Beyond the Elements of Style

Selling to the New Age Market

Okay, I’m not really as lazy as the last couple of posts may make you think: but it seems that the past week for some reason has been filled with brilliant advice from colleagues that I just have to share. Here I’m quoting a post verbatim from one of my brothers in the National Writers Union (which, bizarrely enough, is also Local 49 of the UAW, but that’s a story for another time). Randy Peyser, who runs Author One Stop, has some advice for anyone out there who thinks she or he has the perfect manuscript on Wicca, astrology, the Tarot, or dowsing:

I run a national publishing consulting firm and shop manuscripts to all of the Mind/Body/Spirit publishers. Here’s what I can tell you about them:

While it is possible to shop directly to a publisher, you MUST have a very strong book proposal to accompany your manuscript — and, like anything, it helps if you have connections to people within that publishing house, especially to the acquisitions editors.

Here is more information you should know:

You must have a unique twist to your subject matter. No publisher is looking for material that has already been covered, and so much of the New Age thought/philosophy/techniques have been covered. That’s why Harper Collins, who used to be a major publisher of New Age books, rarely publishes them anymore. It wasn’t until The Secret that the MBS publishers started to really “rev” up again. Now there are a flood of Law of Attraction knock-offs on the market, but that phase will probably wear thin soon.

You had better have a very strong promotional plan and be out there promoting PRIOR to sending them your manuscript, because publishers are interested in authors who have eyeballs — in other words, those authors who are out in front of audiences where they are being seen continually. Likewise, the competition section of your proposal had better be strong, because otherwise publishers will know you didn’t do your homework.

I know the majority, if not all, of the Mind/Body/Spirit publishers. Never tell a publisher that you know you have a bestseller or that you know Oprah will want to interview you. They will see both of these statements as signs of an amateur.

While you don’t necessarily need an agent to approach many of the MBS publishers, you will want an agent or someone at the NWU to help you with your contract. I used an NWU contract advisor for my first book, which was published by a New Age publisher. That advisor was superb. She gave me eight hours of her time and went through every single detail, telling me what I should fight for and what rights I should not give away. That being said, if I had to do it over again, I would have hired a literary agent to negotiate the contract at an hourly rate, because I didn’t have the clout to get everything I wanted as a first-time author. If I’d had an agent working with me, I could have at least doubled my advance.

So, who are the few agents out there who accept New Age books? Anyone ever hear of Eckhert Tolle? I consistently shop manuscripts to Eckhert Tolle’s agent. So far, this agent has been willing to consider every client I’ve sent to him. My reputation is always on the line when I send something out, so a book has to be polished and a book proposal has to be exemplary before I will ever send it out to someone who can command the kind of advance that Tolle’s agent can command.

Then there’s Sylvia Brown’s agent, but she only takes manuscripts that she believes will get a high six or seven figure advance and you had better have the promotional plan in place to prove it.

There are a few other agents I work with who shop to MBS publishers and there are still other agents I hire to negotiate contracts when I’ve found a publisher for one of my clients. They will negotiate a contract for $50/hour and
have taken about five hours to do contracts for me in the past.

So, there you have it. I hope this letter does not come across as self-serving. It is truly my intention to provide information that helps those who publish in the Mind/Body/Spirit genre to have the success they desire.

Much of this is good advice that transcends genres. As you know, putting together the best possible book proposal and brilliant query letter, having a platform, and having a terrific manuscript are the keys to getting published anywhere, though perhaps particularly so in this niche area. Follow his advice and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Checking Your Amazon Rank

It’s a sad fact of modern life, but most people, once published, spend an inordinate amount of time checking their book’s ranking on Amazon. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. We don’t necessarily know what it all means, mind you, but we do it anyway.

If you’d like to feed the obsession and have someone else keep up with the comparisons for you, then you might want to check out TitleZ, a website mysteriously still in its beta version (and therefore still free) that will help you navigate the complexities of Amazon ranking for your particular title.

Want to learn more about what it all means? Then check out this article, written by one of TitleZ’s developers (looking oddly like Harrison Ford, gotta love PhotoShop…) who gives the following bottom lines:

Bearing the above very much in mind, here’s a temperature gauge you can use to get an idea about a particular title’s success. The following numbers apply to average sales ranks over time:

• Less than 100: Best-seller. Author, publisher, agent are all getting rich
• 101-1000: Extremely good performer. Any publisher/author would be thrilled.
• 1001-10,000: Very successful book. A few of these can sustain a small publishing company.
• 10,001-50,000: A successful book by most industry standards.
• 50,001-100,000: Not bad.
• 100,000 - 500,000: Not good.
• 500,000 or more: Poor.

Keep in mind that books with average ranks above 100,000 may have performed much better before we started tracking them on TitleZ. However, books that launch with ranks above 100,000 are probably not considered successful from a publishing industry point of view. Of course, the book could be selling well through non-bookstore channels such as trade shows, speaking events, etc. In general, though, we’ve found that Amazon sales ranks provides a good indicator for how a title is doing throughout the book market as a whole.

Bear in mind, also, that Amazon isn’t everything. Write a good book, develop an aggressive marketing plan, and leave the counting to others.

If you can.

And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!

Query Letters Revisited

I was recently working with a client on a query letter for a novel he’s hoping to place with a literary agent. His first draft was long, elegant, filled with images and … well, the publishing world doesn’t seem to be looking for that anymore, if indeed it ever was.

Here’s what I told him:

“General: Perhaps we should have spoken, first, about the query letter as it is today. This is a lovely and elegant letter and unfortunately will end up consistently in the rubbish; the publishing world, at least in the United States, is not looking for anything lovely and elegant. It has to be to the point, to follow a form that isn’t particularly interesting but gives agents what they need to know.

“There’s no ideal or perfect letter, but successful ones all have some things in common.

“For some examples and discussion of query letters, you may wish to visit these two blogs: Miss Snark, a literary agent, held forth at http://misssnark.blogspot.com, and the Evil Editor continues to do so at http://evileditor.blogspot.com. Miss Snark no longer writes her blog but the archives are available and while she’s never particularly nice, she is usually right, at least in my experience. The Evil Editor also addresses query letters and is also short and often nasty – but very knowledgeable.

“What most people don’t know is that your query letter is really your first marketing piece for your book. You need to try and sell the agent on it, and talk to the agent as though he/she were the reader to whom you’re trying to sell the book. Like it or not, it really is all about sizzle.

Structure: So let’s look at what needs to go into a query letter!

1. You want to start with a “hook,” literally hooking the agent into wanting to read more. An example of an excellent hook I once read is this: “What if you learned that a family member was plotting to kill the president? Would you try to prove the plot, warn the person, call the police? This is the dilemma that Mark Watkins is facing …” Now, granted, a thriller such as that one lends itself well to an exciting hook; but I think that with some thought you could do one for your book, too. Get the agent interested, make him or her want to read the book, and then move on.
2. Follow the hook with what you’re selling: essentially say that you’ll find the answer to the hook in the novel you’ve written. Include the title of the novel, the word count, and if you can possibly fit it into a genre, do so here. People like to be able to put books on shelves, figuratively as well as literally. (To determine the genre, ask yourself where booksellers will place it, what section of the store. That will give you its genre.)
3. Tell about why you’re the best person to tell this story. You did that in your draft to some extent, but make the reader feel that you’re the exact right writer. Weave your extraordinary life experiences in to the telling of the story. SHOW the agent, make him/her excited.
4. Finally, get to the specifics. What you want is to offer to send a full proposal, not the manuscript itself. This also includes a brief summary of your past publications, etc. (The proposal is phenomenally important, so don’t wait to get a request for it to begin working on it!) Agents will know what you’re talking about.

Next Steps: What I’d like you to do is a little homework. Read some of the blogs that I referenced. Read my comments and do an outline of your query letter, then put it aside and think about it some. Then rewrite the letter and send it back to me. Take heart: most effective query letters are revised many, many times!”

All of this got me thinking about the many forumlas out there, the options for doing things one way … or another. I’ve seen successful query letters that I would have said never had a chance in the world to succeed, and brilliant ones that still haven’t. The bottom line is, of course, that getting published depends on so many factors that it is in many ways a crap shoot.

The answer? Do the best you can; don’t give up; don’t take it personally; hone your craft.

And maybe buy a good-luck charm, too! Then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

What’s a Platform, and How Do I Get One?

Many authors quake at the portion of the book proposal that asks for their platform. What’s a platform? Why is it necessary?

The two questions go hand in hand. A platform is perceived by most publishers as being necessary in order to promote and market one’s book; it’s a way of reassuring the reader that you do indeed know what you’re talking about. It’s essential for nonfiction writers, but important also for novelists, especially those whose names are not (yet!) household words.

So what can you do if you don’t currently have a platform? Don’t despair; there are a number of ways of promoting yourself and your expertise in the public eye.

• develop some short how-to articles related to your topic and submit them to local print newspapers as well as to article sites (such as Helium) on the net. Make sure that you’re not submitting the same article everywhere or you’ll run into duplicate content issues; but get a lot of them out there.
• develop and market speaking topics of interest to groups like Women in Communication (AWC), your local Association of Business Communicators (ABC), and National Speakers Association (whose members often develop books to go with their platform message).
• teach a class in your subject area at a local adult education or community college facility.
• give a free presentation at your local public or city library on your topic. Build on this exposure and give more at less-local facilities. Don’t forget schools! High schools in particular are terrific venues for presentations or workshops.
• publicize yourself. Send out press releases whenever you’re involved in anything related to your topic. Send the releases to your local newspaper.

The more your name can be associated with your topic, the more you;ll be building your platform. Make sure that you keep track of all of your articles, speaking engagements, etc. in some sort of database so that the information is at your figertips when it comes time to write about your platform.

For novelists, remember that you can (and should) build your platform on more than just your writing ability. Your books will often center around a place, an activity, an occupation, or an idea; build your platform around that more tangible information and see how it helps sell books!

Building a platform takes hard work, but its rewards are myriad. Try it, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

What’s an Author To Do?

A colleague remarked to me the other day that he sees publishing going the way of the music business, with more and more “indies” appearing. He predicted that eventually there will be no conglomerates, no large publishing houses.

It’s a question being debated long and hard in a lot of venues, that’s for sure. I disagree with my colleague to some extent — what we’re seeing is more and more consolidation of the book industry (like many others — Beatrice Foods owns just about everything these days, doesn’t it?) and right now there are only really about seven publishers out there that matter. Oh, there are tons of other ways of getting one’s book out, and I think that that’s what my colleague is talking about. But there are some real differences between the music industry and the book industry that stand in the way of our doing what they did:

1. More and more musicians are finding that they do better just “giving” away their music: creating buzz on the net, making downloads easy, that sort of thing. Music and viral marketing were made for each other. It’s much harder to get that kind of buzz going about an author: you can’t hear two minutes of their work and decide that it’s cool.
2. Those same musicians are finding that the money is coming in in different ways, now that they’re giving away the downloads. Two major places where they’re generating income is in swag (shirts, posters, hats, jewelry, etc.) and concert tours. Neither of these is a viable money-maker even for a major author, much less anybody else.

So I don’t see that as a model. Things will change, mind you; people will hack the ebook readers and get books for free, no question about that, and we need to be ready for it (and not many really are, so many authors I know are crying that the sky is falling but not looking for creative solutions for shelter); but I think we need to find another model for it all.

And until then, the only way to get an endcap at Borders or Barnes & Noble is to pay for it, and only the Big Publishers can do that. Being in a period of transition is uncomfortable, but there’s part of me that’s hopeful: the world was never changed by people living in their comfort zones, and it seems to me that the future holds a lot of opportunities for authors — we just have to figure out how to seize them.

And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

What’s in a Bestseller?

The algorithms are kept so secret as to make Google’s search terms an open book. What I’m talking about, of course, is how bestseller lists are devised and maintained. Who decides? Based on what? Every author wants to know; and anyone who claims to know is deluding him or herself.

Some authors choose to take matters into their own hands. Back when the New York Times bestseller list was based on sales alone, Jacqueline Susann bought enough copies of her new book, The Valley of the Dolls to fill her garage … and launch her to the top of the bestseller list, thus making the continued status into a self-fulfilling loop. Did the book deserve such status? Of course it didn’t; but that’s not the way the lists work.

As long as there are systems, there will be people gaming the systems.

We’re seeing a similar phenomenon now, with all the marketers shilling programs to send one’s book to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. It’s one of the few lists that can still be manipulated, and authors with enough contacts (usually marketing writers themselves) are following the plan of getting a vast number of people to purchase the book at the same time, thus catapaulting it to the top of the list for a precious fifteen seconds of fame, and thereafter claiming the title of bestselling author for themselves. It’s dishonest and manipulative, but it’s — at least as of this writing — still feasible.

Yet the list from the New York Times remains the most impressive and elusive of them all. And, as we learn from the Times’s own Clark Hoyt in this op-ed, it seems that the Times’s assessments are byzantine enough to put the mystery novels that grace its list to shame.

One of the first things I learned is that much of what the publishing world thinks it knows about the list is wrong or out of date. For example: The Book Review editor, Sam Tanenhaus, has nothing to do with compiling it, though it is published weekly in his section; it is handled by the news surveys department. The list isn’t tabulated from paper questionnaires sent to booksellers; it’s entirely computerized, after a recently completed two-year project. The roster of outlets surveyed is not adjusted only once every five years; it changes constantly.

The best route? Write a good book. No; write a great book. Market the hell out of it. Speak at libraries and church fairs and conferences. Seek out reviews from reputable sources and use them as part of your marketing. Leave the rest to the gods.

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

To Be Edited … or Not To Be Edited?

Okay, so here’s the thing. No one likes being edited. Any author, any writer who tells you that he or she enjoys the process, is lying. That’s all that there is to it.

Second truth: everyone needs to be edited. Everyone. Every writer has idiosyncracies at best and errors at worst, and there is no way that the writer can be aware of them all. The fact is that one editor probably won’t be aware of them all, either, but he or she has a lot better chance of it than does the writer.

So where does that leave you?

You’ve written your book. You’re about to embark on a search for an agent or publisher. You decide that the first thing to do is to get it — your masterpiece, that is — professionally edited. Right?

Wrong.

I’m not saying that your book doesn’t need editing; au contraire, I’m quite willing to bet that it needs a lot of editing. But that same amount of editing is also going to be very expensive, and it may not be the best use of your funds at this time.

Instead, consider this: what you really want to do is capture the attention and interest of a literary agent or of a publisher. That’s your real goal here, not having a picture-perfect manuscript.

What will you be sending out in your quest for arousing that interest? Certainly not the entire manuscript! Instead, you’ll be sending out a proposal, which will include — at most — three chapters of the manuscript. It will also include other essentials, such as a synopsis, an analysis of competing books already in the marketplace, a statement of your platform, an outline, and other components.

You’re starting to get the idea: I can tell. Your first order of business is to make this proposal the best proposal it can possibly be. So by all means have it edited — and have those first three chapters edited, also — and hold off on the whole manuscript until someone has asked you to send it to them.

You can have someone write the proposal — it’s one of the things that I do for clients — but that’s relatively expensive. Consider writing your own and then sending it to a top-notch editor. You’ll pay up to a couple thousand dollars, but you won’t be in for too much; and if no one asks for it (perish the thought!), you’ll still be able to pay next month’s rent!

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Tolkien, Editors, and the Faerie People

All right, it’s not going to sound like this article has very much to do with language, but bear with me. I’ll try to twist it aound there before I’m finished. Maybe.

The truth is, my mind is filled with swirling colors and haunting music. I’m in Philadelphia this weekend at FaerieCon, a gathering for all things and beings magical, mystical, and downright strange. There are Good Fairies and Bad Fairies (you can probably guess which I find more interesting), Green Men and satyrs, even a dragon or two … and it’s all fabulous good fun.

Saturday morning I sat and listened to a lecture by Tolkien illustrator Ted Nasmith, and afterward my stepdaughter Anastasia brought up what she calls Tolkien’s ability to multitask, writing and lecturing and, in the midst of it all, managing to create several complete languages.

And they are extraordinary. A list barely scratches the surface of the riches and complexeties of languages invented for a race that exists only in one’s mind, yet whose history, sociology, and psychology are so clearly understood and articulated that, to many and for all these years after his death, they seem real. It’s not just a gift, though I’ll never argue that Tolkien wasn’t gifted; it’s also an enormous undertaking that could only be done from some sort of passion in the soul.

And for those of you who look to this column for practical advice, I had a nice long talk with Kerry Estevez, the editor over at Medallion Press, who noted that many, many more books would be accepted if writers (and, for that matter, literary agents) would just read the submission guidelines and follow them. Doesn’t sound that difficult, folks. She’s currently looking for historical fiction/fantasy, and if there’s some romance woven in, so much the better!

So pay attention to guidelines for the good of your publications list, and pay attention to the fairies for the good of your heart. And you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Back to publishing …

Okay, you’ve all been kind as I’ve wandered off a bt in the past few weeks, so I thought I’d offer something useful this week by way of expiation. So I thought I’d give you a quick cheat-sheet on what editors are looking for these days in manuscripts. This information is distilled from talking with a number of agents and acquisitions editors over the past year, so hopefully it’s both relevant and recent.

So what do they want?

First off is, alas, nothing to do with the work itself; it’s audience demand. Is there an audience demand for this book? If not, it’s over before it’s even begun.

Second is still not about the book itself, it’s author platform and marketing. Will you be able — and willing — to promote this book? How? Do you have a specific plan? What is it?

Third is — finally — about the book itself. How does it differ from other, possibly similar, works? Can it stand apart … and stand alone?

Fourth is cost. Publishers are far more willing to take a risk on a book that costs less to produce. What this generally translates into is word count: long books had better be extraordinary and a sure thing.

Fifth: timing. This can move up to number one if the issue the book deals with is in the news and likely to stay there for the time it will take to bring the book to market.

Sixth and final is whether or not the manuscript will fit this particular publisher’s list. “Sorry, it doesn’t meet our current needs” can, unfortunately, mean just that.

So there you go. Bear these points in mind as you prepare your next book proposal and you’ll be beyond the elements of style!

When Shouldn’t You Sign The Contract?

It’s an unconventional thought, but there are times when a writer or editor should not make a sale. When ethics becomes an issue for you, then you are forced to turn down certain clients or publications.

We’ve talked a lot about honesty, and here are some situations when honesty may be an issue with a sale:

• You don’t have the best solution for that client.
• The new business could harm the business of existing clients.
• The client asks you to engage in an unethical or dishonest practice.
• The client’s practices do not meet your standards for ethical behavior.

How about the issue of quality – of standing behind your service or product?

• The client makes unreasonable workload or pricing demands and it might not be worth what you could charge to work with them (this is an issue of the client’s quality).

• You won’t have enough time to do the job up to your normal standards.
• The client’s product is not up to your standards of acceptable quality.

While it may be counter-intuitive to turn down a sale, there are times when it is the right thing to do.

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!