Archived- Promotional Q&A's: Q&A with Emily Mah Tippetts - CLOSED

[Rebecca]

Emily, what got you into writing NA? Is there a quality that is more mature in NA that you can't write in YA?

[Brianna]

Do you have an idea of when you will release the next book in your Fairytale series? Will it be similar to the second book, with a mystery?

[E.M.]

The genre found me, rather than vice versa. When Time and Eternity came out in 2008, there was no New Adult category to speak of, and the publisher even asked me to write for an older age group, which I ultimately didn't want to do. Part of my motivation for going indie was to regain the freedom to write what I wanted.

Even when Someone Else's Fairytale came out, in 2011, New Adult wasn't a well known category. I initially marketed it as chick lit, but other authors were blazing a path and staking out the NA genre. One day I looked up a definition and realized it applied to my work.

While a lot of NA fiction is mature and contains erotic elements, that's never been a feature of my writing. I'm much more interested in the emotional aspects of love and relationships. While some people assume I'm too uncomfortable with erotic themes to write them, that isn't true either. I read a lot of books with strong erotic elements, and almost always if I can't get through them, it's because of that lack of emotional connection I feel between the characters, not because I'm ever so shocked at all the skin.

So I'm a writer of what people refer to as "clean" NA, though I absolutely despise that term. It implies a moral judgment that I do *not* make about anyone else's writing.

I continue to write about people in their late teens and early twenties because that's the age group I've always written about. I think my muse is a perpetual teen.

[E.M.]

Brianna wrote: "Do you have an idea of when you will release the next book in your Fairytale series? Will it be similar to the second book, with a mystery?"

It should be out in the fall, and yes, it will have the police procedural plotline. The Esperanza Dominguez case isn't done yet, after all, but I also watch reader/fan feedback carefully and I see a lot of people asking for more romance, so Chloe and Jason's relationship will be a lot more central to the storyline. I'll also make sure to increase the number of scenes with the two of them this time around.

The working title for the book is The Hunt for the Big Bad Wolf, and I'm plotting it while I write the sequel to Castles on the Sand, which will be out in the next few months. Because of all the work I put into the plot and structure of Nobody's Damsel, I should be able to produce Chloe and Jason books more quickly, but I'll always make quality my first priority. We've all read *that* book in the series that was clearly written to deadline and an overall disappointment. I don't ever want to write one of those; better to push a deadline than to go half measures.

[Brianna]

Yes. Quality is definitely better than quantity. :).

[Megan]

As a former lawyer, what advice can you give to authors looking for an agent or publisher in terms of contracts and other issues?

[Lucinda]

Your main characters are so well built, so deep and real. What kind of process or research do you go through when fleshing them out? TIA.

[Lucinda]

Are you on Pinterest? I'd love to see pinboards for Fairytale and Castles. :)

[E.M.]

Megan wrote: "As a former lawyer, what advice can you give to authors looking for an agent or publisher in terms of contracts and other issues?"

Well, let's start with the lawyerly advice that isn't legal advice. It's easy to go into a deal with an agent or publisher feeling like they're high and mighty and you're little ol' nobody. Forging a relationship under these circumstances will result in an arrangement that sours real fast. You may feel special the day you land an agent who is hot stuff, but you won't feel special when they don't take your calls. (And yes, that scene in Nobody's Damsel in which Jason talks about how he chose his agent and Vicky Hansen chose hers? That's straight from real life experiences of people I've known.) Before you hire anyone to work for you - and remember, you are hiring them; their pay comes out of your earnings - make sure it's someone you feel like you have a good connection with.

When I did people's wills and trusts, I always gave a free consultation, and yes, people did sit down for a lengthy consultation and then disappear. Did I have a problem with that? No. I needed clients willing to talk to me about their deaths, potential severe disabilities, their children being orphaned, etc. It would've been arrogant in the extreme for me to expect everyone to be that comfortable with me. By the same token, any agent worth working with will have the time for a one on one phone call or meeting in which you ask them, honestly, what they think of your work, how they would market it, etc. It's a job interview, for *them*. They should also put you in touch with other clients so you can compare notes, and they should be comfortable with the idea of not being the right fit for you, because no agent is the right fit for everyone.

Now legal stuff. Not all agents use written contracts with their authors. A handshake is still a very common arrangement, but make sure that you're clear on the details. Donald Maass's book, The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success, has a fantastic list of questions to ask. I suggest you refer to it.

Once you have an agent, know what kind of agent you have. Are they a salesman? A contract negotiator? A career nurturer? (Those aren't mutually exclusive.) If they don't really get into the nitty gritty of contracts, you may want to hire a lawyer as well to look those over. Some agents are lawyers, and some are pure salespeople. A friend of mine with a very high powered agent also uses a lawyer, and she has a *fantastic* agent. He just doesn't do contracts.

If you're dealing with a publisher directly without an agent, I'd say 1) seriously consider getting an agent. If that's not what you want, then 2) seriously consider hiring a lawyer. Feel free to email me for help finding one - I know the website directories to use and what kind of practice area you'll need. That's a serious offer to everyone here. My email is: emilymtippetts@gmail.com.

Contractual issues that I've seen lately, that are awful, include:

1) Contracts for more rights than the publisher will use. The publisher should get first North American publication rights. They might also want the ebook rights. Under no circumstances does a *book* publisher get things like film rights, the copyright, nothing like that. That's just absurd. Also hang onto your foreign rights, those are valuable. Even as an indie author, I, like a lot of trad pubbed authors, make almost half my income from foreign sales, and that's from one place: Germany. I have one novel translated into German and it is earning four figures a month. Do not give away your foreign rights!

2) No reversion clause. A contract should always return all rights to you if your book goes out of print. For example, if there are no printings of your book for five years, you get your rights back. Use of this clause is fading away in the days of on demand publishing and ebooks, but make sure it's in there anyway. A publisher really could screw up badly enough that there's no ebook available and no one orders your book printed for five years, in the which case, you want your rights back.

3) No return reserve. Okay, here I have to explain how traditional book distribution works. Your publisher sells books to bookstores, not readers. Bookstores sell to readers. Hence an author's "sales" are those sales to bookstores, for them to stock the shelves with. Sales to readers are called "sell through", i.e. you want 60% sell through on your hardback print run. Books that do not sell through are returned to the publisher, and thus your publisher holds back a little bit of your royalties to cover the cost of these books that they must buy back. That's normal and fair and that amount of money the publisher holds back is your "return reserve". Under no circumstances should the author EVER be on the hook to pay for returns over and above the return reserve. The publisher, not you, decides how many books to print and where to send them, so they, not you, should pay for mistakes. Some small publishers actually bill their authors for returns. Unacceptable, plain and simple.

4) Licensing your name or your characters. This is where the publisher takes ownership if your name or characters, and before you scoff, let me tell you, this happens. Tony Hillerman lost his main character for a span of years because his agent licensed him to the publisher. Romance publishers often want to take your name - which means that if you stop writing for them, they hire someone else to do it *with your name* and you have to take on a pen name. It happens.

5) Guaranteeing the actions of a third party. This is a common issue in contracts of all kinds. What it means is that the publisher wants you to control something you can't control. For example, a clause that says you promise that another publisher will not publish a book by you in the same month as your big release. Well, you don't control other publishers, so you can't make that promise. So don't. A friend of mine had to switch publishers mid-NYT bestselling series over this issue.

Those are just off the top of my head. Like I said, feel free to email me when this becomes a real issue.

And feel free to ask follow up questions if that huge block of text didn't scare you away ;-)

[E.M.]

Cindy wrote: "Your main characters are so well built, so deep and real. What kind of process or research do you go through when fleshing them out? TIA."

Well you and I were just joking on Facebook about my characters dithering around at the beginning of my writing process. I once thought that I'd train and train and go to workshops and eventually get to the point that I'd write clean first drafts that didn't need to have 70% of the words torn out and rewritten. I'm doing the training and training part, but my rewrites are becoming more numerous, not less. I think what's going on is that I'm a method writer the way some actors are method actors. I have to watch my characters walking around, reading their mail, fighting with each other, etc. to get to know them, and then I can figure out what story to tell with them.

I know when I'm ready to do that draft-that-I-really-wish-could-be-my-first-draft-dangit when the characters overtake my daydreams. I used to shy away from writing the stories that I'd daydream on and on about because I feared they'd be too cheesy, but I'm learning that those are the stories that make a stronger emotional connection to the reader. And it gives me an excuse to daydream and call it work ;-)

I appreciate your kind words on how fleshed out my characters are. I think they're the most essential part of any book. People will follow well rounded characters anywhere and through anything, I find.

[E.M.]

Brianna wrote: "Yes. Quality is definitely better than quantity. :)."

Agreed. Why doesn't everyone see it this way?!

Given I'm in London, I'm out of sync with most people here. I'll resume answering questions tomorrow morning, my time, so if I take a long time to reply to you, it's probably because I'm asleep. These are great questions, though, keep them coming!

[E.M.]

Cindy wrote: "Are you on Pinterest? I'd love to see pinboards for Fairytale and Castles. :)"

I am not, in part because I want to avoid social network overload, and in part because I'm not a visual person at all - which I know people will find funny since I do my own covers for the Fairytale series and design jewelry. I guess what I should say is that I'm not *naturally* a visual person. Over the years I've worked very hard to cultivate my visual arts ability, such as it is, but in my heart, I'm the sort of writer who hears her characters and feels their emotions without needing to know what they look like. Just giving them faces and bodies is something I have to make myself do!

So even when designing a cover or a piece of jewelry, I start with the feelings I want to evoke, and then it's a very messy process to get from there to the final piece. I tear things apart and rework them and tear them apart over and over. While I have tried mood boards, I find they don't help me along much. I guess that's just how I'm wired.

[Sue]

It is so difficult for readers to find the gems in the sea of books these days. What sorts of things did you do that you thought were most effective in helping readers discover you and/or your books?

[E.M.]

Sue wrote: "It is so difficult for readers to find the gems in the sea of books these days. What sorts of things did you do that you thought were most effective in helping readers discover you and/or your books?"

I suppose there are two different sides to the answer to this question. For a reader looking for good books, I suggest following the top book blogs like Pixel of Ink and such, though you probably know that already.

As a writer looking for fans, I say get started and keep going. Try something that might work and keep at it if it does or vary your strategy if it doesn't. If that advice seems imprecise, it's because different techniques will work for different writers and different books. High brow literary fiction probably won't get off the ground with a $.99 price point, but that worked for me to launch my chick lit. A book blog tour probably won't sell your children's picture book. That'd probably be better served by a mommy blog tour.

In my case, I began by pricing my novels at $.99 when I first put them out last year, and I did that because my attitude was that no one had ever heard of me, so I wasn't asking for much. I also took to Twitter and spent about an hour every evening talking to various people, and I'm not sure if that actually worked to get me fans, but helped me feel like I was doing something other than just staring at the sales numbers. As Someone Else's Fairytale's sales took off last February and the book broke the top 1,000 on Amazon, I then did a free promo, and only after I'd done all that buildup did I raise the price to $2.99.

I'm also always on a perpetual blog tour. I spend a lot of time submitting to book bloggers and give out a ton of review copies. Whatever a book blogger has wanted, I've provided (usually it's giveaway copies), because I find these more than pay back.

I entered the Kindle Book Review Best Indie Book contest and Someone Else's Fairytale made it to the semifinals, and now I also have started doing Goodreads advertising and giveaways. The overall point I'm trying to make is that I'm always doing something.

Keeping at your publicity, even if you only do an hour or so a day, will help you soon outpace the vast majority of writers who don't bother. I've never really understood why authors are so reluctant, but time and again I get people asking me what I do for publicity, and when I give suggestions, I never hear back, or if I do hear back it's something along the lines of, "I don't believe that would work for me., so I'm not even going to try it." It's too bad in one sense, because it means good books lay undiscovered, but all to the good in another, because it means this is still anybody's game. You just have to try. 98% of indie books sell less than 500 copies. Put in a few months of hard work and you will break into the top 2%, and from there, it's a lot easier to get noticed.

[E.M.]

Ava (Book Nerds Anonymous) wrote: "Hey Emily, loving the q&a. I just want to ask about the start of your writing journey. What made you take that leap and begin to write? Was it always something you wanted to do? Did you publish wha..."

Hi Ava! I've always written and told stories, since I first learned to talk and hold a pencil. I decided to get serious about my writing as I finished off law school, as I felt at that point I'd taken care of the practical aspects of my life. I had training in a good profession that would pay the bills and after twenty straight years of school I was done with all that. While in that last year of law school I applied to the Clarion West Writer's Workshop and somehow got in - it was extremely competitive that year, so I'm not sure how I pulled it off.

I finished law school and then my dad and I drove up the coast to Seattle where I spent six weeks for Clarion West. Straight after I finished there, I was invited into a writers group in New Mexico with some pretty well known writers - the most famous being George R.R. Martin, and I stayed with that group for ten years while I practiced law with a firm, got married, set up my own law practice, etc. Even though I'd always been passionate about writing, it took me five years from the end of Clarion West, and with monthly critiques from my writers group, to sell that first story to an anthology. After that I had a slow but steady stream of short story sales and eventually cracked some of the more difficult magazines, such as Black Gate and Analog.

I then decided that I wanted to learn more about the novel publishing process, so I took on the pen name E.M. Tippetts - I'd been Emily Mah up to this point - and wrote a chick lit novel for the LDS (Mormon) market. This is a pretty small, regional market in the US, so it's quite a bit easier to sell a novel to a publisher that specializes in it. That novel, Time and Eternity, sold well for the size of the market, making it to third on the publisher's bestseller list, but I had a lot of contract disputes with the publisher and ultimately decided to part ways with them (they didn't try *all* the things I listed in my post above, but they did try some.)

A few years ago, my husband decided to go back to school for a PhD and we ultimately moved to London so he could do that, which meant taking a break from my writer's group. One of my Clarion West classmates, Susan Ee, decided to start indie publishing and her book, Angelfall, was a well deserved bestseller. I decided to try indie publishing too, since it was becoming more and more clear that the game has changed in the publishing world, but since Emily Mah still had the beginnings of a good traditional publishing career, I decided to take my other name, EM Tippetts, indie, and the rest is history, I guess. I make quite a bit more money as EM Tippetts, and while I'm not supporting the family yet, it looks more and more possible with each passing day.

[Sue]

Emily, Thanks for the great advice on finding readers and for sharing your writing journey with us. I am curious, did you experience in real life a situation where someone recognized someone they didn't know as being a relative of someone they knew...as happens in the beginning of your "Other Person's Fairytale" story? And how often do you include events inspired by your own life events?

[E.M.]

Sue wrote: "Emily, Thanks for the great advice on finding readers and for sharing your writing journey with us. I am curious, did you experience in real life a situation where someone recognized someone they d..."

I've never seen a celebrity connection turn into romance, but part of why Someone Else's Fairytale is set in Albuquerque is because it is a pretty small community, for a city, and has produced quite a few famous actors. Also, because it's so tight knit, even the non-famous actors are known around town, i.e. the girl who played Prim in Hunger Games, the boy crying in the hallway in Titanic, the guy who plays Jack on Revenge, etc. Neil Patrick Harris and Freddie Prinze Junior both went to La Cueva High School, which is where the fictional Jason Vanderholt also went. NPH in particular was in high school at the same time I was (different schools in different towns, so no, I didn't know him). His grandfather was one of the named partners at the law firm I started my law career with, and his brother owned a popular restaurant, so the Vanderholt family, with it's mix of lawyers and foodies is an homage to him, in a way.

It's impossible to get away from your own life when writing, of course, but I rarely take something verbatim, because that seems boring. Someone Else's Fairytale is, on its face, a pretty typical story of people who knew people in common meeting up and finding love. Add a super-celebrity to the mix and that common story has a new twist.

Events from my life find their way into my books subconsciously all the time. I have scars in nearly the same places as Chloe, but mine aren't as severe. A couple of them are from a car accident I was in when I was eleven, the same age Chloe was when she got all three of her scars, but obviously her story is a lot more dramatic. I also use a lot of locations and other items in the books from real life. Someone Else's Fairytale is dedicated to my good friend Char who is an anthropologist (hence the film scene being shot in the UNM anthropology building). She also used to live where Chloe's fictitious house is. In Nobody's Damsel, Kyra's car, Libby, is Char's old Jeep, which she had to sell. Boots, the cat in Jen and Kyle's home is a real cat who passed away just before the book went to press. A friend was mourning his loss, so I offered to put him in the book so he could live on, but you'll notice he still pines for his owner.

I've never written a book based directly on my real life. This appeals to some people, but not me. I prefer to shake things up by having at least one really absurd thing happen to kick the story off or turn it on its ear. Real life is for all the time that I'm not reading. I get plenty of that ;-)

[E.M.]

Ava (Book Nerds Anonymous) wrote: "Thanks for sharing your writing journey with us. What amazing experiences you have had and continue to have. It's inspiring. :)"

Thanks for reading my rambles ;-)

[Laura]

Lots of amazing and interesting answers there Emily. Thank you for doing the Q+A :)

[E.M.]

Laura wrote: "Lots of amazing and interesting answers there Emily. Thank you for doing the Q+A :)"

Thanks so much for having me. It's been an honor to kick off this new feature with the Book Club. Thanks, everyone, for the awesome questions!

[E.M.]

Faith wrote: "I don't know if I'm too late to ask a question, but Emily what are your thoughts on starting a series in YA then having the characters 'grow-up' in a sequel that's NA?"

Not to late by my reckoning! I'll have a better answer to that once my next book is out, though, as that's exactly what will happen to my characters who debuted in Castles on the Sand. My guess is that there's enough overlap between YA and NA that this can work provided it's a natural progression for the characters.

60% of YA readers aren't young adults, and I suspect this is true for NA readers as well. My readership seems pretty well spread out across age groups. I've gotten fan mail from 12 year olds and 80 year olds, and I haven't read a book pitched at my age group (37) in months, I don't think. I'm always reading YA/NA.

We'll see if my guess is right in a few months when Personal Demons hits the virtual shelves. (That link is to a placeholder cover. It'll be getting a professionally designed one before it launches).