Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 23

Entangled expands Red Tower to the UK

The publisher, best known right now for the Rebecca Yarros series, will expand in a partnership with the Penguin Michael Joseph division.

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New UK children’s publisher: Three Wishes

Three Wishes expects to publish 15 to 20 concepts a year across novelty board books, personalized journals, arts and crafts, and sound books.

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New imprint: Bloomsbury Archer

The imprint will publish science fiction, fantasy, crossover stories, speculative romance, horror, and mythological retellings.

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Dodging the Scarcity Trap

Today’s post is by author and book coach Anne Janzer.

When I landed on the idea for my first book (a business book), I couldn’t believe that no one had written it yet. The gap in the market looked glaringly obvious to me. So I rushed to fill it, focusing all my energy on getting the book to market quickly, publishing myself.

Once it was published, I started the hard work I had deferred: sharing the ideas, blogging, speaking, defending the framework, and learning from others. I began to build the audience.

As a first-time author, I had tried to “own the space” before someone else did. A mindset of scarcity made me rush.

I was not alone. As a nonfiction book coach, I encounter prospective authors who worry about guarding their ideas. Scarcity has many voices:

Would you sign a nondisclosure agreement before we talk about my book?What if someone steals my idea?I don’t want to share this idea/framework/concept until the book is out.

It’s only natural. After pouring your heart into a book, losing it before you’re finished would be heartbreaking.

Of course, someone could “steal” your idea. We hear news stories that only reinforce the problem—some author stealing another’s plot, for example. These things happen, but rarely.

In protecting your ideas, you may just be hurting yourself. Instead of experiencing the relatively uncommon problem of someone stealing your ideas, you live in the much more common condition: no one knows about your ideas in the first place.

What we can, and can’t, protect

Let’s be clear: I am not a lawyer, but to the best of my understanding, copyright applies to the expression of ideas — the words that contain the thoughts. That’s what you protect. Your words. Book titles, though, are not protected by copyright in the U.S. It’s possible you could trademark a title, however, and nonfiction authors might want to trademark a framework or license a system. (Learn more about trademark from a lawyer.) But before you lock everything up, let’s look at the underlying assumption of scarcity and loss.

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, the gap between the idea and finished product is huge. That’s why skilled ghostwriters charge a lot. Your idea is just the starting point.

If you and I both write a book on the same topic, I can guarantee the two books would be quite different, especially if we really bring ourselves to the writing process.

Many people worry about getting credit for their ideas. But credit is rarely guaranteed. Creative work, like science, simmers in a global soup of ideas bouncing and colliding with each other, generating new ideas.

Can you remember the origins of your ideas and beliefs? Do you cite the textbooks you studied in college, the essay by the author you love, the article in the paper? It’s hard because once ideas enter your mind, they react with each other and your experience. They become part of your worldview.

Hoarding ideas rarely pays off. Like money stuffed in mattresses, unshared ideas don’t earn interest.

Do you want to keep your ideas from entering the mix, or do you want to make an impact? If it’s the latter, start right away.

Ideas aren’t scarce

If a plate holds three cookies and I eat two of them, there’s only one left for you. (Sorry — you should have acted faster!) Unless one of us buys or bakes more, those cookies are a finite resource. They belong in the realm of scarcity and so do the following:

Sports (only one team can win the big game)Time (you only have 24 hours in the day — the number is unknown, but decidedly finite)

But other things in life play by different rules.

Love: You don’t love a child less when you have another one. Your time and sleep may be constrained, but love grows.Smiles: If I smile at you, you might smile back and both our spirits will be lifted.Yawns. (We’ve all experienced that.)

Likewise, an idea doesn’t get “used up” if it reaches more people — instead, it grows in impact and value.

Good ideas multiply when shared.

When we treat ideas as scarce commodities, we fulfill the prophecy and make them smaller and scarcer.

Writing and publishing with abundance

What would happen if you approach writing with a sense of abundance and share your ideas well before the book is out?

You might deepen your understanding by testing your concepts in the world.You would start interacting with people interested in those ideas, building your author platform.Your book would have a ready audience when it appears.

If you’re pitching a publisher, imagine if your book already had a bunch of pre-orders. That would strengthen the pitch. (Hat tip to Jeevan Sivasubramaniam of Berrett-Koehler Publishers for suggesting this … I think it was in a LinkedIn post. See what I mean about remembering where you encounter good ideas?)

The lessons of abundance

That first book (Subscription Marketing) turned out pretty well in the long run. In hindsight, my sense of scarcity led to an unnecessary rush. So I wrote a second edition reflecting the lessons learned in conversations about that book. It eventually found a larger audience who appreciated its ideas (and it had a great run with a business publisher in Japan).

But I wished I’d shared my ideas in writing and speaking before the book came out, learning from conversations and building the audience by offering useful insights. I am grateful to my first book for teaching me lessons that I have tried to apply to my books about writing.

Not only is it more effective to believe in abundance, it’s more fun as well. You can let go of fear and anxiety and lean into serving others.

Your ideas don’t live between the covers of a book—they come to life in people’s minds. The best way to support your book, especially in the nonfiction world, may be setting those ideas free long before the book appears in print.

New agent alert at Writers House

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New literary magazine: Amulet

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Ghostwriting conference returns for a second year

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New service company for self-published authors

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Links of Interest: March 5, 2025

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This Memoir Could Have Been an Email: Telling Your Story With Different Forms of Communication

Photo by Dalila Dalprat

Today’s post is by writer, editor, and book coach Jennifer Landau.

There are 15 pages of tweets in Jenny Lawson’s memoir-in-essays Broken (in the best possible way). The thread starts with Lawson tweeting:

Airport cashier: “Have a safe flight.”

Me: “You too!”

I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN!

What follows are a barrage of tweets from some of her 400,000+ followers offering up their own embarrassing exchanges.

Lawson, who started her career in the early days of blogging, is a profound and silly and profoundly silly writer with a deep connection to her readers. They come to her book for her bizarro email exchanges with scammers called “the Vampire Brotherhood,” and her very NSFW text exchanges with her sister about, among other things, the scent of bearcat urine.

But readers also crave her candor about her physical and mental health struggles. Lawson has multiple autoimmune disorders and depression and anxiety that puts her at risk of suicide. As Lawson phrases it, “It’s hard to live with a brain that wants to kill you.”

Her chapter titled “Things We Do to Quiet the Monster,” includes a detailed diary of her experience with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment designed to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. She even shares a picture of herself mid-treatment as well as this message to her readers: “I will get better. So will you. Each day more and more people understand the struggle and more treatments become available. One day there will be a cure. And I’ll be here for it.”

Lawson can get away with a lot because she’s a multiple #1 New York Times best-selling author. She can have her fifteen pages of tweets and a wacky list of Shark Tank pitches for products like Pogo Stilts with the tagline “Pogo Stilts: Someone’s Breaking a Leg.”

Her every-type-of communication-short-of-carrier-pigeon approach works because she knows her gifts and her audience. The comic absurdities offer a balm to her reader. The scathing open letter to her health insurance company offers raw honesty that many who fight to get their services covered can relate to. It begins: “Sometimes I think you want me dead.”

Lawson doesn’t just slap together the tweets and emails and texts and call it a day, either. She has passages of deep reflection and a rallying cry that pulses through the memoir. She posits that many of us struggle to treat ourselves with the care that we would show a dog. Dogs need “walks and healthy choices and water and play and sleep and naps and bacon and more naps. And love. I need that, too. And so do you. It’s not just a gift we give ourselves…it’s a duty. I’ll remind you if you remind me.” Lawson may not be all things to all people. But she is everything to her people.

In her memoir Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bess Kalb refers to her book as an oral history. Kalb’s beloved grandmother Bobby is both the primary subject of the memoir and its narrator. She is also dead as the book opens. Bobby lets us know that it’s terrible to be dead because there’s nothing to read and no one to talk to. She complains about her funeral; especially the Jewish tradition of shoveling dirt onto the coffin, which she finds degrading. “What’s next?” she asks. “They make the kids push the embalming fluid into my veins?”

While Kalb’s memoir certainly puts the creative in creative nonfiction, readers who buy into the conceit do so because they have come to know Bobby’s idiosyncratic voice and worldview through the more than thirty phone calls, voicemails, and in-person conversations that Kalb includes in the book. These real-life communications add an air of authenticity that grounds the book and highlights the deep love these two women have for each other. It’s a high-wire act, for sure, but one that had this reader tearing up at a final image of Bobby: young, healthy, and waving from the bow of a boat.

Want to use email, voicemail, and the like in your memoir? Here are a few guidelines.

Tap into the universal

No matter how you bolster your memoir with different forms of communication, you need to tap into something universal to keep your readers engaged.

Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project, offers an algorithm to keep writers focused on issues that transcend their own experience:

Memoir is about X (something universal) as illustrated by Y (something deeply personal) to be told in a Z (a certain format such as a long-form essay, op-ed, or book).

For example: Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is about:

X: The struggle to accept the loss of a loved oneY: As illustrated by Kalb’s desire to remain in conversation with her grandmother even after her death.Z: In the form of a memoir.Accept the anachronistic

When Lawson published her book tweets were still tweets, not X’s or posts or whatever they are called now. A year from now Bluesky’s skeets may dominate. Or TikTok might be banned—and then unbanned—again. All you can do is be clear about what form of communication you are using—and why.

Don’t use those voicemails or texts as a crutch …

If you can’t figure out how to explain an event or a choice you made, avoid tossing in some voicemail transcript instead. It will come off as a cheat and undermine your credibility going forward.

… or as a cudgel

I’ll start with a caveat: If you are writing about an abusive relationship, the legal, ethical, and safety concerns are beyond the scope of what I’m discussing. I’m talking about including a fistful of emails that show your crummy ex-boyfriend behaving in depressingly similar crummy ways (although there might be legal concerns there, too). Not only will your readers get bored, but they will also be looking for your part in things. It takes two to untangle as they say, and your audience wants a warts-and-all narrator they can relate to and trust.

Have fun!

Did you come across a Post-It note from a former neighbor you’ve lost touch with? A nearly illegible family tree your brother sketched during his genealogy phase? A Build-A-Bear bear that plays your now adult son saying, “I love you, Mommy,” in his very prepubescent voice? As long as these things are a natural fit and not simply shoehorned into your memoir because they’re cool, have at it!