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Giving A Reading: Some Thoughts On Presenting Your Work

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This post, from Kimberly Davis, originally appeared on her Kim’s Craft Blog on 7/5/09. In it, Ms. Davis offers some sound advice for giving an effective live reading. While Ms. Davis is addressing live readings before an audience specifically, the guidance given here is equally useful when creating an audiobook or podcast.

If you are a writer, sooner or later you are going to be asked to get up and read your work before a live audience. If there is a more anxiety-producing moment in the life of an aspiring writer, then I don’t know what it is. Even for a more seasoned writer, having to get up and present your work can be a challenge.

Yesterday I participated in the reading up here at the Summer Writers Conference at Skidmore College. Previously, I had done two Faculty Readings this spring at the Cambridge Center, and yet I still found myself getting nervous and struggling a bit. Some of this was the material. The poems I was reading are at the difficult end of the scale, depending as they do on speed, tone and some athletic line-breaks. Also it was a different (and larger) audience than I was used to, and I hadn’t rehearsed beforehand. At the end of the reading, I found myself making a mental list of "what to do next time"–which I thought I would share.

Slow Down:  I was struck yesterday by how many of the writers read too quickly. There were a lot of writers on the program, and so everyone was laboring under some rather strict time limitations. This is not unusual. At most readings, you will be presenting alongside other writers, and you will be given some sort of time allotment. The trick is to pick something you KNOW will fit within the time you have so you don’t have to rush. There is nothing that ruins a reading like speeding through your carefully selected words.

Read Like You Mean It: By the time you get up to read your work, you are probably going to be sick of it. Whether you are reading poetry or prose, chances are good that by the time you present it to an audience, you’ll have revised it a thousand times, and a lot of the emotion will have gone out of it for you. You’ll now see all the changes you’ve made, the things you still don’t like about the piece, the places where you’re going to have trouble reading it. But that’s not what the audience wants to hear.

What you need to present to your audience is the original emotional energy that made you write the piece in the first place, six months or six years ago. Somehow you need to find your way back into the feelings behind the piece, so that you can communicate them to the audience. I don’t think this is an easy thing for a writer to do. Most of us are not natural performers by nature. If we were, we would have gone to acting school, right?

Still, at a reading we are in essence being asked to "act out" our poems and stories–and to lead the audience through them. The way I like to think of this is that–when we read a poem or story–it becomes a "lived experience," so that as you read, you need to be aware of this and leave enough time and space in your voice and tone for the audience to experience each emotional turn and shift that you take them through.  

Read the rest of the post on Kim’s Craft Blog.

Book Publishers Exploit Stars

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This article, by Ruth Mortimer, originally appeared on Marketing Week on 7/23/09 (in the U.K., where it’s already 7/23 as this article is being posted, 7/22 here in the U.S.). File this one under ‘games some publishers play’.

These may be hard times for publishers, but using a star author to sell another less well-known writer’s book is lazy marketing.

The word “deadline” tends to catch my eye. As a journalist, it’s the term that defines your weeks, days and hours. So browsing in WH Smith recently, I was intrigued to see that Dan Brown, author of megahit The Da Vinci Code, had written a book called Deadline with the intriguing (and horribly familiar to all writers) tagline: “Time Only Matters When It’s Running Out”.

I didn’t think The Da Vinci Code, which is a crime-thriller-cum-religious-tale, was a particularly well-written book when it first came out in 2003. But nobody can deny it has mass appeal and its racy and pacy plot has spawned a whole set of imitators. With more than 81 million copies sold so far and two hit films based on Brown’s novels, it’s one of the publishing successes of the century.

So I picked up Deadline. Would it be the story of a young female journalist struggling for the scoop of the decade against the odds? At which point, I noticed someone else’s name on the cover beneath Dan Brown’s: Simon Kernick. “Aha,” I thought, “The title is actually ‘Simon Kernick: Deadline.’ Perhaps Kernick is the fictional detective starring in this novel?”

But as I looked closer, it dawned on me that in fact, Brown had not written this book at all. And Kernick is not the detective hero of the piece. The front cover, which proudly boasted that it was “exclusive” to WH Smith, bears the legend: “Dan Brown. If you like your thrillers as fast, furious and unputdownable as Dan Brown, then we thought you’d enjoy…Simon Kernick. Deadline.”

I had got it entirely wrong. Kernick is, in fact, the author of Deadline. Brown is not.

Deadline (SIGNED Summer 2008)Publetariat Editor’s Note: this story comes from a U.K.-based site, and apparently, the ‘Dan Brown’ cover isn’t being released here in the U.S.  The cover on the left is the U.S.-edition hardcover.  

This is selling one author’s book with the name of another author as the hook to draw in the shopper. Rather than simply referring to Dan Brown on the cover notes, suggesting similarities between the authors’ styles, at first sight it seems that Brown is the main writer.

The whole top two-thirds of the book is dedicated to Brown, rather than Kernick. Careless shoppers, like me, could quite easily buy it thinking it was Brown’s own work and only realise their mistake when they’d parted with their cash. 

Read the rest of the article on Marketing Week. Also see this additional commentary from Sarah Weinman on Confessions Of An Idiosyncratic Mind, and the Simon Kernick is Awesome photoshop contest on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. 

Five Of The Most Commonly Misspelled Expressions In The English Language

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This article, from David Halpert, originally appeared on the Writinghood site on 7/21/09.

Not only is the English language one of the most complex languages on the planet it is also one of the most verbose, awkward, and contradictory. That being said here are the five most commonly misspelled expressions in the English Language.

Pored over texts, not poured over texts

This one probably stuck with me the longest in terms of misspelled expressions but among the public it’s also one of the most misspelled expressions as well. Want to know what “pouring” over texts has to do with water. Absolutely nothing. While it’s easy to assume that one might pore over a document the way water pours over a surface, the two have nothing in common. In this case, “pore” means “to read or study with steady attention or application“.

Just deserts, not just desserts

A lot of people think that when you say to someone they will get their just deserts, it somehow relates to a giant sundae you will get to eat and the other person won’t, but actually the expression “just deserts” relates to the way you’d spell an arid piece of sandy land. “Deserts”, however, can also mean “‘that which is deserved” from the Latin desiree meaning to get one’s come uppance. Don’t fall into this common trap.

Wreak havoc, not wreck havoc

When spelt “wreck” (pronounced reek) the general public believes to wreak havoc is synonymous with taking your car out on the highway and wreaking havoc on the road, and while “wreck” means to destroy or cause chaos it is used completely out of context. Havoc itself as a noun means chaos, destruction, and general disorder, but so does wreck when used as a verb. To be used beside one another would be a double negative, for example, to cause destruction to chaos, meaning in the wrong sense, to cause order. In the correct version, “wreak havoc” means “to inflict or execute (punishment, vengeance, etc.)“.

Read the rest of the article on Writinghood.

Beware The Writing Masterclass

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This article, from AL Kennedy, originally appeared on the Guardian UK Books Blog on 7/7/09.

Workshops are a delicate business, and calling them masterclasses is unlikely to improve them.

Workshops – I’ve mentioned them briefly in this blog before, but they are currently much on my mind. Increasingly such things are being called Masterclasses, which sound much more impressive and buzzy and vaguely as if they’ll involve an opportunity to be in an airless hotel function suite with a minor deity. I’ve been giving workshops – and now Masterclasses – in prose fiction for a period of time I will not mention for fear of feeling wrinkled and reflecting that I had a bloody cheek to try telling anyone anything for at least the first decade. Then again, giving workshops to people who can’t yet write while you can’t yet write either, is a traditional way for nascent writers to earn their crusts. And it means we can meet people we didn’t make up, and learn, and consider overviews, and be near the process in others and see how lovely it is and how a person can light up when all goes well and a penny drops and so forth …

Of course, having no time of my own and not being the sociable type, I rarely do anything that involves a bunch of strangers and a flipchart, unless I’m the one inhaling the delicious marker pen fumes. But, only last night, I was reflecting with a chum on a masterclass I attended which did absolutely make me reassess how I run my workshops.

First, let us think of the horrible temptations within the workshop scenario. There you are, alone with a largely or wholly compliant roomful of people who offer themselves up to your help, perhaps harbouring a curiosity about the writing life (such as that which fuels this very blog) and perhaps also a touching belief that there is a Golden Key that will make all well and effect immediate change in their putative vocation.

The workshop leader’s power can be huge, given that writing is so intimate. Although the scale is tiny, the possibilities for wrongness and corruption can be appallingly extensive: ideas can be mocked, weaklings can be bullied, tired or apprehensive participants can actively encourage the tutor to blather on about his or her self at revolting length and offer all the worst sorts of admiration. The nervous and self-critical (many good writers are both) may not express needs which therefore go unfulfilled, or problems which therefore continue to fester unexamined. Participants may have no idea what to expect and could be fobbed off with any old nonsense.

With the best will in the world it’s difficult to describe a mental process to someone usefully without requiring at least a tiny bit that they think like you – when they should ideally think like themselves, only more so – and that’s without mentioning the possibilities of technical failures, the restraints of time pressure and the intrusion of acts of God (I once ran a workshop during which a shrew ran up a participant’s leg. Things ended badly for the shrew, much to everyone’s dismay, including the owner of the leg).

Read the rest of the article on the Guardian UK Books Blog.

Some Thoughts About Determination Versus Confidence

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This post, from mainstream-published author Laini Taylor, originally appeared on her Grow Wings blog on 3/1/09.

I’m not quite sure why I got started thinking about this today, but I did. I have an acquaintance who is a very gifted writer but suffers crippling self-doubt that has, so far, prevented her from achieving her dream of writing — and publishing — a novel.

She soul-searches a lot and goes in cycles, up and down, and the ups are beautiful and full of epiphanies, the kind of epiphanies out of which beautiful writing blooms. Just, so far the ups have not been sustained long enough for an entire book to make its way into the world. Doubt rolls back around and derails her.

I suffer cycles too. Really, every writer I know has them: the peaks and troughs of good writing days versus bad ones. Euphoria to despair and back again.

For those of us who have made it through and finished a book as well as we possibly can . . . how did we? I was thinking about this acquaintance, rooting for her and wondering what it might take for her to pull it off, and the word "confidence" entered my mind.

But no, I thought. That’s not it. Confidence is not what it takes to finish a book. I mean, it’s great if you’ve got it, but you don’t need it. What you do need is determination, and that’s something that’s easier to come by. I think, anyway. Confidence is this kind of full trust in one’s abilities, and I most certainly did not have that when I was writing Blackbringer. I did, however, have a mulish determination to do it. It wasn’t that I knew I could do it, it was that I really really wanted to. I mean, really really. Really.

Really.

And that, as it turned out, was enough. You don’t have to believe in yourself all the time; you don’t have to read self-help books and fix your self-esteem problems before you can succeed. You just have to be stubborn and keep on and keep on. Instead of the Little Engine saying "I know I can, I know I can," you can, to be cornball, instead be the Little Engine that says, "I won’t quit, I won’t quit." It’s kind of easier. For me, anyway.
 

Read the rest of the post on Grow Wings.

The Advance v. Royalties Conversation Continues

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This post, from NYT bestselling author John Green, originally appeared on his Sparks Fly Up site on 7/7/09.

Okay, quick background: Last week I wrote a post arguing against outrageously high book advances and in favor of better royalties for authors. I followed this up with a post arguing that the widely held belief that big advances cause big marketing budgets does not really hold up to scrutiny. (Big advances and big marketing budgets are obviously often correlated, but that does not imply any kind of causal relationship.)

Then I promised a mathy post explaining to publishers why this model makes more sense for them, after which I decided that my numbers were perhaps not as lock-solid as I previously believed them to be, so I decided not to publish that post.

For the record:

1. One thing that keeps getting overlooked here is that many big publishers would currently be OUT OF BUSINESS if they were not owned by gigantic media companies that can absorb the losses of their idiotic up-front gambling. It’s not like I’m fretting about some on-the-horizon crisis in publishing; the crisis is here. The model is not working, and it isn’t changing, which historically bodes poorly. (I’m looking at you, record companies.)

2. That said, my radical proposal was wrong enough to be relatively easy to dismiss. But if you lower advances and increase royalty escalations dramatically (at least according to my calculations which might be wrong because I am bad at math), over the last five years EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHER IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EFFING WORLD would either be more profitable or lose less money except maybe Hachette.* So I just want to make it clear that I am not backing away from that fundamental belief.

3. The comments to these posts have been fascinating and wonderful and I am deeply grateful to all of you for them.

4. I wanted to pull one comment out and respond to it in pieces, because it raises a lot of important questions and also brings forth the obvious but as-yet-unstated fact that I am writing from a particular POV. So okay, from commenter writeon:

"If (like most authors) the only money you’d be making from a book is the advance (since most books don’t earn out their advance or stay on shelves long enough to make royalties) why on earth would an author want to turn down money?"

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing against advances. My beef is not with $30,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back. My beef is with $500,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back.

The reason to take less money upfront and get more in royalties is pretty simple, I think: Your publisher is owned by a company that wants to make money. So long as you make money, you make sense. If you don’t make money, you don’t make sense.**

"Authors don’t have a crystal ball where they can see into the future and say, "Well, in three years I’ll come up with this Book X which will make me money, so, for right now I can sell Book Y and Z for pennies."

Again, I’m not proposing you sell any book for pennies; I’m proposing that you sell a book for a reasonable five-figure advance and the kind of escalating royalty that allows you to share fairly in the profits from the book, if there are any.

"Most authors don’t know if they’ll get the chance to publish another book. They can’t count on publishers doing anymore than putting their book in a catalogue as their ‘marketing.’ You want THAT author to turn down money?"

Probably not, because that author probably hasn’t been offered a huge advance. But I think that author is mistaken if s/he thinks that an antagonistic relationship with publisher will help get the book to its audience.

Read the rest of the post on Sparks Fly Up.

* Twilight.

** But to expand on that a bit: You have to begin with the (reasonable) assumption that your publisher wants to make money and would not have acquired your book if they did not feel that it could be profitable. It may be that they think it can only be profitable if they don’t pay to hand out galleys at ALA, which is disappointing and annoying and etc., but it’s irrational to assume from the outset that your publisher wishes to lose money on your book.

From The Offer To The Bookstore

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This post, from mainstream-published author Shannon Hale, originally appeared on her Squeetus website.

Before going through the process myself, I was pretty clueless about the route a book takes to get to the shelf. Here are the major phases of traditional book publishing, based on my own experience.

Offer—When an acquiring editor finds a book she’d like to buy, either from an agent or the slush pile, she then calls agent or author to make an offer (huzzah!). The offer details how much money the publisher will pay the author as an advance on royalties (for a first book, generally $2000 – $10,000), the percentage of royalties the author will get (for a children’s author, generally 10 percent on hardcover, 6 percent on paperback), and the rights the publisher wants to buy (i.e. North American rights, World English, or World. Bloomsbury bought World rights from me, meaning if any of my books are sold for translation, Bloomsbury gets 50 percent of those royalties).

The Counter Offer—Often a counter offer is made, wherein the author/agent negotiates a slightly higher advance, percentage, or asks to retain more rights. This can be brief or haggling might go on for weeks. The actual signing of the contract can delay for months, but once the offer has been accepted, business goes forward.

Editing—For me, this phase lasts six to nine months. See Working with an Editor for more details. After several revisions under my editor’s supervision, we decide the book is ready to go. Such a good feeling! Sometime during the process, my editor is also shopping for cover art, running different artists by me, deciding on a feel and design. Bloomsbury is good at consulting with me, but ultimately the decision is theirs. They send me initial sketches of the cover art for input and accuracy. Eventually, I get a jacket proof in the mail and I go over the front, back, spine, and flap text. That’s always very exciting and makes the book feel more real.

Copy Editing—Now the publisher sends your manuscript to the copy editor (inhouse or outsourced). My editor will send me a xerox of the ms with copy edited notes and I often have just a weekend to go over it. I usually find a couple of errors she missed (though those copy editors are incredibly thorough and very good) and find some changes she made that I don’t want made. I also find adverbs I wrote but now hate and other minor changes. When I go over these corrections with my editor on the phone, our call can last three hours. It’s quite an intensive process, but the ms is so much cleaner for it.

Read the rest of the post, including Typesetting & Proofing, ARCs, Printing, The Release, and Now What? on Shannon Hale’s Squeetus website.

Advances And Royalties: The Business End Of Writing

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This post, from mainstream-published author Susan Beth Pfeffer, originally appeared on her blog on 6/23/09.

I was wandering around the Yahoo listings for the dead and the gone, when I found its official Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paperback publication information. Publication is indeed Jan. 18, 2010, but what I didn’t know was that its price is anticipated to be $7.99. That’s a dollar more than the paperback of Life As We Knew It, which means that every paperback d&g sells will earn me 6 cents more than a LAWKI paperback.

I figured I’d be safe sharing this information with you, since you’d be unlikely to hit me up for a 6 cent loan.

It occurred to me after I decided to make the 6 cent announcement that there are people who read this blog who may not know how writers get paid (not enough and certainly not often enough, but that’s a whole other entry). So for those of you who are interested, here are the basics of how it works, using LAWKI as the example.

When I wrote LAWKI, I gave my agent the manuscript to sell. That’s called writing a book on spec (short for speculation). Neither my agent nor I knew if any publisher would be interested in buying it (when I wrote the dead and the gone, and This World We Live In, I got a contract before writing the books). My agent gets 15% of every penny I earn from these books, so it’s in her best interest to sell them.

Harcourt agreed to buy LAWKI, and offered me a $20,000 advance. For that money, they were given the right to publish the book in hardcover and paperback, and to make some additional money by selling some of the subsidiary rights, which they did, selling to both the Junior Library Guild and Scholastic some reprint rights (HMH gets half that money; I get the other half, after my agent gets her 15%).

An advance is called an advance because it’s an advance on future royalties. Once the publisher gives you the advance, they can’t get the money back, no matter how hard they beg. So I got the $20,000 minus 15% (that’s $17,000; I can multiply anything by 15%), gave Internal Revenue its share, and kept the rest to pay rent and gas and electricity and groceries, etc. Since the book was already written, Harcourt pretty much paid me the whole amount at once; with d&g and TW, I got half on signing the contract and the other half after Harcourt decided the manuscript was ready for publication (I’m currently waiting for the second half of the advance for TW).

I get a 10% royalty on the LAWKI hardcover. That means I get 10% of what the list price ($17) of the book is: $1.70 for every book sold, after I earned back the original $20,000. Because of the sale to the Junior Library Guild, I knew that meant as soon as the hardcover sold 10,000 copies, I would start earning royalties. That happened almost immediately, so I’ve been earning royalties on LAWKI since shortly after its publication. I have no idea why they’re called royalties, since most writers earn less than the average medieval peasant.

Royalties get paid twice a year. The publisher keeps track of how many copies of the book are sold, multiplies the total by the percentage the writer gets (10% for hardcovers, 6% for paperbacks), sends the total amount to the agent, who takes her 15% and sends the rest to the writer, who’s been going crazy waiting for the check to arrive. It used to be I never knew how much money (if any) to expect, but nowadays I can ask what the sales numbers are, so I have a far better sense of how big (or small) the check will be. This definitely cuts down on the stress.

Read the rest of the post on Susan Beth Pfeffer’s blog.

The Book-Club Hustlers

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This article, from Francesca Mari, originally appeared on The Daily Beast on 7/6/09.

Enterprising fiction writers are marketing themselves to book groups in person, by phone, and over Skype to boost sales. Meet the new breed of literary types on the make.

There is a thing authors do, nervously, when they think no one is looking. They check out their numbers—online sales figures, ratings, rankings, reader reviews. Not long ago, Joshua Henkin, a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn College, was doing just such a thing in his home office. He was scrolling through Goodreads.com, monitoring the reception of his new novel, Matrimony. A user named Shelley had given him a mixed review—three stars out of five. Henkin clicked on her name and decided to email her, offering to attend her book club, if she had one. She did—that very evening—and, after several exchanges, Henkin was set to call into it.

Joshua Henkin has topped 175 visits to book groups. “With 10 people in each group,” he said, “that’s 1,750 books sold right there.”

Henkin had already participated in over 80 groups, most of them personal visits to between 10 and 12 middle-aged women. By now, he’s topped 175. “With 10 people in each group, that’s 1,750 books sold right there.” When his first novel came out in 1997, Henkin said the book got good reviews but fell by the wayside in sales, in part because his editor was dying. “I’d heard enough horror stories in publishing that even if a book got great reviews it wasn’t going to sell well, and I got the sense that so many people were in book groups,” he says. So when Matrimony first came out, he emailed friends to put him in touch. Now groups find him. And he’s willing to drive up to two hours, one way, to any group that asks. “Most sales are going to come shortly after publication. When you see sales stay steady,” Henkin says, “something is going on in terms of word of mouth. And that tends to be book clubs.”

Henkin’s efforts are an enterprising response to the publishing industry’s chronic woes. Money is scarce for publicity, and the way it’s often hoarded to buy full-page ads for the books that make bank (think: James Patterson, Stephen King) means that authors must be on-call at all times. To make a living off of fiction, most writers must be as attuned to marketing as they are to writing. Mickey Pearlman, an author, editor, and professional book-club facilitator, says, “The only thing that’s going to save publishing is book clubs.” Pearlman offers four-hour book-marketing seminars (for $500), focusing on “how to creatively market your book on the Web and in other outlets”—one of those outlets being, of course, book groups. “You’re building an interest in you,” Pearlman says, “so they’ll be very likely to buy your next book.”

The focus on book clubs has spurred the evolution of a new breed: the author-hustler, the writer who succeeds in large part because of door-to-door salesmanship. After the writing comes a new challenge, one of industriousness, perseverance, and charm. Since 2000, Adriana Trigiani has averaged two to three book clubs a week by phone, and this past April, she led “The World’s Biggest Book Club,” a 300-person event run out of New York’s Convent of the Sacred Heart High School (the very set of Paris Hilton and Lady Gaga’s [mis]education).

Chris Bohjalian, whose book Midwives was an Oprah selection in October 1998, began phoning into groups after he was forced to cancel his book tour in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Requests keep increasing, and this year he anticipates talking to 120 groups. As soon as The Divorce Party came out, Laura Dave was reaching out to book clubs at the suggestion of her editor and publicist, both of whom recognized her book’s potential appeal to the middle-aged woman. “Every time I speak to a book group,” Dave says, “almost without exception that book club refers me to another book club that emails.” Dave has done over 100 discussions in person, by phone, and on Skype. She says that Gwyn, the middle-aged narrator of her second novel, is a composite of some of the women she’s met in groups.
 

Read the rest of the article on The Daily Beast.

The Theft Of Time

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This post, from Dennis Palumbo, originally appeared on The Writer’s Store site.

A particularly arrogant film producer once said to me, “I could be a writer, too, if I only had the time.”
 

Which implied, I guess, that if he didn’t have to attend meetings, deal with studios, manage production budgets—–in other words, if he didn’t have a real job—he too could just sit around, effortlessly knocking out compelling narratives and crafting pithy dialogue.

Yet for most writers, time is exactly that thing they can’t seem to get enough of. Certainly not without carving it out for themselves, strenuously hewing a private space for their writing from a dense forest of financial and familial duties. Most writers understand that they must somehow demand the time to write; that, in many ways, writing is a “job” like any other, requiring diligence, constancy and commitment. But getting others to understand this is not always so easy.

Robert Frost said that the one thing all nations on earth share is a fear that a member of the family will want to be a writer. There are a lot of reasons for this, from parental concern about a child’s ability to earn a living, to legitimate desires to spare the would-be writer the heartbreak of rejection and disappointment, to irrational fears about the aberrant life-style that writers are stereotypically known to indulge. Next to announcing that you want to be an actor, proclaiming your ambition to write is guaranteed to strike terror in the hearts of parents, siblings, and spouses. Especially spouses with whom you’ve had children.

The pressure to provide for a family is acute for most people, but even more so for writers, often struggling with both the difficulties of their craft and the insecurity and fickleness of the marketplace. Finding time to write is hard enough when you have a writing job—on staff at a TV series, say, or developing a screenplay for a studio. At least then you can justify the time spent away from the family, lost in your thoughts, scribbling notes on coffee shop menus, banging away at the keyboard at all hours.

But if you have a non-writing job, some 9-to-5 gig to pay the bills, any time you might need for writing, for pursuing a writing career, seems a selfish luxury. It’s time seemingly owed to personal obligations, to the tasks of running a home and raising a family. In such cases, “demanding” time for your writing carries with it the possibility of frequent relationship strife, as well as a significant burden of guilt.

In my private practice, many of my writer clients deal with this guilt constantly. They feel an obligation both to the demands of their creative ambitions and to those of their families. Even when their spouse or partner goes along with their need for time and solitude, many of them still feel guilty. Often it increases the pressure to achieve quick financial success. It affects their decisions about what kinds of things they should write. It makes them feel that every second spent writing must “count.”

More than one writer has said to me, “What if my script doesn’t sell? I’ve spent all this time doing it, obsessing over it. I’ve been distracted and impatient with my kids. Totally unavailable to my wife. What if it all turns out to be for nothing?”

Sometimes the fissures in the relationship at home become wide enough to cause panic. “I’ve made a deal with my husband,” another writer once told me. “If this spec doesn’t sell, I’ll give it up. I mean, how long can I keep doing this, banging my head against the wall? I’m not getting any younger. And I don’t want to lose my marriage.”

Even successful writers, those who make a living at their craft, find it difficult to continually justify to loved ones their need for private time. “Unless my kids hear the keyboard clicking,” one noted screenwriter confided in me, “they feel okay interrupting me. You ever try to explain to a four-year-old that you’re working, when all you’re doing is staring at the ceiling? Hell, sometimes I have a hard time convincing myself.”
 

Read the rest of the post on The Writer’s Store site.

Change: Are You Initiating Or Avoiding?

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This post, from Kassia Krozser, originally appeared on her Booksquare site on 6/6/09.

How can authors leverage change to their best advantage?

I have come to accept that our species is not fond of change. Some of us know it is inevitable and take the pain now rather than later, some simply refuse to change (I have seen this and it is awesome in its execution. Also, ultimately futile.), and some pretend to embrace change while carefully manipulating “change” to look like “same as it ever was”. It is that final group, I believe, who face the biggest letdown.

It is surely the rare soul in the publishing ecosystem who believes the business tomorrow will resemble the business of today. Change, being change, is messy stuff, best managed through experimentation. You can design the best process in the world, but until real people get their hands in the system, you don’t really know what will work and how. Change is iterative.

Mike Shatzkin’s article on evolving role of agents, coupled with his piece on the publishing portfolio reshuffle, focuses on key aspects of this change: the economics. You cannot unsettle an entire industry without considering and preparing for the financial impact on all the players.

There is no doubt that the physical retail environment is shrinking. The news about stores closing for good unsettles people in the industry. And outside. Many factors are behind this loss, from changing consumer behavior to high rents in bad economic times to “redevelopment”. The choice throughout the industry is clear: hope for a business-as-usual miracle or make the necessary changes to thrive in a new (sometimes uncertain) environment.

The booksellers who remain standing — and there will be many! — will react to these losses by changing their retail mix to accommodate new customers while incorporating new sales channels, such as digital. In the physical sense, there is only so much shelf space, and booksellers will, necessarily, be more particular and more aggressive about fresh product. The sheer volume of annual releases, with new titles coming out weekly, leaves the bookseller little room for chancy purchases and backroom stock.

Inventory management will be elevated to an art form as booksellers try to balance the slower reactions of customers who rely upon word-of-mouth with those who chase the latest and greatest. Factor in the enduring popularity of catalog titles, and it’s not hard to see that booksellers will be leaner and meaner (oh, and leaner and meaner indicates that booksellers will be purchasing fewer units because, well, managing returns for credit or cash is not a cheap endeavor).

Read the rest of the post on Booksquare.

11 Types Of Bad Writing Advice

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This post, from Dr. Susan K. Perry, PhD, originally appeared on the Psychology Today site on 6/27/09.

All advice is suspect. I’m not suggesting you break all the so-called rules of creativity you’ve collected. Only that every tip can be counteracted with its opposite. And some advice is just plain bad for you. If interviewing 76 successful novelists and poets taught me one thing, it’s this: advice that one person swears by, another will find ludicrous. Here, then, are 11 types of advice to avoid:

1. Advice that limits your potential. An online student of mine once asked if what a famous novelist had written was correct, that if you’d left a novel unfinished for a few years, it was a lost cause. I reassured her that if her passion for the project was still there, or could be resurrected, she could pick it up again. One writer went back to a novel he’d put aside more than a decade before and was able to salvage parts of it. He’s now happily engaged with a new version of the project.

2. Advice that cramps your imagination. Some people would have you write only from your own point of view or about a group to which you belong. That’s too rigid. Credible stories and poems have been written from the point of view of the opposite gender or from some other time or culture that you couldn’t possibly know personally. Writing is about pretending.

3. Advice that insists there’s one way to schedule your creativity. Must you write every single day? If you don’t devote yourself to writing full-time, does that mean you’re not taking yourself seriously? Avoid any advice that starts "You MUST," or that feels like a punishment. Productive artists work out all sorts of schedules that fit in with the rest of their lives.

4. Advice that makes you feel bad about yourself. A young poet told me she’d felt devastated by the admonition a teacher once gave her to put her poems in a drawer for ten years before actually sending them out. She took the advice literally and was thoroughly stymied. In fact, that kind of advice plays into a paralyzing perfectionism. Usually a few days or weeks is enough to see your words through fresh eyes.

5. Advice that tells you more about the advisor than about your own work. A talented poet friend of mine showed some of her work, much of which tends to be about the darker side of dysfunctional family life, to a co-worker. The listener’s response was this: "Don’t you ever write anything about nature?" The water cooler critic in this case apparently thinks poems are only about pretty things.
 

Read the rest of the post, containing items #6-11, on Psychology Today.

POD Publishing: Why Do It? And … Why Not?

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This post, from Mel Keegan, originally appeared on The World According To Mel blog on 2/14/09.

Writing has been likened to bashing your head against a wall — with one exception: it’s not so great when you stop.

I guess this is because writing is in your blood, something you do because it’s … what you do; and the fact is, you’ll do it whether anyone is reading what you write, or paying you, or not!  Writing is a vocation, like religion, medicine, the law.

Publishing is a different can o’ worms (or kettle of fish, if you prefer). Publishing is like jabbing yourself in the foot with a sharp stick. In terms of the pain and anguish you’re inflicting upon your anatomy, it’s about the same … but it can actually do you more physical damage! Let’s face it, if you give your head a good enough bash on the wall the first time out, you’re going to knock yourself right out — and I ought to know! I did this last week! (See also Gay novelist, battered and fried.) Technically, you could jab yourself with a sharp stick enough times to do a whole lot more damage —

Which is where the publishing analogy becomes utterly perfect. Publishers are gluttons for punishment, especially the self-marketing variety. They could stop anytime. But, do they? No. We go on, bashing our heads (and jabbing our feet) when we know that every single day we’re going to be up against unutterable rubbish like this:

Six reasons that self-publishing is the scourge of the book world.

…and I cannot tell you the degree to which this article is wrong in its sweeping statements. The blood boils. Consider this:

1. No one vetts self-published books, allowing even the most puerile piles of crap to adopt the guise of polished, professional prose.

Point one: Mr. Tom Barlow, you must stop generalizing on this first line. All self-published works are not the same, and some are vetted to destruction point. Some will be proofread many more times, by more pairs of eyeballs, than could plausibly be assigned to them by "small" publishing houses who can’t afford a large enough editorial staff to do a proper job. (Point two: drop the alliteration. It makes you sound like an over-inflated idiot.)

2. Self-publishing kills the drive for writers to improve their craft. The artificial, undeserved success they will achieve will trap them in mediocrity.

This is such utter piffle, I was speechless for a moment. Mr. Barlow, who told you this? You were sold a priceless line of BS. The drive to improve one’s craft is born in a writer, and continues to flow in his or her veins irrespective of whether they’re published (slim chance) or not.

Editors do little to inspire writers to improve, because the process of editing any but the bestselling author is so robotized, so impersonal. You mail your manuscript in; a year later you get the galleys back, and a few days to read through them. You have no real idea of what was done to the work, or why, you just check it for errors and mail it back as fast as humanly possible.

And what gremlin whispered into Tom Barlow’s naive ear, that a self-publishing author of a "puerile pile of crap" is going to achieve any kind of success whatsoever? Does he think books sell themselves? Does he honestly believe readers will buy a book without having read at least 10% of it as a free download, seen the cover at full-size, and read numerous reviews, either online or in the print media?

Any copies sold, anywhere, any time, are the result of massive amounts of hard marketing work by the author, and before it could start, said author had to have a real, solid work to go out there and sell. The rubbish he’s describing exists — by the wagonload — on Amazon, on Lulu, and "wherever books are sold." The point he’s missing is this: "puerile piles of crap" DO NOT SELL COPIES. Their authors do not enjoy success, artificial or otherwise, and what traps them in mediocrity is their own — mediocrity.

Read the rest of the post on The World According To Mel blog.

Publishing And The Black Swan

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This post, from Glenn Yeffeth, originally appeared on the BenBella Books blog on 4/20/09. In it, he applies Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan theory to publishing. The Black Swan theory posits that rare and unpredictable events can have a huge impact in whatever aspects of life and commerce they occur. Publishers, Yeffeth says, can apply some specific strategies to proactively minimize their exposure to "negative black swans" while maximizing opportunities to take advantage of those even rarer, "positive black swans" .

The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb, is the best book on statistics I ever read. OK, that may sound like faint praise. But the book is one of the best books I’ve read in years. Brilliant, eccentric, and prescient, this book speaks to me in particular because of my stint in the PhD program in finance at the University of Chicago. I dropped out for exactly the reasons Taleb discusses in the book – the more I learned about mathematical finance, the more I realized how disconnected it was from reality (full disclosure: I also sort of sucked at higher math). If you haven’t read it, you want to, especially if you are in publishing.

The essence of Taleb’s theory is straightforward. Rare and unpredictable events, he theorizes, have an enormous impact on business, finance, on life in general. This might seem to be unexceptional, except that all of statistics, economics and finance (to name a few areas) are based on the assumption that this isn’t true. Everything you’ve heard about the normal curve or law of large numbers, or even the concept of an “average” is based on the idea that once you have enough data – say over a hundred data points – you basically know what’s going on in terms of risky events, that your average is going to be stable etc. The whole idea of finding an average from data, for example, goes out the window if one observation (once you already have lots of observations) can radically change your average. Yet in real life this happens all the time (half the growth in the stock market since WWII, for example, happened in 10 days).

Some businesses are negative black swan businesses. They seem to be making more than they really do make, because they are exposed to rare, but huge, downside risks (think banks and reinsurers). Publishers are exposed to some negative black swan risk (i.e. bankruptcy of major distributor or retailer) but, in general, publishing is a positive black swan business. The rare events can make publishers a lot of money. In fact, without the rare events (i.e. Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code) they barely make any money at all.

The essence of black swans is that they are unpredictable; if they were predictable they wouldn’t be black swans. No one knows they are coming, although everyone can see their inevitability in retrospect. Consider the numerous retroactive explanations for the success of Harry Potter, when, in advance, the original novel was rejected by every publisher that saw it but one, and that one (Bloomsbury) paid 2500 pounds and printed 500 copies. No one saw it coming.

So the solution is to design your publishing house so as to maximize your exposure to positive black swans and minimize your exposure to negative ones. Easy, right?

Not so much. It’s tricky to figure out exactly what to do about Black Swan theory, but here are a few ideas to start with:

  1. Have a healthy respect for what you don’t know. Your management processes will pressure you to predict how each book will do, and allocate resources accordingly. Don’t confuse this with the idea that you know what will happen. Allocate a bit more resources to your small books, and a bit less to your big ones, because you are less sure of what is small and what is big than you think.

Read the rest of the post, which includes 9 additional Black Swan ideas, on the BenBella Books blog.

Leaving Out The Parts People Skip

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This post, from Robert Gregory Browne, originally appeared on his Casting the Bones site on 6/26/09.

One of our best American writers, Elmore Leonard, has famously said that he tries to “leave out the parts people skip” when he’s writing. Anyone who has read a Leonard novel knows that they are lean, move quickly, and certainly don’t require any skimming.

But what exactly does that mean?

People start skimming when they lose interest. When they want you to get on with things. When they’re not as engaged by the story as they should be.

So how do you keep them engaged? I have a few ideas:

Keep your prose style simple and economic and clear

You can certainly be clever and artistic, but never sacrifice economy and clarity for the sake of “art.” Much of that art, in fact, is writing in a way that the sentences and paragraphs and pages flow from one to the next, giving the reader no choice but to hang onto every word.

And clarity is always important. If a reader is confused about what is going on, she may well give up on you.

Don’t bog your story down with too much description

Descriptive passages can be quite beautiful, but your job is to weigh whether or not they’re necessary. Are they slowing the story down?

One of my favorite writers of all time is Raymond Chandler. But when I read his novels, I sometimes find myself skipping entire paragraphs. Chandler seemed to have this need to describe a room or character in great detail, and while that may have been part of the job is his day, I think it’s much less important now.

Gregory MacDonald, the author of the Fletch books, among others, once said that because we live in a “post-television” world, it is no longer necessary to describe everything. We all know what the Statue of Liberty looks like because we’ve seen it on TV. We’ve seen just about everything on TV, and probably even more on the Internet.

So, I think it’s best to limit your descriptions to only what is absolutely necessary to make the story work. Meaning: enough to set the scene, set up a character, or to CLARIFY an action.

Let’s face it. Saying something as simple as, The place was a dump. Several used syringes lay on the floor next to a ratty mattress with half its stuffing gone is often more than enough to get the message across.

If you can, describe a setting through the eyes of whatever character controls the scene (meaning POV). If you include the description as part of that character’s thought process, colored by his or her mood or personality, the description then becomes much more dynamic and also reveals a lot about that character.

One man’s dump, after all, may be another man’s paradise. And showing how a character reacts to a place is much more interesting than a static description.

Read the rest of the post on Casting the Bones.