We believe that…
• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.REWARDS! Project creators inspire people to open their wallets by offering smart, fun, and tangible rewards (products, benefits, and experiences).
ALL-OR-NOTHING FUNDING! Every Kickstarter project must be fully funded before its time expires or no money changes hands. (It’s less risk for everyone. If you need $5,000, it’s tough having $2,000 and a bunch of people expecting you to complete a $5,000 project. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don’t receive the support you want, you’re not compelled to follow through. This is huge! It motivates. If people want to see a project come to life, they’re going to spread the word.
STORIES! Kickstarter projects are efforts by real people to do something they love, something fun, or at least something of note. These stories unfold through blog posts, pics, and videos as people bring their ideas to life. Take a peek around the site and see what we’re talking about. Stories abound.
You need to be absolutely clear about what your needs are and where the money will go, but if you have a business plan for your project (um, you do have a business plan for your project, right?) and feel that it’s possible to get it completed within the time allotted by Kickstarter, this may be the way to go. It’s certainly an interesting concept.
And if you’re actually looking for a project to fund, looking through the available opportunities is a lot of fun. It just goes to show how many creative people there are working out there.
Consider different and unusual ways of getting your project to see the light of day. And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!
]]>But FYI, the London Book Fair will be taking place this spring from the 19th to the 21st of April, 2010.
The London Book Fair is one of the global marketplaces for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. It’s not as large or as famous as the Frankfort one, but well worth taking note of. As the advertisements say,
Even in the digital age, the power of meeting face-to-face cannot be underestimated. Wherever in the world you want to do business, you can do so much more, at The London Book Fair.
Take a look at what’s going on—it’s a lovely time to visit England! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
]]>A 2009 roundup of the happenings in the book industry is offered here by USA Today. it covers the emergence of ebooks, the question of whether literary novels are dead, and the rise—yet again—of the vampire genre.
My best advice? Read about the trends, but follow your heart. Write what is in your soul to write. If it’s meant to be out there, it will be, eventually. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
]]>There may have been a time when that was enough. Writers wrote, and passed their work on to others who took it to market—edited it, packaged it, sold it, promoted it. That’s every writer’s dream, isn’t it? leave me alone to create, you do the rest.
If you’re just writing for yourself, that will work. You can sit and write to your heart’s content. Write a diary, fill notebooks with your deathless prose, feel good that you’re getting the words and thoughts and people out of your head. But if you want someone else to read what you’ve written … well, that’s going to take you out of your quiet room and your quiet writing and out into the bustle of the marketplace. Ewwww.
But take heart — there are a lot of ways to market your work, and among these many activities you can find something that will work for both you and your writing.
In the next few posts I’ll discuss some of these activities. If you haven’t thought much about marketing, try and see this as a buffet: think about each method, try it out, explore it, see if it resonates as something you feel you can enter into and work with.
One of the easiest and quickest ways to market your book—and one you can and should begin before the book is even published—is to write a focused blog. Before we go any further, write this on your brain: this is not the kind of blog where you offer opinions, share your breakfast menu, comment on the movie you saw last night, or diss your coworkers. A blog that markets a book needs to be devoted to that book, and everything that you write in it must have the goal of promoting the book.
A few years ago, Guy Kawasaki wrote a brilliant article about blogs that remains absolutely the best advice available for blogging, and I strongly urge you to read and re-read his words.
A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it. If you want to evangelize your blog, then think “book” not “diary” and market the heck out of it.
So think about writing a blog, even if it’s just to document your progress. One of my clients, Andy Kaufman, maintains this site where he blogs about what’s going on with his yet-unpublished thriller. I’d have liked to see more frequent updates, but you get the general idea (and Andy’s attention has of necessity been elsewhere). Getting people excited about your book before it’s published gives you an immediate sales lift when it does come out, and creates more buzz about it.
Buzz is what you’re looking for. Getting people to subscribe to your blog, link to your blog, talk about your blog and your book—that’s the goal. Work on it, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
]]>The submission calendar is well worth checking on a regular basis: you may have some old unpublished piece that just fits in perfectly — or be inspired to write something new! Either way, keeping up with submission information will keep you … beyond the elements of style!
]]>Remember as you browse the first rule of social media: there’s no one-size-fits-all here. Some of these sites may interest you; many of them will not. And that’s as it should be, because you don’t want to spend all of your time online! Explore the sites at your leisure, see which ones seem to work for you, try them out. If you don’t like one site, move on.
And if you find more to add to the list, drop me an email at jcezanne@customline.com and let me know!
In addition to the list above, there is a Facebook application called Visual Bookshelf that you can access from inside Facebook. It’s another community that shares reading lists and reviews.
So that’s it for now! I’ll update this list periodically, as community life on the Net is always changing, always growing … but this should get you started. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
]]>When it’s a book, the line is pretty clear: send out multiple query letters, but once someone has asked for the full proposal (um, you do have a full proposal, right?), then give that editor the courtesy of not sending it out all over the place. Tell the publication that it has three months to decide, after which you’ll feel free to submit the proposal elsewhere. That’s pretty simple.
The complications come in when you’re talking about sending out articles, short stories, op-ed pieces, and so on.
Frankly, sending your work to multiple publications is absolutely fair and reasonable. Editors receive an incredible volume of submissions, do what they do more for love than money, and are absolutely unable to respond at the speed of light. That shouldn’t keep you from carrying on with your agenda.
Common courtesy applies. If your work is accepted somewhere, immediately notify the other publications with a simple note saying, “Please withdraw my story entitled ______. I apologize for any inconvenience.”
Do you tell them? That’s another gray area. Personally, I never mention that I’m sending multiple submissions; if something is accepted, I follow the procedure outlined above. Chances are, with the few slots available and the thousands of submissions the journal receives, it’s not as if there were going to be a bidding war on my bit of flash fiction!
The bottom line? Follow the golden rule, in this and all things, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
]]>A Salon article from the end of December posits one of the (unexpected) benefits of the crash: the reemergence of the small publisher.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, Open Letter Books, a small press based at the University of Rochester, illustrated how a more nimble firm can benefit from the freeze. The publisher bid on the English translation of Mathias Enard’s novel, “Zone” — a single sentence that stretches for 500 pages. An influential translator had called the work the “book of the decade,” and Open Letter director Chad Post expected tight competition for the rights. But no one topped his offer, and he hopes to publish the translation in 2010.
“There’s not much to cut at smaller presses, so they are going to stay the same — they will have an identity coming into the recession, and they will be the same when they come out,” Post says. “It will open up opportunities for the smaller, more stable presses. The bigger houses like Knopf and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are going through an identity shift. It will become very murky what kinds of books they produce.”
(for the full story, click here)
Years ago in this column I wrote that, in essence, the mills are closing. When the economy forced the closure of New England’s textile mills, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a lot of people—a whole lot of people—found themselves without work, without help, without hope. An entire industry had changed. Those who survived were those able to take their skill sets and refashion them for other opportunities.
Sound familiar?
The mills are closing—most of the big ones are having fire sales as we speak—and the production of literature is changing, too. We too need to refashion our skill sets as well as our expectations of how we will continue to read. Reading isn’t going away any more than the wearing of textiles has. You’ll still be buying (and, some of you, writing) books ten years from now. Will they be different? Probably. But isn’t the essence of literature—communicating ideas, enabling readers to fly away on a magic carpet of fantasy—more important than how it’s delivered?
Just trying to keep things in perspective, which keeps me … beyond the elements of style!
]]>I may well have answered it in the past, but my friend and colleague Richard Bylina has recently done so far more eloquently and clearly than I ever have. Here’s his take on it:
Novel lengths vary greatly, but in general…
…50,000 is considered the threshold for a novel; however, there are many fine examples of novels shorter than that criteria: “The Great Gatsby”, “The Old Man and The Sea”, “A Christmas Carol”. They are very short novels.
Each genre has a tendency to certain lengths, for instance, some romance lines have guidelines to keep the novels at 60,000 words or cozy mysteries between 60,000 – 70,000 words. Science fiction or fantasy has a tendency toward longer lengths.
I’ve not read a lot of Patterson or Koontz, but Koontz appears to be pushing well past 100,000 words most of the time. But it would be unfair use them as a guideline. Since font, formatting, and page size vary, counting the pages of a novel for comparison becomes a fruitless exercise; however, if you want to imitate Koontz, for example, you could type in some typical passages from several books, get an average page, and then multiple by page count for a rough estimate.
For first time novelists, the generally acceptable range to target is 70-90,000 words. Somewhere around 100,000 word crosses a business threshold of initial investment in a book for an author, and first time novelists will get an additional level of scrutiny when crossing that threshold. Remember, it is a business decision for the most part.
A good thing to do is know your genre or sub-genre. What are the typical lengths of those books? Check the publishers who put out the books in your selected genre. What are their requirements?
The best thing to do is write the best book possible without worrying about the guidelines, and write it tight. Have an opening chapter so compelling that the agent WANTS to read the rest of the novel. If your best chapter is chapter 8, well, maybe that’s where the book really starts.
It’s a tough business and agents are going to be no more ruthless than critiquers who salivate over a fresh opening chapter to review. And they do it not to be ruthless, but in anticipation of something that will really grab them and keep them reading for 40-50-200,000 words. If they are disappointed, sometimes you hear about what didn’t work in no uncertain terms, or in the case of an agent – REJECTION. You don’t want to give agents any reason to start reading your novel on the defensive. If you send in a 200,000 bodice-ripping story to Harlequin…expect to be rejected without the first brilliant sentence being read.
KNOW YOUR MARKET. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. WRITE A GREAT BOOK.
He’s right, people. Listen carefully. Write what you need to write, but know that there are certain realities in the publishing world that you’ll ignore at your peril. Listen to Rick, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
]]>A lot of magazine writers subscribe (for a fee) to
Freelance Success, partly for its market guides,
guides to various markets (individual publications, what they want, who to pitch to, etc.), based on interviews.
Similar market guides are available from the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA), which is more expensive to join (and not always easy to get into).
Writers Weekly has a great list of both jobs and gigs for freelance writers.
The Great Britain-based Burry Man Writing Center not only has gigs but hosts a terrific networking site for writers called Inked-In.
One of the best resources for finding magazine and journal submission requirements that are up to date is subscription-based, but well worth the cost: it’s Meg Weaver’s Wooden Horse Database.
These reources are a great place to start … and I’ll share more as I come across them. Remember that diligence and Google are your friends! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
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