Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 37

Avoid Random Acts of Content

Today’s post is excerpted from The Nonfiction Book Marketing and Launch Plan by Stephanie Chandler, founder and CEO of the Nonfiction Authors Association.

One way to attract and cultivate a loyal audience is by sharing compelling content. The goal is to build a relationship that not only leads to book sales but creates fans that stay with you for the long-term. Content marketing should ideally begin before the launch of your book and continue for as long as you want to grow your author business. This is how influencers are born—by marketing content that serves their audiences.

You’ve probably heard the advice to leverage social media, blogging, podcasting, and other content marketing strategies as a tool for growing your author business. However, when you do this without getting clear about the needs, challenges, and interests of your target audience, these efforts usually fall flat.

Let’s take for example Joe Schmoe (not a real person) who authored a book and blogs about backyard farming. Joe is passionate about his topic. He converted his modest backyard into a thriving source of food for his family, and he aims to help others do the same. Despite his passion and enthusiasm, his audience isn’t growing.

To date, Joe’s blog contains several dozen posts. Here are some examples of his titles and topics:

Check out my tomato harvestMemories made on our family vacationWhy I like backyard gardeningSee all the salads I made this weekWhere are the helpers at the hardware store?

Now, imagine you’re interested in backyard gardening. Would the above titles appeal to you? Would they make you want to click on these posts? Or subscribe and visit again and again?

The biggest mistake Joe is making—and one that so many others make with content marketing—is that he’s not considering what his audience cares about. If I’m getting ready to convert my backyard into a mini-farm and I stumble on Joe’s site, seeing photos of his tomatoes or reading about his family vacation offers no value to me. It doesn’t address my challenges or improve my life in any way. So, I will move on, and find one of the many other blogs that can meet my needs.

Here are some better blog post titles that Joe could use:

10 Steps to Getting Started with Backyard FarmingHow to Create a No-Fail Watering Schedule for Your Backyard Farm5 Tips for a Hearty Lettuce HarvestHow to Select Tomato Plants and When to Plant Them3 Reasons Why Your Backyard Garden is Attracting Bugs and How to Get Rid of Them

Can you see the difference here? When Joe puts himself in the shoes of his readers, he will realize they are seeking guidance. As the expert, his readers rely on him to help them get started with gardening and overcome their backyard gardening challenges. If he simply meets these needs, his blog will begin to gain readership momentum.

Identify content ideas

After determining what your audience cares about, you can begin to develop content that meets their needs. Following are some types of content you can create.

How-to/prescriptive

Prescriptive content is some of the easiest to promote because millions of people turn to the internet to seek answers to their challenges every day. When you consider what types of questions your audience is typing into search boxes each day, you can begin to address those needs and develop content they are seeking. Your mission here is to solve their challenges and show them ways to make life easier.

Themes related to book

For narrative nonfiction and memoir, children’s books, fiction, and poetry, you will need to choose a theme and stick with it. Your theme might come directly from your book—or not. You could focus on the location where the book is set and share history of the city or travel tips for visitors. Or, if your book discusses an illness you overcame, sharing helpful information for others battling the illness can be a powerful strategy.

Donna Hartley has authored a series of memoirs based on events from her life, including surviving a collapsed heart valve. Today she earns a full-time living as a professional speaker covering women’s health issues.

Your theme might also be totally unrelated to your book. Charmaine Hammond is a business consultant who wrote a book of lessons from her dog called On Toby’s Terms. She reached out to her business contacts and organized a cross-country tour to promote the book by speaking at dozens of locations. Charmaine picked up the phone and acquired sponsors for the entire trip, covering everything from the borrowed RV she traveled in and a custom promotional wrap placed around the RV, to the coffee she brewed along the way and treats she shared with Toby. Her efforts led to selling tens of thousands of copies of the book and helped her further cultivate loyal fans in her business community—which is her target audience because she offers consulting and educational services for business professionals.

Entertaining and engagingAmazon • Bookshop

If you’re funny, you can engage an audience through laugh-inducing videos (that may go viral!) or a blog where you write hilarious short stories. Though I always recommend picking a theme and sticking with it, being funny could possibly be your focus all on its own. Author Jeremy Greenberg is a former stand-up comic and author of over ten books about pets with titles like Sorry I Barfed on Your Bed and Sorry I Pooped in Your Shoe. He writes hilarious articles for a variety of websites and publications, primarily focused on life with pets and dysfunctional families.

Storytelling is another important piece of the content pie. Great storytellers can build a following by writing for publications that reach their target audience. Without a focused theme, it may be harder to build an audience with your own site until you establish yourself by leveraging the reach that online and print publications offer. The same is true for poets. You either need a theme or you will likely need to rely on drawing interest by getting published on other platforms first.

Want to learn more book marketing tactics? Get a copy of The Nonfiction Book Marketing and Launch Plan by Stephanie Chandler.

To Get on Podcasts, Create a Media Kit

Photo by Medy Siregar on Unsplash

Today’s post is excerpted from How to Get On Podcasts by Michelle Glogovac.

Whether you’re running for a political office, growing a nonprofit, sharing your experience or book with others, educating others on how to successfully do something, or being the light at the end of someone’s tunnel, you’re going to succeed by doing podcast interviews. Your reach is no longer relegated to just those who follow you on social media or find you on LinkedIn. You will now have the ability to reach people all around the world, and not only that, but your interview will be available for the eternity of time … at least while the internet is still around!

Amazon • Bookshop

But before you pitch podcasts, I strongly encourage you to create a media kit. I use the term “media kit,” but others might refer to it as a “press kit,” a “one-page promotional kit,” your “pitch sheet,” or a “one sheet.” Regardless of the name, it’s a one-page document that ideally matches the look and feel of your brand. Its purpose is to offer everything a host needs to know about you that will ultimately make the host eager to interview you. It includes not only your bio and website but links to your social media platforms, your speaking topics, your headshot, your logo, and where you’ve already been featured. Your media kit is a one-stop shop.

Before we dive deep into how to create your media kit, let’s discuss the fact that this is promotional material, and you might be thinking that you don’t want to promote yourself. This is a common theme I hear from prospects and clients alike. I have the same answer for them as I have for you. This isn’t about you. Don’t think about this as promoting yourself if you don’t want to. Instead, focus on how you are going to educate others and share your knowledge and expertise with them so they can benefit from you. Don’t get distracted by negative thoughts of self-promotion. Your interviews are going to help others, as well as help yourself and your business.

First: track down any interviews you’ve already done.

I find that oftentimes we forget where we’ve been interviewed, so do yourself a favor and go Google your name. You can add “podcast interview” or just “interview” in the search bar to help narrow it down. (Tip from Jane: Listen Notes is a good way to search only podcasts, if needed.)

Create a list detailing every interview—whether it’s print, audio, or video—with a link. You’re going to use this information in your media kit. Even if you’re just getting started on your interview journey, chances are there is some sort of recording of you online, whether it was for an interview or a webinar or course you participated in. At this point it doesn’t matter if it fits with the topics you want to be interviewed about; we just want to be able to offer an example to hosts that shows you’re capable of having and holding a conversation.

In the PR world, we refer to “press” as any outlet that mentions you or interviews you. Press includes websites, both digital media outlets and blogs where you have been quoted or have actually written the post, and print media, such as newspapers or magazines, radio interviews, podcast interviews, and television interviews.

For any press that you’ve done, find and copy the link for the interview or where your name is mentioned and also download the logo or graphic art for the outlet. For podcasts, you can google the name of the podcast and then go to “Images” and right-click to save the cover art. Keep all of these in a folder, and give them recognizable file names so you can find them easily. You are going to use these graphics in your media kit. Logos and cover art are more recognizable than text titles and names. Images also tend to take up less real estate, and you need to present a lot of information on one page.

Ensure your media kit feels like you

Your media kit should look like an extension of your website or the branding of your logo, whether that’s for your business or personal brand. When someone looks at your media kit and then checks out your website, there should be no difference in look and feel. This is a part of your brand and who you are. This is what the term “brand recognition” means. It’s like seeing the Nike swoosh without the word “Nike” attached to it, but automatically recognizing what the swoosh means. Brand recognition is seeing the golden arches and recognizing it as a McDonald’s even as you’re driving 70 miles per hour down the freeway. We want your media kit to have brand recognition and to offer the familiarity of your website, your logo, and your social media platforms. The look and feel are all the same no matter where someone sees your content. Consistency is a big deal in how your marketing materials are presented as well as in how you present and share yourself.

You need a professional headshot

One of my favorite movies is Sunset Boulevard, and my favorite line is when Norma Desmond says, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” Not everyone is comfortable with a close-up, but it’s necessary. You need a headshot. Why do you need a photo of yourself? Well, people want to connect with people. We are all virtual these days, so we want to connect more now than ever before. We have emails, Zoom calls, and social media, and so it can often feel like there’s no true human connection. Having a headshot helps to create a human-to-human connection. A high-quality headshot is also going to elevate you as someone who is seen as a professional and who understands the podcasting landscape. Your podcast interviews won’t always have a video component to them, so it’s nice for hosts to see who exactly they are going to be talking to, and this is true even if there’s a video component to your interview. This is part of being approachable and familiar.

Every host is going to ask for a headshot, so you might as well have one ready to go. Your headshot will be used for the graphics that hosts will make and share across their platforms (and you’ll share these elsewhere, too), so you’ll want a great headshot. I recommend investing in a professional photographer to take your headshot photo. Many photographers offer headshot packages, and some larger cities have studios specifically for headshots and social media photos. If you aren’t comfortable with having your photo taken, you’re going to need to get used to it. That’s some tough love from yours truly! Trust me when I tell you that once you get that first headshot done, you’ll feel much more comfortable about it.

Please do yourself (and me!) a favor and don’t use the glamor shots you took in the nineties at the mall! Don’t be afraid to wear bold colors minus any crazy patterns that can be distracting. Your background can be outdoors or a mono-colored wall. If you’ve got a professional taking your headshots, then the person should be equipped and prepared with good lighting to ensure you look as natural and comfortable as possible. Some jewelry is fine, but be sure to not overdo it to the point that it takes away from you being the focus of the photo.

Write a two-paragraph bio

We now know what you look like, but we need to include who the heck you are, so you’re going to need a biography of yourself. Don’t worry; this isn’t your autobiography in book form. This isn’t even your life story in a nutshell. It’s a two-paragraph description of who you are and what you do and should include some of your accomplishments and something that allows your personality to shine through.

Your biography should pertain to your experience, education, special accolades, and awards. If you have a company bio or author bio already written, you might be able to utilize that instead of reinventing the wheel. I think it’s a good idea to have consistency wherever you can, including your bio.

If you don’t have a bio already written, don’t stress. Here are some tips for crafting your bio:

Write it in the third person. This is what a host is going to read to introduce you, so as odd as it may be, write it like you’re talking about someone other than yourself.The opening line should include your full name and what you do. For example, mine would say, “Michelle Glogovac is THE Podcast Matchmaker, award-winning publicist, and host of the My Simplified Life podcast.”Include two to three sentences about your experience—what you do, what you specialize in, and what type of clients you work with—and about your goal—what you are striving to achieve.Create a second paragraph that shares your educational background, the vicinity where you reside, and anything personal you might want to add. Mine includes that I have BA and MS degrees in law; I’m a wife, a mom of “Irish twins,” a stepmom of two adults, and a fur mom; I reside in the Bay Area; and I have a love for wine.Don’t be afraid to give your bio some personality and share who you are in it. The goal is to make your bio not only impressive but relatable as well.

Here is an example of a good bio:

A natural leader in work and life, Shana Pereira has an empathic ability to bring people together and the intuition on how to make the impossible possible. With 20 years of experience in marketing and media, in her professional life Shana directs and guides large-scale operating systems that drive cultural engagement, fast growth, and lasting business impact. After a near-death experience during a heart and kidney transplant in 2020, Shana is now channeling her purpose into building a movement, content platform, and research institute around the future of religion and healthcare.

A storyteller, modern-day apostle, and unrelenting optimist, Shana is a sought-after speaker and thought leader sharing her insights and lessons around organ transplantation, the importance of partnership with your medical team, the mental resilience it takes to survive when faced with death, and the emotional impact of having seen the afterlife. Her experiences and speeches move everyone who hears them—guiding people on how to have a better relationship with crisis and, in turn, their own humanity.

A side note: Be sure to update your bio—don’t let it get stale. It’s a good idea to revisit your bio a couple of times a year, although you’ll be sending it out much more frequently when you are doing podcast interviews.

Point to your social media accounts

We can’t forget to include where people can stalk you … I mean find you! Gather your social media handles for where you show up most consistently. Since the actual hyperlinks are lengthy, I like to use the small icon graphics that represent each platform, such as the Facebook logo, Instagram logo, a microphone (if you host a podcast), and so forth. If you are going to use the Canva app (more on that below), you can get these icons ready to go. If you aren’t active on one of these platforms, don’t include it. Each icon will have a hyperlink to your specific social media account, making it clickable and eliminating any need for the host googling you. If you’re using Word or a PDF, you can also hyperlink your social media account handles within the document.

Put it all together

If you’re new to media kit design, don’t worry: Canva is a simple-to-use website where you can design basically anything. Even better is that it has a free option! I recommend downloading a PDF file of your kit and naming it with your name followed by “media kit.” One thing I want you to remember is that this is YOUR media kit. Let it represent you, your personality, and your brand and showcase how amazing you are. You can also use Word, Google Docs, or Adobe to create your media kit. This is about the end product and not about using the right software or needing to learn a new one.

Final word

Your media kit is going to come in very handy because it’s a tool you will utilize in pitching yourself not only to podcasts but to any other type of media or speaking engagement. You’ve just created your one-stop shop that tells people who you are, what you do, and where they can find you!

Hoping to get on podcasts this year? Get a copy of How to Get On Podcasts by Michelle Glogovac.

How to Write Realistically About Drug Use in Your Novel

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

Today’s post is excerpted from The Grim Reader: A Pharmacist’s Guide to Putting Your Characters in Peril (Red Lightning Books, 2024, used with permission) by Miffie Seideman.

Writers have asked how they can realistically describe a drug they’ve never personally used. How can they accurately portray a character’s actions or symptoms?

Know your history

Building a credible scene requires researching some historical facts, including:

Was the drug discovered yet? A scene using insulin set in 1820 is problematic since this treatment wasn’t discovered until the 1900s. Fentanyl shouldn’t be used in a 1930s scene since it wasn’t available for use until the 1960s—opium or morphine would be more accurate choices.Was the method to take the drug invented yet? Since insulin must be given as a shot, that scene is even less authentic as the hypodermic needle wasn’t invented until the mid-1800s. Older historical fiction could involve the use of poultices and mustard packs, while skin drug patches (transdermal patches) are only appropriate in more modern scenes.

You also need to consider what drug trends existed in the time period of your story. Medical knowledge changes over time and with it the drugs prescribed. This, in turn, impacts the type of prescription drugs diverted into street supplies or available in home medicine cabinets.

Here’s a sample scene:

He picked up the empty glass vial next to her lifeless body. Chloral hydrate! He’d been a fool to leave it where she could find it.

Is this author’s sedative choice realistic? It depends on what year the scene takes place. Popular sedatives have changed significantly over the decades. In the late 1800s, chloral hydrate was popularly used to treat anxiety and insomnia. It was replaced by bromides, which were also unfortunately used to create the “bromide sleep” to sedate patients in asylums. By the 1920s, awareness that bromides caused prolonged hallucinations led doctors to prescribe barbiturates like phenobarbital (barbital) instead. So, it was no accident that Agatha Christie chose to weave barbital into the plot of Murder on the Orient Express. Once the medical profession realized the growing trend of barbiturate addiction, benzodiazepines (“benzos”) became the new alternative. Surprisingly, despite safety concerns, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that chloral hydrate was finally removed from the US market.

Based on these prescribing changes over time, how would you revise the sample scene to take place in the 1940s? In 2000?

Sample scene, setting 2020:

He quietly opened her medicine cabinet, fumbling through bottles, until his fingers landed on the one labeled “Vicodin.”

Over the last decade, the growing opioid crisis has caused concerns about overprescribing and addiction. But in the early 2000s, poorly treated pain created a national push for better pain control, resulting in increased prescribing of opioid drugs such as oxycodone, hydrocodone (Vicodin), and Percocet. Eventually, this led to an oversupply of opioids, excess stores in medicine cabinets, and increased street supplies.

Then, with addiction and overdoses escalating rapidly, additional prescribing restrictions enacted in the US reduced drug availability. The unintended consequence of this was an increase in the black market demand for opioids, which escalated illicit drug smuggling into the US. This influx of opioids has included illicit fentanyl, both in bulk and laced into street drugs such as heroin and counterfeit pain pills. The culmination of these events has resulted in the current fentanyl overdose epidemic.

Due to these rapid social changes in a span of only twenty years, an opioid scene set in 2020 will look very different than one set in 2000.

So, is the scene above appropriate? If the character’s grandmother held onto leftover hydrocodone (Vicodin) after her last surgery a couple of years ago, then yes. Many people, especially the elderly, squirrel away leftover tablets instead of tossing them into the garbage. Some patients hoard pills, afraid they won’t be prescribed enough the next time they’re in pain. But if the character’s grandmother is depicted as having been given the pills after a recent surgery, then no. Opiate prescribing in the US has been extremely restricted during the last several years. Few opioids are prescribed after surgery and when they are, the number of tablets is usually enough for only a few days of treatment. In this case, it would be more realistic to have the character not find the pills he wants and resort to buying some from his friend at school. And where would his friend have gotten the pills? He probably bought them from a stranger at a party.

Study drug abuse trends

Different countries, and different locations within countries, have varying trends of drug use and abuse over time. Factors affecting these differences are complex, but include laws, local cultures, drug availability, drug costs, and proximity to country borders. A drug-related scene in a town along the US-Mexico border will look quite different than one set in a Midwest farming town. The resources page at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) website contains a wealth of information regarding location-based trends in drug abuse and even maps of the locations where clandestine labs have been found. The National Drug Threat Assessment, published regularly on the site, details national data related to illicit drugs. For international information, a great resource is the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime website.

Research slang and look for “trip reports”

How your character talks about drugs and the related paraphernalia is just as important to sounding authentic as what the character does with them. A well-written scene using drug jargon can immerse readers in the setting, even if they don’t know what the exact terms mean. A great example of this can be found in Good Girls (Season 1, Episode 6) when Boomer pressures Darren into selling him drugs. Darren’s response—the litany of drugs he has available to sell, including everything from “Addys” to “fat bags of herb”—is both authentic and funny.

Drug jargon not only changes over time but also with geographic location, age, socioeconomic status, and a host of other factors. Hundreds of street names and a wide variety of related slang exist for various drugs. But applying slang to your scene will require additional research to identify the terms that will sound the most authentic in your story. For example, while doobie and vape are slang terms used for marijuana, having your 2020s high schooler talk about “takin’ a hit off a doobie” would be as out of place as having a 1960s hippie invite someone to “vape some dank weed.” And jargon like dubsack and trippin’ balls should be used in the right context.

Online videos posted by recovered addicts or current users offer a well-rounded sense of how to use such jargon realistically. Using the search words trip report with the name of a drug can be a starting place. For example, a search for DXM, third plateau, and trip report will result in numerous videos of users that were filmed during their DXM trips, offering profound insight for writing a scene. In addition, a few social influencers have posted videos documenting their journey through drug addiction, recovery, and sometimes even relapse.

Consider socioeconomic status

What’s your character’s income? What are the economics of the setting? Crack is a credible choice in a plot involving a low-income character because it’s a relatively cheap drug, while a cheese platter spiked with ecstasy is more appropriate in a high-society women’s brunch scene. Is your character a penniless alcoholic? Instead of passing out after chugging a fifth of Tanqueray gin, the medical responders should find him near death from drinking cheap isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol.

The market cost of drugs has an impact on drug trends. For example, in about 2013 Arizona high school students switched from abusing expensive oxycodone pills to cheaper and more available heroin. But an influx of illicit pills from Mexico has driven oxycodone prices down, making it the preferred choice again. Many of these pills, however, are counterfeit and tainted with potentially lethal doses of fentanyl. Now, an upsurge of fentanyl overdoses and deaths are being reported in those same high schools.

How is the drug usually used?

Avoid the temptation to improvise ways to get the drug into your character just to fit a scene. Most drugs given the wrong way won’t work as planned. If your villain spikes a drink with insulin to kill an adversary, he’ll be sorely disappointed when his victim lives. Insulin must be injected or, in some cases, inhaled, to avoid destruction during digestion.

Learn how fast a character should show symptoms

Avoid writing instant drug effects. They are almost always unrealistic. Instead, build page-turning tension using the actual time it takes for drugs to cause harrowing symptoms. Despite what movies would have you believe, a chloroform-soaked rag won’t make a character instantly pass out, and the effects will wear off quickly after the rag is removed. Even injecting drugs rarely works instantly. For example, a villain attempting to kill with an overdose of insulin shouldn’t see the victim immediately fall to the ground. Insulin takes time to work, initially dropping the person’s blood sugar, leaving his brain foggy, his vision blurry and making him shaky. As his blood sugar drops dangerously low, he can suffer a seizure and lose consciousness. Now your character is on the way to dying.

Use the reader’s own knowledge and need for suspense to your advantage. Did your character swallow a handful of pills? Since many people know it takes several minutes for pills to have an effect, you can let your readers build their own anticipation, waiting for the inevitable, while you slowly develop the scene tension.

Need to hasten a character’s demise? Write the scene using a drug that can be injected into a vein (IV) or inhaled, which generally works faster than a shot into muscle (IM) or swallowed pills. Reserve plots using a skin patch for slow-moving scenes since it takes time for drugs to absorb and cause symptoms. High or lethal doses can rapidly create dangers for your character. But, for any of these methods, symptoms should still appear in a cascade, not all at once. For example, a rapid injection of a high fentanyl dose can suddenly cause chest muscles to become rigid, making it hard or impossible to breathe. Then, with no oxygen, several other symptoms can evolve—such as blue lips, seizures, a slowing heartbeat, and death—over several minutes (or pages). The character shouldn’t die instantly, even with this potent drug.

And keep in mind that not all overdoses are lethal. Depending on the drug, your character may suffer serious symptoms but realistically survive. This fact offers a world of harrowing conflicts that can make your character strong enough to ultimately tackle his inner demons.

A note of caution when using brand names

An abundance of caution should be used when deciding to use the brand name of a drug in your story. Brand names can be acceptable, but using language that tarnishes, defames, or falsely depicts a product as dangerous can bring litigation. Authors can circumvent these concerns by avoiding the use of brand names entirely. It’s often not even necessary to specifically mention a drug name to develop a scene. Instead of mentioning the brand OxyContin, build tension as the character opens the leftover bottle of pain pills. Instead of Adderall, a stressed college student studying for finals can reach for his “study buddies” bought in a previous scene. Simply describing what the medicine does can be effective, evoking the reader’s memory of similar experiences. If you want to be completely fictional, invent your own brand name, but try to stay within the symptoms expected from that kind of drug. Suzanne Collins blended several of these concepts well in The Hunger Games series. The sweet syrup that calmed Gale’s pain and was extremely addictive was reminiscent of morphine. If you do choose to use a real brand name, consider getting a legal consult to verify that you haven’t crossed the boundaries of acceptable use.

Additional resources

There’s a wealth of drug information available. A few resources to consider include:

Amazon • BookshopFDA (Food and Drug Administration) and DEA online databases and drug resources, which provide information on changing trends in various geographic locations as well as updates on the legal status of various drugs.Social networking groups focusing on related specialty writing topics, such as trauma or emergency medicine, can be a wealth of information.Newspaper articles and medical journals are great places to find real cases.Local medical professionals, police, and medical examiners can provide insight and realistic ideas.The US national poison center is an often-forgotten resource that collects data from fifty-five poison centers throughout the US. It provides free information to the public on poisonings, drug exposure, chemicals, poisonous plants, and venoms. It’s a wealth of information on trends in drug abuse, overdoses, and poisonings based on age groups and geographic locations. The poison center is also available to guide the general public during poisoning emergencies, such as the frantic parents of a toddler found chewing on iron tablets next to an empty vial.

If you found this post helpful, be sure to pick up a copy of The Grim Reader.

The Über Skill for Writers

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her on Wednesday, January 24 for the online class Analyze Story Like an Editor.

One of the most important abilities a writer can hone doesn’t involve writing—at least not their own.

Learning to objectively assess other people’s stories, and pinpoint what makes them effective or not, will do more for your own writing craft than even psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s much vaunted (and misinterpreted) 10,000 hours of practice popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. 

That’s not to denigrate the importance of actually doing the work of writing. But no amount of putting words on the page will teach you as much as analyzing what makes story work and training your own editor brain.

Analyzing story like an editor informs every element of writing and every skill a writer must develop—not just editing, but also drafting and revision, and storytelling skill as well as craft skills.

The ability to see our own work clearly is one of the greatest challenges of writing. Authors fill in the blanks of their characters and world and stories in their heads without realizing whether it’s coming across effectively on the page to readers. It’s almost impossible to assess our own work as objectively as we can with other people’s.

That’s why practicing the skill with stories we did not create is one of the best ways of learning to see the component parts of effective story and internalizing those skills in the ones you do.

And no matter where you are in your writing career, whether multi-published or at the beginning, you already have the main tool you need to master this skill: yourself.

Analyzing starts with you

Outside of the intrinsic rewards of creating story, story’s effect and its purpose is the reaction it elicits in the recipient. Much of the reason we work to understand and master essential story components like character development, well-structured plots, meaningful stakes, strong momentum, suspense, etc., is because these are the tools by which story compels its audience.

So in learning to understand these core craft elements, we start with observing our own reactions to the stories we take in, and trace our subjective reaction to the objective techniques that elicited them.

I called this objective analysis because you aren’t colored by your own intentions for the story; you’re simply taking it in as an observer, the way editors approach a manuscript when working on it.

And yet where humans are concerned, there’s really no such thing as pure objectivity. We are all subjective creatures, bringing our own biases, experiences, judgments, and perspectives to everything we experience. But it’s those subjective reactions that will lead you to discover the techniques of story that are effective for you, that lead to the types of stories that affect you and move you and elicit a reaction.

By learning to pay attention to how you are impacted by story, both good and bad, you learn to trace back those ultimate effects to the techniques that elicited them. You use your subjective reactions to determine the objective craft techniques the storyteller used to create them.

Analyzing in the wild

In analyzing what you read (or watch or hear or see), first start with your overall general impressions: Was the story effective? Did it engage you? Elicit any reactions in you? What were they—and where in the story did you feel them?

“Reaction” may mean you loved it, were moved, affected, excited—or it may mean it angered you, galvanized you, engaged your attention and thoughts. Indifference results from those forgettable stories that make no ripple at all.

Then you’ll trace those reactions back to specific story elements they relate to, and dissect why those elements worked (or didn’t, which can be equally instructive). And finally you examine the text line by line, identifying granularly how the author created the effect you perceived.

Let’s walk through an example. I just finished Ann Patchett’s most recent novel, Tom Lake. She has long been a favorite writer of mine, and knowing why is the beginning of understanding how she wields storytelling devices to create an effect and a reaction in readers: Patchett is a character writer, and character to me is the soul of compelling story.

Her stories don’t involve objectively massive stakes like saving the world from nuclear threat. They’re often simply slices of characters’ lives in particularly tumultuous or meaningful moments. But they’re deep. Deceptively deep, like the surface of a caldera that extends countless fathoms into the Earth.

Tom Lake is no exception. From the beginning I felt invested in characters who felt real to me, and relatable. Every night I found myself eager to open the book back up and find out what happened to them next. I was surprised by several twists and reveals I hadn’t seen coming. The end felt satisfying—inevitable yet unexpected—and I found the story continues to linger in my mind even weeks later.

If I scratch deeper into these initial overview reactions, I can identify the specific storytelling elements each relates to:

Character: Obviously. Patchett paints not just her protagonist but every character with nuance and verisimilitude, giving each specific driving motivations and clear, tangible goals that give readers something concrete to root for. Point of view and voice: Part of the reason the story engaged me so deeply is Patchett’s intimate first-person narration. Readers are directly privy to the protagonist’s inner life, experiencing the story in her head, behind her eyes, through her immediate perception—which is also the lens through which the author brings the other characters fully to life.Stakes: I cared about what the characters had to gain or to lose—because I cared about them, and they cared profoundly about what was at stake, even though it was objectively small: winning a part in a play, performing at a regional theater, winning (and keeping) a love interest, completing a cherry harvest before the fruit rots. You don’t have to ever have done or cared about those particular things to understand wanting something coveted and striving for it, or craving the attention of an objet d’amour, or attaining a crucial goal by a pressing deadline. The highly personal becomes universal in a skilled author’s hands, and gives a story its impact on readers.Suspense and tension: Patchett creates questions throughout—not always major ones, but threaded through on every page is some uncertainty, conflict, an unresolved tension that made me constantly wonder, “What will happen next?” Her reveals are so seamless and smooth that I never even realized she was concealing something intrinsic to the story until she pulled the curtain away. And when she did, it added even more layers of meaning—increasing my investment in the characters and what they wanted (storytelling is a web where every element impacts every other).Momentum: Tom Lake relentlessly moves the story forward, even as it revolves around events from the past, a masterful feat instructive to any author who has ever struggled to fluidly incorporate backstory without stalling momentum.Plot and structure: Patchett weaves together the story of the protagonist’s past—her single-summer relationship with a man who became a megastar—with her present, quarantined on her family’s cherry orchard with her husband and three grown daughters, a dual-timeline device that heightens the impact and stakes of each storyline, creates much of its suspense and momentum, and instills depth and nuance in each that neither would have alone. My satisfaction with the ending suggests Patchett resolved the plot and various storylines in an effective, cohesive way.

Finally I can go back and dissect, line by line, how she weaves this tapestry. Let’s take just the opening paragraph—I’ll insert my analysis in red:

That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability. [Patchett plunges readers into the story in medias res, right in the middle of the action. From the first line she begins to paint a picture of the situation and the characters—both that they are responsible but that they see themselves as dull.] The play’s director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother’s friend and State Farm agent. [The first brushstroke in creating a sense of place—a small, interrelated town.] That’s how I was wrangled in, through my grandmother, and Veronica was wrangled because we did pretty much everything together. [Relationship details—both with her grandmother, who clearly has influence over the protagonist, and Veronica, clearly her best friend, which also sets up stakes on these relationships that are both germane to the story.] Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town. We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It spoke to us, made us feel special and seen. Mr. Martin predicted a large turnout for the auditions, which explained why he needed use of the school gym for the day. The community theater production had nothing to do with our high school, but seeing as how Mr. Martin was also the principal’s insurance agent and very likely his friend, the request was granted. Ours was that kind of town. [All small, telling details about the world of the story, the character’s background, and setting up the central role Our Town plays throughout the story as well as its themes.]

Another reader might have different reactions to a story like this. Maybe it seems too quiet or small. Maybe they think nothing really happens. Those are as valid as my own interpretation. Analyzing story isn’t about whether it’s good or bad or you like it or not. It’s about how authors use concrete storytelling devices to create an effect. How you are impacted by that varies from reader to reader—and it’s part of learning your own style and voice as a writer.

Analyze everything

The beauty of this powerful technique to improve your own writing and storytelling craft is that you can do it anywhere, with any story you take in—and everything is story: books, both fiction and nonfiction; movies and TV shows; podcasts and feature articles and interviews; commercials, songs, poems; company slogans and taglines; even your own life. I do this so automatically now it’s like a patellar reflex: I’ve analyzed magazine articles, family dinners, home owners’ association dramas, and why Will Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock so captured the world’s attention.

Far from taking away the joy of story, dissecting it as a writer lets you appreciate it on even deeper levels—or articulate why some stories are DNFs for you, or simply leave you cold even if critics are raving (I’m looking at you, The Lobster).

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate a story, or who agrees with you about its merit. No matter your reaction, it’s the barometer by which you can gauge how effective that story is to you, which is the only metric that matters in creating the kinds of stories you want to tell.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, please join us on Wednesday, January 24 for the online class Analyze Story Like an Editor.

4 Things Every YA Writer Should Know About Teens

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author and book coach Samantha Cameron.

Years ago, I had a student in my AP World History class, who, despite seeming interested in the class, never submitted any homework. It was tanking her grade. Hoping to solve this no-homework spiral, I pulled her aside and asked what she did after school most days.

“Most days, I get home from school and start reading a book. And then I can’t stop reading the book. I keep reading until I finish, and by then it’s the middle of the night, and I’m tired, so I go to bed.”

We never did solve her homework problem, but she passed the class and graduated. As a writer and avid reader myself, I have a soft spot for the kids who hide open novels under their desks or stay up all night reading. As their teacher, I know I’m supposed to keep them on task and insist on better study habits. But, whenever I see a teenager reading instead of something else they’re “supposed” to be doing, I can’t help but think, Well, there’s worse things they could be up to.

I also know that a good novel has everything teen brains are primed to crave—excitement, emotion, and escape.

Since most YA authors are adults, we need to rely on our memories of adolescence to write teen characters. No matter how vivid your memories are, the fact remains that teenage brains function differently than adult ones. These differences are deeper than the poor impulse control that makes you want to scream, “What were you thinking?”

As a high school teacher who writes for teens, I think there are four things about the adolescent mind every YA writer should know.

1. Teens are easily bored.

Compared to adults and younger children, adolescents have a low baseline level of dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that rewards us with a little rush of good feelings when we do things essential for survival—like, eating carbohydrates. It also rewards us for survival-adjacent behaviors such as learning a new skill, socializing, or getting lost in a good story. Additionally, dopamine plays a role in learning, mood regulation, memory formation, and sleep.

Low dopamine makes teens more susceptible to stress and depression but also makes everything—even things they used to find interesting—a total snoozefest.

Because of their low dopamine levels, teens crave novelty—new experiences. Books can be a great source of novelty, but they need to deliver right out of the gate to keep a teen reader engaged.

It’s not just low levels of dopamine that make teenagers picky readers. The average American teenager is overbooked. They’re in school 6–7 hours per day and may have nearly as many additional hours in the day dedicated to homework, extracurricular activities, and jobs. That’s a 12–14 hour workday! And, on top of that, teens need more sleep than any time since they were toddlers, between 9–12 hours per night. If a teenager is going to spend any of their precious free time on reading a book, it had better capture their attention fast.

What this means for you: Trim your story down to only the most relevant and interesting parts.

2. Teens are naturally curious.

Teen brains are highly plastic. In neuroscience, plasticity refers to how pliable and adaptable the mind is. For all the shortcomings of the adolescent brain (poor decision-making, mood swings, regrettable sartorial choices, etc.), one miraculous thing about it is the incredible capacity for learning new things and the rapidity with which teens can acquire new skills. On any given day, your teen is learning Spanish, world history, calculus, and how to drive.

Teens are primed for learning, while also being easily bored. Paired together, these two facets of their brain chemistry make teenagers naturally curious people. They are eager to know more about the world around them, and especially to learn about other teenagers. Books are well-suited to deliver. A novel gives the teen reader the closest possible experience of getting to live in someone else’s skin.

In later adolescence, kids become capable of more cognitive complexity. Most kids are strongly driven by a sense of fairness and justice, and in later teen years, kids start grappling with contradictions and shades of grey. Moral and ethical complexities give their hungry, novelty-craving brains a lot to chew on.

What this means for you: Give teen readers the opportunity to learn new things and have new experiences. Give them big dilemmas and questions to chew on, rather than a sermon.

3. Teen emotions are powerful.

That low dopamine again. While everything in the teenage universe suddenly feels so B-O-R-I-N-G, the low levels of dopamine in their brains also makes their emotions feel extremely powerful, especially brand-new emotions like the first flutters of romantic love.

So, a teen who is feeling bored and alone can experience the rush of a love affair or the adventure of political rebellion from the safety of their own couch. It’s a chance to feel the big feelings they might not be getting to feel in their real lives.

What this means for you: Put your protagonist’s feelings on the page so that your reader can feel them too.

4. Teens need to experiment and test boundaries.

Developmentally, teens are in a phase of life where they’re exploring big issues about identity and their place in the world. That’s why so many coming-of-age stories center around identity formation. One of the ways teens figure out who they are is by testing out different ways of being. Just like reading a book is a great way for teens to experience emotional release, reading is also a way for teens to try on and contemplate new identities. It’s a chance for them to see their own experiences reflected back to them and to realize that they aren’t alone in feeling the way that they do. It’s only as an adult that I’ve had a chance to read books with bisexual protagonists and it has been an incredible affirmation to realize that truly there are other people out there who feel the way I do. It would have been super helpful when I was a semi-closeted bisexual teenager to have read those books!

Because teens are so close to adulthood, this boundary testing isn’t just about identity formation (or giving their parents grey hairs), it’s also about autonomy and independence. They want and need a chance to do things for themselves.

What this means for you: Put teen protagonists in the driver’s seat. Give your hero the agency that your readers may lack in their own lives. Again, don’t be preachy. Not only will readers of all ages find it boring, teens are particularly allergic to condescension. They also have perfectly honed BS detectors. They know when you’re trying to feed them something you don’t believe in. Instead of a sermon, show a protagonist facing a big dilemma or testing boundaries so that your teen reader can come to their own conclusions.

(Bonus) 5. Teens have trouble sleeping.

As I mentioned previously, most teens need between 9–12 hours of sleep per night, but many early adolescents also experience what is known as a sleep phase shift. Basically, their body’s natural release of melatonin (the hormone that makes you feel sleepy) shifts by about two hours. So, instead of being ready to fall asleep at 9 p.m., the way they once used to, many teens aren’t physically ready to go to sleep for the night until between 11 p.m. and midnight, no matter how long their day has been or how early they have to get up the next morning. This shift can be so dramatic that to some kids, it feels like insomnia. These same sleepless hours that attract kids to hours of scrolling on social media also make them susceptible to a good page-turner. So, if you pack your novel with plenty of excitement, emotion, and escapism, you can hook your teen readers and keep them turning pages late into the night.

For more on teen brains and writing:

The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence  by Jessica Lahey  The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed  by Jessica Lahey Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence  by Lisa Cron

Your Substack Isn’t For Everyone

Photo by aboodi vesakaran

Today’s post is by Elizabeth Held, who publishes the newsletter What To Read If on Substack.

One of the first tasks that querying authors undertake is researching their comps. Underlying this research is the question, “Who is your target reader?” And answering this question meaningfully requires acknowledging that your book is not for everyone.

The same is true for a newsletter. Over the past three years, I’ve built an audience of nearly 7,000 subscribers for my book recommendation newsletter on Substack. (I sent my first edition to one subscriber—myself.) I now hear regularly from other Substackers looking for advice on growing a subscriber base.

I can’t pinpoint a single reason for the growth I’ve seen. Luck, support of other Substackers and consistency have all played a part, but there is one piece of advice I almost always give. Make sure you know who your newsletter is for and what they get from it. It boils down to filling in the statement “where XX audience finds YY content.” This guiding principle ensures you’re giving value to your audience.

Deliver clear value

I love this formula so much that when potential subscribers read my newsletter’s About page, the first thing they see is “where book lovers find their next great read.” Immediately, people have a sense of whether my newsletter is something they’re interested in.

Other successful newsletters deliver on a similar formula, even if they’re not writing it out as directly as I am:

Kathleen Schmidt’s Publishing Confidential: Where writers and publishing professionals find information on an opaque industry. Dearest by Monica McLaughlin: Where antique enthusiasts find undiscovered gems.Sari Botton’s Oldster: Where Gen X finds camaraderie about aging. Lit Mag News by Becky Tuch: Where creative writers find insights on the lit mag world.

Each of these newsletters has a clearly defined audience—they don’t pretend they’re writing for everyone—and deliver value to their subscribers.

Many Substackers seem conflicted about establishing a niche. Instead, they write personal essays or cover a wide variety of topics, without a clear throughline. Established writers, such as Emma Straub, can succeed with this method, but it’s harder for those not coming in with a built-in audience. Subscribers, for better or worse, need to see clear value to take a chance on an unknown author.

That’s not to say all newsletter writers need to be quite as formulaic as I am (three book recommendations each week) to attract an audience. Jolene Handy writes about history, family and life in Chicago, all through a lens of food for Time Travel Kitchen. It creates a sense of consistency for her readers, while allowing her to explore a range of topics. A similar approach would work with art, books, movies, music, etc.

Start with what your audience needs

Completing your “where XX audience finds YY content” starts with thinking about the subscribers you want to attract then determining what they want that no one else is giving them.

For example, if you’re working on a true crime book and want to use a newsletter to find readers for it, you’ll want to think about content true crime enthusiasts are looking for. Podcast reviews? New long reads to check out? Essays on the ethics of the genre? From there, examine what other newsletters are doing and find something different you can do.

This approach works for novelists, too. I am genuinely delighted when I receive romance writer Joanna Shupe’s newsletter in my inbox. Shupe writes love stories set in the Gilded Age, so she’s likely using it to sell those books. Her newsletter, Gilded Treats, includes a mix of historical nuggets about the era and romance recommendations. It’s for readers who pick up her books because of the time period as well as general romance fans.

The difficulty with an audience-centric approach is that it requires putting your subscribers before yourself, at least some of the time. It’s about giving your readers what they want, even if it’s not quite what you feel like writing.

I have found, though, once you’ve established yourself and built trust with your audience, you have some leeway to experiment and explore. I use my book recommendations to comment on the news and pop culture happenings, while also delivering what my audience has come to expect.

It’s tricky and requires some creativity, but rewarding once you nail it.

Researching the Right Literary Agents for You

Today’s post is by editor Christopher Hoffmann from Copy Write Consultants.

You’re all ready to go: Your manuscript is complete, edited and polished to perfection. Your query is a masterpiece of concise, articulate marketing that both encapsulates the heart of your work and gestures at its inexhaustible profundity. Your synopsis … Well, it clearly states what happens in the book, let’s not pretend they’re ever that sexy.

So the next step is simply submitting to agents, right? No big deal. There are agents, who are at agencies, and they, uh, want stuff, and you … have something …

You start researching literary agencies. Wow. There really are a lot of agents. Like a lot. Do that many books actually get published? When was the last time you’ve even seen a bookstore?

So how do you decide to whom you’re going to submit? Full-on shotgun approach, every single agent for whom you can find an email address? Or a targeted, absolutely surgical strike, approaching only those agents with whom you’d love to work and you just know would love to work with you?

The thing is, there isn’t a best or only way to go about deciding on a list of agents you’re going to query.

If you have mountains of spare time and a love (or at least a high tolerance) for tedious tasks, indiscriminately querying gobs of people has the advantage of putting your work in front of all sorts of agents, including agents who might not have been interested in books in your genre/category/subject until they came across yours. But given that most agencies ask that you query only one agent at the agency, you’ll still need to make some decisions.

On the other hand, if you’d rather spend time with your kids, catch up on your Netflix queue, drown your sorrows at the local boozemonger, or, I don’t know, do anything other than cut and paste agents’ names into 250 emails followed by a meticulous accounting for each and every “no response” on a spreadsheet, a little work toward identifying agents who might be a good fit for you is probably worth the effort. Sure, you might miss that one agent who has never repped a fiction book in her life, never even read a work of fiction, but certainly would have been dying to rep yours had she seen it—but hey, those Rusty Nails aren’t going to drink themselves.

Fortunately, there are some strategies you can employ, regardless of your approach, that can help you decide whom to query and whom to ignore.

One of the most important ones, one that we employ when generating agent lists for our clients, is to be careful to not overweight what agents claim they want and to rather pay close attention to what they actually sell.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you ignore an agent’s posted wishlist or send an agent who explicitly states NO WEREWOLF ROMANCES your lurid tale of forbidden lycanthropic love, but instead that, for a variety of reasons, what an agent asks for might not always be what they sell.

An agent may simply have not updated her preferences—in 2019, when she last edited her wishlist, she wanted a Kristin Hannahesque, great-outdoorsy, semiautobiographical potboiler, but these days she’s actually looking for a Where the Crawdads Sing-style, genre-crossing, creepy-real-life-elements page turner. Okay, so maybe that’s not that much of a stretch, but you know what I mean.

An agent might also be looking for a very particular take. If her wishlist states that she would really love to rep a “new spin on the courtroom thriller,” but she’s never repped a thriller of any type, and 90 percent of her sales are in nonfiction, it may just be that she’s looking for something very specific or unique and hasn’t come across it yet. Does that mean she’s a good candidate for your list? Maybe, if your legal thriller subverts, expands, or transcends the genre in some way. But maybe not, if it is an excellent but dutiful adherent to the tropes and requirements of the category. Having a realistic understanding of your work can help you narrow down your list.

There are a variety of ways to determine what/whom agents are selling. A rather clunky one is to look at an agency’s website and check their clients list. Another way is to check QueryTracker’s Who Reps Whom list. This can be most helpful if you’re trying to find out who reps a particular author, as the list is set by authors’ names. It’s not a particularly comprehensive list, though, and is not always up to date.

A more targeted method is to use the deal-tracking functions on Publishers Marketplace. PM has a searchable database of deals, reported by the agents and editors who made them, that goes back to the early aughts. Along with author, editor, and (when applicable) agent, each entry includes a blurb regarding the book’s contents. Coupled with the keyword search, this allows you to find deals (read: agents) that relate to anything you feel is relevant.

When searching for agents like this, you might want to consider how large the market is for your work and whether you’re adding to an agent’s list or competing with it. If you’ve identified the only agent out there who’s sold a book on the therapeutic power of dryer lint, which just so happens to be the subject of your own work, you might not bother querying her—“I’ve already got a dryer-lint guy, you think I want two?” On the other hand, if your work is aimed at a large market and you’ve focused on an agent who reps several authors in your genre, that’s probably a good sign.

You can also cross-reference agents and editors to discover who tends to work with whom; if the agent for one of your comp titles regularly sells to a particular editor or two, what other agents do those editors consistently buy from? Those agents might make good additions to your list.

On the downside, PM is a subscription site, so this method requires a financial outlay (at least $10 for a day pass). Additionally, not all agents report deals, and the ones who do might not report every deal; this means that while there is a lot of fantastic information available on PM, it is by no means a complete picture.

It’s also important to remember that while every deal on PM represents someone getting a contract with a publisher, not every deal goes on to get published. Much like some fully completed movies or second seasons of beloved television programming at the big streamers these days, some manuscripts are simply put out to pasture for reasons that are rarely clear. Checking to see that a deal was actually published is important if you want to use it as a comp title. It is a good idea, as well, to look a little deeper at titles you’ve located: blurbs can be misleading. Sometimes you discover that the what-sounded-like-a taut thriller you found in the Debut category is actually cozy mystery or a supernatural romance, and as such, maybe the agent who sold it is not such a good pick for your list.

So you’ll need to outlay a modest sum and do a little homework, but this method can save you a lot of time in the long run—there’s no need to waste energy and attention getting ignored or rejected by agents who never have and never will sell works like yours.

Putting wishlists in the back seat (but not ignoring them) and focusing on what agents actually sell can help narrow your query list, grounding it with a quantitative strategy that puts less weight on what agents may or may not be looking for and more on what they actually find and sell. The time you save can be spent ranting in fan forums about The Nevers being cancelled after only a single season or complaining to your bartender about his ratio of Drambuie to scotch. Or, you know, writing.

Need help compiling an agent list? Check out Copy Write Consultants.

Add a Luke Skywalker Moment: Give Your Main Character a Bitter Choice

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author and book coach Janet S Fox.

How can you create a truly memorable story? By giving your main character a righteous motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating decisions leading to the balance edge of an impossible choice.

Let’s replay a moment in the crisis scene in Star Wars Episode 6, “Return of the Jedi.”

The Emperor tells Luke Skywalker: “You want this, don’t you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”

Luke has turned away, his back to the camera, his gaze focused on the rebel fleet that is facing ultimate destruction. We can almost feel his temptation. If he strikes down the Emperor, he will become powerful enough to save his friends. But he will lose his soul to the dark side of the Force. If he stands firm in his resolve to be good, his friends will die.

It’s a brilliant moment of moviemaking, heightened by the fact that we can’t see Luke’s face as he wrestles with a bitter choice.

Bitter choices make powerful characters.

The writing exercise that changed everything for me

When I went to my first workshop with agent and teacher Donald Maass, I was working on what ended up becoming my most popular middle grade novel—but I wasn’t there with it yet. Donald helped me take it to the next level.

One of the exercises he gave us was critical to that evolution.

Donald asked us to choose a big scene—one of our turning point scenes. Brainstorm ideas for different responses, actions, reactions with our main characters. Try something utterly different with the scene. Make a list of no fewer than ten ideas.

Not knowing where he was going with this, but wanting something big to play with, I chose my crisis scene, near to the end of the book. A big, dramatic moment.

After we’d made our list, he said, “Now rewrite the scene using the last idea you created.”

(I love this technique, that forces us to brainstorm until our internal defenses drop and we come up with an out-of-the-box option.)

My tenth idea was to turn my main character, for a brief moment, toward the dark side. To give her a way to step back and think, “If I make this choice, I will become powerful enough to save my friends.”

And then, “But I will also become pure evil.”

This is now my very favorite scene in the book, one that showed my character’s nuance and depth, a point at which she could have gone over to the dark side and become a mirror to the truly terrible antagonist. And this was due to her character flaw. Her stubborn nature was crucial to finding herself trapped by this choice.

As I revised, I expanded this nuance to enrich her character with every choice she made up to that moment. My revisions made all her choices, throughout the story, difficult and contingent upon her stubbornness, though not as bad as that one final and pivotal choice.

Luke Skywalker makes choices earlier in Star Wars that suggest he’s vulnerable. He starts wearing black. He modifies his light saber. He fights with Yoda, ignores warnings, insists he must save his friends no matter the consequences. He’s imperfect. He’s his father’s son. He could be persuaded to turn, and the Emperor knows it.

His character flaw: he’s impetuous. He could choose the wrong path because although his motives are righteous, he’s impetuous, and that makes all the difference.

Deepening character through bitter choices

Let’s look at what you can do in your current story, to deepen your character through bitter choices.

First, make sure your main character has a righteous motive. Her righteous motive should be large enough to be impactful, and true to the mission of all heroes: saving of others, saving the world.Next, define her character flaw, one that will trap her in bad choices. Her flaw, whatever it is, must be revealed by little steps in early scenes—her impetuousness, her ability to lie just a little, her tendency to be just a teeny bit cruel, her stubborn attitude—and that flaw will create a potential trap, as every decision she makes will show the reader how precarious her position could become.Then find a scene late in your story, maybe the crisis or the climax scene. What impossible choice can you force on your main character? Go left, and save yourself/your friends, but lose your soul. Go right, and they all die, but you remain good. Can you make your main character go really dark, even for a moment? For a few sentences or half a page? Can you make her motives righteous, but dangerous? Make her flaw the trap she just might fall into?Moving backward through your manuscript, find all the places where your character has to choose something, even something trivial. Can you force her to wrestle with this choice? Show herself to be slightly untrustworthy, or moderately ambitious, or just a little bit biting? Don’t go as far as you did in the big scene; but hint that maybe she could be persuaded to fall into the trap because, after all, though her motives are righteous, her flaw is potentially deadly.

Your main character wants to do the right thing. She loves her friends. She wants to be happy. But like all people, she has a flaw, and in the course of the story you’re creating, she’ll show herself through her choices. Both her righteous nature and her flaw will become apparent.

You will prime your audience to believe that she could accept the dark side.

Create the balance edge of a bitter choice

Readers expect a story might “show them the way” to behave. There must be a moment where a story’s main character understands the righteous path, even if the ending is tragic because the character chooses wrong. A bitter choice creates a balance edge, tipping the character and audience one way or the other.

Luke Skywalker, confronted by the Emperor in a scene like the one above, but earlier in his maturation, would have responded impetuously. He would have made a really bad choice. We believe that he still could, and that makes this moment in the movie so tense, emotional, and memorable. That he chooses to be good is the catharsis we need, with an uplifting ending.

Great tragedies (if that’s what you’re writing) tip the other way, toward the darkness, but with equal power and memorable quality.

Give your main character a righteous motive, a flaw, and a series of escalating choices leading to that balance edge of bitter choice, and you’ll create a memorable story, too.

Why Do Publishers Close Imprints?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

This article first appeared in Jane’s paid newsletter, The Hot Sheet.

Imprints have long been getting closed, merged, reorganized, and reborn over publishing’s history, but this summer raised new frustrations and fears among authors about how and why it’s happening. In June, Penguin Random House (PRH) announced they would merge the long-respected Razorbill into Putnam Children’s (retaining the full team in doing so); in July, HarperCollins announced the closure of Inkyard and the layoff of Inkyard’s staff. Harlequin Teen (started in 2009) was relaunched as Inkyard in 2019, publishing both YA and middle-grade fiction.

We talked to three industry experts about what prompts imprint closures and what authors should expect if they find their imprint on the chopping block.

The most straightforward explanation for imprint closures: lack of sufficient sales. It’s only logical: Publishing is a business, and if the imprint doesn’t earn its keep, there’s only so long it can continue. “Publishing companies today look at imprints through the cold calculus of earnings,” says Paul Bogaards, a longtime Knopf exec who now runs Bogaards Public Relations. “The consolidation that is taking place across the industry—and the closure of imprints—is principally tied to economics.” He says that business managers across the publishing industry review yearly profit & loss statements, and if an imprint is consistently in the red, watch out.

Publicist Kathleen Schmidt, who has had a long career in traditional publishing, agrees. “If the acquiring editors of the imprint are bringing in projects that aren’t selling well enough as frontlist titles, chances are they will not backlist well. While there isn’t a specific frontlist sales number associated with being a profitable backlist title, publishers often know, based on similar books, which ones have the ability to sell steadily over time. If an imprint isn’t producing titles that will add to a publisher’s backlist, it becomes a liability. Additionally, if an imprint’s frontlist titles continue declining sales rather than remain steady or become profitable, it makes more fiscal sense to fold the imprint into an existing one. Often, when this occurs, the staff at the imprint being shuttered is let go.”

In the case of Razorbill and Inkyard, it helps to consider current sales trends: The children’s market has been declining. In 2022, children’s hardcover sales were down 12.5% versus the prior year and below their levels from 2020 and 2019. Circana BookScan reports that frontlist children’s hardcover sales fell more than 20% last year. Additionally, Barnes & Noble has been reluctant to stock children’s middle-grade hardcovers because they are often returned unsold to publishers.

Schmidt says, “Over the past two to three years, B&N has skipped buying many titles because they are no longer willing to take as many chances on debut authors and are being conservative with numbers on previously published authors with mediocre sell-through. Further, B&N store managers aren’t overstocking categories. The cuts in children’s titles are a good example of this. In the YA category, BookTok plays a big part in what B&N carries. Independent bookstores only account for a small percentage of book sales. Amazon is truly where sales are concentrated right now, and though they stock pretty much everything, it doesn’t mean it sells. Discoverability is a major issue there.”

Andrea DeWerd, who runs The Future of Agency and has worked in marketing and publicity at three of the Big Five publishers, says that sometimes imprints spend too much on acquiring books, and “the sales simply aren’t there” to back up big advances. She sees that as more of a risk with personality-driven publishing, where an important editor is given their own imprint due to connections or relationships that bring in high-profile projects (and often high expenses). While imprint closures can appear sudden, she says once you look back, you can often see the signs that it wasn’t working.

Some imprint launches are opportunistic, meant to take advantage of current events or a growing market. Because of the socio-political situation today, you can see this as clearly as ever: Since 2016, new publishers and imprints have appeared to serve the conservative and far-right political audience. Alongside those are an increased number of imprints focused on BIPOC authors and historically underrepresented voices. One publishing industry veteran wondered why publishers start so many imprints in the first place (see imprint map below for a visual), and suggested that it’s partly about sending a signal to certain buying or marketing communities. Obviously sending a signal doesn’t always come with a viable business model, and when the market opportunity passes—or when the economic environment gets challenging, as it is right now, with everyone in cost-cutting mode—such efforts are the first to go.

A visual map of the sprawling imprints at Penguin Random House.  See all of the Big Five imprints.

Are publishers being patient enough to see new imprints pay off? It depends on who you ask, of course. Bogaards says publishing used to be a more patient business, which was a saving grace for both editors and imprints alike. Despite that, he says, “[Publishers] still believe in the acquisitions they are making. They are, however, being thrifty with post-acquisition spend, and writers need to understand this. Writers need to be thinking about what critical investments they should be making in their work. In the old days, you could leave it all to the publishing house. And for a select subset of authors, this may still be true. But many writers will benefit from learning about, and then making, publication investments/spends.”

And a warning for authors who unfortunately signed with an imprint that’s been closed: DeWerd says it can be very challenging to continue to sell through or publish through the imprint’s schedule of titles when it no longer exists, because even though marketing and publicity staff still work on those titles, they don’t necessarily have a clear point person to go to for important decisions or budget approval. And that can be to the serious detriment of those books. She says authors shouldn’t take at face value a publisher’s claim that nothing is going to change when an imprint shutters.

When imprints close or merge, sometimes it’s about personalities and power in addition to efficiencies. PRH recently laid off legendary editors at legendary imprints, which has led to a great deal of pessimism about the state of book publishing. While Bogaards believes that “emotional ties to imprints are relics of a bygone era,” sometimes these moves are about “clipping wings,” because corporate leadership doesn’t want to deal with a power base that lives outside of it. “Sonny Mehta [at Knopf] was a headache for years!” Bogaards says. “He ran a profitable imprint, and when the corporation wanted to rein him in, he told them to ‘f— off,’ and they did. The numbers kept the corporate tinkerers at bay. When he died, all that changed. Profits were down, so they were waiting in the wings. They got in there with their scalpels and started taking imprint jobs and amortizing them into divisional jobs and then into corporate jobs—because it was cost-efficient to do so. Does a publishing company need a head of production for every imprint? A managing editor? An art director? A marketing director? The answer, as it turns out, is no.” (And indeed, a day after Bogaards made this point, mid-size publisher Abrams announced structural changes that impose such efficiencies.)

DeWerd says that the people in leadership or finance always have their eye on potential and immediate solutions to make budget, and sometimes imprint closures may come down to cutting very senior people making high-level salaries. (Typically, these are people who hold titles such as editorial director or publisher.)

Ultimately, neither how well an imprint once did nor its long-standing reputation offers indefinite protection. Schmidt says, “If an imprint has a robust backlist but the editors who acquired those titles haven’t acquired anything profitable in a long time, it is easy for a new CEO to eliminate those salaries. You don’t need the editors to continue backlist sales, because there is a department dedicated to doing so (sales/marketing).” Case in point: This year, McGraw-Hill stopped acquiring new business titles but has held onto its backlist.

Bottom line: Bogaards says, “The majority of readers have no idea who published their book. Many media outlets have given up identifying imprints in their coverage of books.” And DeWerd said that the imprint’s name or reputation doesn’t necessarily affect how the sales and marketing team positions or talks about forthcoming books. Most often the imprint is a neutral factor, whereas the sales rep’s relationship with their account can matter much more, she says.

In the end, it may not matter which imprints stay or go as far as the fortunes of authors or the future of book sales. And for a slight bit of encouragement: “The focus on data and the need for books to be profitable has not winnowed what is being published in an appreciable way,” Bogaards says. “The opportunities for writers are still there. That’s not to say it won’t thin down the road. It may well.”

If you enjoyed this article, consider a subscription to The Hot Sheet, brought to you by Jane Friedman.

Agents and Editors Aren’t Always Right About Market Potential

Whenever I teach on nonfiction book proposals, I open up the conversation by talking about market potential ($) and how to convince agents or editors that your project has it.

Some of the things that don’t indicate market potential:

The opinion of your family or friends (unless they’ve done the market research themselves)The opinion of the freelance editor you hiredThe opinion of your beta readers or critique partnersThe opinion of your colleagues

And finally, the one that frustrates everyone:

The opinion of literary agents and editors in traditional publishing—people who probably know something about market potential

But I think we all realize (let’s hope) that agents and editors are not all-knowing gods, and can’t necessarily know about market demand in every book category.

And that’s exactly why book proposals exist: to make the business case that persuades agents and editors that there is in fact a market for your work.

Unfortunately, authors can be susceptible to taking feedback from agents/editors as gospel or the final word on the market potential for their work. That is a mistake. Their feedback can be useful, of course, to the extent it demonstrates where you might have failed to make your business case, or it might reveal something you didn’t know about the market. (For example: if you’re a white woman pitching a book full of recipes all about grain bowls, you’ve got an uphill battle because that market is saturated.)

On Oct. 15, 2020 (I keep very good records), I had a consultation with established author Bella DePaulo. She had an agent who was not at all enthusiastic about her next project-in-progress about the power and freedom of living single. Instead, this agent convinced DePaulo to write a different book, one the agent thought would be “big.” Unfortunately, even though that book was published, it was not successful.

So, by the time of our conversation, DePaulo was actively deciding whether to find another agent, or if it would be smarter to simply self-publish her book on singlehood.

It’s pretty rare that I outright dissuade clients from self-publishing if they seem well-suited for it, and DePaulo certainly was. But after I evaluated her materials and her platform, I believed a traditional publisher could be found if she wanted to invest time into securing another agent. Here’s why:

DePaulo had done a TEDx talk, “What No One Ever Told You About People Who Are Single,” viewed more than 1 million times.DePaulo’s work on single people has been featured in the New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and more. DePaulo was referred to in an Atlantic article about single ladies as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.”DePaulo herself has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic, etc.DePaulo had been writing the Living Single blog for Psychology Today since 2008. Some of her individual blog posts had views in the six figures each month.DePaulo started a Facebook group, the Community of Single People, with about 5,000 people from around the world.A Pew survey conducted in 2019 found that half of solo single people do not want a romantic relationship or even a date.

DePaulo is an expert on the topic of single people, has a solid platform, and plenty of connections and opportunities to spread the word about the book. Plus she has evidence there is interest in the topic. Given that she preferred a traditional publisher for the project, I advised her to stick with the querying process.

What we soon discovered is that DePaulo’s sales record was making her a pariah—namely, the poor performance of the very book she’d been convinced to write by the agent who didn’t want her any longer. She was able to find at least one agent who agreed to help, but without any enthusiasm. DePaulo passed on that offer.

Then, a law professor who knows about DePaulo’s work offered to make a referral to Bridget Matzie of Aevitas. It seemed like a long shot, since Matzie represents some high-profile authors and has sold many books at auction. Much to DePaulo’s surprise, Matzie was enthusiastic and (after working on the proposal together at length), Single at Heart was sent to 30 editors at the very top publishers.

A few publishers responded with 1-sentence “not for us” rejections, and a few more never responded, but the others seemed to take the proposal quite seriously, and many described what they liked in some detail. One said it was the best proposal he had seen in a long time, but he just couldn’t take a chance because of the sales of DePaulo’s last book. There was even a Zoom meeting with one editor who was very enthusiastic and who already had buy-in from several colleagues. But her boss said absolutely not, because of of the sales track record. (If it were DePaulo’s first book, the answer would probably be different.)

After more revisions to the proposal, it was sent to another 29 editors. DePaulo got two Zoom meetings out of that group, including one with an editor who was herself single at heart. She loved the proposal and had all sorts of ideas for the book, including an idea for a follow-up. But she got shot down by others at the imprint, again because of the sales track record.

In the end, DePaulo ended up with only one offer, from a new-ish independent publisher, Apollo. It wasn’t much of an offer. No advance, just profit sharing. She took it.

Single at Heart releases today (Dec. 5, 2023), and DePaulo sent me this update:

I am so happy to let you know that your optimism was warranted. Bridget encouraged me to hire an independent publicist. I had the same sort of experience at first—some of the publicists I contacted could not be bothered to respond. But I signed on with Leah Paulos at The Press Shop and she and her associates have been great. Here are some of the media that have come through:

I will be doing an event at Busboys & Poets, in DC, on Dec. 10I’ll be doing an event at Book Passage in San Francisco on Feb. 13I had a pre-recorded interview for the PBS show, “To the Contrary,” on Nov. 16I’ve written an essay for HuffPost that will be published on Dec. 4I will do a live show, “Central Time,” for NPR-Wisconsin on my pub date, Dec. 5Time magazine will publish an excerptNumerous podcasts have been scheduled

As this post was being prepared for publication, DePaulo alerted me that AARP mentioned her book in a book news roundup. (For anyone unaware: the AARP readership is massive.)

Additionally, Single at Heart will be translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. And I bet there will be more.

It’s obviously frustrating to see publishers so resolutely focused on an author’s past sales, especially in the nonfiction realm where I consider it an unreliable predictor of future success. It also feels increasingly irrelevant, mostly reminiscent of the heyday of Barnes & Noble, when their New York buyers would base their buy-in on the author’s previous sales in store.

Amazon • Bookshop

These days, consider:

Barnes & Noble’s ordering is no longer centralized and publishers can’t pay for merchandising.More than 60 percent of books today are bought online.An author’s ability to reach their readership directly can greatly transform and advance over time—as it did with DePaulo.

But sure, if publishers assume from the start they will not support a book adequately and rely on the author’s name alone to drive sales, by all means use Bookscan sales figures from many years ago as the guiding light for what to publish.

I guess, at the very least, I appreciate that publishers were honest about the reason for the rejection. But it does not speak well or bode well for their future, assuming it’s indicative of the direction of their decision making today. It’s possible to make meaningful, data-informed decisions in publishing that support strong acquisitions. To focus on an author’s past sales alone leaves out most of the picture.