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3 Tips for Cutting Your Word Count (Without Giving Your Whole Story the Ax)

Photo credit: jeremy_norbury

Today’s post is by author Leslie Vedder (@leslievedder).

When it comes to writing and word count, you’re always up against the Goldilocks principle: you don’t want too much or too little—you’ve got to get it just right.

Personally, I am always on the side of too much. Especially by the time I’ve gotten through my edits, I’ve usually inched up to a word count that’s waaaay over my target goal. So when those alarm bells start going off and you find yourself staring at a book you need to cut 10,000+ words from, where do you begin?

Is it time to start chopping entire scenes and subplots?

Does some side character or love story get the ax?

Maybe not. Try these things first.

1. Look at your transitions.

Transitions are those little connector pieces that help you pass time and distance or move between scenes quickly. You know: Three weeks passed in a flash… Two hours later… As the days grew colder and the leaves began to change… Sometimes it’s just white space on the page before a new scene picks up in a new place. Transitions can be practically invisible, because when they’re done well, you often don’t notice them.

And that’s what makes them a great place to start cutting word count. In a fantasy book, for example, how much of your character traveling to a new kingdom do you really need to portray? If nothing important happens, could you use skip right to the destination?

Do you find yourself filling in a lot of details about the days before an important event? (Think of the multiple scenes of Cinderella sewing her stepsisters’ dresses and doing chores in the run-up to the ball.)

Do you get into the minutiae of your characters opening doors and then entering rooms and then looking around—only then getting into a new scene? This one is my personal Achilles heel. Consider:

Cinderella reached for the door, pushing it open slowly. The ornate wood creaked on its rusted hinges. She stood in the opening, peering around at the royal gardens…

Or: Cinderella slipped into the royal gardens, marveling at the lush greenery as …

The first example has more rich detail, sure—but is it detail your reader needs or wants? Often, you’re better off saving those words for a more exciting moment: like Cinderella stumbling on her stepsisters trying to assassinate the king. (It could happen!)

Cutting transition words not only makes your writing tighter, but helps manage your pacing. Best of all, it’s usually material you won’t miss.

2. Cut down on description.

Description in books is vital—it deepens the world building and adds flavor and tone. It’s also easy to go overboard. As the author, you may have a picture in your head of exactly what your castle looks like, down to the last turret, balcony garden, and flying buttress. No matter how fantastically you paint that picture, though, consider cutting long descriptions and trading that for lines that evoke a feeling.

For example, when describing the ancient manor house where your gothic romance is set, you will absolutely want to detail the architecture, the overgrown ivy, and the twisted shapes of the gargoyles. But at some point, instead of counting off every peaked roof and creaky weathervane, your word count may be better served by subbing in a feeling line: The longer she stared up at the towering manor, the more it felt like it was looking back at her, the black windows shining like malevolent eyes.

Look carefully at any scene where you’re describing something for the second time: a second look at your haunted mansion, repeated trips to the castle library, etc. Trust your reader to remember your first glorious description—and use this to motivate yourself to make that original description absolutely sparkle.

3. Remove one word from every sentence or paragraph.

I wish I could remember where I heard this advice—I think it was at a writing conference. Regardless, I use this one all the time!

Cutting thousands of words from a manuscript is daunting, however you slice it. But think for a moment about removing a single word out of every sentence in your book. An 80,000-word book could easily have upward of 7,000 sentences, and some sentences have extra fluff in them, like “a little” or “very.” Obviously, some lines of dialogue or short action sentences might be as short as they can ever get. But even if you can only cut a word from every other line, or every paragraph, it’ll add up in a hurry.

Plus, there’s an added benefit: it really streamlines your writing. Like pruning extra leaves or branches, sharper and tighter prose makes the details you keep stand out. And any time you cut word count, you make your book a faster read.

Obviously, these tips won’t work for every project. Each book has its own voice and style, and as the author, you know it best. If you write in a very concise manner, cutting one word from each sentence could be devastating. Or if you’ve worked hard to include exactly the description that you need with no overflow, cutting it down would be a nonstarter.

Still, take a hard look at your transitions, long descriptions, and overstuffed sentences, because whenever you can cut truly unnecessary material, you get to keep something you really care about!

Writing True Crime: Q&A with Janis Thornton

Today’s Q&A is by journalist and romance writer Cathy Shouse (@cathyshouse).

Janis Thornton (@JanisThornton) is the author of history, mystery, and true crime, as well as an award-winning news reporter and former editor of The Times of Frankfort, Indiana.

Her latest book, No Place Like Murder: True Crime in the Midwest, is a collection of 20 true crime stories that rocked Indiana between 1869 and 1950. Janis released her first true crime book in 2018, Too Good a Girl: Remembering Olene Emberton and the Mystery of Her Death, the story of her high school classmate, whose tragic death in 1965 was never solved.

Cathy Shouse: I was touched by the human vulnerabilities in No Place Like Murder: True Crime in the Midwest and by how much the characters come to life, both those who were killed and their murderers. You’ve stated that sensationalizing the stories wasn’t your goal and I believe you’ve honored that. How did you get started with writing true crime?

Janis Thornton: I discovered my fascination for true crime in the early 2000s, when I began to research the unsolved murder of my high school classmate. I had recently started a new career as a newspaper reporter and was learning the investigative reporting skills crucial for accurately documenting historical facts. Off and on over the next 14 years, I combed through court records and news articles, tracked down and interviewed law enforcement officials connected to the case, sent Freedom of Information Act requests, studied criminology, picked the brains of forensics experts, attended conferences, talked with Olene’s classmates, friends and family members, followed all the loose ends, and ultimately tied them together for Too Good a Girl.

While the research was intensive, the most challenging aspect of the project was breaking through my self-doubt. The closer I came to wrapping up the research phase, the more I heard myself asking: Am I the right person to tell this story? Have I crossed a line? Will the book cause the family pain by opening old wounds?

Ultimately, my classmate’s family gave me their blessing, which is a gift I still cherish. That book is the most complex, most important, and most satisfying writing project I’ve completed to date. Equally satisfying, and immensely gratifying, was the community’s support of the memorial fund I established in my classmate’s name. In addition to the book’s net proceeds that I donated, the fund raised another nearly $30,000, which will be used for community grants for many years to come.

Why did you choose historic crimes for No Place Like Murder: True Crime in the Midwest?

My interest in writing true crime is an offspring of my love for history, mystery, and telling long-forgotten stories. I first stumbled onto what I refer to as historic crime stories while I was a newspaper reporter in Frankfort, Indiana. I was looking for something in the building’s basement and found an old clip file named “Murders.” I couldn’t resist reading through the stories, some dating back more than 100 years. The writing was vivid, colorful, a tad sensational, and as riveting as any Stephen King novel I’d read. I made copies and took them home, thinking maybe I’d eventually find a use for them. And I did. Three of them became fully fleshed-out chapters in No Place Like Murder.

Conventional wisdom tends to view the good ol’ days as a scene from “The Music Man,” when, in fact, the early 1900s produced the likes of Lizzie Borden and H.H. Holmes, and a couple decades later came Bonnie & Clyde and Indiana’s own John Dillinger.

As a writer, I see myself as a historian, preferring to preserve stories of criminal misdeeds from long ago, as well as the memories of those who experienced them, rather than recounting recent crimes that dominate our modern-day media.

Once you’ve selected a crime to research, how do you find the nitty-gritty details that are going to keep a reader’s interest?

No one associated with the vintage cases written about in No Place Like Murder is living. So I primarily relied on old newspaper stories, searchable online via newspapers.com. Occasionally, I also found valuable information in old court records at county courthouses and historical societies, and in school yearbooks and family histories at city libraries.

When I was researching my classmate’s death in 1965, I found many more resources at my disposal. While I also relied on old newspaper stories for the facts about the case, the stories contained names of law enforcement officers that had worked the case. With a little help from Google, I was able to locate some of them, and despite the 40-50 years that had passed, they readily agreed to meet with me to be interviewed.

What does a writer need to know about the legal aspects of this type of writing?

There are legal risks in writing about living people, such as defamation, that can apply to any genre, not just true crime. However, writers can mitigate or even eliminate such risks by practicing the rules of good journalism by including only quotes and information that are part of the public record, sticking to verifiable facts and rejecting unsubstantiated claims, omitting opinions disguised as facts, and citing sources. Ethical journalism should always be adhered to, even when the person written about is deceased. Generally, liability issues are nullified upon a person’s death.

Nonfiction writers sometimes ask their sources to sign a liability release waiver, but the best advice I received before I published the book about my classmate came from a true crime author I met at a conference, who suggested I join The Authors Guild. The Guild offers members access to its legal department and media liability insurance through a reputable underwriter. I did purchase the liability insurance, which is good for the life of the book. The one-time fee was roughly $1,000. That may sound hefty, but it was worth every cent for the peace of mind it brought me. Insurance cost varies based on the book. If the insurance provider determines that the content of the book is too risky, it could decline to insure it.

The legalities concerning photographs are another matter. For the book about my classmate, I wanted to reprint a few photos that had appeared in a couple of area newspapers in 1965. Copyright still applied, so I contacted the publishers at both newspapers and asked for permission, which they granted.

My most recent book contains several newspaper photos that appeared in print as far back as the early 1900s, and those were usable without permission [they had fallen into the public domain]. The Indiana State Prison mug shots in the book were provided by the Indiana State Archives and required a minimal use fee. In addition, a few other photos were supplied by county historical societies and individuals as a courtesy.

Finally, it should be noted that, after I turned in my manuscript and photos to the publisher, they asked that I submit copies of written permissions for each photo, except those in the public domain.

Copyright and libel laws are often ambiguous. Thus, I highly recommend that, prior to publishing stories and photos regarding real people or events, the author get their manuscript reviewed by a lawyer.

Tell us how you ended up with Indiana University Press for No Place Like Murder.

My historic true crime project was originally composed of 15 true crime stories: three set in my central Indiana county and three in each of the four counties surrounding it. In early 2017, I submitted my book proposal to a well-known national publisher, who was interested but ultimately declined. I then queried another highly respected publisher, who initially said “yes” but a few weeks later reneged without explanation.

Discouraged, I turned my attention to a different project and left my true crime book to simmer on the back burner. By the end of the year, I was seriously considering publishing No Place Like Murder myself. But in early January 2018, the idea to query I.U. Press occurred to me. It had published numerous books about Indiana history, and its Quarry Books imprint included true crime books similar to mine. I emailed my proposal with one of the stories to the acquisitions editor, and two days later she emailed me back asking for the full manuscript. She said her team would publish my book if I would commit to adding at least two more stories, one set in Northern Indiana and the other in Southern Indiana. In the end, I included five additional stories. I also included two forewords, written by distinguished Indiana authors. Working with I.U. Press has been a joy.

Does a true crime story have a built-in audience?

Who doesn’t have a morbid curiosity about the dark side? Who hasn’t succumbed to the allure of a particularly sensational crime and taken a peek behind the headlines?

While many readers revel in crime fiction, it’s true crime that reigns supreme among hard-core armchair detectives. True crime dominates TV, movies, and podcasts. There’s even an annual CrimeCon that draws thousands of true crime fans from around the world. Bottom line, true crime has been “killing it” for decades. Knowing there’s a hungry true crime audience out there, my job has been to discover the best places and ways to feed into it.

When I released Too Good a Girl in August 2018, I held a launch at the local library. As special guests, I invited law enforcement officers who had worked the case, the current coroner, the current mayor, and members of my classmate’s family. I had no way of knowing whether five, 25, or 50 people would show up. But when the day arrived, a standing-room-only crowd of at least 150 packed the library. I gave my presentation, followed by a Q&A, followed by a book signing. People waited in line for an hour to get their books signed, and the librarian told me later that they had never before hosted an event like it before.

The book also generated a lot of media interest, and I was thrilled when the Indianapolis Star ran a story about it that dominated page one of its August 13, 2018, edition and most of its first section. In addition, the NBC-TV affiliate in Indianapolis featured the book in a broadcast segment that included an interview with me recorded at various locations related to the crime. This kind of publicity is extremely rare. I call it a gift from the marketing gods.

Unfortunately, due to COVID, many avenues for promotion are now closed. Zoom has been a godsend. I have upcoming podcasting and Zoom activities scheduled with one of the area libraries, focusing on the new book. It will be an experiment for the library, too, but I see no downside to trying something new and learning from it.

print / ebook

My most innovative undertaking has been a 15-part blog series documenting my travels throughout the state visiting graves of people featured in the book—villains as well as victims. I located the graves using the website Find a Grave. On September 1 I started posting the pieces and followed with a new post every other day through the end of the month. To help encourage a wider circulation of the posts, and ultimately readers once the book is released, I asked my Facebook friends to share the post with their friends in exchange for a chance to win a copy of the book. The response has been enthusiastic.

What are you working on next? I want to research and write 20 more historic true crime stories for No Place Like Murder 2, while working on a history of Indiana’s experience with the Palm Sunday tornadoes that ripped through the Midwest on April 11, 1965. Neither project has yet been signed by a publisher, but I’m optimistic that they will be.

Writers Often Ask Me a Question I Can’t Answer

Photo credit: denisbin

Today’s guest post is by author, editor and writing coach Mathina Calliope (@MathinaCalliope).

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you have been told at some point, by someone, likely more than once, that you are a good writer. Maybe even a great writer. Your mom, maybe, as she pinned your block-lettered picture-sentence stories to the refrigerator when you were in first grade. Or the seventh-grade teacher who read your poem to the whole class, which was embarrassing but also super validating. Maybe you won a high school essay contest. Or your colleagues praise your memos and emails, perhaps, for their clarity or wit.

And you know it to be true. You have a knack for it. You’re comfortable with your fingers flying over the keyboard. It pleases you to put together a sentence whose rhythm feels right. Your mind bristles with ideas, clamoring to be let out onto the page.

But becoming a Real Writer? About this you’re not as certain. Maybe you didn’t go into a writing field—you had to put food on the table, raise the kids. Maybe you did pursue a writing degree, but your main output now is press releases or ad copy. Something always draws you back though. You’re reading a memoir and the protagonist’s story reminds you of yours. I could do that, you think. I should do that. Why aren’t I doing that?

So you take a writing workshop and there it is again, just like in high school: validation. Your classmates love your story. “These details are great,” they say. “I love the tension you create in the beginning,” they say. “I can really sense the emotion the narrator was feeling in this paragraph,” they say.

Of course, they also note that maybe you didn’t need that whole first paragraph at all, and that you probably could explain this bit about the relationship between the brothers a little better, and overall it’s pretty long and repetitive, so maybe go through and try to cut unnecessary words?

Still, you’re encouraged. Not just from the feedback but from the feeling you got writing it all down. The memories that emerged and surprised you. The satisfaction of finally doing a thing you’ve said for years you wanted to do.

Now you decide to take a plunge. Get some personalized guidance and accountability, invest in yourself. You hire a coach. She’s encouraging and interested in your story. She leaves little margin notes reacting to the story, and you see that she gets it. She understands what you’re trying to do. More validation, because what are writers after if not readers who get it? Just like the workshop classmates though, she has more than praise for your masterpiece. She has criticism, questions, and suggestions. She wants you to rethink the structure. She thinks you should take out that whole section you labored over. She doesn’t understand how several of the paragraphs relate to the chapter as a whole. She’s put commas in all over the place.

You start to wonder if you should keep going. Coaching’s not cheap, and the publishing industry is ruthless. The field is saturated with writers, so many people wanting to tell their interesting stories. What makes yours so special?

You wonder: Am I good? Am I a good enough writer to keep doing this?

I’m so, so sorry. No matter how much I love your writing, no matter how much it impresses me, or—on the other side—no matter how much I think you have to learn, I cannot answer that question. It’s not because I’m trying to be coy, or don’t want to hurt your feelings, or—on the other side—boost your ego.

It’s because it isn’t an answerable question.

“Good enough” implies there’s a benchmark of writerly skill. Learn these techniques, practice this structural approach, master those literary devices. As if there were a bar out there somewhere, and your inherent talent plus practice puts you either above it or below it.

Don’t I wish.

Other fields have more rigid standards. Lawyers, for example, must know a canon of precedent and must possess logical minds and rhetorical skills.

But art isn’t like that. Not only is there no way to answer the question of whether you are good enough, there’s no way to even define what it means. Good enough for what?

Good enough to share with your kids?Good enough to be published on HuffPost?Good enough to get a book deal?Good enough to move some specific audience of readers?Good enough to convey your truth, to help you discover what that truth even is?

On top of all of the above, good writing isn’t even the main criterion for publication. Sadly, it’s not even in the top three or four. What gets someone published is whether their story is relevant, timely, and MARKETABLE; what sort of platform (social media following) they have; their degree of expertise; and the uniqueness of their idea, its angle. Knowing people in the book world is awfully helpful, too.

No one person can ever know the answer to that question, then: Is your writing good enough. Not the agent who might or might not sign you. Not the editor who might or might not buy your book. Not even the reader who picks your book for book club, where a disagreement emerges about the quality of the writing.

It’s not knowable.

Because of that, “Is my writing good enough?” is not the question you should ask yourself.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tells an anecdote about a student who asked a well-known author if he, the student, could become a writer. The reply: “Do you like sentences?”

I love this answer so much. It goes straight to the point, which many aspiring writers, in their visions of publication, book parties, and New York Times bestseller lists, skip over entirely. I take it to mean, Do you love writing so much that you cannot NOT write? Because if you like sentences, you probably like words, paragraphs, pages, chapters. You like writing for writing’s sake, and not for all that other stuff. The other stuff is fine; there’s nothing wrong with the other stuff.

So, do you? Like sentences, I mean? If the answer is yes, then keep going. Put in the time. Read, read, read, read literature. Work hard. Enjoy the process. And see where it leads.

Online Book Events: A Necessary Pivot in 2020, But How Do You Compete?

Today’s post draws from material previously published in The Hot Sheet, a paid subscription email newsletter that I write and publish every two weeks. This week, we celebrate five years of continuous publication. Get 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

The entirety of the publishing community has turned its eye toward online events as a way to spread word of mouth about books—even as lockdown restrictions have eased. It’s now possible to fill every lunch hour and evening with book clubs and book festivals and live readings and more. Thus, even if you offer a creative and enticing online event, it’s hard to market them (much less sell them) when so much content is now available for free. Before you decide to run an online event, consider the following.

Decide what you want from the event.

Former literary agent Mary Kole (who runs the Good Story Company) says you need to decide if you want readers or if you want sales—the two are not necessarily the same thing. “By hosting a great event where you have hundreds of attendees—but no sales—you have maybe gained some readers. They came, they saw, they enjoyed, they maybe signed up for your email list. Is this enough?” Sometimes it is, Kole says. But you need to be clear about what you’re hoping to achieve so you can adjust how you frame the event from the start and what you ask people to do.

Novelist Hank Phillippi Ryan of Career Authors says, “A book event does not necessarily need to translate into sales at that very moment. If an author can drum up interest in their new book and themselves, and create a general excitement about it, and a sense of anticipation, I think that’s very helpful. Then the next time the reader sees your book, they remember, Oh—I just saw that! Or I just heard about that.”

As marketers are fond of saying: People buy books they’ve heard about, and events create word of mouth and a needed impression. If successful, the event will endear you to readers and increase the future likelihood of a sale. Novelist Caroline Leavitt, who launched A Mighty Blaze with Jenna Blum to promote new releases during the lockdown, says, “Be casual. Be yourself. Readers want to see the real you, so the more unpracticed and unrehearsed you sound, the better. If you can be warm and funny, readers will love you, and they will want your book that much more!”

Build marketing support or find partners for your event.

Author Angela Ackerman of Writers Helping Writers suggests reaching out to your existing audience and letting them know you’re planning something fun. In other words: form a street team. Provide a signup form that lists all the ways your team can help; then they can decide how to support you. Ackerman says she and her co-author rely on the street teams’ blogs to point to the event, a strategy she describes as lots of windows, one house. “I craft the posts in text and HTML to make it easy [for them] to drop in, and create three different versions which I split into three groups so not every blog has the same images and content.” Also, she says, be sure to offer street team members a thank-you gift afterward.

If you don’t have a street team yet, now is a great time to create one. However, Rachel Thompson of BadRedhead Media offers a caveat: “I caution any author to not jump into this unless they have a body of work behind them,” she says. “I didn’t start my street team until I had published four books.” That said, if you have a recognizable name already—or if your book is on a topic that readers can quickly and avidly get behind—she says it’s possible to create a street team and people will jump right in.

If a street team is out of the question for you, look for other like-minded partners. “I think an online launch is all about increasing your reach,” says novelist Kristy Woodson Harvey. “Teaming up with other authors, influencers, bloggers, and, of course, a favorite indie bookstore for joint events can help grow the potential audience. And if you have a regional bookseller association that would get involved (SIBA, MIBA, etc.), so much the better.” Likewise, novelist Karen Karbo suggests, “Being in conversation is more interesting than a talking head. If you can talk with someone with her own following, even better.”

Determine the event theme, content, and structure.

Ackerman says that she and her co-author try to do events with an emotional pull, so they look at three components for each event.

Offering entertainment. This isn’t a hard one to understand: people want to participate in something fun. Ackerman says, “We think about why our readers are online, what sort of escapism might appeal to them, and how can we cater to that. People tend to respond to creative things that pull them out of their day-to-day as long as it’s easy to do.”Adding value. Often, this takes the shape of a giveaway and gives people a reason to attend. More on this below.Satisfying a need. Ackerman says, “As human beings, we have common needs, like connection, belonging, fellowship, creativity, etc., and if you can find a need that your audience is receptive to, you can build a theme into your event they will connect to emotionally and so rally behind. This makes them more motivated to participate in the event and share it with others, which in turn means visibility and books sold.”

Whether it’s better to use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Zoom, or something else will depend on where the author has a following or is otherwise comfortable engaging. Consider these factors:

“If the event takes place on social media, think about what the audience is there for. Entertainment? A break from routine and work? Information?” Ackerman says. “What do they like, and what will catch their attention on that platform?” She offers a free PDF that lists ideas for different platforms.Facebook launch parties. Thompson says these aren’t likely to sell a lot of books, “yet you’ll connect with your readership and build relationships and visibility for future sales.” If you have a street team, you’ll gain new membership, new followers on other channels, and newsletter subscribers. Indie author and marketer Shayla Raquel hosts Facebook launch parties specifically on the day of release to push for last-minute sales, so she always hosts them in the evening. She says, “The launch party in no way is meant to replace any other marketing components—it’s a little bonus tool to help you end the day with a bang.” Keep the event fast paced and fun, Raquel says, and ensure posts have relevant and unique photos of you, the book, and/or the prizes; avoid stock photos. Thompson recommends that if you have no experience doing a Facebook launch party, consider hiring someone who does. “There are lots of ins and outs. They’re a lot of work.”Twitter chats. Thompson suggests authors look for and participate in a chat already running in their genre or on their topic. If there isn’t one, consider starting one. “Be forewarned, though, chats take coordination and commitment,” she says. “I’ve been doing these chats every week for about five to six years. You need to pick a weekly topic, research it, invite guests, and share summaries. I also create blog posts from the chat. This can help immensely in your Twitter growth and author branding.” (Thompson hosts #BookMarketingChat every Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern.)Author Q&A. As suggested earlier, try to coordinate with another author or influencer so that you’re not a lone talking head, and do these live. Thompson says you can invite readers to ask you questions about your inspirations, writing process, books, writing life, cats, etc.

Author Kristina Stanley had a very successful Facebook launch party several years ago that pushed her to number one on Amazon Hot New Releases. But her later events were not as successful. “I’ve heard from other authors their first Facebook launch party goes better than the others. One thought is all your friends are super keen about your first book. … To make my first party work, I reached out to hundreds of my friends directly and asked them for help. After my third book, I stopped doing the online parties because of the effort/payoff ratio.”

Ackerman says that whatever you do for an event, it can’t look like the same old same old. “Thinking outside the box to do something fresh is what attracts attention and gets people talking and sharing.” In other words: your first successful online event may not be replicable; you have to mix things up to keep attention over a series of events.

Give people a reason to attend by offering giveaways.

Just about every event—especially a launch event—includes book giveaways and other prizes. Raquel and Thompson both recommend using gift cards; the grand prize can be a signed copy of the author’s book.

Ryan says such enticements have escalated over the past couple of years. “At first, people were giving away things—notebooks and coffee mugs and tote bags,” she says. Eventually, she saw that people grew tired of those, so she and some authors switched to “buy one, get one.” For example, if a reader bought her new book and sent a proof of purchase, she sent a backlist book for free. But that also lost its allure over time. Ultimately, she says, the strongest factor of all is whether the reader really wants the book no matter what (and may end up purchasing it anyway).

Novelist Amy Impellizzeri has found that the promise of future book club appearances (whether live or FaceTime or Zoom) is a fan favorite. “When readers know their favorite authors are willing to make an appearance to their own book clubs after the online launch, they are more likely to buy and even read!” she says.

Ackerman says while she and her co-author might give away books at their events, they tailor prizes to their readership. “I think that’s important—anyone might stop by to win an Amazon gift card, but only people interested in writing would want to win my critiques, seats in a writing webinar, or writing swag.” Another option to consider is access. “People, especially readers, like to be part of an inner circle, and all authors can incorporate this into giveaways or freebies. I’ve given away lunch dates, Skype sessions, etc., but you could be accessible in lots of ways—offer membership in a Facebook reader’s group, send ecards and recipes on their birthday—whatever fits the author.”

Know how to design a sales-focused event, if that’s your goal.

This is where your intended ask comes into play—your call to action. Kole says you should know what it is long before the event takes place; it determines how you set up the event and how you close it. As discussed, it’s acceptable to plan an event more focused on building a readership than making sales. But what if you want to be sales focused?

Kole says that an event focused on “come hear a reading” doesn’t prime anyone to buy; the expectation is entertainment. “The writer doesn’t ask for a sale and doesn’t get one. If the writer does ask, their audience may not be expecting it and may be turned off,” Kole says. “The writer’s icky feelings about sales come to the surface. It is a mismatch between expectation and call to action.”

Alternatively, a call to action like “come support my book launch” is a bit better because the attendee knows there’s an expectation: support. Kole says, “To me, this is the writer’s ‘nice and polite’ way of asking for a sale without asking for it because, again, they feel icky about it.”

But the ideal way to frame an event that leads to sales? Kole suggests “Be the first to get your hands on my new release.” This might attract fewer attendees but result in more sales because the language is very clear. “The expectation is that you come and buy,” Kole says. “This is a straightforward call to action with very little dancing around the issue. With the audience primed to expect a sale, the writer will have less trouble working up the courage to deliver the call to action at the event.”

To further increase sales and visibility from her online events, Raquel creates book-related prompts that attendees have to complete for a chance at winning a prize. For example, attendees might have to follow an author’s Amazon page, sign up for the author’s email newsletter, and/or recommend the book on Goodreads to three friends.

Ackerman says she rarely pressures people to buy during online events, although it can be prudent for pre-orders and Amazon ranking. When she did a more sales-oriented pre-order push, it was separate from online events. “I did three things to encourage people to get the pre-order. First, we made a big deal about a ‘surprise book’ we were writing but wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. We even had a fake cover. So, we built excitement and encouraged guessing. Second, we announced the pre-order the day we announced the book and shared the cover. So, people who were excited by the book’s topic could ride that excitement all the way to Amazon and pre-order. Third, we offered a freebie to anyone who did pre-order. We set up a Gmail account just for this and asked people to submit proof of purchase to it. When they did, the autoresponder sent them a link to a website page with the freebie. This worked well and made it easy for us to distribute the free item.”

Kole says any ask for a sale can be galvanized if you offer a promo code or discount with an expiration date. However, that can obviously lower your earnings—which takes us back to where we started this piece. “What is it that you want with this event? To get readers? To transmit books into hands? Or to make royalties?” Kole says. “It doesn’t just have to be about the dollar amount of the sale … it can be about gaining a fan.”

Thompson encourages free or low-price ebook promotions right now because they allow authors to share their work without worrying about profiting on misfortune or appearing opportunistic; plus the work reaches a wider audience it may not have enjoyed without such promotions.

Whatever tactics you adopt—whether sales oriented or relationship oriented—Kole says, “Writers need to market now more than ever. There are people out there marketing their work, and they are getting ahead, while writers who succumb to overwhelm or analysis paralysis miss opportunities.”

Also, we’d like to highlight the advice that publicist Fauzia Burke offers at her website to all authors who are worried: “I don’t believe books have an expiration date. You don’t need to give up on your book if it does not sell in the first weeks. Plan your marketing for the long run. Create a year-long strategy with several phases that can be rolled out over time to make sure you stay connected with your audience and keep your book front of mind.”

Now is a good time to invest in your organic reach to readers; if you haven’t been investing in your author website, email newsletter, or social outreach, use available time to build a strong foundation for the future. And for those authors who intend to focus on online events: while it’s a good (and necessary) idea, such events don’t automatically lead to online book sales.

Additional resourcesPenguin Random House has good starting advice on how to use live social video to reach your readers.The Alliance of Independent Authors published an extensive post on how to host a successful online author event.BookBub offers a quick and helpful overview of the live broadcast options for free online events, mainly via social media sites. Read Diana Urban.The American Booksellers Association has collected a list of articles on how to host an effective event on Zoom, GoToWebinar, Crowdcast, Skype, social media livestreams, and more. Take a look.Publishers Weekly summarizes initiatives from the children’s publishing community, which include not only the usual live video entertainment at lunchtime, virtual book festivals, and podcasts, but also an innovative choose-your-own-adventure game played via Instagram or Twitter.Thinking about hosting a virtual conference? Don’t miss this incredible, practical guide to using the Zoom webinar platform to increase engagement and quality of experience. Read Stefanie Murray and Joe Amditis at Nieman Lab.How YA authors are moving online: Authors discuss the advantages and drawbacks of marketing their books through online events. Read Alex Green at Publishers Weekly.Last, but not least: host the best virtual author event on the planet. A former bookseller and event manager offers an author roadmap for planning your next event. Read Cristin Stickles in the Agent and Books newsletter.

If you enjoyed this post, consider a subscription to The Hot Sheet. You’ll receive 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

Amazon’s Importance to US Book Sales Keeps Increasing—for Better or Worse

Today’s post draws from material previously published in The Hot Sheet, a paid subscription email newsletter that I write and publish every two weeks. This week, we celebrate five years of continuous publication. Get 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

Since Hot Sheet started publishing in 2015, Amazon has changed, grown, and dominated more than any other company in the US book publishing industry. While that’s not likely a surprise to anyone, here are the key developments that authors need to know about.

Amazon has pulled back on most of its writer-focused programs

Here’s a list of all the writer-focused programs Amazon has launched in the last decade; only one is still active.

Kindle Singles. This program debuted in 2011 and expanded with Singles Classics in 2016. Amazon describes the initiative as “a way to make iconic articles, stories, and essays from well-known authors writing for top magazines and periodicals available in digital form, many for the first time.” It seems mostly designed to give Kindle Unlimited subscribers a library of special content. (More on that in a minute.)Kindle Serials. This program was very active in 2012 and 2013, but Amazon stopped publishing serials in collaboration with authors in 2014 and no longer features them on the site.Kindle Worlds. This program launched in 2013 and provided a way for authors and fan-fiction writers to collaborate in a way that profited everyone. It was discontinued, to authors’ great disappointment, in 2018.Kindle Scout. Launched in 2014, this was kind of like American Idol for unpublished books. Any writer could upload the beginning of a story, along with a cover, and try to gather as many reader votes as possible to catch the attention of Amazon staff and secure a boilerplate book contract with Amazon via Kindle Press. It also closed in 2018.Kindle Press. This program published titles primarily coming from Kindle Scout. It was discontinued in 2019.Write On by Kindle. Launched in 2014, this was kind of like Amazon’s version of Wattpad, an online writing community. It closed in 2017.Amazon Storywriter and Storybuilder. In 2015, Amazon launched special, free software to help people more easily write their scripts, presumably for the discovery benefit of Amazon Studios. It shut down in 2019.Day One .  Amazon’s literary journal was produced every week starting in October 2013 until it closed in 2017.But Amazon has doubled down on its own traditional publishing program, Amazon Publishing (APub)

Amazon now has more than a dozen active traditional publishing imprints and is the largest publisher of works in translation. Amazon can easily identify the money-making authors and niches that publishers miss through their own data-based decision-making and consumer marketing. In 2019, Amazon Publishing released more than 1,000 titles, which puts them in the top 10 of US-based publishers in terms of publishing volume. Amazon Publishing titles are not carried by traditional bookstores, and the digital editions cannot be purchased by libraries.

Amazon Publishing ebooks often sell for around $5 or $6, or can be read for free through Kindle Unlimited. Meanwhile, traditional publishers often charge more than $10 for a new release. That has important implications for the rest of the market.

Amazon could be making it difficult for other publishers to break out new novelists

Peter Hildick-Smith of the research firm Codex Group has argued that cheap ebooks from Amazon (including titles from self-published authors) can make it more difficult for publishers to establish or maintain loyalty for brand-name authors. Amazon’s media revenue keeps growing, despite them giving away an incredible amount of free content. He told us, “If [official industry reports say] fiction is down, we don’t believe those sales have gone away. They’ve just become hidden behind the Amazon curtain…where 90 percent of Amazon’s own proprietary publishing titles are also in fiction.”

Hildick-Smith said that one might best describe Amazon Publishing not as a traditional publisher but as a content creator feeding a subscription machine. Subscriptions like Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited now earn close to $6 billion for Amazon and continue to grow—so it might be wise to think of Amazon Publishing as a Netflix or Spotify. Amazon Prime members look to Kindle First, Prime Reading, and the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library for free ebooks to maximize their subscription value; Kindle Unlimited subscribers who pay a monthly fee for access may rarely venture outside Amazon’s selection.

Kindle Unlimited: the ebook subscription service that requires exclusivity has become essential for some genre fiction authors

In July 2014, Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited, an “all-you-can-read” subscription service for ebooks that costs $9.99/month. Notably, the Big Five publishers keep their titles out of the service, with few exceptions. Thus, the KU catalog is made up of self-published titles and Amazon Publishing titles, as well as titles from traditional publishers outside the Big Five. The service primarily attracts genre fiction readers and romance readers in particular. For self-published authors who aren’t yet established, KU is often seen as a necessity.

The big drawback to KU for self-published authors: it requires exclusivity to Amazon for the ebook edition (but not print), and it pays based on pages read. The pool of money for making these payments to authors—the KDP Global Fund—is retroactively determined each month. (While payment terms for traditional publishers remains unknown, the working assumption has been they are not paid on a per-page system.)

The page-read system is frequently manipulated by bad actors. Amazon continually tweaks what constitutes a page read and makes other modifications to the system to curb manipulation, but it still exists. Amazon has to remain vigilant to prevent underhanded tactics that hurt all authors, since there’s a fixed amount of money to go around each month to pay for pages read. For an historical overview of the Global Fund payout (and the value of a page read), see Written Word Media’s charts. The first month’s fund in 2015 was $2.5 million; it reached $32.6 million in August 2020. The average payout per page now hovers at less than half a cent.

Well-established indie authors don’t necessarily have to go exclusive with Amazon—at least not for all their titles—and usually prefer to distribute widely. However, less-well-known authors may feel compelled to put all their eggs in the Amazon basket. KU page reads contribute to a title’s Amazon ranking, and thus can make a title more visible. When we asked indie author Sean Platt of Sterling & Stone about the matter in 2017, he said, “KU is where all the power is. [It] is pixie dust. Sprinkle some of that on a subpar title, and it can shoot up the ranks by simply existing.”

In 2017, Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch estimated that self-published titles represent about 73% of all KU reads. Furthermore, KU reads and other proprietary Amazon programs possibly represent more ebook units read than all of the competitive stores have sold put together.

Amazon creates its own bestseller lists and also dominates its own Kindle bestseller list

Ever since Amazon’s rise as the dominant book retailer, many of us have loudly regretted that the company doesn’t make public the data on its sales of digital products. While that hasn’t changed, Amazon did start producing Amazon Charts—updated each Wednesday—showing which titles have been Most Read and Most Sold in fiction and nonfiction categories.

It’s important to note how these lists are put together: Most Sold includes print sales and pre-orders through Amazon and its physical retail outlets; Most Read reflects digital consumption that’s actively happening (ebook + audio). Something could be Most Sold, for example, but if it’s not being read or listened to, it might not appear on Most Read. Both numbers include books borrowed or accessed through subscription programs like Audible and Kindle Unlimited.

The Amazon Most Read list does something the rest of the industry can’t do: reveals the top 20 titles the Kindle/Audible-universe people are actually consuming. Genres and categories such as children’s and adult fiction are combined, which makes for some amusing juxtapositions. Some industry insiders think that “borrowed” copies from Prime and Kindle Unlimited shouldn’t count in Most Sold, but the inclusion of borrowed books authentically reflects Amazon’s strong interest in its subscription services and offers a worthwhile comparison to the established bestseller lists (as does Most Read).

A data point that is unlikely to surprise anyone: Kindle bestsellers are often from Amazon’s own publishing imprints. This is partly because Amazon Publishing puts its own books into the Kindle First promotions, ebooks which are available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers before their release date.

Hildick-Smith told us the hallmark of successful fiction publishing is sustaining loyalty to a brand and that the number-one factor in a decision to buy a new book is whether the author is someone the reader knows and likes. However, that loyalty is being eroded by low-price tradeoffs. The big question about the subscription programs: Even if they bring in a lot of money for Amazon and are growing year on year, will they generate the same revenue for authors?

If you enjoyed this post, consider a subscription to The Hot Sheet. You’ll receive 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

Everyone Wants Barnes & Noble to Survive. Can It?

Photo by Ed!

Today’s post draws from material previously published in The Hot Sheet, a paid subscription email newsletter that I write and publish every two weeks. This week, we celebrate five years of continuous publication. Get 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

It hasn’t been the best decade for Barnes & Noble, the biggest bookselling chain in the United States. As sales slowly eroded—and Amazon gained dominance—the position of CEO became one of the fastest revolving doors in the publishing industry. Each new leader trotted out a revised “concept store” to revive the fortunes of the bookseller, none succeeding. Here’s a brief history starting from 2015, when things started to get really bad.

If you don’t want the grisly history, skip right down to the “who’s to blame” section!

September 2015: A new store prototype is announced. New CEO Ron Boire takes the helm, the stock plunges due to a bad earnings report, and media outlets wonder if Barnes & Noble can be “saved.” The bright spot: B&N sales of toys and games are up 17.5% and company leadership considers a new store prototype. The Wall Street Journal speculates, “A new prototype could be smaller and feature a broad assortment of merchandise.”December 2015: Barnes & Noble will become a lifestyle brand. Boire hopes to turn B&N into a lifestyle brand, saying “Barnes & Noble has become a destination for personal development, learning, and entertainment.” Overall performance continues to look stagnant, at best. B&N stock is down 45% since August. The BN.com website suffers reduced traffic and sales to the tune of 22% due to its problematic relaunch over the summer. Nook sales are 32% lower against the prior year.March 2016: Nook pulls back to the US market. Nook pulls out of the UK market and operates only in the United States after previously operating in forty countries. Nook’s digital content sales are down by 56% since 2012. Boire continues to talk of opening new concept stores, but no specific plans are made public.June 2016: New concept stores to feature full-service restaurants. More information is released about B&N’s concept stores, with the first set to open in October 2016. The most widely touted feature is the inclusion of full-service restaurants, complete with wine and beer offerings. For fiscal 2016, B&N overall sales are down 3.1% from the prior year.August 2016: CEO steps down. CEO Ron Boire steps down from his position, the third CEO to leave in three years.November 2016: New CEO hired. Demos Parneros is hired as CEO. He previously worked at Staples.Summer 2017: Revenue declines, but profit is maintained. B&N reports a more than 6% decline in comparable store sales against the previous year. B&N says that profit expectations will remain the same despite a decline in revenue because of a “company-wide simplification process” to cut costs.Winter 2017: Time for a pivot. The store claims to be “pivoting” back to books, emphasizing discoverability and bookselling interactions with customers. In line with its cost cutting, Barnes & Noble says it will shrink stores—carrying less inventory but improving discovery. CEO Demos Parneros said, “Our goal is to get smaller. We want to actually have a better store, even though it’s a smaller store.”February 2018: Layoffs ensue. The store announces a “new labor model” that eliminates certain store positions to save $40 million annually. Layoffs appear to target long-standing and full-time staff who would likely be essential to increasing store sales. Various sources estimate a loss of between 1,600 and 1,800 jobs and/or at least three positions per store.March 2018: Concept store 2.0 announced. True to Parneros’ word, Barnes & Noble opens five new stores that are about half the size of the traditional superstores. The original restaurant concept stores are dubbed “a great learning experience” (that is, a failure) and the new stores head in the direction of Amazon’s small-format bookstore strategy.June 2018: Sales keep declining, even for non-book merchandise. Sales fall 6%. Parneros says that “turnaround plans take time.” B&N sees not just a decline in print book sales, but in sales of non-book merchandise (not to mention online sales). Daniel Kline at Motley Fool writes, “It’s possible that the chain can survive by catering to its core customer base—people who still like to browse in bookstores—while finding small ways to expand that audience and increase its spending. That’s not a turnaround; it’s more like clinging to existence.”July 2018: CEO is fired, who then sues. Parneros is fired without severance, leading to his lawsuit (still being litigated) against Barnes & Noble.October 2018: Barnes & Noble is put up for sale. Big Five publishers actually welcome this development, hoping it will bring some needed stability. However, the announcement is made right at the critical holiday selling season, and the pending lawsuit is, at best, a distraction.June 2019: A hedge fund buys Barnes & Noble, takes it private, and puts James Daunt at the helm. The new owner, Elliott Management, also holds Waterstones, a UK bookstore chain. Elliott announces that the new CEO of Barnes & Noble will be James Daunt, who also heads up Waterstones.Also: a quick history of the Nook

The Nook debuted in October 2009, two years after Amazon Kindle. At its peak, Nook enjoyed sales of nearly $1 billion a year. By summer 2019, in the last public earnings report from Barnes & Noble, Nook delivered less than $100 million in revenue per year, with negative profits.

In acknowledgment of Nook’s failure to compete against Amazon’s Kindle or even Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble’s chairman at the time, Len Riggio, told investors in 2017, “There is no business model in technology” for the chain. That immediately led to speculation that the Nook business would eventually be sold off. However, current CEO James Daunt has expressed commitment to the Nook and said that it should have a more prominent place in the stores.

Are Barnes & Noble’s struggles preventable or inevitable—and who’s to blame? 

This is where you’ll find the most interesting debate. There’s a reliable contingent that argues Amazon is to blame or points a finger at bad government policy (see the Department of Justice case against Apple and the Big Five). Others see the resurgence in independent bookstores and believe B&N has failed to innovate or at least capitalize on its strengths.

In a 2018 presentation at BookExpo on the future of retail, Kristen McLean of NPD said that the retailers then losing were those swimming in debt, those who couldn’t innovate or didn’t have the leadership to innovate, and those who didn’t have the right footprint (because they were locked into particular real estate contracts, for example). She said physical retail is not dead, but retailers have to give consumers a reason to visit stores—there has to be an “experience”—and that highly local businesses will compete.

In a 2018 podcast from Knowledge@Wharton, a few marketing professors discussed what the future might hold for the beleaguered retailer. Wharton’s Peter Fader said, “They’ve tried lots of different things from devices to experiences to broadening the merchandise. Nothing’s working. At this point, they haven’t found that hook to save the business; nor have they found the vision or leadership to give people any confidence in it.” Wharton’s Barbara Kahn said that while the retailer probably does a good job overall, “The problem is they’re not the best at anything.”

The Wharton podcast is enlightening for the points it makes when compared to McLean’s talk at BookExpo. McLean more or less offered a hit list for retail success during her talk: personalized attention, curated selection, and convenience (friction-free purchasing). The professors found fault with B&N in all of these areas. There is little or no excitement in the attention or experience provided in-store (laying off long-time staff couldn’t have helped), there isn’t a local focus to the store selection, and B&N hasn’t put much energy (if any) into an omni-channel experience (seamless purchasing and discovery from digital to in-store and back again). Fader summed it up frankly when he said, “It’s boring retail.”

Can CEO James Daunt “save” Barnes & Noble? How?

James Daunt is perhaps best known for spending the last eight years getting the venerable but once shaky Waterstones (with 283 stores) on its feet. Back in 2018, when Elliott acquired Waterstones, there were worries that Elliott might hamper Daunt’s efforts to cut costs and build the UK chain. But it doesn’t appear that was the case; in fact, Daunt has been able to open new stores, show some modest profit, and earn the respect and gratitude of many in the UK industry who want to see the chain survive.

Charlie Redmayne, CEO of HarperCollins UK, told The Bookseller, “James Daunt has done an excellent job stabilizing and now growing Waterstones back into a profitable and secure business. In my opinion Barnes & Noble will benefit hugely by having him at the helm.” Much public response has been similarly upbeat.

However, Daunt used some tough tactics, the kind publishers complain about with Amazon, to salvage Waterstones. Philip Jones, an editor at The Bookseller, warned the US industry, “Publishers should take time to understand Daunt’s singular vision. Gone will be the grand plans and corporate double-speak of the current regime, replaced instead by someone whose message will be simple, to the point, sometimes bruising, but effective.”

Early on, when Daunt was asked what he thought of Barnes & Noble on his last store visit, he said, “There were too many books,” by which he meant that featuring the right inventory is more important that stocking a big blur of titles. Back in 2015, he commented to Slate, “My faculties just shut down when I go in there.”

On Sept. 11 of this year, the Book Industry Study Group hosted a conversation and Q&A with Daunt, in which he stressed a local-first selling strategy. Daunt says that if you give booksellers the autonomy to choose and display and curate their stores (rather than making decisions on a corporate level), those booksellers will make sure the books that customers want to buy are in front of them. “Ultimately we will sell more, customers will come into the store more, and publishers will sell more. That is the happy outcome that should reconcile publishers to this [new model].”

However, because of the focus on local booksellers making their own stock decisions, there won’t be any co-op going forward. Co-op is the practice of publishers paying for title placement throughout the chain. It’s a reliable way for publishers to guarantee sales, but it’s also associated with high returns. Daunt said, “Co-op and promo and all of that doesn’t actually work with my way of running things, when one talks about giving stores the autonomy to do what they want. That’s not a form of words. That’s actually meant. Therefore you can’t take co-op.” Daunt said that no store would be required to stock even blockbuster titles like Rage by Bob Woodward (although it would be expected every bookseller would logically want some number of copies).

Furthermore, because of this local-first strategy, a number of longtime buyers for the chain (headquartered in New York City) have been let go. Some of these buyers, such as fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley—once profiled in The Wall Street Journal under the headline “So Many Books, So Much Power”—had been with the company for decades.

Daunt has been in bookselling for 30 years, but he is not precious about it, which is something of a rarity for the occupation. He said, “Bookstores do have to justify themselves, and I don’t think we have any God-given right to exist. If we are not inspiring within our communities and able to attract customers to us, frankly we will not exist. How is it that bookstores do justify themselves in the age of Amazon? They do so by being places in which you discover books with an enjoyment, with a pleasure, with a serendipity, that is simply impossible to replicate online.” He believes accomplishing that is all about empowering the local bookseller teams. “If the physical bookstores are good enough, they can live alongside Amazon.”

What would the publishing industry look like without Barnes & Noble?

In 2017, Nathan Bransford interviewed Mike Shatzkin to specifically ask what effect the loss of B&N could have on the commercial book publishing industry, which was built on the ability of big houses to put books on shelves. “That’s what [publishers] can do that authors can’t do for themselves and, up until now, Amazon couldn’t do for them either,” said Shatzkin.

Starting with the premise that B&N supplies about two-thirds of shelf space for books in the United States, Shatzkin’s points include:

Smaller trade presses would be hurt worse by a B&N collapse, since they have fewer mass-merchant outlets (such as big-box stores, which trade mostly in bestsellers) for their books.Big publishers would find it less efficient but doable to launch trade books only through the disparate network of indie bookshops; smaller presses would have a harder time.Should Amazon’s physical bookstores continue, then all publishing roads would, finally, lead to Seattle. Amazon could say to publishers, “You pay the cost to print your books, and we’ll put them on our shelves”—at the publishers’ risk.

Ultimately, more authors might move to Amazon Publishing for its status as the reigning producer and retailer of books. Stranglehold is Shatzkin’s word for the grip Amazon would have on the business.

If you enjoyed this post, consider a subscription to The Hot Sheet. You’ll receive 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

Traditional Publishing Enjoys Its Best Sales in a Decade—Despite Supply Chain Problems

Today’s post draws from material previously published in The Hot Sheet, a paid subscription email newsletter that I write and publish every two weeks. This week, we celebrate five years of continuous publication. Get 30% off an annual subscription through September 28 using code 5YR at checkout. Your first two issues are free.

Recently you may have heard about book publishing’s printing problems from outlets such as the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. In the US and UK, spring and summer titles were delayed until fall, making for a crowded season. Not only is it challenging to get media attention for new releases right now, but it’s also leading to a “printer jam”—a tight printing market.

Meanwhile, a surge in print book sales during the pandemic, with a volume increase of about 12 percent over the summer, has made things worse. In fact, for the year print book sales are up by nearly 6 percent versus 2019; traditional publishing is expected to have its strongest performing year since 2010. But it has come at a cost: reprints that normally take two weeks now sometimes take more than a month. Some publishers have now pushed back release dates to 2021 as a result of low printing capacity.

So what’s caused this tight print market?

Printing delays are problematic—but the problem has little to do with the health of book publishing.

Book publishing is just a fraction of the overall printing and paper business in the US, and it will continue to be at the mercy of bigger marketplace changes. The printing market has been tight since at least 2018 for various reasons, all complicated by issues such as tariffs on paper. Even pre-pandemic, there wasn’t any slack in the system.

We talked to industry veteran Bo Sacks about the current environment and how we reached this point. Sacks has observed the evolution, growth, and decline of printers for the last 50 years. “They’re in serious debt, which is part of the problem,” he said. That’s because of the long, ongoing battle between the two largest printers in the United States—LSC Communications and Quad—to buy up market share. Sacks says sometimes the printers would buy a company just to get the clients, then shut down plants. Quad, in fact, only entered the book-printing business in 2010, and through just that type of scenario. But these decisions were made in another era, Sacks said: “2010 seems a lot longer than 10 years ago. The difference from that moment until now is unbelievable.”

Sacks said that Quad built the company on the expectation that long-run magazines would go on forever. (Long-run magazines are titles that get printed in extremely high quantities.) But that’s not a business model that works today. “The long-run [magazine] titles are diminishing and dying left and right,” Sacks said. “So what they’ve done in the last decade is buy plants that focus on short-run printing.” He says that getting quality workers—productivity—has also been part of the problem. And indeed, at the Book Industry Study Group annual meeting this year, an industry expert on book manufacturing said that a tight labor market is one of the industry’s biggest problems, and perhaps only automation can solve it.

Because they were increasingly in financial trouble, the two biggest US printers, LSC and Quad, announced a potential merger in 2018. But the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit to block the deal. Soon, Quad and LSC terminated their merger plan rather than fight the suit, and Quad announced in 2019 it was exiting the book business entirely. That may sound dramatic—and it is, for book publishers—but Quad won’t miss the revenue. Quad’s annual net sales are around $4 billion, of which $200 million is book printing. Quad has already sold part of its book printing division to CJK Group.

Meanwhile, LSC has filed for bankruptcy; its assets are being sold to a private equity group that has other manufacturing businesses, including paper. A recent earnings report blamed LSC’s decline on digital disruption in magazine and catalog printing as well as fewer educational book sales. Last year they closed two printing plants—one of them a Gideon Bible printer, the other a printer of retail inserts and Sunday magazines.

Ingram is helping publishers (of all sizes) meet increased demand for books as the supply chain gets tighter and uncertain.

Due to the pandemic and current events (see: political books related to the US election), some books are more in demand than ever, exacerbating the supply problem and creating order backups.

Industry vet Mike Shatzkin wrote about how publishers’ ability to keep fulfilling orders during the pandemic has relied heavily on Ingram’s Guaranteed Availability Program, which uses print-on-demand to ship books to accounts within 24 hours. This program makes it possible to deliver “just about any quantity of books to just about any account in the world. With just about any return address you want on the package,” Shatzkin writes.

Indeed, Ingram is critical in the US market as the biggest wholesaler and distributor of print books; its operations include Lightning Source, a print-on-demand printer used by small and Big Five publishers alike, as well as IngramSpark, its self-publishing arm. Turnaround times for print-on-demand through Ingram have become significant: 22 business days, not counting shipping. Before the pandemic, typical turnaround time was a few days.

As Shatzkin notes, five of the top 10 New York Times nonfiction bestsellers in June 2020—related to social justice and antiracism—were supplied by Ingram’s Lightning Source division and benefited from the GAP program. If publishers had waited even two or three weeks for supply, those sales would’ve been completely lost.

However, one group is not so happy with Ingram: authors using IngramSpark. Print turnaround times for self-publishing authors using the service have been 22 to 24 business days (plus shipping time) since May. Author Andrew Shaffer said, “I’ve been working on a new self-published book, and a five–six week turnaround to get a single proof copy is unworkable. Then when I make a change to the cover or whatever, I have to wait five–six more weeks to see how it prints.”

Ingram announced earlier this year they’re investing in their print-on-demand operations across the globe and will hire hundreds of new employees to run new equipment now being installed. In an August 12 presentation, Ingram representatives spoke directly to publishers’ concerns about managing inventory and making books available as buying patterns keep shifting. Matt Mullin, senior key accounts sales manager at Ingram Content Group, advocated that publishers move as many backlist titles as possible to print-on-demand and consider using Ingram programs like GAP, which keep titles available via print-on-demand if conventional supply runs out.

While Mullin said it’s made sense in the past for publishers to watch and manage their own print runs to replenish inventory as needed, this only works when demand is knowable, and not so much when demand is “crazy,” as he described it. “Anyone managing a P&L right now knows you can’t have your cash caught up in inventory that can’t sell. That’s what sets 2020 apart from 2018, when we saw similar constraints in supply.”

Publishers haven’t been great at predicting which books or categories will spike in demand. In February and March, book publishers realized the scope of the pandemic and made the decision to stock up on pandemic and dystopian literature, Mullin said. But people don’t, in fact, want to read about the end of the world while stuck at home. In fact, one UK study found such literature rated at the bottom of what consumers’ stated preferences are. Of course, we now know what did sell and continues to sell: home-education materials. While some trends might be predictable, like gardening in summer, “What’s amazing is how widespread the [sales] uncertainty is. It really goes across every category,” Mullin said.

In a Publishing Trends article looking at the recent increase of digital and POD printing, Lorraine Shanley writes, “The old model of looking at the unit cost of a manufactured book has morphed into looking at the cost per unit sold. And, as printers close and consolidate, … flexibility becomes more important, forcing publishers to look at ‘total cost of ownership.’ How do the advantages of having inventory on hand in your own warehouse weigh against the carrying costs—or the possibility that the warehouse closes or the inventory can’t get to the end user?” That is the calculation that publishers must make during the pandemic, and it’s the kind of uncertainty that will carry through 2020, and into much of 2021.

The biggest book publisher in the US has been shoring up its infrastructure.

The New York Times recently profiled Madeline McIntosh, the CEO of Penguin Random House in the United States. Reporter Alexandra Alter writes: “The company has grown even more dominant in recent months in part because Ms. McIntosh, who took over two and a half years ago, and other leaders foresaw a future in which online book sales would vastly outstrip physical retail, but print books would continue to be a popular and lucrative format.

“For years, the company had been investing in infrastructure, spending $100 million on expanding and upgrading its warehouses. With four distribution centers and warehouses on both coasts and in the Midwest, it is the only publisher that ships books seven days a week. That supply-chain advantage enables Penguin Random House to quickly react to upticks in demand for particular titles, which has not only increased sales but cut down on returns of unsold books by 30 percent.”

Behemoths like Penguin Random House—which may eventually acquire Simon & Schuster—are well positioned to maximize their scale for greater efficiencies and better profits. Ingram is another such behemoth, a longstanding industry firm that has gobbled up other book wholesalers and distributors over the years. It is positioned for even greater growth due to its wise investment, years ago, in print-on-demand. The pandemic may be stressing the supply chain, but book publishing is also a recession-proof industry, and the big companies that were strong going into 2020 will likely pull through even stronger by the end. The weaker ones? They may become acquisition targets.

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A Successful Daily Practice Requires Honesty

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Today’s guest post is an excerpt from The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals by creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel (@ericmaisel), run with permission from New World Library.

Your daily practice demands honesty. If you play a passage on your musical instrument and it isn’t strong yet, you are honest enough to say, “This isn’t strong yet.” You don’t then berate yourself, pester yourself, rail at the gods, or create any other sort of inner or outer drama. You just calmly say, “Not strong yet.” Then you practice more.

If you skip too many days without attending to your new start-up business, you are honest and say, “I skipped too many days.” You don’t then also lament, “I’ve wasted so many days!” or “Now I have no chance!” or “I missed that golden opportunity!” You nod to the truth—that you skipped days you shouldn’t have—and proceed with some simple affirmation, like “Right here, right now” or “Back to work.” And you get to work.

Being 80 percent honest or 90 percent honest is lovely and a pretty high bar for human beings. But you and I are actually aiming for 100 percent honesty. We are aiming this implausibly high because that tricky, untruthful 10 percent or 20 percent can scuttle our ship. One blind spot, one area of denial, one little white lie the size of an elephant, and our practice may not survive.

Imagine a general honestly admitting that her troops need more training and then increasing their training. Good for her. Imagine her honestly admitting that their rifles jam too often and getting them better weapons. Good for her. But imagine her refusing to acknowledge the enemy’s air superiority. For all the honesty that she managed to muster, she will likely lose the war.

That last 10 percent is often the hardest to admit because it is the hard truth. That general can admit that her troops need more training, because she can do something about that. She can admit that their rifles jam too often, because she can do something about that too. But what if there is nothing she can do about the enemy’s air superiority? Many a mortal will be inclined to refuse to look that hard truth in the eye.

Take a memoir writer with a daily writing practice. Maybe she has faced the truth that her siblings will be upset with her for writing about them and made peace with the fact that they will be angry. Maybe she has faced the truth that she will be revealing embarrassing family secrets and made peace with that. Maybe she has faced the truth that she herself doesn’t come off that well and has made peace with that. But what if she hasn’t quite admitted that she is physically afraid of her ex-husband and dreads him reading it? Not facing that last hard truth is likely to cause her not to write.

She should rightly congratulate herself for dealing with all those truths she did acknowledge. That took a lot of courage. But she mustn’t let herself off the hook with respect to the last one. That one must be faced also, not out of a moral imperative, but because if she doesn’t admit it and deal with it one way or another, she’s unlikely to get her memoir written. And that will deeply disappoint her.

I think you can see that honesty of practice requires that we face many hard truths, not just one or two. Take a yoga practice. You may have to face the truth that on some days it bores you. You may have to face the truth that certain positions are actually injuring you. You may have to face the truth that, as you’d intended to start a yoga business, you don’t need more training but, rather, the courage to start a business. You may have to face many other truths as well. Each of them is its own knotty problem, its own taxing challenge.

Be honest about whether you are attending to your daily practice enough. Be honest about whether you are creating dramas so as to avoid your practice. Be honest about whether you are truly engaged with your practice or just going through the motions. Be honest about whether you tend to leave your practice too soon. Be altogether honest: anything less jeopardizes your daily practice.

Consider Larry, an established inventor and engineer. Larry set as his daily practice the study of a certain aspect of artificial intelligence. He loved the problem he set for himself and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting to his practice regularly. He spent a lot of time thinking about it, journaling about it, and chatting online about it with other AI specialists. Finally, it came to him.

“I’ve known this all along,” he explained to me, “but I’ve kept it hidden away so that I wouldn’t have to face it. The truth is, it scares me where AI will lead. Just go see the movie Ex Machina. I love AI as an intellectual puzzle, but I actually hate where it may take us. What am I supposed to do about something that I’m so completely invested in and that I also despise?”

With that cat out of the bag, Larry had no choice but to give up his intellectual passion for AI. A few months later he began a very different sort of daily practice: writing a book exposing the dangers of AI. In his heart of hearts, he wished that he had never admitted that truth to himself. But he also knew that the truth was going to win out eventually. If it hadn’t, it’s very likely that Larry would have found himself unable to complete anything.

[image error]Print / EbookFood for ThoughtDiscuss the role of honesty in daily practice, as you see it.Is there some area you already know you had better be more honest about?Discuss the difference between being “rather honest” and being “totally honest.”

Note from Jane: if you enjoyed this excerpt, check out Dr. Eric Maisel’s The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals.

Where Novelists Get Stuck: 3 Common Issues with Early Drafts

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a first 50-page review on works in progress for novelists seeking direction on their next step toward publishing.

Many believe that having written a novel is a sort of superhuman feat, but in reality, the bigger challenge is revising—and this is where so many writers get stuck.

I love to work with clients at this stage of the process, because this when an outside eye can mean everything. There’s nothing more satisfying than the moment when a client responds to editorial feedback by saying they’ve gone from feeling frustrated and overwhelmed to experiencing real excitement at the prospect of revision.

Over the decade plus that I’ve been doing this work, I’ve seen certain issues over and over again—issues that tend to dog the work of newer writers, and even that of seasoned pros. So I thought I’d share them with you all here, in the interests of helping as many writers as possible turn that corner.

1. Pacing and Tension

I have a longtime client who writes middle grade fantasy, and his series is largely set in a second world where his young protagonist has magical powers. In book five of the series, that protagonist is stuck back home on Earth and has to find a way to use his powers here, so he can travel back to that second world and reverse the death of his best friend (via time travel)—in time to prove to the authorities here that he didn’t actually just murder her.

The big issue I saw in the early draft: The protagonist’s efforts to manifest his powers on Earth were largely fruitless until near the end, which threw the pacing off—and when he told people about that second world he’d traveled to, no one seemed quite as skeptical as they should have been. The evidence tying the protagonist to his best friend’s disappearance also seemed pretty flimsy, so the threat of him being found guilty of her murder didn’t seem all that convincing.

Also: If the protagonist could just travel back in time once he returned to that second world, what was the rush to get there? And if the evidence tying him to his friend’s disappearance was so flimsy, why wouldn’t he just sit around and wait to be exonerated via due process?

My first suggestion for this author was to address that lack of urgency by giving his protagonist a window of time during which, if he gets back to the second world, he might be able to reverse his friend’s death—but if he doesn’t, she’s done for.

I also recommended that this author think through the case against the protagonist from the prosecution’s POV, and create a more realistic murder scenario—one that really looked convincing, and therefore put the protagonist in real danger of being convicted. This would then create a ticking clock for the protagonist here on Earth as well.

Finally, I recommended that the author have the protagonist’s efforts to manifest his powers on Earth prove more fruitful early on, and then establish a clear pattern of ups and downs—ups being the points where he appears to be making progress toward his goal, and downs being places where people either don’t believe his wild claims or actively stand in his way. The former would make the protagonist appear more active from the reader’s POV, while the latter would help to ramp up the tension.

The issues: Inconsistent pacing, lack of urgency and tension

The fixes: A ticking clock, and a pattern of “ups and downs”

2. Character Arc

A new client came to me with a novel somewhere between women’s fiction and romance. In it, a middle-aged woman, at loose ends with her job, sets off on a road trip—and in the course of that trip meets an injured hiker, himself at loose ends with his life. The two of them wind up having a wild Western states adventure, and (of course!) falling in love.

The big issue I saw in the early draft: The protagonist appeared to have a big realization at the end that was all about the power of self-love, but there was very little at the beginning to suggest that this was even an issue in her life. In fact, at the beginning of this novel, the protagonist seemed pretty happy—until some trouble came along to destabilize her work life.

There were also various points where it was suggested that the protagonist’s real problem was that she felt a sense of powerlessness, that she’d never really taken the reins and gone for what she wanted in life. So what was the real issue here? Her lack of self-love or her lack of gumption?

In real life, there are many internal issues we all struggle to overcome. But in a novel, an effective character arc is the product of bearing down on one internal issue clearly—one that the protagonist is struggling with at the beginning (often without realizing it) that the events of the plot will help her overcome. That’s the key to creating a real emotional effect for the reader, and it’s also critical to establishing a sense of depth.

To address these “dueling character arcs,” I suggested to the author that he make the protagonist’s lack of self-love the reason she never stood up for herself or went for her dreams—effectively keeping both angles, but making one central and the other secondary.

I also recommended that he make it clear that the protagonist’s pattern of not going for her dreams played into this problem at work, thereby showing us how she herself had played a role in creating the trouble in her life at the beginning—thereby setting the stage for an affecting transformation by the end.

The issue: An unclear character arc that kept the novel from generating real emotion, and a lack of setup on that arc

The fix: Focusing on one internal issue for the protagonist, establishing it clearly at the beginning, and sticking with it all the way to the end

3. Plot Structure

A client who’d been a student in several of my online classes came to me with a novel incorporating elements of time travel, portal fantasy, and alternate history. In it, a foundling in an alternate version of Georgian England seeks a way to save his adopted brother from execution, and along the way receives help from various magical entities connected to his mysterious past. The novel also featured multiple threads from other POVs pertaining to various secret societies and the historical struggles between them, incorporating many minor characters and their personal dramas.

The big issue I saw in the early draft: There wasn’t enough focus on the POV of the protagonist for the reader to really identify with him and his struggles—the author seemed more interested in exploring this fantasy world than he was in actually telling the protagonist’s story.

Another issue I saw was that while these various other POVs and threads were supposed to make it clear how the magical elements of this world operated (e.g., why some characters could transform into animals), they offered more questions than answers—and these two issues, in tandem, made the story itself hard to follow.

The first thing I suggested to this author was that he cut down on all of those asides and POV digressions and stick closer to the protagonist’s story, thereby imparting a sense of focus to the plot.

The second suggestion I made was to provide exposition in context from the protagonist’s POV—for instance, by having that protagonist already know how it was that certain humans could transform into animals, or by having another character appear to explain this phenomenon. Many newer authors seem to believe that leaving such things mysterious will draw the reader in, but if you go too long without any explanation at all, you’ll make the story itself difficult to follow, and risk losing your reader’s trust.

The issues: A plot that was hard to follow, absent exposition

The fixes: Simplifying, by focusing on telling one person’s story clearly, and including the essential exposition in context

Bringing a novel from concept to completion—and eventually, publication—can be a lonely, solitary process, and it’s easy to feel like no one else struggles with the sort of issues you do with your work.

But that’s seldom true. The truth is, there’s a good chance one of your favorite novels was afflicted by the same sorts of issues as an early draft.

So take heart: Consult your books on craft, take a class, or hire someone like me to help you—but don’t give up! The world is waiting for your story.

To Avoid Rejection, Take the Writer Out of the Story

Today’s guest post is by editor and author Joe Ponepinto (@JoePonepinto).

An admission: As I read my way through the submission queue for our literary journal, I often decide to decline a story well before its end.

It’s not that the stories are always bad. Many times the premise is interesting, and the characters as well. It may exhibit the opening tension and stakes that can pull a reader in. In fact, there may not be anything technically missing from the submission, and this proficiency is supported by the writers’ cover letters—many submitters have been published in other journals; some are contest winners or Pushcart nominees.

But for me, the stories they’ve submitted just don’t resonate.

So it’s a matter of taste, then?

Sometimes, but more often it’s something else. It’s a quality that can’t be measured or pinpointed, and I think that’s why it’s an aspect of good writing that is rarely taught in MFA programs, or writing classes, and almost never mentioned in blogs and articles on writing. Call it something ethereal. Call it alchemy. Or call it what it is, a story so advanced that it is no longer just a story, but something beyond a story—a virtual reality that transports a reader into a frame of mind vivid enough to replace actual reality. It’s a story so engrossing the reader forgets that he’s reading, a story in which the author’s voice seems not to exist. A silent story, as a writer friend once noted.

So many times stories give me the impression of a writer writing about something. It’s in the story’s tone and flow. It’s in the plot that’s been done a few thousand times before, or is based on something that’s in the news. It’s in characters filtered through the writer’s personal experience, which limits their diversity and individuality. In short, the writer is present in every sentence, hunched over the reader’s shoulder, which is why so much in these stories sounds like explanation, like the writer worrying that readers won’t “get it” unless they lay out paragraphs of background info. As Elmore Leonard famously said, it sounds like writing.

As I read these submissions, I can visualize the writer thinking about aspects of writing as he writes. Does this scene have tension? Is it making my theme clear?

But a successful story exists independently from its author. It seems so real that readers don’t have to be schooled in the facts of the story’s world, but can, through the actions and dialogue of its characters, adapt and understand how it works. Kind of like the way we do it in real life.

Here’s an example of what appears to be decent writing, but falls short of resonating with an experienced editor:

Like hundreds of times before, Barry Jacobs watched the signals on the subway wall as the train glided under his Brooklyn neighborhood. The car rocked in rhythm with the tracks below, but the gentle swaying did little to put him at ease, even after almost ten years of traveling the L line to his office in Manhattan. This time, Madeline, the new supervisor, would be waiting for him.

“We’ll be making some changes. I’ve been working on them for a while,” she’d said. “I want to restructure how projects are assigned.”

He realized her position of newfound authority forced her to do this. She had to show the upper management she had a vision for the department’s future in order to gain their respect. He knew it was going to cause trouble for him.

This opening establishes tension and stakes, plus a hint of intrigue in Madeline’s statement about changes, which are still unspecified. Barry seems to be a sympathetic character. We are beginning to learn how he feels about his job. In terms of writing conventions this a good approach.

But here’s how an editor can read it:

The first paragraph is good. The second is also fine, although an editor may notice that Madeline’s statements are factual and don’t indicate subtext, which is the key to understanding character motivation. They are really there to provide grounding for the opening situation. It’s not a major error on the writer’s part, but this passage could do more.

In the third paragraph, though, note how the writer drops into the character’s head to ostensibly reveal both Madeline’s and Barry’s motivation. On the surface it appears to deepen the reader’s understanding of character. The character may even be thinking these things. But in fact it’s an explanation planted by the writer to help ensure the reader “gets” who these people are. It also begins to break away from that opening tension.

As an editor, I can see what’s coming next. It’s usually at this point that a less experienced writer will dive into backstory, relating how Barry came to work at his company, or how Madeline rose to lead her department, or both. And that’s the road to decline.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his “Borges and I,” broaches the idea of the writer and the person as different people. A good writer is like that; when writing she becomes someone other than the person. She becomes the writer, an alter ego who doesn’t care whether the reader loves the story. The writer cares only about the story itself, and not the recognition it might bring. That’s what editors are looking for when they read submissions—the story, not the writer. Also consider this interview with Elena Ferrante, the Italian writer whose true identity remains unknown. She not only talks about the separation of the writer and the author, she lives it.

How do you get to that place in your writing? It’s not easy. You have to internalize the conventions of creative writing so that you know them without thinking about them. That might mean writing almost daily for about 10 to 15 years. It takes that long for your brain to synthesize the conventions and possibilities of writing into something relatable to others (and, by the way, to break the terrible writing habits most of us were taught in elementary school, high school, and college—the ones that forced us to explain ourselves in every sentence). That’s when you get to stop worrying about them.

Then, every once in a while, ask yourself why you write. Is it to become well-known or make money? Or is it because you have stories that must be told? Editors are far more interested in submissions from the latter type of writer.

Every story you write is a step toward better writing. Every publication you achieve is encouragement to keep going. This I know—I’ve had dozens of stories published in literary journals, and each one was an ego boost. But looking back on most of them now, I realize they were not that good. Many don’t illustrate the qualities I’m talking about here. But some do, and I take that as a sign of progress, the promise that my writing is going to keep getting better as long as I continue to work at it. Yours is too. But you have to know where you’re trying to get to before you can go there.