Sell

 On HarperStudio’s blog yesterday was the news that they have offered Gary Vaynerchuk a 10 book deal. Maybe you haven’t heard of GaryV, but yesterday I discovered why authors need to know about him and how he got his book deal.  

So why did Harper Collins offer Gary a 10 book, 7 figure deal? 

One word answer: platform.

A platform is a way to reach people, it’s a following and from the publisher’s perspective, it’s people who will buy your books. And why does Gary V have a platform?

Passion creates a niche. Do what you love.

When you watch Gary in action, you know he is passionate! Check out one of his wine video blogs and be amazed. This guy is enthusiastic! You don’t have to copy his style, but you do need to follow your passion. In the above video, he says “stop doing stuff you hate”, and that is true for writers and creative types as much as anyone else. Identify what you hate doing, and stop it. (I hear you saying that you can’t but believe me, there is a way! Leave a comment if you need some help. )

He also says that if you do what you love, you can monetise it. Break out of the mindset that you just have to write a book, sell it to an agent/publisher and repeat in order to make a living. You can do so much more with your content it is amazing! (more on this author/entrepreneur idea in future posts)

Be authentic. Be transparent. Be real. Build brand equity.

Gary does not hide anything from what I have seen. He is so very real, it is probably scaring the introverted authors reading this! But his authenticity is what attracts people to him. He does video everywhere and seems to be openly honest. “The only way to succeed is to be completely transparent”. If you build a brand, you can build a business based on that – whether it is through your books, your speaking or other products. 

Connection and caring for your readers/viewers

Gary connects with his viewers and the people who follow him. He says he responds to all email personally, and he works ridiculous hours to make sure he is connecting. He also talks about the social networks – you need to be there and you need to connect with your readers, or potential readers. (Incidentally, he rates search.twitter.com as the most powerful website in the world right now – here’s more on twitter)

Persistence. Work hard. Don’t give up.

Gary took over his family’s wine business and built it up over 7 years. Then he gave it up to start Wine Library TV. He did it 5 days a week for 17 months before he started getting any attention. He is now on #652 of his videos (each are half hour of quality TV!) so he is not an overnight success. He works incredible hours and continues to post daily. He is not resting on his laurels. He suggests working at nights if you have a day job, stop watching TV and get on with it.

Freemium

The internet is all about free information now. You have to understand that your content needs to be free. This model is new and strange to authors (especially if you spend years writing your book). But you need to give and give in order for people to find you, and then they may want to spend money on the products you have available. You have a premium product on top of the free information. You don’t need to give away your book for free (although Cory Doctorow uses that model), but you can post chapters, excerpts, tips, information, downloads, audio, video on your blog for people to sample. Gary gives so much away for free but he also has a Wine Club as part of Wine Library TV (and many more monetisation strategies!)

It is important to note here that your free information has to be of great quality “If you pump out good shit, people will come”

Attraction. People attract people (attract book deals)

I LOVE the fact that Gary did not chase this book deal. Harper Collins went to him. They saw his popularity, his platform, his attraction and approached him. He did not ask for a book deal, he did not pursue publication. He did not do a book proposal, or a query letter, or receive rejections from agents or publishers. He just does what he loves and built his business, and attracted the opportunity. “The gatekeepers are no longer in control”. The internet frees all of us to be noticed. Mainstream media now follows the net so you can build your own platform.

I would love a 10 book deal. I’m sure you would too. I am going to learn my lessons from GaryV so I hope this has also helped you see a new model for authors to follow!

There is also a video version of this post here on how you can build your author platform. 

Original version of this posted at The Creative Penn. 

This blog post, by Angela James, executive editor for Samhain Publishing, originally appeared on her Nice Mommy – Evil Editor blog on 3/26/09. In it, she discusses how Twitter’s 140-character limit presents authors with an opportunity to hone a book pitch.

ETA: The first thing to say is that a pitch isn’t necessarily about selling your book to an agent/editor. Time to move out of that mindset! Read on…

Here’s another one to file under conversations from Twitter. This came up this past weekend in a conversation about Blood and Chocolate by Annette Kurtis Clause. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it. Someone (@lihsa, follow the link for her article on it) on Twitter asked for a review/description and the challenge was on. 140 character review for a book? It’s the “elevator pitch” at its most refined!

Now, it’s been a few years since I read Blood and Chocolate so even though it’s one of the books I recommend often when someone asks for paranormal YA, I still had to stop and think how to refine it in an interesting way. Years after I’d read it. Hard!

I came up with: teenage female werewolf struggles to find acceptance in a world that doesn’t know about the supernatural. Moody, dark and emotional.

I don’t think it’s the best review/pitch but it does start to refine the ideas. I could make it punchier, ramp up the hook, really get someone interested. Let’s see…

Rebelling against her society. Searching for love. Desperate for a chance. Can this teen wolf reconcile what she is with who she wants to be?

Hmm, I’m not sure. I’m actually over by one character but I figure if I delete a space, I’ll be okay. What do you think? Better? It took me 15 minutes of fiddling to come up with that versus the first one, which I just popped off the top of my head.

But what I’m getting at is that it’s important to be able for authors to refine your book to its purest hook. The conflict, the angst, the info that’s going to make a reader, editor or agent want to pick it up to read, go find an excerpt, request a full or keep reading your query letter.

TV does this with what they call log lines. A one sentence hook meant to engage the viewer and get them to watch the show. Something that will easily fit in the TV guide or, for many of us now, on the guide channel. There’s no second chances when the viewer has only that guide to look at and base their decision off of. So the log line has to be good enough to convince the viewer to turn the channel right then and there, without a bunch of extranneous detail or someone saying “oh wait, that didn’t quite hook you? Well let me tell you just a little more”. The log line is it. The same should be considered true of the elevator pitch or, for purposes of my blog post, the Twitch (Twitter pitch. Ha! I’m funny).

At Samhain, we do something similar with each of our books’ blurbs, but we call it a tagline. If you go over to the website, the tagline is what you see on this page. Something to pique the interest of readers browsing our website, to entice them to click through to the book’s blurb and then excerpt.

I remember being at a conference a few years back and someone at our lunch table asking another author there about the book she wrote. I remember it was a historical but that’s all I remember because she spent the next 15 minutes talking, in depth, about the plot of her book and all the details. Ouch. Those are the times that I have to really struggle to pay attention.

It’s harder if it happens during a pitch session because, let’s be honest, it’s hard for any of us to be talked to for 8 to 10 minutes without drifting off and thinking about lunch (unless you’re at lunch, in which case you’re thinking about your post-lunch nap and how much you’d like one). But I can be hooked by a plot refined down to its most interesting conflicts and ideas. Something that either makes me want to ask questions and find out more, or go buy the book and find out more.

Read the rest of the post on Nice Mommy – Evil Editor.

Parts one and two of this series offered an interview with Doyce Testerman, an author who’s writing experimental fiction on Twitter, the micro-blogging web application which allows a maximum length of 140 characters (including spaces).  Today the series concludes with a survey of Twitter projects in authorship and books.

Twitter has become a force to be reckoned with in authorship, publishing and media. Here’s a sampling of some of the more interesting projects and developments happening on Twitter.

FICTION:

We’ve already discussed Doyce Testerman’s @finnras project, but you may not be aware of these others.

@smallplaces – The Christian Science Monitor reported on this project from author Nick Belardes in October, 2008.

Earlier this year, Belardes was cleaning out his desk drawer when he came across an unfinished manuscript for a workplace novel called “Small Places.” He briefly considered shipping the thing off to publishers for consideration. Instead, he decided to serialize “Small Places” on Twitter, a popular microblogging site.

“It was a natural fit,” he remembers. “So many people are sitting in their gray cubicles, reading Twitter. They’re looking for something easy to digest. I thought I could put a smile on their face.”

Slowly, in fits and starts, he adapted the manuscript to terse, comedic tweets, frequently digressing into colorful observations. “I’ve grown to like small places,” runs the first post. “I like bugs, bug homes, walking stick bugs, blades of grass, ladybug Ferris wheels made out of dandelions.”

As the narrative spooled out over some 400-plus tweets, “Small Places” began to attract a sizable audience…Belardes has become a figurehead of sorts for a decidedly micromedia movement: the novel by tweet. Although exact numbers are hard to come by – many projects have been abandoned and more crop up every week – the idea appears to have real ballast among the millions of Twitter fanatics, who crave rapid bursts of overshare.

Twiller – Also in October of ’08, Media In The New Millenium reported on this project from NY Times reporter Matt Richtel.

Boulder native, New York Times reporter and Rudy Park co-creator Matt Richtel has launched his latest creative project: a novel on Twitter.

Called Twiller, it’s a thriller delivered one 140-character slice at a time. Catch it at  http://twitter.com/mrichtel.  You might want to check the plot summary first before jumping into tweets like this:

Interogators of 10days past asked: how do U no bout China&The hookers? Says I: huh? BAM; Face-punched. again: huh? again: SMACK. blackness about 22 hours ago from web

and this:

any1 no how 2 stop internl bleedin? must avoid hosptls. 11:18 AM Oct 11th from web

Richtel tweets from his PC because, he notes, “im just 2 old 2 create-n-write on a gadget smaller than a hamstr.”

@joymotel – The Phoenix reported on this project from John Kewley, as well as a few other Twitter fiction projects, in January of 2009.

Toronto ad man John Kewley — he writes concisely for a living — likens Twitter, teeming with constant updates, to a global "brainstream" where users can submerge themselves in others’ thoughts, feelings, and existential particulars. So he’s co-writing a language-dense, James Joyce– and Philip K. Dick–inspired Twitter sci-fi narrative, Joy Motel, the plot of which plugs the reader into the protagonist’s stream of consciousness.

Kewley’s writing partner, Wayne Allen Sallee, is someone he’s never met. ("We’ve never even spoken on the telephone.") Nonetheless, they correspond online, and "share a wavelength," and one day, when Sallee tweeted Kewley with "a snippet of a film noir–sounding sentence," Kewley replied in kind. "I sent him one back, to sort of build on his, and we did about 20 of those."

The pair banged on back and forth, braced by the brevity and immediacy mandated by the medium. "You can just jump on there because you have half a thought, and then an hour later, Wayne will respond," says Kewley. "We don’t know where this is going. It’s real-time writing on Twitter."

BOOK REVIEWS:

The Christian Science Monitor posts its book reviews on Twitter under the username csmonitoronline.

Flashlight Worthy Books posts lists of books deemed so good that they’re worthy of reading under the covers with a flashlight.

You may want to consider sending review copies of your books to these Twitter members; the subsequent review will be seen by all the reviewer’s ‘followers’.

The BookGeeks are a group of book reviewers operating out of London.

Mystery Books News – Information for and reviews of mystery books, television, movies, games, and more.

Chrisbookarama – Reviews from a reader in Nova Scotia.

BOOK CLUBS:

Twitter book clubs are a relatively new phenomenon, but a very good idea.  Essentially, a group of Twitter members all agree to read the same book and comment on it via Twitter.  Some book clubs have a dedicated Twitter account, but this is very limiting since only people with sign-in access to the club account can post tweets there.

Another approach, which allows literally any Twitter member in the world to join in the discussion, is to set a "hashtag" for a given book or book club.  When a reader wants to comment on the current book or discussion, she tweets as usual but includes the specified hashtag. Club members then follow the discussion by doing a search on Twitter for the specified hashtag.

A hashtag is simply a word with a pound sign (#) appended to the front, i.e., #authors.

On 3/24/09, Galleycat reported that Picador has launched a new book club on Twitter:

Picador formed a new book club on Twitter today, and at two o’clock this (Tuesday) afternoon, they will give away free copies of the inaugural book.

The club begins with Yoko Ogawa‘s "The Housekeeper and the Professor," which will be discussed on April 10, 2009 in pithy Twitter posts. Upcoming book club titles include: "A Wolf at the Table" by Augusten Burroughs, "The Story of a Marriage" by Andrew Sean Greer and "Last Last Chance" by Fiona Maazel.

The book club has its own webpage, with information about sign-up and today’s giveaway: "[Sign up for Twitter] then ‘follow’ Picador here so you can hear about the upcoming announcements and discussions. We’ll create special hash tags (#) to append to your tweets during the discussion. This way, you can simply search here with the hash tag to see what people are saying! It’s open to all and ongoing – if you missed a recent discussion day, you can still contribute."

The Canada Book Club tweets here.

You can follow the discussions of the Prose Hos book club by searching Twitter for the #prosehos hashtag, and join in by posting your own tweets with the same hashtag.

Try searching wefollow and TweetGrid to find more book clubs, twitter novels and Twitter book reviews.

This piece, by Lisa Barone, originally appeared on Outspoken Media on 3/9/09.

It’s Monday morning. Okay, it’s actually more like Monday afternoon now. And that simple fact means that I spent a big chunk of today reading and commenting on different blogs (and re-breaking my foot…). It’s part of my Monday morning Getting Caught Up process, the one that prepares me for the week ahead. Impressive considering that my brain on Mondays is still usually half dead from whatever transpired over the weekend.  But that doesn’t matter. Because it’s Monday, dammit. And now my head is filled with half-written blog posts on SEO and social media and blogging and search and everything in between.  And they’re all fighting for their proper attention.  Because Monday means writing.

Monday also means one more thing: My head. Is going. To explode. 

This is my life. And if you’ve ever been in the position of having to write content, it’s probably something you’ve experienced as well. It’s hard, that whole ‘getting it out’ thing. The ideas are there, your mind is racing, but trying to get them down…well, that’s a whole other story.

On Friday, my friend and kickass Web designer Zane DeFazio tweeted this bat signal:

"I need writing tips!"

He was trying to knock out a few awesome blog entries but couldn’t get them out of his head. He was stuck and needed some writing tips. Vince Blackham suggested we blog about it.

I get their struggles because I have them daily. Just because I’m a writer doesn’t mean it always comes easy. It doesn’t. It’s a process. But here’s what I do when I’m having a hard time getting my writing juices flowing, maybe it’ll help you as well.

Close down the distraction sites.

If you were to look over my shoulder during the day, you’d find that I’m staring at 18 different browser windows (all tabbed for her pleasure). My eyes are bouncing back and forth between information groups and my brain is about to explode. I like it that way. That’s how I take in information. I’m ADD and I jump around, always looking for more, clicking further into a Web site. Until it’s time to write.

When I’m writing, the noise has to stop.

Here’s the thing, it’s really easy to spend 5 hours writing a 400 word blog post. If I leave all my screens open, it means I’m going to notice when my Twitter Search updates. It means I’m going notice when another piece of email rolls in and I’ll have to check it immediately. I’m going to keep an eye on the Celtic game that is updating in the background. And the second my brain hits a lull, I’m going to go straight to one of my social media sites to check in there. It’s too easy to give in to the temptation and what’s easy. [Hey look, as we speak Rae is Skyping me.  I should have turned that off as well.]

These tics not only rob you of time, they also affect the quality of what you’re writing and disrupt your flow. When you’ve hit a groove and then you look away because your BlackBerry just lit up, you break your train of thought. You take yourself out of what you were doing and away from your current thought. You’ve set yourself up to come back feeling scattered and disconnected. That means more editing time.

Close it down, folks. Commit to your writing time and write. Unless Google buys it and feedburners it, Twitter will still be there when you’re done.

Start with a short sentence.

I know, this sounds stupid but I swear to God it works. I write a lot of content. Blog entries, longer articles, guest posts, comments, guides, social media stuff, etc. And if you’ve noticed, most of my posts start off with a short sentence. A quick three or four words. And I do it that way for a reason.

I love blogging. I love my job. But it can also carry a lot of pressure. The act of having to produce something daily. To constantly be funny or smart or to get a point across. It’s daunting. And there’s nothing more daunting than the sight of that blank screen with that stupid cursor flashing in your face reminding you that you’re only at the beginning of the race. Honest to God, I think that’s why we kick letters off with a simple “hi”. Anything to get you quickly get over that awkward hump and get you into the flow of writing. Because once you make it passed that, you’re in the zone. It’s like sex. Once you get passed that initial awkwardness, everything just fits together the way it’s supposed to. You remember why you’re here, what you’re doing and what your audience is waiting for.

Beginnings are scary but you can tackle them. Just say hi and get it over with.

Write without reading.

For the love of God and all things holy, writing and editing are two different tasks. Stop trying to do them at the same time.

The reason you can’t write is because you keep breaking your flow to fix that typo, to use a different word, to clean something up, to say something else, to make yourself sound smarter etc. Of course you can’t get anything down, you’re using the different sides of your brain against one another.

When you’re writing, just write. The first draft is all about getting it out. It’s about getting out all your ideas, putting it all down and losing those restraints. And that’s really the best piece of advice anyone can give you. If you’re having trouble writing, just start typing. Don’t look at the screen, don’t edit yourself, don’t read it aloud yet, don’t even pay attention to what you’re saying, just type. You can fix everything else later. But writing and editing need to be two different processes. Accept that from the beginning and stop trying to combine them.

Lisa Barone is the Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media.  Read the rest of Lisa’s terrific tips at Outspoken Media.