so a writer needs to know the difference in quality between, for instance, the word domicile and the word home, the word food and the word egg, the word surrender and the phrase wave the white flag. When we add to our knowledge of denotation and connotation a practical understanding of the qualities of words, we can make even more skillful use of their power. Knowing the qualities of words gives us an essential tool for choosing the words we want to use.

What are some of these qualities of words?

1. Formal vs. Informal

When we write, we often need to consider the degree of formality our words should have, depending on the circumstances in which they will be read. Formal language tends to be language that is rather stiff and mannered, like a butler in a novel about the English upper classes. Words that feel and sound formal are usually Latinate words, made up of several syllables: tendentious, prepossessing, rubicund. Informal words are typically of Anglo-Saxon origin (or Norman words that have been Anglicized) and usually contain only one or two syllables.

The degree of formality in the language you use in your writing helps create your voice on the page, just as it does when you speak. It also creates what’s called the tone of your work. This tone has to be appropriate, not to an occasion, but to the purpose of your writing. Listen to the difference in the voices of these two novelists:

Nell could not help smiling at the naiveté with which Letty classed these trivialities with her marriage, but before she could make any attempt to show her sister-in-law how the very fondness which led Cardross to indulge her in small matters would stiffen his resolve not to permit her (as he thought) to throw herself away in a marriage doomed to failure, Farley, her butler, had entered the room, bearing on a salver a sealed billet, and on his countenance the expression of one who not only brought evil tidings but had foreseen from the outset that this was precisely how it would be.

—Georgette Heyer, April Lady

But by the time they reached the morgue it was too late. The ID had been completed and everyone had gone home. Rebus stood on the Cowgate and looked longingly back toward the Grassmarket. Some of the pubs there would still be open, the Merchant’s Bar, for one. But he got back into the car instead and asked Davidson to take him home. He felt tired all of a sudden. God, he felt tired.

—Ian Rankin, Let It Bleed

The differences in the two voices come in part from the way each writer puts sentences together; but word choice is also key. Heyer, who is re-creating for her readers the world of upper-class Londoners in Regency England, makes use of relatively formal words like naiveté, trivialities, indulge, resolve, countenance. Rankin, who is bringing to his reader’s mind the world of an alcoholic police detective in contemporary Edinburgh, uses very ordinary words like late and looked and tired. In each case, the author has chosen words appropriate to his or her purpose—in this case, the creation of a particular fictional world and the people who inhabit that world.

The formality or informality of the words we choose also helps us create the voices of people, other than the author, on the page. If we have people talking in our writing, whether they are real people or invented characters, the words we provide them with will help make real their individual voices. For, just as our choice of clothing creates a particular style and helps other people recognize us, so do our spoken words show who we are. Skilled writers know this, and choose words for their characters that will make sense for those particular people and will help reveal what kind of people they are.

And so, Heyer’s characters, London aristocrats of the early nineteenth century, talk like this:

“Yes, I dashed well do call it that!” replied his lordship, his eye kindling. “Besides, it’s all slum! I may have to listen to that sort of flummery from Mama, but I’ll be damned if I will from you! What’s more, it’s coming it a trifle too strong!”

Rankin’s detective, John Rebus, talks quite differently (and with considerably fewer words):

“Flower’s got a point though, sir,” said Rebus, covering his boss’s embarrassment. “It’s just that he’s got the tact of a tomcat. I mean, somebody’ll have to fill in. How long’s Frank going to be out of the game?”

2. General vs. Specific

You can hear, and even feel, the difference in quality between general and specific words in even the most basic of sentences. Just listen to the difference between I love sports and I love baseball, or between We were served good food and We were served lobster salad with fresh-baked rolls.

It’s this attention to detail that usually separates spoken from written language. When we talk, we typically rely on generalities: We had a good time or The food was delicious. Perhaps we talk this way because we’re in a hurry, we’re not sure our listeners even want details, we’ve been taught that we can’t talk too much or we’ll bore people. Whatever the reasons, most adults in this culture tend to have only general words in their word hoards. While this may not be a problem in ordinary conversation, in writing we’ll be at a serious disadvantage if we have nothing but general words to use.

That’s because general words can communicate in only vague ways: Have a nice day. General statements are often called “empty” because they contain little or no content: It was a great film. Jane is a nice person. While we can get away with such statements in conversation—though no one who speaks only in generalities could be called a masterful conversationalist—when we write, if we want to communicate well, we must use specifics. Specifics give readers sensory details, statistics, examples, particulars. They provide the substance of all good writing.

Suppose, for instance, that you want to write a few sentences describing a lake you visited recently. You don’t want to settle for generalizations like beautiful or lovely. But as you try to come up with your sentences, you find yourself struggling. Why is this happening?

There are two possibilities. Either your word hoard is poor in words specific enough to help you make your description, or—just as important—while you were at the lake, you didn’t pay enough attention to what was around you. You didn’t collect enough sensory information—colors, quality of light, feel of the water, and so on—to be able to call the place vividly to mind now as you write about it.

You might find yourself in the same kind of struggle with other subjects as well. Suppose you want to write about why Ted Williams was a better baseball player than Willie Mays. Suppose you just know that’s the case—but you have a hard time explaining your view to other people. The problem may be that you lack the words you need. Or it may be that you lack information: the statistics and specific anecdotes to provide content for your argument.

For while you surely can’t communicate well without specific language, you also can’t communicate without specific information, whether that information is sensory details, statistics, anecdotes, or examples. Many people struggle to write because they simply haven’t collected enough material to work with.

Techniques for Using Specifics

Use specifics instead of making a general statement. For example:

[Cooper] was a tall, thin fellow, with a sallow face in which there was not a spot of colour. It was a face all in one tone. He had a large, hooked nose and blue eyes. … [His] large skull, covered with short, brown hair, contrasted somewhat oddly with a weak, small chin. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, but they were shabby and soiled; and his battered topee had not been cleaned for days.

—W. Somerset Maugham, “The Outstation”

Make a general statement, then follow it with specifics. For example:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits [small islands] and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin …

—Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Making your language more specific forces you to come up with more things to say, with more details about your subject. Most of the time, this is a good thing—most inexperienced writers rely too heavily on generalizations. But some of you may feel that you don’t want so much detail in your writing. Making choices about how many specific details to use is one more way that a writer’s style is created.

Some writers love detail. We could call their style elaborate or highly ornamented. The paragraph from Dickens is a good example.

Other writers prefer a more plain style, using the minimum amount of detail necessary to communicate and to create the effect they intend. For instance:

It was late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.

—Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

Do you want to develop a plain style, an ornamented style, or a style somewhere in between? The choice is up to you.

Skilled writers don’t make their choices about how much specific detail to use simply at random. Their choices depend on their particular purpose, on what they are trying to do with their writing. If you give a lot of detail about something, you are inviting your reader to spend time with that “something,” to dwell there for a while. For instance, that paragraph from Bleak House comes on the first page of a thousand-page novel. Dickens wanted to make sure his readers were shown that fog, so that they would experience the fog-like atmosphere that envelops all the events in the story.

3. Abstract vs. Concrete

Our words have yet a third quality that’s important for us to know about and be able to recognize: They can be concrete or abstract. A concrete word is one that conveys to our minds something we can know through the senses, like tree or birdsong. An abstract word gives us something we can know only through the intellect, like justice or hope.

Concrete words speak to our sensory intelligence, by way of our imaginations; they evoke in our minds something real, something we can see or hear, taste or touch. But when we read or hear an abstract word, no pictures will appear in our mind, except by association with the word. Say or read the word justice or the word belief, and the “picture-screen” in your mind will remain blank. Abstract words do not conjure up physical reality; they merely convey concepts and ideas. To understand the difference between abstract and concrete words is to provide oneself with one of a writer’s most powerful tools.

You may already be familiar with the difference in power between concrete and abstract words. But the overuse of abstract words is such a prevailing characteristic of professional, academic, and bureaucratic writing that I want to call attention to it for a moment.

Anyone who’s ever taken a college course, or read a book by a professor, has most likely encountered writing like this:

Though an increasing interest on the part of the educational community is being shown in transpersonal teaching, the literature reflects a lack of empirically based studies concerning the teacher characteristics associated with its adoption. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to attempt to identify characteristics (values, attitudes, and teaching philosophy) pertinent to transpersonal oriented non-public school teachers and to compare and contrast those characteristics to those of public school oriented teachers.

—quoted by Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe

What happens in your mind when you read these words? Take a closer look at this passage: How many concrete words has the author used?

Now read this passage:

Meanwhile, at home, we should try to keep out of reach, and even out of sight, valuable or dangerous objects that we don’t want children to touch. At the same time, we should keep on hand a good many objects cheap and durable enough so that a child can touch them and use them; we shouldn’t have to worry if they get broken. Many ordinary household objects would be good presents for small children; an eggbeater, a saucepan, a flashlight. After all, it doesn’t make much sense, in a family that will later spend tens of thousands of dollars on the child’s education, to get upset, and to upset him, because he may ruin something worth twenty-five cents.

—John Holt, How Children Learn

The differences in style between these two passages (both written by educators) are not created by word choice alone, but it’s worth taking careful note of the difference in effect between the first author’s obsession with abstractions and Holt’s more judicious use of them. Can you understand what the first writer is saying? What about the passage from Holt’s book? If you’re like me, you found Holt’s writing clear and comprehensible and the other passage impossible to understand. Holt has successfully communicated, transferred what he had to say from his mind to ours; the other writer has communicated nothing.

Does this mean that we should never use an abstraction? No. Where would we be without words like love or justice or peace? But we need to devote special care to using these words. Abstractions are not precise; they are not specific. They are what I like to call “suitcase words”—words that contain many possible meanings and ideas. (This is why they are such useful tools for writers who want to disguise or hide the truth.) If you want to use abstractions well, you have to know not just their dictionary meanings, but what you mean when you use them. If you write In this situation, we all want justice to be done, or Everybody needs love, you need, first of all, to be sure of your own meaning: What are you trying to say through the abstractions justice or love? Then you need to make your meaning clear to your readers.

Since abstract words, like general words, are vague, the best way to make your meaning clear is to get more specific. Show your reader what you mean by those abstractions by giving specific examples, details, or statistics.

A Final Note

A word’s particular qualities, be they abstract or concrete, general or specific, give that word a particular power. To make good use of this power, we need to think, not only about what we want to say with our words, but also about what we are trying to do with them. Simply putting our thoughts and feelings into words, though it may satisfy us and teach us something, is not enough when we are writing to others. When we write for readers, we have to think about what we want our words to do to them.

Although it’s essential that readers understand what we’re trying to say—confused readers stop turning the pages—it’s equally important that our words move them in some way. Do we want them to laugh? Cry? Hold their breath? Then we need to know how to make use of the different qualities of words. When we can move easily between formal and informal language, general and specific, abstract and concrete, we have the foundation for mastery.

To learn more about crafting masterful sentences, check out Spellbinding Sentences: An Author’s Guide to Achieving Excellence and Captivating Readers or visit WhereWritersLearn.com.

The Lure of Romance Writing (and Earnings) for the Literary Set

Note from Jane: Last year, I wrote and reported the following article for Scratch magazine; it has been edited and updated for my site.

Madeline Iva is her pen name, and you won’t find a trace of her real-life identity anywhere.

Iva is an emerging novelist who, as she puts it, writes “lady smut.” Her first novella was published last year by HarperImpulse, and it focused on sexsomnia, an actual condition in which people have sex in their sleep and wake up not remembering anything about it. The story’s protagonist is a young economist who has the hots for a strapping biologist, and starts waking up in the morning on the floor wearing different clothes. She has to solve the mystery of what she’s doing at night—and whom she’s doing it with.

I met Iva for the first time in 2013 during a social outing with several other authors. She told me how much she loves writing smut. She calls romance novels “happiness machines”—they guarantee that you’ll be happier after reading the novel than before.

Only later did I discover Iva has an MFA in creative writing from a top-tier program in the U.S., where she studied under one of the most respected literary writers today.

Iva is part of a growing number of authors with serious literary cred who are finding greater financial success—and a welcoming community—in the romance business.

It’s not exactly news that the literary establishment looks down on genre fiction; rarely is it welcome within creative-writing degree programs—and god help the student who tries to workshop his genre work. While I was earning my BFA in creative writing, there was one student in the degree program who loved Doctor Who (before it was cool) and role-playing games, and brought fantasy fiction to workshop. A vague embarrassment would fall over the group. If the writer wasn’t seeking to emulate Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Woolf, we didn’t know how to critique it.

Indeed, as far as careers go, the publishing world often sets up genre writing as an all-or-nothing choice: you’re either a literary novelist, or you dive head-first into the commercial side of the business. You can’t have one toe in each swimming pool, can you?

But for many authors, the separation between literature and genre isn’t so clear. The choice to write genre is often about money, yes, but authors like Iva are also weighing the costs and benefits of less tangible perks like community, mentorship, and audience response.

Put another way: can romance writers really have it all?

How the Romance Genre Has Evolved

Iva has joined one of the bestselling genres in the publishing industry—and one of the most lucrative for authors. Fans of romance often read voraciously, consuming multiple books per week, so there is continuing and high demand for people who can write it.

“Romance” tends to be an umbrella term for many types of novels that, according to Romance Writers of America, are defined by (1) a central love story and (2) an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. Beyond that, they vary tremendously. Some are contemporary stories; others are historical. Some are sweet (no explicit sex), while others are more steamy. Romance novels can also take on the attributes of other genres (paranormal romance, romantic suspense, young adult romance). The hottest of the hot is erotic romance: It’s more explicit, there’s more sex, and there may be kinky elements. As with sex itself, what’s erotic is in the eye of the beholder, and readers will find varying definitions in the market. Then there’s erotica, which is not usually centered on romantic love and doesn’t follow any conventions of romance novels, but rather is material intended solely for the purpose of arousing the reader.

Since the rise of ebooks, it’s easier than ever for readers to download the newest titles immediately to their e-reading device without being subject to the judgment of family members, store clerks, or fellow commuters. The ability to leave behind chunky pink paperback covers and keep your romance habit a secret has benefited the market, and the outstanding success of Fifty Shades of Grey points to very large audience potential. Very, very large.

Romance writing is also an accessible way for new authors to get their start in publishing. Houses like Harlequin allow unsolicited, unagented submissions and offer online communities that can help writers improve their craft, understand the requirements of the genre, and get published.

In addition, since the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and other digital self-publishing platforms, authors can take an experimental approach and see how they like the fit of romance—while earning money in the process. Last year, two young women received extensive media coverage when their self-published dinosaur erotica series was discovered to be making the authors a significant income. Even something on the fringe of mainstream romance has the potential to earn authors thousands of dollars per month; author Virginia Wade claimed her Bigfoot erotica was netting her $30,000 per month during peak sales periods.

To be clear, the genre has changed a lot over the last 30 years. If Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t tip you off, it’s gotten more explicit. Back in the 1980s, if the heroine had sex with someone she didn’t love, the sex couldn’t be consensual. Women weren’t supposed to enjoy non-monogamous sex. But whether writing decades ago or a few months ago, romance authors may not want their bosses, colleagues, or even family members to know what they’re up to—thus the prevalence of pen names in the genre. And there’s the other main reason some authors have to be coy: aside from creating brand confusion for an author who wants to write outside the romance genre, too, a successful career writing lady smut might negatively affect her reputation in other markets, especially the literary market.

Not long after Iva finished her MFA, she tried writing a literary novel. She had a top agent interested in her short story collection, but as is often the case, the agent also wanted a novel to sell. Under pressure to produce and disheartened by the negativity she encountered inside the literary community, Iva found herself unable to write. She fell into depression for two years. It was the act of writing romance, and discovering the romance community, that she says transformed and revived her career. Although she came from a prestigious literary background, genre fiction wasn’t entirely new to Iva. She grew up reading romances because that’s what was in the house. “I had Kurt Vonnegut in one hand, and these bodice rippers in the other,” she said.

As she entered the romance world, she created the persona of Madeline Iva, whom she views as less angsty and less complicated than her real self. Having an alter ego allowed her energetic and enthusiastic side room to grow. And Iva liked the romance community she found, comprising women who she says are warm and outgoing, vibrant and middle class, who reminded her of the women she grew up with. “I felt at home with them. The literary world is much more introverted, and much more bitter, cynical, and weary to some degree. There’s a vast amount of transparency in the romance world. That’s how women operate; it’s a women-dominated field.”

In the romance industry, emerging authors don’t have to search out advice or mentor-shop, Iva said. Experienced authors and peers will tell you how it works, repeat what they told you, then take you by the hand and show you. “You could call that mothering,” Iva said. “It’s just how they do it.”

Adult contemporary author Jamie Brenner, who also writes erotic romance as Logan Belle, noticed the same thing about the community, especially in her former career as an agent. While Brenner describes the literary community as very “closed ranks,” she says that no matter how new or obscure a romance author is, established romance novelists will readily blurb new books or blog about them. “That’s the status quo,” Brenner said. When she published her debut Logan Belle novel, Blue Angel, in 2011, she immediately felt welcomed.

Iva says the competitiveness found in the literary community—where there’s such a small slice of the pie to go around—doesn’t exist in romance because there is so much more money being spent on romance, with plenty of readers for everyone. However, Brenner has noticed some changes lately that have caused her to pull back on writing as Logan Belle. “It’s getting very, very crowded. You have to be louder and louder and louder. You have to be really comfortable shipping things out. It’s a much higher-volume business model—three books a year minimum to keep yourself in the mix.”

Brenner says the other aspects of maintaining a genre career are growing more burdensome. Being on the basic social media outlets—Twitter and Facebook—used to be fine, but now that’s not enough. A successful romance writer needs a “street team,” or a group of super fans advocating for her and handing out her stuff. Genre writers also participate in more anthology work, so in between the several novels per year, they often contribute stories to collections. “The books are getting worse when they’re coming out closer together. I don’t know if this pace was set by the people in genre fiction or by ebooks, but it’s a really bad trend,” Brenner says.

Iva has found solutions she’s comfortable with by cultivating the sense of community that first drew her to the genre. She started a group blog, Lady Smut, where she feels more comfortable with marketing and promotional activities because it’s about promoting the group rather than herself. “In the romance world, they talk about a two- to five-year startup period. I’m still in that period. I have a very strong sense of the market, and I have a plan of what I’m going to write for the next several years, and I’m ready to execute that plan. I also have mad writing chops from going to a really good grad school.”

Using Romance to Achieve Commercial Success

Barbara Palmer is the pseudonym of a Canadian bestselling novelist who is also in her romance startup period, trying on the genre for the first time. Her erotic novel, Claudine, was released by Penguin Canada last year. So far, Palmer says she will keep her identities entirely separate: bestselling historical novelist (who refuses to be named here) and Barbara Palmer, who will not be making any TV or visual appearances to promote her romance book.

The idea of writing such a book was suggested at a lunch with her editor, and Palmer’s immediate reaction was to laugh. “I’m way too shy; I’m too much of a reserved WASP to ever write something like that,” she told me. But when Palmer went home, she couldn’t stop thinking about it and decided to give it a try.

Because she realized she was starting from zero—without any knowledge of the field at all—Palmer spent an intense period reading all the erotic literature she could, including the classics. “Belle de Jour is just phenomenal. I think it’s one of the best novels of the twentieth century,” she said. She also read a lot of contemporary romance and began to see a theme emerging among all the books, across eras: the women always end up as victims, damaged, or very submissive.

“That just didn’t compute well with me. Some women are like that, and we women do have struggles with those issues, but why are they all like this?” Palmer wanted to write about a woman who was completely different, someone who was very sensual, powerful, and in charge of her life. And so she created the titular character, a grad student by day who by night works as a high-end escort and commands stratospheric prices.

Palmer believes that authors like herself are crossing over to romance because of the visible potential for commercial success, even in wild spin-offs that push the envelope in terms of morality. “Some of these people are pulling in $60,000 to $80,000 a year just with self-published material.”

The possibility of commercial success is something that motivated the editor and dramatic screenwriter operating under the pseudonym Aphrodite Elliot to give romance a try. But similar to Palmer, Eliot wants to create different kinds of female characters after discovering disturbing themes when researching the genre. She labels her stories with the tagline, “It doesn’t have to hurt to be hot.”

And it’s definitely the hotness that sells best in the current market. Agent Laura Bradford told me quite directly, “There is a lot of money to be made.” Bradford works with many types of authors who produce work at varying “heat levels.” She says she has authors who can release an erotic romance and earn $50,000 or $60,000 for the first month or two that it’s available—and that’s not an unusual situation. Such authors, however, have been at it for ten years or more, and may already have 30 books under their belt.

Generally speaking, Bradford says an erotic romance (which typically involves kink, but not everyone agrees about that) stands to earn more than mainstream romance, which is focused on a monogamous couple and may or may not be sexually explicit. Of course, not all writers are comfortable writing the racier books. Still, Bradford says, “The bar has risen in terms of explicitness. An average-heat-level romance today is far hotter than it was a decade ago.”

None of Bradford’s clients write romance secretly, though some do use pen names. For writers publishing the hot stuff in the 1990s, however, it was a very different experience. Author and writing professor Mary Anne Mohanraj, who has an MFA from Mills College, told me the trade was very taboo; if she told anyone she wrote erotic material, “they were stopped in their table conversations. I would still say it, but it would derail everything.” At the time, there were very few choices for reading or buying erotic fiction, and it was hard to find.

People often asked Mohanraj what erotica paid, at which point she’d have to explain the difference between erotica and porn—because, at the time, porn paid ten times more than erotica. (Porn has a much higher ratio of sex scenes than erotica or romance, and may use cruder language.) Mohanraj wrote letters for the porn magazines and earned $300 per letter. It was only a couple hundred words, and she could knock one out in about 20 minutes. She also wrote longer pieces; all in all, she could work two days a month writing porn, then take the rest of the month off. Mohanraj wrote erotica and porn for about ten years; when she turned 30, she switched to mainstream literature. “Writing porn is pretty mechanical, so I just got completely bored by the end of it. I felt like I’d said most of what I wanted to say. I thought a lot of damage was being done by sex not being talked about openly.” Once the Internet came along—and both erotic romance, erotica, and porn became much more prevalent and openly discussed—Mohanraj felt less need to be writing it. In addition to her full-time professorship at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she is currently working on a memoir as well as a science-fiction series with, as she puts it, “a fair bit of sex.”

Bradford, who also witnessed the very beginnings of the erotic romance market as an agent, told me that the digital publishers who came onto the scene in the early 2000s—Ellora’s Cave in particular—published stories that took risks in sexual explicitness that she hadn’t seen before, in addition to implementing a digital-first strategy. The mainstream publishing industry wasn’t really paying attention, so it wasn’t until around 2005 or 2006 that the New York houses started looking at the Ellora’s Cave model and several major romance publishers started erotic romance imprints. Bradford said, “By and large, romance readers are very open minded, they are happy to try new things, happy to try new authors. You can mix it up a little bit more. I don’t think of mystery as the land of taking risks, but romance kind of is.”

The Role of an MFA Degree in Writing Successful Romance (Really)

As a debut author, Madeline Iva is still focused on learning the conventions, which is harder than she thought it would be. “The romance authors who are making the most money fulfill the expectations their readers have,” she said. But she’s also using what she learned from her MFA program, where her famous professor told her that the best novels not only engage your intellect, but are hellishly entertaining. “Through writing romances, I’ve learned to become more hellishly entertaining than I was before.”

Iva says she owes her skill at the craft to her MFA program, and other romance writers I talked to who have MFA degrees—including Marina Adair and Kait Ballenger—emphasized the value of their degrees in teaching them the craft and how to accept feedback and criticism. The combination of disciplined writing chops and romance’s marketability certainly appears to be rocket fuel for a publishing career. Adair sold seven romances while earning her MFA from San José State University; while she started out in screenwriting, focusing on family films and teen comedies, she says she can’t imagine writing anything else now except romance. Ballenger also signed traditional publishing deals while enrolled in a low-residency program at Spalding University, and now has multiple romance books out, with more on the way. Before pursuing romance, Ballenger focused on writing and publishing young adult novels (her degree concentration is children’s/YA), and she continues to pursue both genres. But romance is now paying her bills, and she doesn’t have a YA deal yet.

Scoring book deals that provide a decent wage is an uncommon outcome for most MFA graduates, who, Iva says, don’t expect to make a living writing literature. “[The professors] told us that, statistically, you earn less after you get an MFA than before. And most everybody is going to quit writing because they’ll want a house and a family and a retirement plan.”

But Iva has found her solution, at least for now. Her romance writing career has lent her the confidence and energy to take another look at her literary work and try another novel. She’s bringing to her new draft a fresh perspective on how to write a successful story, reach a readership, and craft an authorial persona that suits her needs. “A lot of the ‘writing’ world revolves around writerly stuff, not writing. The writerly stuff shuts me down. But the process of actually writing and being a professional is sublime.”

Balancing Dialogue and Description in Your Story

By Quinn Dombrowski via Wikimedia Commons

Note from Jane: In today’s guest post, Alex Limberg (@ridethepen) discusses attaining the perfect balance between dialogue and description in your fiction.

To shape your dialogue scene into a compact and intriguing unit, dialogue and non-dialogue have to complement each other. If the equilibrium is off, one of two things will happen:

If your scene contains too much dialogue (and not enough description), your reader might lose her orientation and sense for the characters’ surroundings. Also, your audience might feel like there is something missing. Whenever we talk to each other in real life, our minds are not just all dialogue. We usually do something else too while we are speaking, whether it’s sipping a coffee or doodling on a notepad during one of those long telephone conversations. At least we see or hear something else too. Our lines of dialogue never fill up our entire reality, and they shouldn’t fill up an entire scene in our reader’s reality either. In literature, readers are used to an interplay between dialogue and surroundings. They are conditioned to expect it.


If your scene contains too much description (and not enough dialogue), on the other hand, chances are it will become boring. Your readers want to see character interaction.

Signs You Have Too Much Dialogue

Description is probably missing if the reader feels even the slightest confusion about who is speaking or how the characters are positioned toward each other.

But even if the attribution of dialogue and movement in your scene is perfectly clear, it could still lack description in another way. When you read your scene aloud, does the description give you a sense of the mood?

Great stories are not just all characters and conflict. They also use description and setting to create an intriguing atmosphere. Imagine an apparition on a busy street in broad daylight. It wouldn’t be as spooky as the very same apparition in an old, cobweb-draped castle with the creaky doors. Setting makes a big difference.

Can you feel the atmosphere of the place based on how you’ve written the scene, or are you rather just feeling the mood play out in your own head? If the mood is only in your head, your scene lacks description.

Finally, it’s possible you have concentrated so hard on crafting intriguing words for your characters to speak, that the form has just become one monotonous back-and-forth. It’s all dialogue. Even if your figures are giving the monologues of their lives, you’re still much better off accentuating the words with a brushstroke of surroundings every now and then.

Signs You Have Too Much Description

First, check if your description is moving your scene forward.

A character walking over to his liquor cabinet to pour himself a cognac can be a good idea and add an additional flavor (quite literally) to the scene. However, if you spend too many sentences or even paragraphs on the character looking for his slippers, feeding the cat and scratching his arm, the scene is at risk of falling into an unbearably slow pace. Your reader will use a different term, though. She will call it “boring.”

How can you recognize description that doesn’t move your scene forward?

Any new information that advances plot or character or creates a mood can help move a scene forward. But if there is description after description that doesn’t have a dual purpose, your scene will become static.

Keep in mind that pure entertainment can also be a way to advance a scene. But if you are describing a lot of detail about a character, a location, or an action, that’s a strong warning sign your dialogue scene is overloaded with too much description—unless you are purposefully slowing down the scene.

Test your dialogue: When you read a line, has the previous one fallen out of your immediate memory? In that case, the connection is broken and your description is suffocating your dialogue. Time to cut back the description.

6 Excellent Ways to Let Your Description Support Your Dialogue

So you know your scene needs a certain amount of description. But how can you ensure it creates a rich, vivid scene and compelling overall story?

Advancing Plot. Obviously, you will use description when you have plot to develop: Brian finally dares to kiss Claire or punches Gregory in the face. Often, your dialogue will build up to that pivotal moment. When the climax finally arrives, make the description of the action short and spend more time on the characters’ psychology: we want to see the drama unfold, that’s what we tuned in for. It’s also a good idea to cut the scene not too long after its high point. Describing unnecessary ordinariness will be a big turn-off for the reader at that point.


Orientation. It’s absolutely essential that, during the entire dialogue, your reader is clear about who is speaking. If you just have characters A and B talking and they consistently alternate A-B-A-B, it’s not that tricky. An occasional dialogue tag with the speaker’s name attached will do. On the other hand, if there are several characters talking and/or they talk in irregular succession of speech, then you need to be careful. Mention the speaker every now and then in dialogue tags, or describe an action with his name attached. Your characters should also be individually recognizable simply for what they say and how they say it. In case your characters’ positions within the scene’s location matter, make sure the reader is clear about whereabouts and movements too. Don’t describe Henry as next to the door and whispering to Lady Chatterbee, who is sitting at the other end of the hallway. It’s what filmmakers call “blocking”—the sequence of character movement throughout the scene. You can convey a message very subtly by how a character moves and by his body language. Imagine Desmond turning away while confessing an awkward truth or Mary moving slowly closer to Clark throughout a scene as a sign of her attraction.


Information. For each piece of information you give your reader during a dialogue scene, you have two options: including the information in your dialogue or in your description. Dialogue will often be the easier and more obvious choice, because people can talk about literally anything. Sometimes your setting will offer information quite generously or your characters display information in a very natural way. Think of microscopes and vials standing around or a first-prize ribbon for an acrobatic riding competition hanging on the wall. If a character used to travel by bike and suddenly a new Ferrari is parked in the driveway, what might have happened?


Characterization. The little side actions we perform while we are speaking don’t lie. Whether your character is nervously fumbling with his pen or mischievously rubbing his hands over victory, he delivers a statement about himself. If he is watering his plants, we now know he likes plants (or at least owns some). If she is stopping in front of the shop window to look at a baby stroller, she might secretly (or not so secretly) desire a baby. Be smart about it and you can use even the smallest movement or action of your character to tell your readers a bit more about her.


Atmosphere. We already talked a bit about atmosphere earlier. Any description is a great chance to let some moody details slip in: the huge, noisy washing machine, a warm breeze in the air, the alien’s breakfast spoon lying around. Don’t overdo it, though. Sow your details sparsely, because most of them will likely be static. Only when the big picture becomes clear during the scene will your investments in mood and vibe pay off, and your carefully woven atmosphere will creep up on the reader.


Entertainment and Variety. Don’t forget what your story is there for in the first place: to entertain your reader. For screenwriters, it’s almost mandatory to give each scene its very own source of entertainment, but novelists will profit from that mindset as well. Say a story is about a guy named Gary fighting a legal battle against a huge construction company. When Gary enters his attorney’s office for the first time, he finds the guy hanging upside down from the ceiling, practicing a new, modern form of yoga during the entire consultation. While the attorney’s surprising and ridiculous posture has nothing to do with the overall plot, it’s an additional small element the writer can use within a single scene. It’s fun for the reader.

Great descriptions can fulfill several of these functions at once. Like with any part of your story (e.g., character and plot), the functions don’t just stand side by side, but are deeply interconnected and have a strong effect on one another.

How Much Description Is Just Enough?

There is no hard rule to follow. Great writers have written scenes consisting almost entirely of dialogue and made them work. William Gaddis’s novel J R is a magnificent piece, and it’s composed almost completely of unattributed dialogue!

Even though there is no mathematical way to calculate it, there is one indicator that can serve as the bottom line. It requires experience, it’s something you need to develop a strong inner sense for, and it’s something that’s impossible to explain within the scope of a post. I’m referring to rhythm.

Every scene, just like any sentence and the entire overall plot, has a certain rhythm to it. In every dialogue scene, the interplay between direct speech and description automatically establishes a certain rhythm.

After a certain amount of direct speech, the reader just expects a countermotion by a descriptive part. After some description, he expects direct speech again. It simply satisfies our urge for ebb and flow, for music to our inner ear. It sounds good.

As you gain writing experience, you develop a sensible ear for what sounds great and what doesn’t. You start to clearly recognize which parts lack dialogue and which parts could use a little more description.

5 On: Craig Lancaster

In this 5 On interview, Craig Lancaster talks about his surprise success, what he learned from his most memorable rejection, why he gets so personal on social media, and more.

Craig Lancaster is the best-selling author of the novels 600 Hours of Edward, The Summer Son, Edward Adrift, The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter, and This Is What I Want, as well as the short-story collection Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure. His work has been recognized by the Montana Book Awards, the High Plains Book Awards, the Utah Book Awards, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He lives in Billings, Montana.

5 on Writing

CHRIS JANE: You blogged in 2013 about having sold your 100,000th book, which is a milestone I think is safe to equate with achieving a certain level of success as an author. What (outside of NaNoWriMo, which is where your first novel was conceived) inspired you that first time to sit down to write not an article, not a short story, but something as daunting (to most) and as time-consuming and involved as a novel, and did you have any feelings early in your novel-writing pursuits about success—whether you would achieve it, what success would look like, or whether/how much it mattered?

CRAIG LANCASTER: Like most of the novelists I know, I have a past littered with manuscripts that never made it or never had a chance of making it. Somewhere in the recesses of my accumulated paperwork is an attempt I made at nineteen years old. It has all the marks of that particular age, all the mimicry of writers I admired, and all the indications that, while I was thinking of the writing life, I wasn’t the least bit prepared to embark on it. I’d taken the time to cultivate a stuffy name—C. Elliott Lancaster—but hadn’t begun to think about what I knew, what I didn’t know, or what I wanted to say. Suffice to say that it’s a manuscript best viewed by no one.

But in retrospect, here’s the important thing: I did have the ambition to write, and that never left me, even in the intervening years when I was busy building a career in newspaper journalism. I never let the idea of someday writing a novel get too far away from me. Over about twenty years, a few things happened that served me well when I tried again. I developed a voice that I could call my own (for better or for worse), I accumulated experiences and memories that I could draw on in my work, and I finally had the patience to see something that ambitious through to the end.

600 Hours of Edward, my debut, was the first novel I ever wrote to completion. I’ve come to believe that it happened not a moment too soon or too late. When I was ready, I wrote one that had legs. I had no illusions about publication and certainly no benchmarks for success, which partly explains its strange journey. Impatient with agent queries, I self-published it via CreateSpace in early 2009, figuring I really had no idea whether it was good or bad. That summer, Riverbend Publishing in Helena, Montana, reached out to me and acquired the publication rights, and it came out anew in October 2009. It was a Montana Honor Book and a High Plains Book Award winner. In 2012, Amazon’s publishing arm acquired the rights, and it came out a third time. In almost three years with the Lake Union imprint, it’s sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide.

All of these things were inconceivable to me when I wrote it, and a continual source of ongoing wonder. I’m grateful and stunned, and I try to remember that it all started with writing a book that was in my heart.

What piece of writing advice floating around out there do you most agree with, and what piece do you least agree with?

I’m not sure I can fixate on particular pieces of what I consider to be bad writing advice. Most of the mechanical stuff—write in the morning, write at night, draft feverishly, edit as you go, etc.—strikes me as fairly useless, because so much of it hinges on what’s been successful for the person offering the wisdom. And that, I’ve found, is an intensely personal journey.

I’ve discovered that I work best after a long period—sometimes months—of considering a character from every angle I can think of, getting close, developing a bond before I even sit down to the keyboard. So I’ll have weeks and weeks each year that look fallow, if all you’re looking for is words on paper (or pixels, or whatever). But those aren’t lost days. They pay big dividends when I finally do sit down to write, because I tend to move fairly quickly on first drafts.

As for good advice, Walter Kirn (Up in the Air) said something a few years ago that has stayed with me since: it takes hundreds of pages of reading to fertilize the mind enough for one tiny shoot of original writing. I read everything I can get my hands on, in every format imaginable. I can lose myself in a good day’s links at Facebook, or in any of the books in my house that I haven’t gotten to yet, or in that 99-cent Kindle novel I took a flyer on last year.

What inspired the following novels, both (1) at the surface level (where did the characters and their conflicts come from?) and (2) thematically (why do you write what you write?): 600 Hours of Edward, The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter, and This Is What I Want?

The more I do this, the more I realize that memory is what I rely on most when I’m building characters and their stories. Not just things I’ve experienced or done, but reactions I’ve witnessed, encounters I’ve viewed from afar that have confused me or caused me to ponder the ranges of human expression. I’m grateful for whatever it is in me, nature or something nurtured, that made me a good observer and allows me to try to find motivation in myself and others. That wide view of humanity permits to me to go far afield in what I write, I think.

For example, Edward Stanton, the main character in 600 Hours, was built from a premise: What if I took a guy who was so devoted to his routines that the smallest of interruptions would begin to change his life in profound ways? That was the foundation, but his interactions with others—and the father-son story at the center of things—came from observation and contemplation. And memory. So much memory in that book, like his recall of a trip with his father in a tractor-trailer that was being converted into a drilling rig. I took that same trip as a four-year-old. The memories are sepia-toned and spotty, but they’re with me.

Hugo Hunter, on the other hand, is a love story. It’s chaste and rooted in the entangled friendship of two men, but it’s undeniably love. I drew heavily on memories of watching my stepfather, a professional sportswriter, at work, as well as my own love of prizefighting in my early teens. When memory—intimate knowledge of something—meets imagination, some really wonderful things can happen. I don’t know Mark Westerly, the sports reporter in the book, or the titular Hugo Hunter, the fighter. Neither one is a pure distillation of anybody in real life. But have I met them? Do I know them? Yes, I do.

After four novels written in the first-person point of view—all of which leveraged the attendant advantages of intimacy as well as suffered the limitations—This Is What I Want is something new for me, with the revolving third-person points of view of eight or nine major characters. Soon after I met my now ex-wife, we traveled to her hometown, a tiny little dot on the eastern edge of Montana, for the town’s annual old-timers reunion. I grew up in the North Texas suburbs; I’d never seen anything like this—a two-day celebration full of food, parades, downtown concerts, and public intoxication. I was enthralled, and true to my nature, I began to wonder about the lives that underpinned it all. I’ve traveled and lived widely in my own country, and I’ve come to the conclusion that what we really want, and what we’re willing to do to get it, doesn’t have a lot of variances. So I imagined a story and set it against a fictionalized town with the size and the general character of this real place that I came to know pretty well.

Who reads your rough drafts, and what does your editing process look like before you send the finished manuscript to your agent?

Nobody but me reads my first drafts. When I get done with the first round of writing, I print out the entire manuscript (FedEx Kinkos loves me) and work it over with a red pen. The amount of ink expended varies from book to book, but I try to really be hard on what I’ve done at this stage, and because of the quickness of my first drafts (generally no more than three months), there are often fairly major things that need reworking—names of tertiary characters that have changed between chapters, memories of dead relatives in an early chapter that yield to very much alive characters in a later one, etc. After that, I do rewrites, then repeat the process.

After a second round of revisions, I’m usually ready to let someone else see it. My friend Jim Thomsen, who’s been interviewed here, is always on the distribution list, because he has that rare ability to be both deeply trusted and loved friend and complete no-bullshit arbiter of literary merit. Other people get drafted into the duty on a one-off basis, but if I choose someone, it’s because I know that person (a) will give me something to work with in a way that doesn’t trample me (e.g., I prefer visceral reactions to what-if-you-did-this suggestions) and (b) won’t waste my time by blowing sunshine up my skirt.

After I accumulate that feedback and incorporate the useful stuff (and toss the rest), I take one more crack at it myself. By then, I’ve usually carried it as far as I can, until my agent or my developmental editor comes up with all kinds of new things for me to consider.

For what it’s worth, I love revision. It’s so much more fun and rewarding than the actual drafting, because I think that’s where I see potential become something much more tangible.

 “Every writer should read ___________ at least once.” And: why?

I have no desire to tell anybody what he or she should read at least once. Who am I to say something like that? What I’d like to see, in a general sense, is more challenging of convention. When I was a young journalist, almost every mentor or wannabe-mentor I had told me that I should read The Elements of Style and commit it to memory. So I tried to, and just like so many of my peers, I would foist this same advice upon the up-and-comers who followed me. Later, when I grew weary of the arbitrary ways in which journalists try to corral a living, breathing language, I found much of what Strunk & White prescribes to be unnecessarily rigid, and at times simply oafish. There is good advice in the covers of that little book, but I think it’s helpful to take it in the sense of a guideline rather than an ironclad rule.

And some of it, frankly, is complete nonsense. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has written the definitive breakdown of that. So if you’re a writer, read Pullum’s words, and stop promulgating such inanity.

5 on Publishing

You get very personal on social media, sharing intimate details of your life with not just your real-life friends, but also those who were brought to your feed through your books. Is this kind of open sharing something you’ve always done naturally, or was it something you decided needed to be done if you were going to engage on a meaningful level with readers? And do you ever have moments when you wish you could pull back something you’d revealed because it resulted in the unique kind of nausea that sometimes comes with a fear of having put too much out there?

I don’t think I can fake something like that. This is who I am, sometimes to the great consternation of those closest to me. (My father, for instance, has finally become numb to the idea that I’ll write about him.) I’m reminded of a story Pat Conroy told about his mother on her deathbed complaining that she found it difficult to die comfortably when she knew he’d run home and write down everything she said.

So, no, I didn’t decide to open up my life online just so I could find a way to interact with readers, or, more cravenly, to sell books. It’s just part of me, and it’s something that lends itself to interesting interaction in a social sphere.

All that said, there are certain things I won’t do. I won’t blast off on my ex-wife if I’m frustrated with her. (In fact, the opposite is true—I’ve held forth at some length on how I believe we’ve found a healthy relationship that works for us beyond the strictures of marriage.) I won’t embarrass anyone. And I won’t talk about the intimate things that belong to two people (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, knowwhatImean?).

What I’m after is the universal. Life. Death. Loss. The merits of happiness vs. fulfillment. We all think about these things. We all wrestle with them. I’ve found little downside to sharing them, even with strangers. Indeed, the communal experience online has been nothing but positive for me. All it takes is a good sense of propriety and some boundaries.

You ran the independent Missouri Breaks Press for a time (currently on hiatus) and took on projects or writers you believed in. I can think of a lot of writers who would love to run their own press even if only to introduce fellow authors or poets whose writing they think readers will enjoy but that, for whatever reason, isn’t finding homes with the traditional presses. What are the pros and cons of doing such a thing, and what was the biggest lesson you learned while acting as publisher that you couldn’t have known until you tried it yourself?

Missouri Breaks Press isn’t on hiatus; its mission has simply changed. It’s now the arena for possible future publishing ambitions for me, as well as the business under which I pursue some of my other interests, namely graphic design and manuscript editing. That’s quite a different approach from the one I initially envisioned, which was, as you say, helping writers I admired put out books they could be proud of.

A couple of things chased me off that course. First, given my own responsibilities to my own writing, I found that I wasn’t doing anything for those authors that they couldn’t do for themselves. There was nothing value-added for them that they couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. And second, the ongoing management of royalties—receipt and disbursement—was a nightmare that only promised to get more frustrating if I added more titles.

That was probably the biggest lesson I learned, and it’s one I’ve discussed at some length with friends of mine who are still holding on to the dream of running their own small publishing houses. The money matters are an enormous responsibility, in terms of time and import. You don’t want to get that stuff wrong.

What expectations does your publisher, Lake Union Publishing, have of you when it comes to your independent marketing and publicity efforts, and how much is done for you? What is most difficult for you when it comes to marketing yourself?

I’m fortunate to be with a publisher whose main goal is for me to write more books. That happens to dovetail with my own aspirations. I’ve been given no directives about how to market or what those efforts should look like, although I’m certainly aware that anything I can do to increase the visibility and sales of my books will be an ally the next time I ask Lake Union to consider a manuscript.

When I started out, I wanted all of the experiences: bookstore signings, library readings, literary festivals, book clubs. I put thousands of miles on my car and spent untold hours going to events, and some of that outreach led to relationships and contacts that continue to serve me well. Some, on the other hand, were wastes of time. In the years since, I’ve adjusted my approach accordingly.

The most difficult part, I find, is pitching an angle on my book, or on me, to professional journalists. I spent twenty-five years in that line of work. You would think that would aid me in crafting a better press release, but really what it did was convince me that most pitches are garbage. I try not to waste journalists’ time with stuff I know I wouldn’t have bitten on when I was in that job.

What was your worst/most memorable rejection as a writer, and how did you handle it?

Early in my career, before publication, there was a published author in my region who took a great interest in my work and looked as though he was going to turn into the kind of trusted mentor I needed at that stage of things. Soon, however, the relationship soured. At this juncture, you’d get two different stories about what happened, so I think it’s best to just skip the details and say this: We’re not friends. We’re not colleagues. We don’t speak. The end.

This writer was editing an anthology at the time we first met. He invited me to submit an essay, and then he assured me it would make the cut. I was enthusiastic; it was the kind of break I wanted and felt as though I needed.

You can probably figure out what happened next. Months went by, our friendship long dormant, and I got an e-mail that said my can’t-miss essay had, indeed, missed. I wrote back with some false bravado and noted that I was probably overdue for some bad news. And then I turned around and sold the essay to a magazine and pocketed $400, which was about $400 more than I’d have ever seen from the anthology.

It wasn’t quite fuck-you money, but it was satisfying nonetheless.

What was your greatest success as a fiction writer (whether an award, getting a specific agent, being mentioned in a certain publication), what did it take to achieve it, and how did you celebrate?

My greatest success as a fiction writer comes every time I’m able to cover my monthly bills. I’m dead serious about this. My only ambition when I started this was that I might someday be able to make a living on what I write, and I fueled that ambition by writing the best books I knew how to write at the time I undertook them. There are other ingredients, too. I try to be kind and helpful, as so many writers have been to me, and I try to live in a way that promotes gratitude for the fact that I’ve been able to do this. I don’t take it for granted.

My heroes among the literary set have a similar ethic. My friend Dick Wheeler, the great Western novelist, is eighty years old and turns out three or four books a year. He’s polished, he’s good on deadline, and he delivers the goods. What more could I want than to do the work I love, do it as well as I’m able, and to put myself in position to keep doing it?

I was able to make the leap into full-time writing in August 2013. That’s how I celebrated. I walked into my boss’s office at the Billings Gazette and told him I was done editing copy and designing pages, and I got the hell out of there. It was a good career for me for about twenty years, and a soul-sapping slog for about five. Once it was over, I never looked back.

Thank you, Craig.

How a Book Becomes a Movie

Note from Jane: I wrote the following article for Scratch magazine earlier this year. It discusses what authors need to know about the process of getting to the big screen, and has been updated for my site.

In 2008, writer Jeanne Bowerman was working at home in upstate New York when her husband pointed to an article he was reading in the Wall Street Journal and said, “I would see that movie.”

The article discussed Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon, a book detailing an episode of American history that very few people know about: after the abolition of slavery, millions of African-Americans experienced new forms of coerced labor in the South and were sold into coal mines, construction crews, and plantations.

Bowerman was on her third year of writing romantic comedies with another screenwriter, and it wasn’t working—she didn’t even like to see rom-coms in the theaters. She wanted to do something meatier, darker, and drama-driven. As soon as she saw Blackmon’s book, she knew this was the project.

What she would come to realize, years later, was that she probably picked the hardest thing in the universe to sell in Hollywood—and not only because she was an unproduced country girl who didn’t know anyone in the industry.

But a massive industry shift was working in her favor: adapting existing intellectual property, such as a book, can be a smarter and easier way to break in. Director and producer Lane Shefter Bishop, who has become known as “the book whisperer” of Hollywood, says, “Harry Potter and Twilight came out and suddenly everything shifted. Now the executives are calling me for book material. I even tell screenwriters to write their book first because they’ll have a better chance at getting their screenplay made.” Bishop believes that, in the current Hollywood environment, underlying material is everything. If you can say it’s based on something—anything—it has more value.

Unlike book publishing—which is a fairly predictable process from contract to release date—the movie-making process is filled with U-turns, dead-ends, and uncertainty. It’s why authors are told never to get their hopes up or to presume they’ll have any control over the outcome. Ernest Hemingway once said, “Drive to the border of California, throw your book over the fence. When they throw the money back over the fence, collect the money and drive home.”

Whether you’re curious about how the system works or want to educate yourself (and perhaps adjust expectations) should your book ever interest Hollywood, the process can be broken down into four different stages:

The pitch
The option
Development hell
Production

1. The Pitch

Making a successful pitch to Hollywood almost always requires an existing “in” or connection. However, if you are a traditionally published author represented by a literary agency, you don’t necessarily need any further connections. Your material will be passed to the agency’s contact in Los Angeles.

For example, the process for pitching author Chuck Sambuchino’s nonfiction humor book, How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, followed standard protocol. Sambuchino’s agent sent the book to the Gotham Group in Los Angeles (which represents writers, directors, and actors). A Gotham agent was assigned to it, and the agent sent the work to several dozen producers known to adapt books. Eventually, director Robert Zemeckis, who apparently is highly fascinated by garden gnomes, got wind of the book and approached the Gotham Group for a two-week exclusive to consider the book. By the end of the exclusive, they started talking about a deal, and an option was sold. (An option is just what it sounds like: an option to make a film based on the material—more on this in the next section.)

Just like literary agents, Hollywood agents have individual tastes. Literary agent Ann Rittenberg, who represents Dennis Lehane, says she works with a variety of book-to-film agents and is very selective about which books she’ll send out for consideration because not all books translate well into film. Plus, she says, “Some books fall into categories that are out of favor or haven’t been working. Right now, it’s hard to get women’s fiction made into film. There’s Lifetime, there are a couple of outlets in terms of big feature films, but it’s difficult.” What does work are books with an unusual plot twist—or anything that’s a bestseller. (See Wild and Gone Girl.)

When it came to pitching Lehane’s Mystic River, Rittenberg already had interest from various producers before the book’s release, but she didn’t want to show it to them pre-publication. The material was dark, it was similar to another project that hadn’t really worked in Hollywood, and she knew they might pass quickly. So she decided to keep her cards close to the vest; she felt certain the book would hit the bestseller list and that the right person would come along then. “One day I came back from lunch and heard that Clint Eastwood’s agent had called, and I told my assistant she shouldn’t joke about things like that. So I called him back, and it was Eastwood’s agent.”

When it comes to adaptations, some books are more ideally suited for a movie of the week or TV series than for feature films. With a TV series, according to Bishop, the question is always: Could this sustain a hundred episodes? Also, the size of the fictional world dictates its suitability for TV. If it’s a big world (e.g., outer space), that usually means no TV, because it would be too expensive to produce. Movies of the week often tap into current events or tackle a social issue.

Rittenberg strongly advises authors that if you are asked directly whether your book’s film and TV rights are free, you should never say yes, especially if you have a literary agent, for two reasons. First, there may be a film agent who has the book and is working on it, but word hasn’t circled back to your literary agent that there may be an offer. (Literary agents don’t always know exactly who the book-to-film agent has been talking to from one week to the next.) Second, there’s a possibility than an unethical Hollywood agent or producer, upon hearing the rights are available, might make a pitch to a studio without optioning the book and kill the chances of you making a deal later with that studio.

When Bowerman wanted to option Slavery by Another Name, she had no money to offer, no connections, and no published clips. She worried that someone else was going to adapt the book before she did. In a moment of incredible chutzpah (a near-requirement for aspiring screenwriters), she flew to meet Blackmon in Atlanta to pitch herself and kept communicating with him until he eventually agreed to give her a shot at writing a dramatic feature based on the material. Bowerman says, “His appeal to working with me was that he knew that if he sold the rights to someone else, he wouldn’t get a chance to put his hands on the script. … But he was taking a really big risk taking it off the market.”

2. The Option

Very few options ever result in movies, meaning the option payment is rather like free money. Take it, enjoy, and don’t worry. Sambuchino says most authors can expect something in the high four figures, but that the fee for an option “varies like crazy,” just like book advances.

An option also includes very specific terms and conditions for what happens if the movie does in fact get made and released. Therefore it’s helpful to understand what gets negotiated—this negotiation affects everything from the author’s earnings to how many tickets the author receives to the movie premiere. All of these things collectively are called deal points.

Rittenberg says it’s very important in such deals to limit the studio’s reach, especially now, as rights grabs are getting worse. “They’ll come right out and say they get publication option on the author’s next book. Absolutely not! You have to sit on top of them and say ‘No way.’ You have to make sure the studio’s contract doesn’t interfere with the publisher’s rights.”

Here are some common deal points:

How much will be paid for the option? Typically, authors get paid for the option (which doesn’t mean the movie gets made). Then they’re paid a second time, either by a studio or producer, when cameras start to roll. In the case of How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack , Sambuchino was promised ten times the option price if the film actually got made. (That’s not necessarily an industry-wide standard.)
How long is the option good for? Typical terms are twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months. If the option money doesn’t look good, then it might be possible to negotiate an even shorter term, such as six months.
Can the option be renewed, and for how long? If the option expires and isn’t renewed, the book can be sent out again to other directors or producers for consideration.
Does the author get his name in the credits? If so, in what font and size relative to other people in the credits?
Does the author get to review the script or have any input into the process? (More on this in the next section.)

Keep in mind that the agents involved keep 20 percent of whatever the author receives—10 percent goes to the literary agent (assuming there is one) and 10 percent goes to the book-to-film agent (again, assuming there is one).

3. Development Hell (or Writing the Script)

Once the option is final, the next step is finding a screenwriter to adapt the work to the screen, but this is not a straightforward process. Very few films are written by only one person, and the screenwriters who start a project are commonly fired at some point in the process when the studio decides it needs a different approach. (Often, the original screenwriters are brought back after the rewrites don’t work out.)

Throughout development hell, the author rarely has any say or involvement unless she’s a bestselling author with some clout. Either way, most agents discourage their clients from getting involved. Sambuchino says it was never important to him to be consulted or be able to review the script. “I was opposed to doing anything that would jeopardize the deal. I’m not Suzanne Collins, just do the deal, I get it.”

Dennis Lehane, however, was a big movie fan and was able to strike a deal that ensured he would have input. He first wanted to know who they had in mind to write the adaptation—which he had a very strong opinion about. Fortunately, Eastwood was able to secure Lehane’s first choice, Brian Helgeland, the writer who had adapted L.A. Confidential. In one or two areas, Lehane contributed scenes to the script.

Bowerman’s project, Slavery by Another Name, illustrates an alternative method of getting a book to screen, which is to write the adaptation first and then get someone to commit to producing the film (whether a director, producer, studio, or actor). The difficult part of adapting this particular book is that it doesn’t have a fictional story with an arc—rather, it covers eighty years of history. So Bowerman had to figure out where the story was, and it’s taken her nearly seven years of pitches (including one to HBO), several script consultants, and countless rewrites to truly believe the script can’t get any better. How does she know? “This last version, one of my friends read it and said it was a fast read. That’s the ultimate compliment.”

4. Production

At some point during development, the film will either succeed in getting the green light or not. Before cameras start rolling, financial backing must be secured, the right talent brought on board, and the target market or audience defined.

Claire Cook, the bestselling author of Must Love Dogs, says she feels like one of the very few authors who have had a positive experience seeing a book make it onto the screen. Her work caught the attention of director Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties, Spin City), who picked up Must Love Dogs at a bookstore, read it, loved it, and made an offer to Cook’s agent. (There are a few more dramatic twists and turns to this story, which led to Cook and Goldberg becoming friends, but ultimately that’s what happened.)

Cook says, “I got lucky in the sense that Gary was unusual in a couple ways. He had made enough money through his own career, through TV syndication, that he had total autonomy. So when he optioned it, it was his money. When main cameras roll, that’s when you get your big payout, and that’s when I got my money.”

Because Cook had a good relationship with Goldberg, she was invited on the set during filming and granted opportunities many authors never receive, contractually or otherwise. However, she didn’t insert herself into any of the creative decisions that needed to be made, or into the scriptwriting process. She felt that her role was to cheer everyone else on and help them in any way she could—to bring good energy to the project. She says, “When someone is devoting a couple of years of their life to your book, hey, I’ll get coffee, I’ll do whatever you want, rather than stomping my foot and saying ‘Where’s page 38?’”

Cook never judged the movie against the book. Her philosophy is that whoever options the material has the creative right to make whatever movie he wants to make. Two of her other books have been optioned, but not made into films. She says she’s patient; the right person will come along. “There have been times where I’ve thought about doing a screenplay, but the best thing I can do as a writer is pick one thing and keep getting better at it. Screenwriting is a different kind of writing. I love watching movies, but I don’t love reading scripts. They’re not real compelling.”

Back to the Start

The option on Sambuchino’s book has reached its expiration. The deal was first announced in April 2011. At the time, the picture was conceived as an R-rated horror-comedy that would cost between $20 million and $30 million, according to industry reports. Later on, news outlets reported the film would be an edgy PG-13 adaptation, similar to Gremlins, that would combine live-action humans with scary CGI garden gnomes.

Sambuchino says, “Ultimately, in my case, [the scriptwriting partners] could never settle on the perfect draft together and left the project. They hired a second writer to tackle it, and how much [that writer has to] follow in their footsteps is up to the studio.”

As for Slavery by Another Name, Bowerman says she’s decided to move on to other projects. The book was adapted into a PBS documentary in 2012, but that didn’t fan the flames for a Hollywood feature. The subject matter made the dramatic script too much of a challenge to sell—it was a period piece, a drama, and about the African-American community, all qualities working against it in risk-averse Hollywood. She says it’s the kind of project that Hollywood never undertakes unless someone champions it. “Brad Pitt getting behind 12 Years a Slave—you need that champion. [You have to] find the person who has the courage to take it on.”

Rittenberg echoes that sentiment, emphasizing it’s not the be-all and end-all to have a book optioned, or even make it to production. It’s important that an author feels the filmmakers understand the book and have a vision for it on the screen. “Don’t be too eager to do it,” she says. “Find out what the credentials are [of the person optioning], and ask: How likely is it this producer will get something made and make good decisions for the book on film?”

Alternative Paths for Unagented or Independent Authors

Authors without agents—and self-published authors—can get their books considered by Hollywood, if with a little more difficulty (or creativity, depending on how you look at the situation).

Theoretically, an author could try approaching a Hollywood agency such as the Gotham Group directly, without a literary agent. You would need to become a pro at pitching in writing, over the phone, and/or in person at a pitchfest.
You could write a script based on your book and submit it cold to studios and agents. But for authors not interested in a career in scriptwriting, this doesn’t make much sense. Even if the script is good, there’s a miniscule chance it will get produced, and writing a great script mostly puts you in a position to get hired as a scriptwriter. (In Jeanne Bowerman’s case, this was in fact one of her top goals, which she accomplished.)
Get your book to take off at Amazon and rank in the top 1 percent. This happened to Colleen Houck, the author of Tiger’s Curse . When her self-published young-adult novel blew up on Amazon, she started getting calls from movie producers.

If the above sounds discouraging, it might be time to simply start a new book. Producer Lane Shefter Bishop of Vast Entertainment has considerable success with book-to-movie deals based on unpublished and partial manuscripts. She reads hundreds of submissions a week—material that hasn’t gone to publishers yet, such as book proposals and partials—and she doesn’t actually need the whole book to sell it, because so much gets changed during the adaptation process.

She says, “I think there’s something to be said [for] getting to a book so early that the buyers can adjust it to what they want it to be. That’s the big plus to doing it the way I do it.” With finished books, she says, studios don’t feel so much freedom, and it gives them a reason to pass. “It’s better that I get it early and the author can change the ending.”

When reviewing material, Bishop tries to get a feel for whether there’s a hook to it—if not, it’s an easy pass. “If it’s a story of a mother-daughter going cross-country on a journey to find themselves, I can’t sell that, there’s no hook.” She needs to be able to sell the concept in one sentence.

Claire Cook also mentioned an alternative that she’s observed in the market, something called a “shopping agreement,” where a writer or producer puts time into developing your work but doesn’t option it. Any money you make comes directly from the studio if a film gets made. Cook says, “It’s happening more and more instead of directly optioning. You’re in this together—the money thing has changed like it has in book publishing.” These agreements are far from standard, but since it’s a buyer’s market, they might be suggested more often than before. Jeanne Bowerman, who works as an editor at Script magazine, says to carefully research people who want to either option your work or help develop your work. “Technically, I’m a producer. I could say to someone, ‘I want to produce your book, I want your rights.’ A lot of people call themselves producers. Really make sure their personality has a sensibility that they can get shit done.”

For more about screenwriting, read my other piece How to Sell Your Screenplay (for Beginners).

Why Your Non-Disclosure Agreement Is Probably a Bad Idea

Photo by zimpenfish via Flickr

While working at F+W Media (from 1998–2010), on one or two rare occasions, I would receive a frustratingly vague query from an unagented author. Such authors would promise to send more information after I signed their non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

I never agreed.

First, I couldn’t enter F+W into that kind of agreement without permission from the executive team. (And they would have laughed me out of their offices.) But perhaps more importantly, NDAs have never been part of the traditional book publishing business. When literary agents submit work, they don’t ask editors or publishers to sign NDAs. When literary agents agree to represent their clients, no one signs NDAs. Etc.

So when you encounter the NDA as an editor, agent, or publisher, you know you’re dealing with someone who isn’t familiar with the standards of the industry. Of course, it’s true that once you put an idea out into the world, there is the possibility someone else will steal that idea and use it for themselves. Ideas can’t be protected under copyright.

But in publishing, do you know how hard it is to profit from an idea alone? Almost impossible. You have to be able to execute it well. And execution is everything.

When I recently heard Derek Sivers give a talk, he showed the following slide.

Derek Sivers at World Domination Summit 2015

Sivers also dislikes NDAs. He’s in the startup and tech industry, where they’re far more prevalent. But even in that more profitable industry, execution (again) is everything.

No one can execute your idea like you can. With fiction, no one can put your voice, style, or spin on the characters and plot. With nonfiction, it will require the right personality, brand, or platform to pull the idea off in a way that’s meaningful or profitable. (Not to mention the right marketing, packaging and distribution.)

And no one can be you. If anyone could be you, you’ve got a problem.

These days, perhaps because I’m a full-time entrepreneur, authors ask me to sign NDAs more frequently. I always say no, partly because of everything I’ve just described. But NDAs also indicate an author with a scarcity mindset, someone who is probably too invested in a single book idea. They may think: This is the only valuable idea I will ever have, or the most valuable idea I will ever have. 

Anyone holding on that tightly to something can be a difficult person to work with. The level of sensitivity or emotional investment can be hard to navigate.

Furthermore, as a person working for herself—and without a legal team—I don’t want to expose myself to any potential legal quagmire, not unless it’s a very special scenario. Consider what this company says (I agree):

NDAs are serious legal documents. Our lawyer says it’s a bad idea to sign one before we know the party well and understand what we’re promising not to disclose. He’s particularly not fond of NDAs that are broad and general. We try to listen to him.

For more reading:

NDAs Are for Dummies
Why We Probably Won’t Sign Your NDA
Are You Worried Your Work or Ideas Will Be Stolen?

5 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Email Newsletter Performance

by David Moran 1988 / via Flickr

Quick note from Jane: Today is the deadline to register (without a late fee) for my 7-week class on how to effectively start and develop an email newsletter. Only a few seats are left if you want the critique-level registration.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how authors can start an email newsletter. It’s a very big-picture, broad overview of the considerations for email content, frequency, and list building.

Once you start sending—and as you observe how well your list grows—you’ll learn all kinds of things about what works and doesn’t work. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Improve your sign-up copy.

Maybe you’ve noticed everyone seems to be starting an email newsletter these days. For that reason (and more), you should customize your sign-up so that it’s specific and unique to what your newsletter offers. Saying “Sign up for my free newsletter” isn’t terribly exciting or likely to get you subscribers.

Here’s a creative writing challenge for you: Can you ask people to sign up without using the words “free,” “newsletter,” or “sign up”? If you’re offering an “ethical bribe” (something free in exchange for an email address), then it’s easy. See Michael Hyatt’s homepage for an example.

If you’re not offering an “ethical bribe,” then consider the unique value or angle of your newsletter. For example, my sign-up copy begins with “Be the Smartest Author” (see the footer of this page).

2. Try a simple A/B test on your subject line.

An A/B test is when you create two newsletters, but change one single quality, and test them against each other (by sending to a small portion of your list) to see which performs better. I recommend testing your subject line to find out what leads to better open rates, so over time you know exactly what triggers your readers to open your messages. Here’s an example of a recent A/B test on my list.

3. Add unexpected value—or at least a smile. (Delight.)

A sure way to keep people opening your messages is to offer something that goes beyond a straightforward “here’s the news” or “here’s the latest thing I want you to buy.” It works even better if it’s an exclusive for your email newsletter subscribers.

Consider:

What free digital download could you offer?
Could you record and post a secret video?
Could you send handwritten notes (or similar) to people who notice the fine print at the end of your newsletter? (Think: treasure hunt.)
Could you arrange a meet-up at a conference with you and the first 10 subscribers who respond?

Even if you can’t offer something of tangible value, consider how to add something each time that’s meant to do nothing but delight or draw a smile. Bo Sacks does this effectively with a closing, humorous image in his newsletter.

4. Use bold, italic, or other simple formatting to draw attention to important calls to action.

Especially if your emails are primarily text-driven, use bold and italics to ensure people don’t miss important links (or calls to action) while skimming your message.

Yes, skimming. Most subscribers will spend about 5 seconds with your message before deleting it, so help them see the most important information—and maybe they’ll slow down and take a closer look.

If your emails are primarily image-driven, then test how your emails look when the images do not load. Can people still see the most important information or calls to action?

5. Ask your readers for feedback.

As soon as I started explicitly asking my readers for feedback, I began receiving responses with every send, whereas before I rarely, if ever, received any response.

Understand, though, that people will give feedback that may ask you to reconsider how you format the newsletter, what you put in it, and when you send it. Not every suggestion should be employed, but if you ask for feedback, prepare to be responsive to it.

Final tip: on building your list

Have you ever used Feedburner or WordPress.com? Have you imported those subscribers into your email newsletter list? In this 10-minute video tutorial, I show you show.