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How to Get Your First Freelance Byline (and Why Even Fiction Writers Should Freelance)

Today’s post is by author Catherine Baab-Muguira (@CatBaabMuguira). Her book, Poe for Your Problems, releases in September 2021.

If you aspire to be an author, then you probably already know that you need a “platform” to land that big book deal. Or any book deal, period.

Most of us are aware, by now, that we’re supposed to have two million Twitter followers, plus a couple gazillion more on Instagram, YouTube and Substack. Platform haunts our dreams in the literal sense. It follows us around like a swarm of starved mosquitos. If you’re anything like me, the word alone makes you want to bolt up from your desk right now and go hide in your hall closet, behind the Swiffer and forgotten rolls of Christmas paper, stopping only to grab a Lime-A-Rita.

It’s not just us link-stained wretches churning out the nonfiction, either. Even fiction writers eventually need a platform. Story alone may get your query plucked from the slush pile, and later acquired by a Big Five editor, but those odds are long. You bet on them at your own peril.

Now what if I told you that you could distinguish yourself amidst the slush, disguise the weaknesses elsewhere in your platform and stick it to your snarky brother-in-law, just by doing some freelance writing?

By “freelancing,” I mean contributing articles to websites and other outlets, and by “byline,” I mean the journalism term for author credits, i.e. whom a piece is attributed to.

But before we get into the how, let’s look at five reasons you might want to do some freelancing.

1. Voilà! You are now a professional writer, not some loon

Adding just one or two freelance bylines to your query letter gives you instant credibility, because bylines prove that some editor somewhere has already deemed you good enough and sane enough to contribute to their publication. Why is this so important? Because it shows agents and acquisition editors that you’re a pro. It says, I know how the writing game works. I know how to pitch and handle edits. And I’ve got some media connections, too.

2. A brilliant cover story for your introversion

Many writers—maybe most?—are introverts. This means that plenty of us, regardless of age, don’t feel super comfortable on social media, or as though our natural register chimes just right with internet speech and customs. Maybe you don’t want to turn your life into TikTok content, or tweet out cruel hot takes, or relentlessly Instagram your infant. (These are not the only ways to use social media, of course, just common ones.)

Freelance bylines can help you cover up such modern-day character flaws, helping you raise your profile another way. Also, because media outlets tend to operate on much quicker timelines than literary journals, freelancing typically offers faster turnarounds than short-story publication, too. You may, in other words, reach payoffs much sooner, which leads us straight to reason #3.

3. Little wins

The book-writing life is grindingly slow, lonely, difficult. It’s hard to feel like you’re gaining any ground. When you freelance on the side, you can scoop up a little validation while you hustle on your longer-term goals. Plus, now you’ve got an answer for the next time your brother-in-law buttonholes you at the family barbecue to ask, “Hey genius, where’s the book?” Instead of flinging your coleslaw in his face, you can take the high road, like: “Oh, I’ve been busy freelancing. Did you see my piece in [publication name]?” So chew on that, ya jerk!!!

4. Crucial pitching and selling experience

To eventually sell a book, you first need to learn how to pitch your ideas. I mean, maybe you were born a virtuoso who grasps the splashiest, most salable aspects of a story from the get-go. The rest of us may need several dozen trials to gain such a sense. Freelancing, because it runs on pitching, offers you a low-stakes way to hone your skills and get experience. (More about pitches in just a minute.)

5. Scoring other opportunities

You’ll notice I have not mentioned money yet in this list, for good reason. There’s precious little money in freelancing. Depending on which outlet you’re writing for, you may not be paid at all. Be that as it may. Freelancing can lead to other opportunities. You could be invited to appear as a guest on podcasts or radio shows, or be interviewed by other news outlets. And this gives you yet more fodder for your queries and submissions: more credibility, more of a platform, more professional experience.

One friend of mine, years ago, published a funny essay about a house-flipping adventure gone wrong, and she still gets emails about it. Another person I know wrote an op-ed for his hometown newspaper, and some five years later, a big-time news producer found the op-ed via Google. They now plan to feature the writer in a documentary.

Speaking for myself, I can say that nearly every podcast and radio interview I’ve ever done grew out of some freelance piece I wrote. I’ve also made friends through freelancing, met fellow writers, and gotten to know some cool people in media. It’s a kind of non-mercenary networking.

Long listicle short, for the investment of time it takes you to get your first freelance pitch accepted, you could realize vast gains.

So, how can you get your very first byline?

The process of getting a freelance acceptance works like this: You email an editor a “pitch,” by which I mean a short, 200-word-ish presentation of an idea for a piece that you’d like to write. Then the editor responds, accepting, rejecting, and/or asking you follow-up questions about your idea.

Who to approach

I recommend first trying editors at your local newspaper, alternative weekly, or any local-interest websites. This is because these outlets tend to be okay with publishing writers who may not have a ton of experience yet.

It’s true (and sad) that local newspapers are fast disappearing. If you don’t have one in your area, or haven’t been able to get a response from an editor there, then you can look further abroad to special-interest websites. Are you into knitting? Search for websites that run articles about knitting. Or fly-fishing. Or Crossfit, or whatever your hobby is. Start with smaller outlets, rather than huge names.

If you’re a parent, you can write for sites like ScaryMommy or Fatherly or similar. If you’re into personal finance, then you might write for a personal-finance site. Et cetera.

Editors’ names and email addresses are typically listed on a publication’s masthead. You can also just Google relentlessly with such search terms as “who is the opinion editor at [publication name]?” or “how to pitch [publication name].”

What to approach them with

Yes, idea generation can be hard. The best way to approach it is to read the publications first to get a sense of what they’re putting out. You might, for instance, peruse the op-ed pages of your local newspaper online. You might spend a few hours browsing the local-interest website.

Now think of topics you’re interested in that might be similar to the ones you’ve just seen covered. Could you write about an arts or literary event in your area? Could you write about a personal experience that speaks to some larger subject now in the news? Is your cat hilarious, could she be the subject of an entire essay?

Bear in mind that you don’t have to have reporting chops to write, say, an op-ed. You’re not doing any reporting—you’re essentially just popping off a seven-paragraph essay about something that you already think.

When I first started contributing op-eds to my local newspaper, I wrote about my deep love for the local airport. Next, I wrote about why I don’t hate Black Friday. I wrote another piece about how I think my hometown is much cooler than the nearest big city. Basic opinion stuff. Nothing too spicy—more friendly and warm.

How to approach them

Below, you’ll find an email template that you can adapt and use. The subject line of your email can be super simple, like: Pitch: [Title of Your Proposed Article].

Hi, Firstname—

My name is Yourname, and I’m a writer who’s previously contributed to [any other publications you’ve ever written for, no matter how tiny or long ago; if you’ve never been published, then just say: I’m a writer who lives in Town/City].

I’m contacting you because I’m a huge fan of Publication—especially your recent piece, “Article Title.” I love the variety of perspectives that Publication offers [or some other sincere compliment].

Now I’m getting in touch with another idea you might like.

Title of your article

A 200-word-ish encapsulation of your idea goes here.

Would you be interested? I could have it for you in two weeks [or whatever your timeline is] if so. Or, if you’d like to see a draft first, I’d be happy to provide that, too.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

All best,

Yourname

Still confused? Let’s look at an example. While I wouldn’t say it’s hall-of-fame material, here’s the pitch I sent Jane for this very article.

Hi Jane,

Thank you so much for running the piece on the dozen-year query quest. It got a nice reaction, at least according to my Twitter. Grateful to you for publishing it.

I’m getting in touch now with another idea you might like.

How to Get Your Very First Freelance Byline

Most writers understand that developing a “platform” is crucial. No wonder, then, that so many of us are running the exact same play on Twitter and Instagram—sometimes with quite limited success. Not everyone is going to feel truly comfortable on social media, or as though their natural register chimes just right with internet speech and customs.

So what else can you do to round out your writerly resume? You can publish freelance articles, which will give you professional-writing experience as well as bylines to brag about.

Still, most fiction writers don’t freelance, even though just one or two bylines can really add to your bona fides (and help fig-leaf any weaknesses elsewhere in your platform). At the same time, this reluctance is understandable. Getting your first byline can be a major challenge.

I’d love to contribute a piece about where to start and who to pitch, showing readers how to approach editors in their immediate area, at their local alt. weekly or hometown newspaper. Even though local papers are rapidly disappearing, most metro areas still have one, and in my experience, these outlets are receptive to previously unpublished writers if approached the right way. There are also niche internet and trade publications similarly open to those without much experience, so I’d provide sample pitches and article ideas for such outlets, too.

Getting your first freelance byline is a big hump to get over. But once you’re over it, a new world opens up. All of a sudden, you have experience working with editors, and more of a real-world sense of what it’s really like to work as a writer. Plus, the pitching experience you gain can help you land an agent and, eventually, sell a book.

Would you be interested?

Thanks!

Cat

Finally, one weird tip about when to pitch

I have, until now, guarded this freelancing secret with great cunning, stealth and ferocity. Men have DIED trying to… Okay, not really, but it is pretty good, so lean in: The best time to pitch someone an idea is on Tuesday mornings between 9:30 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Why Tuesday, why mid-morning? Because Monday is an awful day to approach anyone with anything, and by Wednesday, most of us have been sucked into the vortex of the week, with all our mental energy directed someplace else already. Mid-morning because people aren’t off to lunch yet and tend to be at their desks.

Happy freelancing! Here’s hoping it helps you reach your bigger, hairier, scarier, far more frightening and horrible writing goals.

Deepen Characterization by Mining Your Own Reactions

Today’s guest post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin (@FoxPrintEd). Join her on June 2 for the class Craft Believable and Compelling Characters.

Humans are infinitely complex, and creating believable, three-dimensional characters in all their colors, textures, and nuances is some of the hardest work of writing. But authors don’t have to have godlike omniscience or an encyclopedic knowledge of psychology to develop fully fleshed, realistic characters. We all have an endlessly replenishing source of reference material: ourselves.

Learning to pay deliberate, meticulous attention to how you react to and handle your own challenges and triumphs, obstacles and demons can be rich turf for growing characters readers deeply relate to and conveying them vividly on the page. Start by noticing your physiological responses—your gut reactions—and follow them to the thoughts behind them—your inner life.

Listening to Your Gut

What happens inside your body during emotional situations in your life?

You may know generally what you’re feeling at these times—sad, excited, hopeful, angry, etc.—but labeling the emotion is your higher-reasoning amygdala analyzing the data it’s receiving from your lowly little reactive lizard brain. It’s that primitive cerebellum’s immediate knee-jerk reaction we’re after first: the actual physiological sensations those emotions create inside you.

For instance, let’s say you receive a rejection letter from a submission you had high hopes for. See if you can pay attention—minute attention—to what that feels like inside you, specifically and concretely and in real time: Does your chest lift with hope, and then sink or tighten as you read the email? Does it feel heavy? Empty? Deflated? Are you breathing? What does your face feel like—tight and drawn in? Frozen? Are your eyes hot, wet? Your jaw or hands or toes clenched? Your shoulders sagging? Neck tight? Armpits sweating?

That’s valuable information—not just in identifying what’s going on inside you so you can deal with it, but for filing these visceral reactions away to draw on with your characters.

Your protagonist may not receive a rejection on her creative baby, for example, but you can mine those powerful feelings in writing about the rejection a mother might feel from her suddenly disdainful teenage daughter, or a child when her dad is too busy to look at her drawing or come to her school play, or that of an employee being fired, or a woman being left by her spouse. Rejection, like all emotions, wears many faces. How can you extrapolate your reactions when it happens to you to enrich the way you portray your characters’ reactions to their particular rejections?

Let’s say your protagonist comes home to find her spouse packing a bag and this is your initial draft of the scene:

“I’m not happy. I’m leaving.”

She froze in the doorway. “What do you mean, leaving? For how long?”

He continued meticulously folding his favorite blue work shirt. “I don’t know, Em. I just need time away.”

She offered a conciliatory smile. “Can you stop packing for just a moment? Let’s talk about it.”

This shows the action, but it doesn’t let us deeply into the POV character’s reactions that reveal so much about her.

Now let’s use some of these gut reactions you’ve paid such close attention to in yourself to bring the scene a little more viscerally to life:

“I’m not happy. I’m leaving.”

She froze, fingers gripping the doorjamb. “What do you mean, leaving? For how long?”

He continued meticulously folding his favorite blue work shirt. “I don’t know, Em. I just need time away.”

Her chest hollowed. She forced a conciliatory smile she hoped didn’t look as stiff and unnatural as it felt. “Can you stop packing for just a moment? Let’s talk about it.”

In the second example we have a clearer and more visceral idea of how his leaving is impacting her. It makes us more a direct part of the scene.

You can use this self-observational technique in a wide variety of situations, negative as well as positive, minor as well as major. What does it physically feel like inside you when you are delighted with something or someone? When you feel love or excitement or hope? What about when you are angry, or irritable, or sad? How do you viscerally react to a missed elevator, a rude customer, a fussy child?

Get into the habit of paying attention to your own responses anytime stimuli change your mood or feelings or cause a reaction in you, and you’ll create an endlessly original, realistic, relatable atlas of reactions you can reference for your characters.

Tuning In to Your Head

Now let’s dig a little deeper, beyond those physiological responses to what’s causing them.

Let’s go back to the hypothetical rejection letter. Maybe your physiological reaction is a sinking heart, a clenched jaw—but why? Objectively that’s not a stimulus that would cause a primeval fight-or-flight reaction, but our cerebellum—our higher-reasoning brain­—is feeding us thoughts that suggest to us that it is. What kind of internal messaging might be going on in your head as you read the email?

Maybe your inner life is something like, Oh, no! Not my dream agent! But she asked for the full! Dammit! I hate this business. Or maybe it’s me? This is my thirtieth rejection so far. What if the manuscript is just no good? But my crit partners loved it! What do they know, though. They’re not published either.

None of these thoughts are likely to run through your mind as literally as a news chyron like this—our thoughts are often lightning-quick impressions and reactions, rather than actual internal dialogue. But what we’re after is the gist—the mental story that accompanies whatever stimulus has made you feel whatever you are feeling…and feeds those feelings.

These thoughts are the reactions and responses that reveal to readers who your character is at the core—and letting readers experience them along with your character is a great way to paint a clearer picture of your protagonist and of the story. For instance, mining some of your own reactions in the face of rejection, you might lace some of this inner life into your scene:

“I’m not happy. I’m leaving.”

She froze, fingers gripping the doorjamb. “What do you mean, leaving? For how long?”

He continued meticulously folding his favorite blue work shirt, the one she’d spent weeks looking for so the shade would exactly match his eyes. “I don’t know, Em. I just need time away.”

Her chest hollowed. Time away from what? From her? But why? Things had been hard, yes, but they were working on it, right? How could they do that if he left? Look at me, dammit! But anger would just send him out the door faster. She forced a conciliatory smile she hoped didn’t look as stiff and unnatural as it felt. “Can you stop packing for just a moment? Let’s talk about it.”

In this example we’re more privy to her thoughts, the reasons she’s reacting the way she is, and it offers more dimension on her character: We know something of her feelings for him—at least at one time—by how diligently she sought a shirt to match his eyes, emotions you may mine from your own dedication and effort with your rejected manuscript. We understand the hurt it adds to this situation for her that he’s taking that sentimental shirt even as he’s walking out on her—maybe you draw from your hurt that this agent had requested an R&R from you (revise and resubmit) and then rejected your story anyway.

We see not only her gut reactions that show her hurt, but the reasons for them: It adds context and texture to their relationship: her desire to salvage it, the flare of anger that he’s not even paying attention to her, and the effort she’s making to mask that, which paints in more depth on her character and their history: for example perhaps she’s prone to sharp rejoinders she knows annoy him and understands that’s part of why he’s leaving. To bring that to life you might mine your own feelings of anger at the agent’s rejection, and your efforts to suppress it in offering a gracious reply that might leave the door open for future submissions to her.

Dialogue and action are just the tip of the clichéd iceberg in a scene—so much of what’s actually going on and how it’s affecting your characters is beneath the surface in how they are responding internally. Learning to pay attention to your own visceral reactions and thoughts lets you mine those direct experiences to create richly developed characters who leap off the page.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, please join me and Tiffany on June 2 for the class Craft Believable and Compelling Characters.

Why Your Memoir Also Needs the Good and “Normal” Times

“Photo Booth Guest Book from my wedding” by paperladyinvites is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Today’s post is by Allison K Williams (@GuerillaMemoir). Join her on May 27 for the class Memoir from Memory.

Trauma and pain are often the wellspring of memoir, significantly shaping our personal journey. For readers, the great gift of memoir is opening your book and realizing, I’m not the only one who felt that way.

For most writers, painful episodes are easier to remember than pleasant ones. This is actually a good thing—just as the newspaper doesn’t announce “School Bus Doesn’t Drive Off Bridge; Kids Got There Safely,” our default state is “reasonably OK.” Bad experiences stick out in part because they are usually uncommon.

But what about the good stuff?

Your memoir needs a clear sense of “normal” (as you experienced it), because constant “bad things” aren’t particularly dramatic on the page. Trauma after trauma fades into generic unpleasantness; any one incident loses impact if it’s part of a litany of despair. If your memoir is delightfully non-traumatic, showing “normal” establishes the setting, and shows the reader the support you had to pursue your goal.

“Normal” is world-building for nonfiction.

If you remember negative events most strongly, write those down, in all their messy ickiness. Not just how you felt, or how awful that person was. Write what you physically experienced—not just actions you took or that were taken against you, but what you smelled when you fought with your dad in the kitchen. The temperature of the diner, the slight greasiness of the table, and the taste of the cheese fries when you said, “I want a divorce.” The music throbbing from someone else’s car at a stoplight when you realized you had to leave home.

Expanding outward into our senses, beyond the action and emotion of the scene, helps us recall details that may have blurred into the general trauma of the experience. Sharing those sensory details on the page helps the reader feel the pain with us, rather than watching our pain and feeling pity. “Sucks that happened to you!” doesn’t help them understand your experience, or change their own life after sharing your journey. Let the reader see through your eyes. Bring them into your bad times.

But you also need the good times.

Show the reader the days you enjoyed hanging out with your abuser, and they’ll be shocked with you when the abuser shows another face. Loving actions from a parent lull the reader into thinking, Maybe this time will be different, just as you did.

As the writer, honestly portraying the good times also allows ourselves grace for not leaving the situation earlier, not standing up for ourselves. We can remember why we justified that other person’s actions or tolerated a terrible relationship. Humans are mammals, and mammals respond strongly to unpredictable rewards. Give a dolphin the treat every time, and the trick gets sloppier and sloppier. They’ll do the minimum. Random treats make mammals do their best and keep trying. Slot machines pay out just enough for gamblers to keep feeding in quarters. Your terrible boyfriend apologized just enough to keep you coming back. Your mom gave just enough love to keep you desperate to please her.

To call up the everyday, turn to your sensory experience again.

Make a playlist of your favorite songs at the time—and also songs you didn’t like, but they sure popped up on the radio a lot. Try driving your old neighborhood with a 50-song playlist on shuffle. Surprisingly, your ears can bring up old memories. Search YouTube for your favorite Saturday-morning shows (Bugs Bunny as Brünhilde, anyone?) or the after-school shows you watched before the adults came home. Watch them sitting cross-legged on the floor with your eyes too close to the screen and recall what was happening around you—your big sister wiping off her eye makeup before Dad saw it? Mom wrapping birthday presents and asking for your finger to hold the ribbon knot while she made a bow?

Buy a childhood treat—a candy bar, ice cream from the truck, Girl Scout cookies—and eat it slowly. Freewrite as you go—Dinty W. Moore teaches a wonderful exercise in which writers write for five minutes about how the treat looks, five minutes about how it smells, feels, sounds we remember, and finally the taste. I’ve done this exercise several times, and every time it shakes loose “everyday” memories, and sometimes more significant ones, too.

See if you can visit your old school. My high school let me speak to an English class about being a writer. Wandering the hallways with a student guide brought back flood days—in Florida, our outdoor-plan school got several inches of standing water after heavy rain. Cheerleaders piggy-backed on football players, dorks like me rolled up our jeans, and…oh, yes…that day when we hall-passed out of Social Studies and talked about what we wanted to be, in the girls’ bathroom, until the bell rang and we all had to run back to get our books…

After a hard week in the typing trenches, strolling the nice parts of Memory Lane can reignite the desire to write, and refresh our human spirit, reminding ourselves, there was a reason I stayed.

Share those reasons with the reader. Showing what you aspired to, the dream life you prepared for, the moments of kindness from your antagonist, brings the reader more fully into your life. Drama is heightened when we don’t see another bad thing coming—or when we see misfortune down the road but are still rooting for the protagonist to take another path. Show why you made the wrong choice, the one that didn’t get you to the end of the book.

Show the good times.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, please join me and Allison on May 27 for the class Memoir from Memory.

How Much Do Authors Earn? Here’s the Answer No One Likes.

money icons from Noun Project

In the last month, there have been a few informative articles discussing how much authors earn:

The One Where Writing Books Is Not Really a Good Idea by Elle Griffin (Substack)How Much Do Authors Make Per Book? by Sarah Nicolas (BookRiot)How Much Do Authors Actually Earn? by Lincoln Michel (Substack)

All of these are excellent pieces, written and reported by people bringing transparency to the money side of the writing life. If you go and read them, you’ll have a meaningful education in what to expect as a writer if you’re just starting out. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and why I wrote The Business of Being a Writer. I’d heard too often—usually from speakers at AWP—that they wish someone had told them, before they went into six-figure debt for their MFA, that writing doesn’t pay that well. Not even a minimum wage.

So I’m always happy to see the veil lifted. We need more discussion of what writers earn, with specific authors talking about their advances, royalties, sales, expenses, connections that led to earnings and profitable gigs—all of it. In an industry where talking about the money is often taboo or even shameful (few want to admit how little or how much they earn), the more we all open up, then the more we can normalize the practice of talking about art and commerce, and the more people can make the best decisions for their careers. And I’ll disclose my own book earnings by the end of this post.

The big secret I haven’t revealed until now

OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s the thing: I do not like this question. Of course I understand why it’s asked, and I empathize with those who ask it. But it’s like asking what does a musician earn? Or what does an artist earn? The answer will be influenced by all kinds of factors that may or may not apply to you—and that are entirely misleading about your own potential.

So, with the posts above, you’re going to find limitations. Someone will react to the information and say, “BUT [exception here].” From my POV, these exceptions can often be categorized thus:

Traditional publishing earnings can have little in common with self-publishing earnings.Your genre/category can determine a lot about your potential earnings. So does how much work you have out on the market. More books equals more earnings potential, period, no matter how you publish.Authors who participate in the so-called Creator Economy can have little in common with authors who do not. (Here’s one perspective on the creator economy if you’re not familiar with it. This is a more optimistic view; there are pessimists, too.)

This is also why it is a tortured exercise to try and run any kind of meaningful survey on what authors earn. I’ve written at length about the problems of these author earnings surveys. However, authors organizations engage in these surveys regularly, partly because they have to. How else can they pressure lawmakers and advocate for their members? They need some kind of evidence that says, “Look! Writers are suffering. They earn less than ever before. This is an emergency!”

Is that true?

No.

But is publishing and literary culture changing?

Yes.

Are the changes bad?

It depends on who you ask.

The majority of writers don’t earn a living from book sales alone.

This hasn’t really changed over time. We all know people don’t go into the writing profession for the big bucks unless they’re delusional. Rather it’s the pursuit of a dream, maybe the pursuit of fame and prestige. And it’s like playing the lottery if you’re hoping to become one of the bestsellers.

The good news, for some? I referenced The Creator Economy above. In short, there are more opportunities than ever for creators (including writers/authors) to earn money directly from readers. But that has very little to do with writing and selling books in the traditional, old-school, pre-internet manner. And that’s what traditionally published authors (like those who belong to The Authors Guild) really care about. Can I earn a living from publishers’ advances and royalty checks, while I focus solely on writing more books? And the answer to that is: for the majority of traditionally published authors, most of the time, no. You should not expect this today. Yes, it happens. But without some other support or income (a spouse, a day job), it’s tough. Should this be the ideal the book publishing industry strives for? That’s another post.

There are a good number of self-published writers, though, who can make this happen. They work largely in genre fiction. They have to put out a ton of work each year—multiple titles. It’s a treadmill. It’s not for everyone. But it can be done, and some enjoy it and wouldn’t trade that model for a traditional publishing life.

I’m a writer and author—and also a “creator.”

I traditionally publish and self-publish books, but that’s a very small part of my income—less than 5 percent. I’ve made about the same amount of money from my self-published book as my traditionally published book. I was paid a $5,000 advance for The Business of Being a Writer and I earned out that advance after the first year of sales. After my advance earned out, I’ve received an additional $20,000 in royalties (since 2018).

But most of my money comes from teaching and hosting online classes (by myself and others) and by selling a paid subscription newsletter, The Hot Sheet. I also offer some services and consulting, but I’ve been drawing that down to focus on my own writing and publishing. Why? Because over time, I’m earning more from my writing and publishing activities. This is the way it works for most people. You don’t earn that much at first, but you keep at it. If you can stay in the game longer than others dropping away from discouragement and disillusionment, it’s possible to see results.

There are many other issues I have not touched on here. This is obviously not an exhaustive post about what authors earn but why the question is so challenging. What you earn is about what business model you can envision or build for yourself and whether it’s sustainable for you over the long term. And by sustainable, I also mean enjoyable and not something you wake up every morning regretting.

Your Final Responsibility to Your Story: Creative Stewardship

Today’s post is by author, editor and coach Jessica Conoley (@jaconoley).

As writers, it can feel daunting, vulnerable, and impossible when we contemplate sending our own stories out into the world. So when end stage paralysis strikes you, it’s time to step away from your identity as writer, and into your role as creative steward.

Creative stewardship fulfills our final responsibility to a story— placing it in the best position to connect with readers. Yet, it’s in this final act of stewardship that many authors find themselves paralyzed.

If you find yourself sitting atop a mountain of work you haven’t shared with anyone but your cat, I have good news for you. You can (and will) get better at this critical piece of the writing puzzle. Even better, once your stories are released into the world, they have the potential to significantly impact readers’ lives, bring you devoted fans, and earn you some cash. All those writing craft skills you’ve refined while writing the story will help in your role of creative steward.

First, detach from the role of writer with the use of personification.

You have finished your story. It is now time to acknowledge this beautiful shiny thing as an entity entirely separate from you. To help me detach, I personify a project by giving it a new, friendly, human sounding name. E.g., the book I want to sell right now, The Color Eater, became Gretel. Gretel is entirely her own being, independent of me. By detaching, we take I and me out of the equation, which eliminates the problems of self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and fear of personal rejection.

Build an extra layer of emotional resilience through a point-of-view shift.

Before personification, every thought related to your WIP was solidly in first person. I’m writing. I’m editing. I’m sending out to beta readers.

Now that you’re acting as a creative steward, it’s time to change the point of view when you think or speak about the project. Switch from first-person to third-person language and build another level of psychological distance between you and the work.

Gretel is out with beta readers. Gretel is out on sub to publishers. Gretel just made it past an editor and had her first acquisitions meeting.

This added level of disassociation diminishes the sting of rejections. It also makes it easier to speak with confidence about the project. I know Gretel has mad skills to entertain readers for hours, and I can’t wait until she has the chance.

Learn about your ideal reader through research.

There are readers out there who need this story. You don’t know who they are exactly, and you may never know how this story changed their lives—but the readers are out there waiting for an insight this story holds. It will resonate for them at just the right moment in time and unlock a new world for them. It is your duty as a creative steward to give your story the opportunity to connect with these readers. To do that you need to figure out where they hang out.

Brainstorm where your ideal reader is likely to spend their reading time. Are they the type to hang out on fanfiction forums? Subscribe to literary magazines? Read blogs? Just like in your writing, the more specific you are the greater the potential is you will connect with your reader. And time-wise the easier it is to narrow down your search.

Searchable databases are your best friend in this recon stage. Find time-saving databases at:

DuotropeSubmittablePoets & WritersPublishers MarketplaceQueryTracker

Use the search parameters you brainstormed to narrow down markets or agents that are the best fit for this particular story.

Protect your stewardship time with strong boundaries.

Stewardship is a whole different type of headspace than writing, so don’t try to do both at the same time. This phase of things often turns into a time suck, so I set a timer on my phone for thirty minutes and do as much stewardship work as I can during that block. Save time by creating templates with your generic thank-you-for-your-consideration email. Copy and paste away, with one sentence opening or closing personalization. I try to limit myself to one hour a day of research and/or submissions, because at this point in my career it’s more important to be generating content and writing. Strict boundaries with my time are key.

Carving out time to research, submit, review contracts, return revisions, and land our stories in the hands of the right readers means saying no to countless other requests. I find it easier to decline requests with a phrase like, “No. I’m working with Gretel at that time.” It reminds me that Gretel deserves my time and attention, and has the added benefit of cutting down on follow up questions, because prior commitments with another human are a socially acceptable reason to say no.

Let’s get back to Gretel and me for a second. When Gretel was first stepping out into the world, I brainstormed about who would want to hang out with her, i.e., SFF readers who weren’t scared of big moral questions, dug some mythical-industrial world building, and could get into the winking humor of a Studio Ghibli story—but with a gritty twist.

With those readers in mind, I researched and began submitting. Initially I introduced her directly to smaller presses. One of those smaller presses thought she was just as fantastic as I did. The press, Gretel, and I made it through an edit letter and talks with the editor. Then we started in on the contract talking part of things. I started asking questions, lots and lots of questions, to help me determine if this press was the right long-term home for Gretel. How many copies had they sold each year? What type of distribution channels did they have? Were their books placed in libraries? Ultimately I decided, the readers who needed to meet Gretel probably weren’t going to find her through that press.

And while I wanted (and still want) to see Gretel in print I knew that, sometimes the best way to advocate for our work is to say no to the wrong opportunity. It is our job to turn down the wrong deal, the wrong agent, or the wrong publisher.

After I turned down that opportunity, I went in search of a secondary advocate for Gretel. Secondary advocates include: agents, editors, and publishers. The right secondary advocate will help you position your work to the largest market possible.

Eventually, I introduced Gretel to Lucy Cleland of Kneerim & Williams. It was clear from our first call that Lucy loved Gretel as much as I do. I knew Lucy was the right advocate for us, because when she talks about The Color Eater I see it with renewed passion and enthusiasm. I worry about Gretel a lot less now, because I trust my agent to advocate for Gretel just as fiercely as I do.

Creative stewardship is all about finding the right opportunities for your story. You’ve already mastered the tools you need. Start applying your skills in a new way to give your story the chance to inspire, entertain, or change the world. There are readers out there who need it. Now go, help your story find them.

To Write a Better Memoir, Learn This F-Word

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Today’s guest post is by writer, coach and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison (@lisaellisonspen). Join her on May 19 for the online class Finding the Universal in Your Memoir.

In 2015, I participated in a yearlong memoir class. Nine months into the program our instructor asked us to bring in a scene that included the character who challenged us most. The scene I chose could’ve been titled “The Reason I Hate My Mother.”

During class, our instructor raved about her recent trip to the Tin House Conference and the assignment she’d learned from its founder, Rob Spillman. The lilt in her voice suggested our minds were about to be blown.

We hunched over notebooks and laptops, eager to begin this earth-shattering assignment. When she finished writing our prompt on the board, I glanced up, half expecting to hear a microphone drop. Then I read what she wrote.

Write the scene from your antagonist’s perspective.

Staring at those seven words, I mentally flipped her the bird then bit the inside of my cheek to keep from saying, “Do you know what she’s effing done?”

Throughout our yearlong class, this instructor had been our constant cheerleader, craft guru, and coach who held us accountable. Despite my misgivings, I worked on her crummy assignment. Twenty minutes later, the chain anchoring me to that scene snapped in two. While I wasn’t completely free of the pain I’d experienced, the perspective shift felt alchemical.

Three years later, I began a memoir about my brother’s suicide. I knew that writing about my brother’s tragic end and its aftermath would be emotionally taxing, but I was more concerned about how I’d portray my ex-husband. For years, I’d shared a story about him that began with the phrase, “Let me tell you what he did…”

I’d repeated it so often I knew when listeners would gasp, shake their heads, or say, “No he didn’t!”

Eliminating him from the book was impossible. That thing he did was a major plot point. As a believer in both karma and good writing, I wanted to do justice by my characters. So early in the drafting process, I completed my instructor’s perspective-taking exercise, hoping to experience that alchemy once again.

I gave my first draft to a group of skilled readers who promised to call me on my shit. Their verdict: I’d portrayed my ex as a superficial turd.

He didn’t read much better in draft two.

Or draft three, for that matter.

It took seven drafts for me to forgive him and one more draft (plus six months of wait time) to understand his role in this manuscript. To get there, I had to move past his boneheaded choices and tap into the love we’d once shared.

While it took more time and drafts than I cared for, forgiving him unlocked the story I wanted to tell.

As an instructor and coach, forgiveness is something I now teach. When I use this controversial F-word with writers who’ve been deeply wounded, I get eye rolls and toothy grins that barely hide the bird I know they’re flipping in my direction.

Sometimes the do you know what they did?? is transmitted telepathically. Other clients and students blurt it out.

Most believe forgiveness is like the playground ritual many of us were forced into that goes a little like this:

Some bonehead whacks you upside the head with a dodgeball. On purpose.

When you tell the teacher, there’s an “investigation” followed by a chat where the bonehead whispers an insincere “I’m sorry.”

You think justice is about to be served, but then the teacher looks at you. “Now tell the bonehead you forgive them.”

You don’t forgive them at all, but you say those words, because recess is precious, and this dirtbag has taken up enough of it.

Clients and students forced into this ritual often believe forgiveness means burying your feelings, making it OK for the other person, forgetting what happened, and staying BFFs with someone who hurt you.

But that’s what perpetrators ask victims to do.

Real forgiveness is about empowerment.

We forgive for ourselves.
We do it even if the other person isn’t sorry.
We do it to heal because healing is how we regain our power.
But we don’t begin until we’re ready to engage in the process.

That rehearsed story I’d told was what forgiveness specialist Fred Luskin calls a grievance story. While the responses I’d received were highly satisfying, each rendition kept me in the role of poor victim without any power.

When we forgive, we restore our power by releasing the bonds of hurt chaining us to a specific situation.

Forgiveness isn’t the same as absolution. Bad behavior is still bad behavior. You’ve just shifted the story around it, so the person’s actions no longer harm you.

Stub your toe and it’s likely you’ll curl inward as the pain shoots through you. The harder the impact, the tighter the curl. Pain forces us inward and heightens our sense of separation from others. A sense of separation can obscure the themes, emotions, and larger issues that connect your experience with your readers.

When painful events hold power over you, you’re more likely to say, “But this is how it really happened,” which limits the frames available to you.

You’ll also be less likely to see how your story fits into the conversation happening around this topic.

But rehearsed stories aren’t all bad. When we’re first injured, those stories protect us from feeling our pain all at once. They can also help us get the attention we need. But eventually, they stop serving us.

So how do you forgive your characters?

In The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path of Healing Ourselves and Our World, Desmund Tutu says we must do the following:

Tell the rehearsed story.Name the hurt.Grant forgiveness.Renew or release the relationship.

That bird-worthy writing prompt is an essential part of granting forgiveness.

When I teach classes on forgiveness for writers, I include the following prerequisites:

Establish boundaries so the person can no longer hurt you.Develop a self-care regimen.Enlist the support of a loving community and, when needed, a therapist.

True forgiveness can take years to achieve. That’s why memoirs take longer to write than novels. But it’s worth the effort—especially if you need to forgive yourself. Forgiveness can not only help you turn painful moments into art, it can help you discover your manuscript’s unique angle.  

But before you get started, feel free to flip me the bird.
I’ll smile and you’ll feel a little better about starting this process.

What questions do you have about forgiveness?
What myths have you created around it?

Note from Jane: if you enjoyed this post, join me and Lisa on May 19 for the online class Finding the Universal in Your Memoir.

Overcoming Writer’s Block Brought On By Childhood Trauma: Q&A with Marc Jampole

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In this interview, Marc Jampole discusses the techniques he used to overcome writer’s block brought on by childhood trauma, the challenge of not getting bogged down by factual details when writing autobiographically, his literary novel’s path to publication, and more.

Marc Jampole (@MarcJampole) wrote The Brothers Silver (Owl Canyon Press, 2021), Music from Words (Bellday Books, 2007) and Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month (Poet’s Haven Press, 2017). His poetry and short stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies. About 1,800 freelance articles he has written have been published. A former television news reporter and public relations executive, Marc writes the OpEdge blog and is president of the board of Jewish Currents, a national magazine of politics and arts.

KRISTEN TSETSI: The Brothers Silver (releasing June 1, 2021 and available for pre-order) is your first novel, but you’ve published two books of poetry—Music from Words and Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month—and have been writing articles and poems for some time. Additionally, you’ve been involved in filmmaking.

In the marketing material I received for The Brothers Silver, you explain that the childhood trauma you experienced, and that influenced The Brothers Silver, is what prevented you from writing fiction for so long. It also stopped you from writing more poetry than you did ultimately manage to write. You say, “Feelings of shame, guilt, or unworthiness served as a dam that held back the flow of words.”

What is it about fiction, in particular, that is harder to write, emotionally, than poetry (which seems to be just as creatively revealing) or stories told with a camera?

MARC JAMPOLE: After a few early highly imagistic and abstract experimental films, virtually all of my film work was journalism, training, or selling products and services—no personal emotional skin related to childhood trauma in any of those games, at least not for me.

Poems hold a number of advantages over novels (and all fictional prose) for those in the throes of a writer’s block:

1) Length. Eugene Onegin and Paradise Lost aside, most poems are far shorter in length than the average short story, let alone any novel. During the brief periods of flowing words that interrupt a long-term writer’s block you have time to plan and complete a short poem.

2) Relative simplicity of writing process. Poems depend on creating an epiphany—an isolated moment when the reader suddenly understands something new, and usually unsaid—which the poet can capture in an inspiration, and then work over in editing; whereas in a novel, you have to string together a series of moments, each of which must be set up and then described. A more complicated process, with more steps, each of which can be halted through any of a number of the artificial barriers people with writer’s block find to throw in their own way.

3) Concealment. You can hide your emotions in obscurities and lush imagery in a poem far easier than you can in a novel. Keep in mind, I’m talking about myself, but I think what I’ve said applies to many blocked writers.

When and how did you decide you had to write The Brothers Silver, and why was it such an important story to tell that you forced yourself to overcome those feelings of guilt and unworthiness?

I have always “had to write” this novel, from the day I decided I wanted to write professionally. I’ve always wanted to tell others what it’s like to grow up in emotionally shattered circumstances and how hard it is to confront and overcome childhood trauma.

If you think you can sweep it under a thick rug of forgetfulness like the brothers in the novel do, you’ll find that it always comes back to haunt you worse than before—panic attacks, feelings of worthlessness, bad dreams, broken relationships, and general unhappiness. But if you accept that you’ve been permanently scarred by your childhood as if it were a disability, you have a chance to learn not only how to live with it, but also how to grow beyond it.

I wrote the first draft of the second chapter and the beginning of the last chapter when I was in my mid-twenties, the first draft of chapter six when I was twenty-nine, and the first draft of the first chapter when I was thirty. All these bits and pieces curated in a series of drawers and filing cabinets until I was ready to confront the material about five years ago.

By that time, three therapists had helped me to overcome my shame and anger related to my childhood. I had also figured out a number of ways to drill holes through the thick dam that was holding back my flow of words. My drill bits consist of little rules and techniques: Make sure you sit at the keyboard for a few hours every day, even if all you do is stare at the screen. Always have a number of projects going, so if you’re blocked on one, you can work on another. Always end the day with something more to write the next day (a tip I picked up from Hemingway). Make artificial deadlines and enforce them.

My most important rule when nothing else works—stare at the blank page and remind myself with my best tough-love demeanor that I’m emotionally crippled and always will be, but that I can’t let my malaise stop me from doing what makes me happy.

I want to mention something else that may have helped. I have always needed an emotional “safe space” in which to write creatively. Through the years, my best creative work has always emerged when I felt most secure in my emotions and emotional relationships. I went almost ten years in my forties not writing even one poem, because I didn’t feel in a safe space (one of the disadvantages of a bad marriage). About 10 years ago, I started living again in New York City after an absence of more than forty years. I have enjoyed every place I’ve lived—and there have been many—but I feel the safest emotionally in New York.

What is it about New York that makes you feel safe?

On a conscious level, my answer involves my love of trains; my preference for not owning or driving a car; the cozy joy I get from life at street level (as opposed to life lived in cars, parking lots, and malls with artificial “water features”); my preference for more public space even if it means less private space; and the exhilaration of crowds and beautiful architecture.

But there’s also the irrational nostalgia factor: there is so much I do in New York that hearkens back to the happy moments of my childhood: riding subways to Coney Island and to visit family in Washington Heights; strolling through Central Park, the Village and the Lower East Side; and seeing artwork I’ve loved since I was a boy, such as Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer” or Picasso’s “Three Musicians.”

From the time I could travel by myself at the age of 12, New York (meaning Manhattan and the great civic establishments of Brooklyn) was always my escape from the violence, mental illness and drug abuse of my family life. Thus I’m used to the sounds, sights and smells of the city comforting me.

Was writing The Brothers Silver in any way permanently therapeutic? Did it change how you feel now when you approach fiction?

Wow, was writing The Brothers Silver ever therapeutic!

I’m working on a new novel now, and progress is remarkably swift. I do have my bad days—and weeks—but for the most part I am forging ahead. My mind is constantly swimming in ideas about the details of the book—rounding out characters, setting up the jokes and epiphanies of later chapters in the early ones, editing as I write to improve rhythms and precision.

I am not fretting over writing challenges, but analyzing and solving them one by one, and then working through their implications for the rest of the work.

What is it that draws you to writing fiction, in general, and what draws you to writing poetry?

The same impulses attract me to both fiction and poetry: wanting to experiment with language. Wanting to say something in a new way that pleases both the ear and the mind’s ear. Wanting to entertain people in their minds and their hearts. Wanting to communicate my thoughts about life, relationships, politics and philosophy as epiphanies and gradual realizations, rather than as structured treatises. Wanting to make people feel real emotions, to make readers and listeners feel Aristotle’s “fear and trembling” (and Kierkegaard’s, too!).

According to your Wikipedia page, your work—up to this point—“is rarely autobiographical.” But at least the first part of The Brothers Silver, when brothers Jules and Leon are young, is based on your experience growing up. What was it like to put the focus so boldly on yourself when, traditionally, that hadn’t been your practice?

At first it was very uncomfortable to delve into my past. I had to relive the emotional pain of my youth, not once, but many times. I also had to contemplate all the what-ifs, many of which involved confronting mistakes of judgment I made as a youth or the many no-win situations in which nothing I could have done would have been right, since all ways would lead to bad outcomes.

The further I got into the first draft, the harder it became. But once I had the first draft down, I was able to treat the writing as “material” and deal with it as easily as I have always dealt with writing a news release or a television commercial.

The reason my poetry has rarely been autobiographical—in contrast to most practitioners of contemporary poetry, no matter their style—is that my writer’s block was tied up with my inability to confront my past and what I felt about what had happened to my brother and me. It was thus exceedingly difficult to write about my childhood or my current feelings.

What I often did in my poetry was to write about other people who had the same feelings but in entirely different circumstances. Making sure readers and listeners recognized that the writer was not the speaker of the poem helped me to keep those feelings concealed, since someone else was having and expressing them, not me.

From a technical standpoint, what did it take to tell, to the extent that you did, your own story without getting lost in the details of memory? What advice would you give other writers considering stepping into more self-focused writing for the first time?

What a great question. And it is always the central question when working on any kind of creative venture in any artistic medium or genre; “What to leave in, what to leave out,” as Bob Seger put it in his pop ditty, “Against the Wind.”

Many know the story of Hemingway cutting his short story “The Killers” from many pages to fewer than three thousand words, each round of editing slicing away more extraneous detail. I remember reading the wise words of an independent filmmaker whose names escapes me: “You don’t know if a film is good until you cut out a shot or sequence you love.”

I have found that maxim applies to virtually everything I write. Thus, the approach to deciding what characters, plot lines, anecdotes and details from your own past or life you want to put into a piece is exactly the same as when working on non-autobiographical material: keep focused on what you want to say; don’t be afraid to change what happened in real life to honor a higher truth, create symbolism or improve the rhythms; and cut out everything extraneous.

One example of all three of these concepts is my approach to Jules Silver, the character in the novel who is based in part on my life. Time and again in writing The Brothers Silver, I combed through everything involving him in the novel to make sure none of it hinted that he was or would become a writer; remember he’s a character based on someone who has been a professional writer since graduate school, but what I wanted to say was more universal than yet another writer-coming-of-age story could contain.

The Brothers Silver is told from ten different perspectives, including a dialogue-only exchange between two people, the boys’ aunt and uncle. Older brother Jules’s perspective is particularly distinctive, though, because in addition to being poetic in a number of other ways, it also dips into and out of rhyme, and often playfully. How did you decide what would rhyme and what wouldn’t?

Every paragraph that Jules speaks in narrating the first and last chapters contains rhymed words. Those rhymes are much more noticeable when they come at the natural pauses of the prose rhythms in these chapters. The rhymes that are harder to find—which means those rhymes that don’t jump out at the reader in the natural flow of reading—are embedded mid-phrase.

I thought long and hard a about setting every rhyme at the end of a natural pause, but to do so would have prioritized this technical element over hewing to the vocabulary of the speaker and the naturalness of the language. If we were to inject line breaks into the prose presentation of these two chapters, we would experience more of these “hidden rhymes” as enjambments.

Rhyming prose came to me as a happy accident of literary experimentation. I wrote the first chapter as a stand-alone non-rhyming poem several years back. After setting it down for a few months, I decided to set it to irregular rhymes, which seemed to give it extra emotional power. I put it down again for a few months, then started playing with the poem. I decided to experiment and set it as a prose piece, and the lines suddenly seemed to soar—at least to me.

This experiment occurred when I was making the transition from writing poetry to writing fiction. Once I made the decision to tell the story from different points of view, I realized that I could create more stylistic contrast between the chapters by having only Jules speak in irregular rhymes.

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Was there a perspective that took much more time than the others to write?

The last chapter represents about 40-45% of the total length of the book, so of course that chapter took the longest to write. But the perspective that took the most time to develop was definitely the narrator of the second chapter, who is a devious, brutal, and misogynistic narcissist, but at the same time quite clever.

I found the character thoroughly repulsive. It took much thought and mental energy to develop the language and situations that would let the world know that this despicable creation was an unreliable narrator, without being heavy-handed or having him ever have a moment of recognition or acknowledgement of the monstrosity of his actions and thoughts.

Women authors are often expected to deliver “likeable” characters. How important do you, as a writer, think it is to deliver a likeable or relatable character, and how important is it to you, as a reader, that a novel feature a character you like or find relatable?

I was not aware that women writers are expected to deliver “likeable characters,” but I find it a highly sexist and offensive expectation. And to some degree, it’s untrue. Nobody is really likeable in either Anna Burns’s Milkman or Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport, although several characters in both are quite sympathetic and our hearts go out to them; it is hard not to despise every character in Burns’s Tiny Constructions. I have found no admirable characters in fiction by either Anna Kavan or Silvina Ocampo. I consider all of these writers and books among the very best literature since World War II.

Now to the question, which is whether I as a reader want to see likeable characters in the novels I read. Let me answer by revealing that of the five novels that I consider the greatest of all time, three of them—Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Madame Bovary—have no character that is heroic or sympathetic. There are 108 heroes of Shin Nai’an’s Outlaws of the Marsh, all admirable for their skills and actions, but all butchers.

The likeability of the two main characters of the last of my five favorite novels, Joyce’s Ulysses, is open to deep questioning.

Now relating to a character is different than liking. We can relate to Emma Bovary’s longing for something other than her dreary life or Song Jiang’s desire to revenge corruption in the Chinese state, and I can certainly relate to the self-centered drifting of Stephen Daedalus in Ulysses.

Somewhat relatedly, a writer asked recently on Facebook how readers would respond if a character in a novel used a word known to be offensive to a group of people. Would they decide the book wasn’t worth reading? Would they hate the writer? understand the language was true to the character?

What is your opinion of the notion that writers should be careful not to offend in their writing?

Let’s first discount those writers whose goal is to offend a group of people—all the overt and camouflaged racists, supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, and fascists.

The question for a writer who wants to avoid insulting any group with invectives or ugly stereotypes is always who says the nasty word?

If a distinct character who the audience understands does not represent the author would say something offensive, then let it rip. One of the characters in The Brothers Silver uses the n-word. I would never write the actual word in a letter or a piece of journalism or criticism, but it was as true to this particular character in the given situation as breathing is, so I did not hesitate one nanosecond to type out the word, nor felt any moral constraint in the typing.

What was your path to publication for The Brothers Silver? It’s a literary novel, and literary novels are notoriously hard to sell.

Long and hard. First, I tried to get an agent. Over an 18-month period, I sent my manuscript with what I thought was a strong cover letter to about 180 agents. The three who responded said “no,” “no interest,” and “no thanks.”

I then worked up a list of 200 small and university presses that would accept novel manuscripts not coming from an agent. After about 18 more months, Owl Canyon and two other small presses responded within the same two-month period.

Things clicked immediately between me and the Owl Canyon publisher, Gene Hayworth. That’s a total of three years, but during that time, I kept revising and perfecting my manuscript.

Because literary fiction usually tends to reach beyond the more easily log-lined traditional plot structure, reducing a literary novel to a “this and then this” description for a query letter can be a lot of hair-tearing fun. Would you be willing to share your successful query letter as a sample for other literary fiction writers hoping to find an agent or publisher?

I will happily share my basic letter, but seeing as it attracted the attention of only three out of 380 agents and publishers, I’m not certain you can call it successful. I imagine, however, it would have been more successful if I had made a few minor changes, such as signing it “Kim Kardashian” or “Edward Kennedy, III.”

Here is the basic letter:

Jules and Leon Silver sit at a dusty Formica table in a cold kitchen drinking warm sugar water. Downstairs in the basement their mother is unconscious, having swallowed hundreds of Librium sometime during the last few days when the brothers were away at Boy Scout camp, her latest suicide attempt. The food cupboards are empty. The phone doesn’t give a dial tone. As the sun goes down, the kitchen grows colder. The boys are frozen in their inability to do anything but sit there waiting for their mother to die.

She doesn’t die, but the guilt and anger the brothers feel that they did nothing to save her haunt them for the rest of their lives. The incident, near the end of the first chapter, stands as the focal point of THE BROTHERS SILVER, the hot center from which the novel’s multiple story lines and voices radiate backwards and forwards in time.

Through the distorted prism of the emotionally crippled Silver family, the reader experiences the second half of the American 20th century. The younger brother Leon drops out and lives a drug-addled itinerant life. The older brother Jules ruins the beginning of a promising career by getting involved with a woman who treats him miserably. The book ends with Jules looking back from a perspective of 30 years at how childhood trauma distorted his view of the world.

The 12 chapters of THE BROTHERS SLIVER unfold in ten voices, each of which has its own vocabulary and literary style, from simple first person and third person omniscient to script dialogue, surrealism, flash fiction and stream of consciousness. The narrator of two of the chapters speak in irregular rhyming patterns. THE BROTHERS SILVER is a tour de force of voices and styles that stands firmly in the American traditional of accessible literary experimentation established by Heller, Pynchon and Wallace. A terribly fat-headed statement, I know, but please forgive my arrogance in advance and judge THE BROTHERS SILVER’s literary merits by the manuscript.

Please note that one of the chapters of THE BROTHERS SILVER, “Hashmal,” has been published in the Jewish Literary Quarterly.

A brief bio: I am a successful writer who has been widely published as a journalist, ghost writer, blogger and poet. I am probably most well-known for my blog, OpEdge, which has about 40,000 followers and appears on the websites of Jewish Currents, Vox Populi and The Progressive Populist. My literary credits include two books of poetry, Music from Words (2007, Bellday Books) and Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month (2017, Poet’s Haven Press), and more than two hundred individual poems published in journals and anthologies. A former television news reporter and public relations executive, I have also written or ghost-written more than 1,800 articles that have appeared in newspapers and magazines. I am president of the editorial board of Jewish Currents, a national magazine of politics and the arts.

One of the requests in the submission guidelines of your publisher, Owl Canyon Press, is “available marketing and promotion.” As someone who for 30 years owned and operated a marketing communications agency (Jampole Communications), you must have had an easy time with that one. What do you find is the best or most effective way to market something like literary fiction?

I won’t know for about a year whether anything I did worked, or what of the things I did worked. I can tell you that I’m pursuing major news media that cover literature and the arts, literary journals that publish book reviews and author interviews, and consumer trade publications that might be interested in my personal story. I also intend to advertise on Amazon and Facebook, work my extensive social media network, and run a number of marketing campaigns targeted directly at the library market.

You said you’ve been working on a new novel. Many writers have either embraced writing during the year of COVID-19 or have been unable to focus on writing because they’ve been too worried or distracted. How, if at all, did COVID-19’s presence in the world impact your writing?

Not one bit has Covid-19 affected my writing. I continue to put in the seven-hour-a-day regime I established when I sold my public relations business five years ago.

Like everyone else, however, Covid-19 has profoundly affected my non-writing life, as we could not go to restaurants, movies, or concerts, could not travel, could only see friends through Zoom, couldn’t ride the subway or bus, and didn’t do any walking outside beyond standard chores.

But because we enjoy an extensive selection of restaurants that deliver near us, have kept in contact with many friends and family members, and have begun to enjoy livestream jazz concerts, my non-writing life has been pleasant enough not to threaten my writing life with a debilitating depression.

I have written a few Covid-inspired poems, like everyone else.

Thank you, Marc.

How to Find Compelling Comps for Your Book

“paper snowflakes” by miheco is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Today’s post is by writer Star Wuerdemann (@starwuerdemann).

When you start querying agents about your book, very quickly you’ll discover their guidelines ask for “comps.” Comps stands for “comparable titles”: books that might be considered comparable to your own.

For many writers, coming up with comps is a daunting enterprise, but the important thing to remember is their key purpose: to show where your book would be shelved in a store or who your most likely readers are. Everyone from agents to publishing sales people to booksellers will have an easier time understanding what your book is like or who it’s for if a comparison can be made. “If you liked X, then you’ll like Y.” It also shows that you know something about the current marketplace and how your book fits in it.

On my quest to write the perfect query letter, I got stuck on what comps to use. I channeled my frustration into research. Here is what I learned from the experts.

Per Jane Friedman

If you can’t find any, you are probably looking for too similar of a comp. Look at aspects of a work that relate to yours: style/voice, themes, plot, or character quality/journey.Focus your search on the last few years. You can go back up to ten years if absolutely necessary but if you do, pair the older comp with something more contemporary.Try to find a comp that will show where you’re positioned in today’s literary landscape. If you were on a panel with other authors at a book festival, who would be seated next to you?

Per Carly Watters, literary agent at P.S. Literary

The comp must be perfect: no comp is better than a poor comp.It’s OK to use film/TV as comps, as well as authors and podcasts instead of books.Do your best to find at least one comp.The comp can be a bestseller, but if a book has become ubiquitous, it is too popular to be a comp. You can use the following formulations to talk about your comps: “This (x) meets that (y)” or “in the tradition of” or “Like Y, my novel.”Consider your category/genre and where your book fits in the publishing world. How would your book be pitched?

Per Janet Reid (aka Query Shark)

Comps are a shorthand for where the book belongs on the shelf and/or what kind of reader will like the book.What books, published in the last two years, appealed to readers who will like your book? “[TITLE] will appeal to readers of _______”What books, published in the last two years, are similar in plot or tone to yours? “[TITLE] evokes the story of ______”Describe what aspect of the book is comparable to yours: the tone, the multiple points of view, the style, et cetera.Once there’s a movie, assume the book is not a good comp. Also assume this if the author has 20+ bestsellers. Ask: Is it a success or a phenomenon? If it’s a success, comp it!What I did to find my compsI looked at my own bookshelves. Maggie Cooper, a literary agent with Aevitas, emphasizes that we often read books that are in the same genre and influence our own writing.I asked librarians. I told them the “dust jacket” version of my book, along with themes and writers I think I’m similar to.I asked other writers, especially those in my writing group and beta readers who know my book.I went to local independent bookstores, asked the booksellers, and browsed the shelves. At each store, I bought a couple of books to read—I considered it payment for the booksellers’ time and input.I used EBSCO NoveList (accessed through my local library). This is especially helpful for similar themes, styles, and characters. It’s a great place to put in older titles and find more recent ones.Goodreads and Amazon; I found these helpful for similar readers and similar genre books. I could also see how popular a title was based on the number of reviews. I found several books that would be excellent comps but the book wasn’t well-known enough so I couldn’t use it (but I did add some great books to my TBR pile).I researched the last three years of “best of” lists. My book is literary fiction, so I looked for articles about “best literary fiction” in 2018, 2019, 2020.I researched debut books of the last three years in my genre.I checked out a ton of books through the library to listen to and read. This was the least painful part—getting to read other books! (Please don’t comp a book you haven’t read. It’s bad form, and it may very well not end up being an appropriate comp.)I considered what books I would expect my readers to be reaching for and thought about why—then applied this to my search.I discovered these websites after my search, but would totally check them out next time: BookBrowse and Literature-Map.

In the end, I used a recent debut novel with similar themes (family secrets) and storytelling methods (multiple POV told in alternating timelines that converge in present day) and paired it with a mystery/thriller that has nuances similar to a sub-plot in my book. As in: “debut X meets mystery Y.” One was super popular (but not ubiquitous) and one performed solidly with laudable reviews.

It took me two months of diligent work to come up with my comps. A lot of it felt like “wasted” time—going down internet rabbit holes only to come up empty. But none of it was actually wasted as I came out far better educated about the marketplace I’m preparing to break into. Engaging in the literary world and discovering what books are out there is always beneficial. Consider the comp hunt both a rite of passage and a learning opportunity—and may the odds be ever in your favor.*

* Don’t comp The Hunger Games. It’s ubiquitous. And too old anyway.

The New Holy Grail of Traditional Publishers: Direct-to-Reader Relationships

Photo by Doug88888 via Flickr

Today’s post is excerpted from Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson, with permission granted by Polity Books.

Amazon, with over 70 percent of the ebook market and over 40 percent of all new book unit sales, print and digital, in the US, has exclusive proprietary information on the browsing and purchasing practices of a large proportion of book buyers, far more than any retail organization ever had before. It’s hard to overestimate the historical significance of this. Even in its heyday, Barnes & Noble probably had no more than 25 percent of retail book sales in the US.

Moreover, since many books bought in physical stores are bought at the till [cash register] rather than on a customer account and the browsing practices of individuals in a physical store are not tracked and recorded, the amount of information that Barnes & Noble would have been able to capture and store on its customers was much less than Amazon, for whom every online customer is by definition a registered user whose browsing behaviour, as well as purchasing history, is tracked, recorded and stored. The quantity and detail of the customer information now held by one retailer is historically unprecedented and this produces a structural asymmetry between publishers and Amazon that is far greater than anything that existed previously in the retail space for books.

So is there anything that publishers can do to try to counter-balance this structural asymmetry? Why, in this new digital age, should publishers stick with old practices that effectively cut them off from any access to, and contact with, the individuals who are the ultimate consumers and readers of their books? Why should they allow one retailer to monopolize information about book buyers, turn this information into a proprietary asset and then use this asset as a means to strengthen their own position in the field, sometimes at the expense of the very publishers who supply them with books?

These are questions that have preoccupied many publishers as they have watched the power of Amazon grow. The irony of a situation in which the popularity of their own books becomes an asset that can be used against them is not lost on the managers of publishing houses. But what, in practice, can they do?

This is the question that lies behind some of the new initiatives being undertaken by senior managers at publishing houses in recent years, including Melissa. Melissa heads up a unit concerned with developing new kinds of consumer outreach at ‘Titan’, a large US trade house with a full range of general-interest books. ‘My job is to figure out how to build a relationship with readers’, she explained. ‘So understanding who readers are, how to reach them, how to influence them, how to get them to take some action.’

This has become a key concern for Titan and for many other publishers – large, medium-sized and small: trying to build direct relationships with readers is the new holy grail of trade publishers. It used to be a lot easier for Titan to influence the kind of placement and marketing it was getting on Amazon—they could secure spots on the home page, purchase spots in certain merchandising areas, influence which emails were going out and so on: ‘We had a lot of leverage on the platform to be able to drive sales to our titles there.’ They would pay for it, of course—it might be co-op, it might be pay-per-click advertising, it might be something else. It wasn’t cheap, but at least they got exposure on Amazon’s platform. But now things are different, explained Melissa. Amazon is bigger, they have other priorities and, in the area of books, self-publishing is a much more important part of their business, so Titan could no longer rely on Amazon to drive sales:

They’re stronger, they’re driving people to their self-published authors, they’re driving people to things that they want to build. So it behooves us to figure out ways to drive sales on their platform because they’re still a great fulfilment account. And when they get behind a book it still works. But we have a broad list and they’re creating a retail universe that is bigger and more diverse, and so in order to get the signal through the noise we want to be able to drive that ourselves. So rather than depending on their email list, we should be building our own.

Melissa had to persuade her colleagues that it would be a good use of resources to divert some away from marketing specific titles in order to build a proprietary database of email addresses. This is easier said than done because marketers, editors and others in a publishing organization are understandably concerned about the books that are being published next week and next month – they need to get attention for these books and move the units because that’s how they’re going to be assessed at the end of the year. The fiscal demands and incentives of publishing organizations favour short-termism. You have to persuade colleagues to set aside the short-termism and see that there could be immense long-term value in building a database that would be a renewable asset, one that could be used again and again to reach out directly to consumers. ‘So instead of spending x thousand on new online ad spend for every single book, what if we just had a million people on file that we could reach out to directly. Yes, we have to pay the costs of the email service provider and the deployment on top of that but it’s still much cheaper on a cost-per-thousand basis—and, by the way, much more engaged, because they’ve given us permission to reach out to them, than just doing search marketing through Google and Facebook.’

People are more likely to open emails that are linked to specific author brands and specific genres. ‘The benchmark is 20 percent’, said Melissa, ‘but if you look at the open rates for real brands, like a Danielle Steele, they’re like 60 percent, which is unbelievable. So the engagement you get through email is staggering.’ This is not really surprising when you think about it. Many people have an emotional connection with authors whose books they love and they want to know more about them and about any new book they’ve just finished or published. ‘People want to connect with these incredibly creative people. And so we have this advantage and we need to make the most of it, and actually email is a really solid way to do it.’

A lot of Melissa’s time is now involved in developing a new site—let’s call it GoodFood.com. ‘Although it’s a website, the primary thinking behind GoodFood.com is that it’s actually an email program’, said Melissa. ‘It’s an email sign-up primarily for women. It doesn’t look that way on the site just because we don’t want to alienate dads.’ They chose to focus on women for several reasons: women are heavy readers and book buyers, they buy across channels in lots of different categories and they are very active on social media, so they share and chat about recommendations more than any other segment. Melissa set herself an ambitious goal: try to get half a million women signed on with an open rate of over 30 percent in twelve months’ time. They used a variety of methods to drive women to the site and get them to subscribe—paid ads, partnerships with food companies and supermarkets, sweepstakes to win a Nook or an iPad or gift vouchers for books, and so on. The sweepstakes work particularly well, explained Melissa. ‘We basically said, we’re going to give away 25 books of your choice, something like that. And the reason we did it that way, “of your choice”, is because we also wanted to gather preferences. Because you don’t just want names: you also want people to tell you what they like. You do an ad on Facebook and then people click through to GoodFood.com and say, yes, sign me up. They give us their address and they put in preferences, which was fantastic and a very cost-effective way to do it.’

Some of these people are only interested in the sweepstakes but a substantial proportion—over half—opt in to receive news and information from GoodFood, and half of those again opt in to receive information from Titan. Then, once someone has signed up, the key is to personalize the communication with them through targeted emails.

Melissa and her team did actually achieve their goal of getting half a million email addresses in the first year. They produce a lot of content for the site—by the end of the first year, over 500 pieces of content had been produced. Most of the content—‘I would say 90, 95 percent’—is ‘inspirational’, explained Melissa, by which she meant short articles about which recipes work best for which purposes, how best to deal with certain practical problems, and so on—‘people are looking for guidance, so that is really the bread and butter of what we do, as opposed to “buy this book now”. This is not the hard sell. This is information, inspiration, almost lifestyle.’ But Melissa is confident, nonetheless, that it does sell books: ‘I know it’s selling books because we track everything we do. It’s a super-light sell. Some of our articles don’t even have a click through. I would say that 30 per cent of our articles actually have buy links and it’s very subtle—there’s a buy-it button and you press on it and it drives you into retail. We’re seeing conversions from retail at a higher rate than some of the other programs that we’re running—even those programs that are much more focused on selling.’

Having created this successful prototype, Melissa’s goal is now to roll out this model across the company and build a limited number of other topic-focused sites. By developing GoodFood.com, they’ve created a set of tools, templates and methodologies that can be used by other groups and divisions in the company to build dedicated customer databases that will enable them to reach out directly and effectively to the kinds of readers who might be interested in their books. These initiatives are part and parcel of a broader plan to grow substantially Titan’s database of customer information.

As Melissa sees it, building the customer database has become a critical part of what a publisher is—and what it needs to be—in a world where people are increasingly learning about things, and buying things, online. People are not walking into bookstores as much as they used to, and not seeing physical displays of books: book marketing is becoming more personalized and is increasingly happening online. But publishers can’t assume that the big retailers like Amazon will do this marketing for them.

Titan is not alone in pursuing this strategy. Many publishers are developing their own customer databases, and many have launched sites similar to GoodFood.com—there is Brightly.com, a site run by Penguin Random House aimed at mothers with young children; Epic Reads, a site run by HarperCollins aimed at teens and young adults; Tor.com, a site run by Macmillan aimed at readers of science fiction and fantasy; Work in Progress, a site and newsletter run by FSG aimed at readers of literary fiction; and many more. Most of these work on a similar model: a publisher creates the site, populates it with content that is often linked to authors and books (some of which will be the publisher’s own books, though they may also feature and recommend authors and books published by others), and uses a variety of methods to encourage people to sign up, adding their email addresses and perhaps other information to the publisher’s customer database. While the model is similar, there are many variations and permutations. 

It’s too early to say whether these initiatives will flourish, or even survive; too early also to say whether initiatives of this kind will enable publishers to wrest back some power from Amazon and chip away at the near-monopoly of information capital, in the form of user data, that Amazon now has in the world of the book. Amazon has a huge advantage in the struggle for control of information capital—with more than 300 million active users, they are far ahead of where any publisher, or even consortium of publishers, could ever hope to be. But publishers are not without cards to play in this game. After all, the relationship that most readers have with Amazon is a practical and functional one: Amazon provides an excellent service at a good price. Most readers don’t want to have a relationship with Amazon beyond this practical and functional one. But there are many readers who do want to have some kind of connection or relationship with the authors they like to read, with ideas and stories—a relationship that is more than a purely functional one, that is richer, more engaged and more interactive, and publishers are much better placed than Amazon to facilitate these connections.

Publishers who have seen this potential and used the digital resources at their disposal to reach out to readers have begun, in their own small way, to build and facilitate relationships of this kind. Small databases of readers who are actively interested in the kinds of books and authors being published by a particular publisher or group of publishers may be just as valuable—perhaps even more valuable—than large databases of customers with diverse interests, and building databases of this kind may turn out to be one of the ways in which publishers can make some small shift in the balance of power in a game where the giant retailer holds most of the cards.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, check out John B. Thompson’s Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing.

4 Voices That Can Help (or Hinder) Your Memoir

AHORA / Mene Savasta Alsina, Hernán Kerlleñevich (AR) by Ars Electronica is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Today’s guest post is by writer, coach and editor Lisa Cooper Ellison (@lisaellisonspen). Join her on May 19 for the online class Finding the Universal in Your Memoir.

For memoirists, the concept of voice is a little complicated.

In her Brevity essay, Sue William Silverman talks about the two voices memoirists must employ in their manuscripts—the voices of innocence and experience. The voice of innocence is the voice of the character living through a situation. The voice of experience helps us understand what the situation means.

These are in addition to the ethereal capital “V” voice agents and publishers love to talk about—the one that’s a unique combination of vocabulary, tone, point of view, and style.

Innocence, experience, and capital “V” voice show up on the page. They are part of the craft of writing we need to cultivate.

But as a memoirist and coach, I’ve also discovered a few internal voices that can influence the way we tell our stories. If we pay attention, we can capitalize on their wisdom while avoiding their pitfalls.

1. The False Prophet

The False Prophet wants to help others and has a clear vision for the story. Sometimes this voice describes a project as a memoir with a strong self-help bent. Chapters are filled with hard-earned wisdom and lessons learned by an author who has already survived and arrived.

Unfortunately, the False Prophet isn’t keen on vulnerability.

Its rehearsed stories are dominated by a pseudo-voice of experience that weakens the story’s dramatic tension. Because the False Prophet thinks it’s beyond the story’s conflict, it tries to portray every character in the best possible light—often avoiding certain characters’ bad behavior or psychoanalyzing them as if the story is a kumbaya sing-along where we’re handing out compassion for all.

When readers encounter these stories, their BS meters spike to eleven because they intuitively know this version is superficial.

It might sound like the False Prophet is a real douche who’s screwing up your project, but that’s not true.

Sometimes the prophet doesn’t understand that stories require conflict or that readers learn vicariously by living through the narrator’s experience. It might not know that real answers and insights are discovered through the writing process.

More often, the prophet wants to protect you from a level of vulnerability you’re not ready for.

The False Prophet appears when your heart is closed to the hurt you’ve experienced, or it’s not sure how to deal with the difficult parts in your story. Allowing the False Prophet to speak in early drafts gives you a chance to ease into the vulnerability memoir requires.

In future drafts, you can open up more by asking yourself the following questions:

Do you fear judgment from others?Are you worried you’ll judge yourself?Does your story include one or more traumatic events?If so, should you consider working with a therapist?2. The Wounded One

Because many memoirs arise from deep wounds where someone has done us wrong, these are the oaths experienced memoirists often pledge:

I will not write from a grudge.

I will not lie. 

I will not unnecessarily dump my trauma on the reader.

Sometimes we begin with the False Prophet because we’re trying to live up to this pledge. But at some point, you’ll need to let the Wounded One share its story.

This vulnerable voice expresses painful and traumatic stories living inside the body. Because this voice was silenced when terrible events occurred, it sees a world filled with victims, good guys, and bad guys. Sometimes the only way it knows to express body-level memories is to share a “terrible thing” from beginning to end.

In early drafts, let the Wounded One speak—even if it leads to flat characters and unfocused scenes. Once these stories live on the page, you can revise them. When you’re ready, find readers who can bear witness to this version of your story so you can trade pain and catharsis for deeper insights.

If you find yourself writing beginning-to-end renditions of traumatic events, consider a therapist as your first reader. They’re trained to help you find meaning inside traumatic experiences—something many writers aren’t equipped to do.

3. The Investigator

After you’ve shed the False Prophet and let the Wounded One speak, it’s time to call in The Investigator. With its help, you’ll discover the story that frames your experience.

Early drafts sometimes lack story. They focus instead on the Y in Marion Roach Smith’s memoir formula, or what Vivian Gornick calls the situation. Situations in memoir look like this:

Wild: My mom died. I trashed my life and then went on a hike.In the Dream House: I thought I met the love of my life, but this person almost destroyed me.

The Investigator is curious. Like a detective, it researches, interrogates, and evaluates each rehearsed section, looking for “aha” moments. It doesn’t refute what’s already been written. Instead, it asks what else is true.

In situations where someone has behaved badly, The Investigator asks:

What wound is this antagonist compensating for?Is this scene essential and thoroughly explored?What don’t I know about this situation?What decisions did the narrator make?How did these decisions inform the story?If I’m the one who behaved badly, am I portraying myself fairly?

If the False Prophet continues to dominate, The Investigator asks:

Is there an aspect of this story that doesn’t feel safe?What support do I need while I dig deeper?

One your investigations are complete, it’s time to truly write your book.

4. The Wise One

This voice uses everything The Investigator unearths to form the story that frames your experience. You’ll know The Wise One is speaking when you can examine your draft objectively. While some parts might still feel cringeworthy or like a gut punch, you know they belong to the narrator.

Vivian Gornick calls the story the meaning underpinning your experiences. It’s the X in Marion Roach Smith’s memoir formula.

Stories can be distilled into one sentence. They frequently tap into a universal experience like belonging, forgiveness, grief, love, or identity. Stories in memoir look like this:

Wild: It’s about the unbearable nature of grief and how we carry it.In the Dream House: It’s about how traumatic love objectifies us.

The Wise One cuts ruthlessly, frames precisely, and manages scenes efficiently as it crafts a compelling story. But even when the Wise One speaks, we haven’t necessarily arrived. Drafting a memoir is not a linear process. Sometimes we reach later stages only to learn there’s something else to investigate or maybe the Wounded One has more to say. The key to moving through the memoir stages is to recognize the voices when they’re speaking, listen to what they have to say, and then use those insights to inform the story.

Note from Jane: if you enjoyed this post, join me and Lisa on May 19 for the online class Finding the Universal in Your Memoir.