Video Excerpts from the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar

Brandi Bowles, Emmanuelle Alspaugh, Colleen Lindsay and Jason Allen Ashlock relate encouraging stories of publishing success. Excerpted from a panel at the November 2009 Agent-Author Seminar.



Brandi Bowles, Emmanuelle Alspaugh, Colleen Lindsay, and Jason Allen Ashlock address commonly held myths about the publishing industry.



The 2010 Backspace Writers Conference & Agent-Author Seminar will be held May 27 - 29 in NYC.

No Consensus on “Perfect Project” at Backspace Writer’s Conference (But That’s a Good Thing)

by Sanna Levine

One hundred eight writers attended the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar in New York on Nov. 5-6, expecting to go home with a query letter and two pages of their novels that no agent could resist. No one did, although one writer went home with a signed contract (ed note: as of this posting four writers who attended the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar received representation).

That’s at least in part because the 30 agents who participated in the conference have 30 different ideas of the perfect book project – good news for writers because it opens the field to an enormous range of genres, topics, and voices.

The Perfect Project

For example, Rebecca Strauss, an agent at McIntosh & Otis with a background as a book scout at Sony Pictures, described her ideal book as “a book club dream project with dark humor that makes me cry.” Adam Schear of DeFiore and Company wants “something new, something touching” in both the fiction and non-fiction books he represents, although the precise specs of his perfect project defy definition. “I know it when I see it,” he said.

Alexandra Machinist, JD, an agent with The Linda Chester Literary Agency who looks for everything from swift-moving narrative non-fiction to Jane Austen to cyberpunk, likes working with screenwriters. “They know how to deliver product on deadline – a high sign of a professional,” she said. When demonstrating “platform” – the writers’ point of departure for promoting their work, such as expertise in a technical field for non-fiction writers or a widely read blog – she prefers that writer’s don’t give personal issues supremacy, such as stating biographical details in the first sentence of a query letter.

Laney Katz Becker, an agent with Folio Literary Management, LLC, disagrees. “If you’re writing about schizophrenia, I want to know if you’re schizophrenic. Publicists can use that information to sell and promote your book.”

All of the other agents at the opening panel (What Literary Agents Want) agreed that any book they represent will have a great voice, excellent writing, and a sense of humor – but those are a matter of each agent’s personal preference. “Voice” is subjective, said Ms. Katz Becker. “Some agents will hate your voice, and one will love it. That’s why you have to keep trying.”

Miriam Kriss, an agent with Irene Goodman Literary Agency who focuses on commercial fiction, looks for an “effortless” writer’s voice. When she finds the voice that makes her forget she’s reading, she calls the author immediately, “shaking and worrying that another agent will get there first.”

Consensus on What Not to Do

Beyond the prerequisites of superior voice, writing, and humor, agents agreed on what they didn’t want: vampires, zombies, and memoirs that could interest only the writers and their mothers. The exceptions, said Jennifer DeChiara, president of Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency, are memoirs with “memorable voice and unique stories, but the sad truth is that most lives aren’t that interesting.”

Like the panelists, the agents at one query letter workshop agreed on what they didn’t like. Paige Wheeler of Folio Literary Management and Stephany Evans of FinePrint Literary Management slashed bio paragraphs from a half-dozen over-long letters. “Unless you won a writing contest, don’t mention it,” said Ms. Evans.

Other query letter faux pas? Don’t mention where you grew up unless it’s important to the story. Don’t tell every plot twist – just the broad strokes. Don’t make grandiose comparisons to literary greats. Nobody will believe you just wrote the next Harry Potter series. In fact, don’t mention a multi-book series at all: A publisher doesn’t want to be stuck with a three-book series if the first book bombs. And don’t ever, ever demean yourself with ingratiating sign-offs such as “I know you’re a very busy person, so thank you for taking the time to read my letter.”

Even when agents agree on a well-written letter for an interesting project, personal preference often tips the balance between a final thumbs-up-or-down decision. For example, Ms. Wheeler and Ms. Evans of FinePrint Literary Management told Helen DePrimo “don’t change a word” of her four-paragraph query letter for a southern gothic novel.

Accordingly, Helen, who traveled from New Hampshire to attend the conference, was one of the few writers to enjoy a leisurely lunch on Thursday; most others spent the 90-minute break frantically revising and printing their letters for the afternoon workshop. In the afternoon, Lois Winston of Ashley Grayson Literary Agency and Janet Reid of FinePrint were less enthusiastic about Helen’s query, asking for less bio and more content about the story and characters.

“They said to lead the letter with the plot summary and to forget about comparables,” Helen said. “They liked the voice but not the clichés.”

Responding to both sets of advice, Helen made several versions of the letter, sending the original to the morning leaders and the revised version to the afternoon’s leaders. A week after the conference, she had a request for first refusal and several requests for the full manuscript.

Value of Face Time

Experienced, polished writers like Helen can use the face time with agents to their advantage, but not all writers are ready for publication. “I get hundreds of queries in my inbox every week,” said Gina Panettieri, President and Executive Editor of Talcott Notch Literary Agency. Only a very small percentage of queries provoke her interest.

Jennifer DeChiara reports that her days are “insanely busy. Days are for answering mail, making calls, drafting contracts,” she said. “Evenings and weekends are for reading.” Like Ms. Panettieri, she considers relatively few submissions ready for publication.

In spite of the discouraging numbers, it’s a myth that there’s no place for debut manuscripts, said Colleen Lindsay, an agent at FinePrint Literary Management (she also ran the contest whose four winners won scholarships to the Backspace conference). “A lot of agents and publishers are looking for fresh new voices,” without which the publishing industry would soon founder and fade.

The constant need for new talent is one reason why agents, with their time deficits and swollen inboxes, attend conferences like Backspace, where they’re sure to be inundated with even more queries.

Lois Winston, an agent with Ashley Grayson Literary Agency as well as a published writer herself, attends because the conference queries are better qualified. “The writers who come are more publishable. They’re serious about their craft and they’re educated about the business,” she said. “They’ve invested time and tuition, and they’re responsive to advice and instruction.”

That responsiveness is an important attribute of the signed author, Paige Wheeler said during Thursday morning’s panel discussion. “We ask writers to be patient, share information, and not to take critiques as put-downs.”

She also attends because the conference gives respite from the agent’s busy but solitary workday. “It’s just me and my computer and my phone most of the time,” she said.

Janet Reid, an agent with FinePrint, agrees. “It’s a social thing,” said. “We’re a community.”

About Self-Publishing

Regardless of how books are published and distributed, there will always be a place for good storytelling, Colleen Lindsay said at the closing panel discussion, "Breaking In: The Secret to Becoming a Published Author." Since e-books currently account for less than one percent of books, rumors of the traditional publishing model’s demise are greatly overstated.

However, there is a place for self-publishing, especially for topics with a captive audience outside regular retail avenues, such as a notable book about equine massage therapy. “Self publishing can be done right, but more often it’s done wrong,” said Ms. Lindsay. “Poor sales will be modeled, and writers can have trouble selling future books.”

Broad distribution and publicity channels – drugstores, Costco, Sam’s Club, Barnes & Noble -- are undeniable advantages of big-house publishing. Even then, publishers don’t always have the resources to throw at their mid-list books.

Another myth that needs debunking, said Jason Allan Ashlock, a principal at Movable Type Literary Group, is that because so many bad books see the light of day, editors must be lazy and indifferent. “Editors are usually smart, hardworking, and energetic in advocating their books,” he said. “Writers need to be self-critical.”

*****

Sanna Levine is a debut novelist with 25 years experience writing for trade publications. She attended a Backspace conference for the first time in November 2009 and went home with two requests for full manuscripts and a kick-ass query letter in case those requests don't pan out.

Bouncing Eyeballs and Other Unintended Meanings

by John Robert Marlow

LITERAL VS. FIGURATIVE

Unintended meanings are mood-killers. This is as true on the page as is it is in life: you say one thing, your listener hears another, and trouble soon follows. They heard every word you said, and accurately too—but they took those words to mean something very different from what you intended.

Consider the following passage:

“His eyes bounced between Teddy, Mandy, the girl, the geologist, then back to Franklin.” Read literally, this tells us that “his eyes” are flying around the room, bouncing between characters like a pinball between posts. And while it’s true that very few readers are going to take this figure-of-speech sentence literally, many will nonetheless read it the wrong way. When they do, one of two things will happen: they will stop, go back, and read it again to clarify—or they will laugh. The first reaction is never good; it “breaks” the read and kills momentum. In a work not intended to be comedic, the second reaction is also not-good.

When I first read this bit (an actual line from one of the manuscripts I’ve edited, though the names have been changed to protect the innocent), it conjured up images of John Anderton in the film Minority Report, chasing his freshly-dropped eyeballs as they bounced down the corridor at Precrime. Aiding and abetting this impression was the fact that, in this particular manuscript, one of the first murder victims had his eyeballs scooped from his head—making a literal sentence about bouncing eyeballs somewhat more credible than might otherwise be the case.

Another zinger: “Judy’s eyebrows jumped like she was impressed, then walked toward the front door and stopped at the fish tank.” That’s one lively pair of eyebrows. It is of course Judy doing the walking. So here again, we have a perfect example of grammar gone slightly askew, and completely changing the sentence’s intended meaning–so much so that, in this instance, there is no multiple choice: the unintended meaning–walking eyebrows–is the only one present. “Judy raised her eyebrows as if impressed, then walked toward the front door and stopped at the fish tank,” on the other hand, would at least be clear, if poorly constructed.

DANGEROUS SITUATIONS

You might expect such unintended meanings to be rare, but this is not so. Most manuscripts have at least a few—admittedly less bizarre—multiple-choice sentences. The vast majority are unique to the stories in which they appear. Still, when you’ve read enough manuscripts, you begin to notice that certain. grammatically dangerous situations lend themselves to particular variants of this problem.

One that pops up consistently goes something like this: Our heroes—call them Dick and Gwendolyn—are trapped in an old warehouse, where they’re hunted by armed thugs. Dick ambushes Thug One and takes his gun. Telling Gwendolyn to stay put, Dick moves forward, gun at the ready. Suddenly, Thugs Two and Three appear. The next line is:

Dick shot Gwendolyn a glance.

Tense scene, mounting suspense, edge-of-the-seat reading and then—Dick shot Gwendolyn? Of course not but, thanks to unfortunate grammar, that’s the way it reads. And that’s your reader’s first impression. It doesn’t matter how skillful you’ve been to this point, or how much suspense, drama, and reader involvement you’ve managed to create—it’s all gone, right there. Shot to hell, you might say, along with poor Gwendolyn. The good news is, the heroine will recover. The bad news is, the writer may not.

Quick tip: when you’ve got characters running around with projectile weapons, thinking they may have to shoot someone, never—ever—use the word “shot” unless someone has in fact fired a gun (or crossbow, or whatever). In different circumstances, this phrasing is perfectly acceptable; here, it is not.

MUDDLED MEANINGS

Unintended meanings are not always so dramatic but, dramatic or otherwise, they do always interfere with a clear, smooth-flowing read. This holds true for both fiction and nonfiction.

In this example, we have a character kneading a small, pliable object: “Now the size and shape of a pistachio, or tiny football, he achieved what he wanted and gently laid it to rest inside a wooden cigar box.” Read literally, this says that he—meaning our character—has somehow become the size of a pistachio.

More often, unintended meanings are mundane, and lead readers astray on such simple matters as choreography (specific physical actions and the order in which they occur), or which character performed a specific action or spoke a particular line of dialogue:

“O’Rourke was dead, shot in the head by an off duty cop fleeing the scene of a robbery.” It’s clear that O’Rourke is dead—but was he shot while he (O’Rourke) was fleeing the scene of a robbery, or was he shot by a cop who was himself fleeing the scene of a robbery? Even without crooked cops (which this story had), the meaning is not quite clear. Also unclear is whether the person fleeing the scene of the robbery actually committed that robbery.

The addition of a single word would clarify this: “O’Rourke was dead, shot in the head by an off duty cop while fleeing the scene of a robbery.” (To get the opposite meaning, add two words: “O’Rourke was dead, shot in the head by an off duty cop who was fleeing the scene of a robbery.” Still, the phrasing itself—a cop fleeing a crime scene—runs sufficiently against expectations as to warrant rephrasing, or the addition of a second, clarifying sentence. Even though the meaning is technically clear, the reader may think he’s misread it.)

Another example: “I pulled into the trees, trying to get Frank’s car out of sight and then turned around so I could see whoever came down the road and waited.” This reads as if the narrator is hoping to see someone who comes down the road and waits, but is meant to tell us that the narrator is waiting to see someone who comes down the road. The unfortunate addition of the phrase “Frank’s car” introduces a point of possible confusion here: is the narrator looking at Frank’s car and trying to ensure that he himself cannot be seen by anyone who’s already in (or might get into) Frank’s car—or is he himself driving Frank’s car? A third point of confusion: is the narrator turning around, or is he turning a car around?

“It’s a friend of hers, her son, punk kid.” Is it a friend of hers, or a friend of her son’s? And who’s the punk kid—her son, or her friend’s son?

““He really does look much healthier again,” she said as they walked into the market.” In this scene, two women are walking together—but which is speaking? Because the speaker is not identified, the line could be read as having been spoken by either character.

As writers, we’re expected to have an exceptional facility with language. With few exceptions (political speechwriting and a few ex-presidents come to mind), we are in the business of making ourselves perfectly clear. Unintended ambiguity—“multiple choice sentences” that can be read in more than one way—do a disservice to both reader and writer.

Exceptions are few: situations where a character is deliberately employing multiple meanings (think of Klaatu in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, saying “I’m a friend to the earth”), or where you as author are doing the same for purposes of deception, comedic effect, etc.

CONCLUSION

Unintended meanings are the antithesis of good writing. The reader is taken out of the moment, plucked from the world of the story like Dorothy from Kansas, or Neo from the Matrix. What should have been dramatic is now confusing or–worse–comedic. The spell we’ve worked so hard to weave is now broken; the reader who a moment ago didn’t know the real world existed, now marveling at our ineptitude.

Multiple meanings creep into our work—and, often, remain there—for the same reason typos do: we as authors know how the sentence is supposed to read, and so that’s the way we read it, regardless of what’s actually on the page. For us, only one meaning is possible. For someone unfamiliar with the work (and with what was going through our heads when we wrote it), the meaning of each sentence is conveyed by the words of which it is composed—and nothing else.

So as you write, keep this question in the back of your mind: Is there any possible way to misread this sentence? If the answer is yes, rephrase it. When the manuscript is complete, proof it with the same question in mind. Then have someone else do the same. Hunt these sentences down without hesitation, pity, or remorse.

Then kill them—before they kill you.

*****

(Reprinted with permission: copyright © by John Robert Marlow)

John Robert Marlow is a published novelist, optioned screenwriter, and professional editor. This article first appeared on his Self Editing Blog, which contains free advice on editing your own novel, screenplay, or nonfiction book.

No Excuse For Bad Ads

This post comes to us from MJ Rose's always popular blog: Buzz, Balls & Hype.

In the world of publishing and promotion MJ is a formidable force. Much can be learned by reading her blog, but much more can be learned by working with MJ to learn how to promote your books. Whether you have a dozen books on the shelves of every bookstore in the country, or your debut novel's release date is fast approaching and you've no idea what to do next, MJ can help. From the self-published to the newly and soon-to-be-published, to those lucky and talented few who have been publishing for years, MJ's class is an investment in your career. More about the Buzz Your Book class can be found here, and in the meantime, here's a blog post from MJ (October, 2009).

*****

I'm going to start tweeting/blogging about bad book ads. Good ads too when I see them.

Today's a bad ad day.

IMHO there's no excuse for lousy creative.

Good books... great books... deserve great ads.

This is the problem with saving money - perfectly lovely people in publishing who don't know how to do a good ad write the ads for books.

You can make toast is a toaster without much education. But you cannot make a souffle without some lessons or a really good recipe.

Ditto with ads.

90% of the ads we see today for books are toast. I love Audible - I am a member of Audible - I'd work with them on ITW projects - but have you seen the TV ads they are spending so much money on? Nothing provocative or imaginative about them. Think for a moment about the magic of listening to a book while you are on a boring commute.

Take Target- today in the NYT online they are spending mega dollars advertising four books. Anyone looking at that page on a normal screen can not read 3 out of the 4 titles/covers of the books they are advertising.

*****

Check out MJ's "Buzz Your Book" online class. It's a 6 week long intense class, includes a free eBook and it sells out every year.

*****

About M.J. Rose

M.J. Rose, is the international bestselling author of 10 novels; Lip Service, In Fidelity, Flesh Tones, Sheet Music, Lying in Bed, The Halo Effect, The Delilah Complex, The Venus Fix, The Reincarnationist, and The Memorist. Rose is also the co-author with Angela Adair Hoy of How to Publish and Promote Online, and with Doug Clegg of Buzz Your Book. She is a founding member and board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. She runs two popular blogs; Buzz, Balls & Hype and Backstory.

Getting published has been an adventure for Rose who self-published Lip Service late in 1998 after several traditional publishers turned it down. Editors had loved it, but didn't know how to position it or market it since it didn't fit into any one genre. Frustrated, but curious and convinced that there was a readership for her work, she set up a web site where readers could download her book for $9.95 and began to seriously market the novel on the Internet.

After selling over 2500 copies (in both electronic and trade paper format) Lip Service became the first e-book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as being the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.

Rose has been profiled in Time magazine, Forbes, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Working Woman, Newsweek and New York Magazine. Rose has appeared on The Today Show, Fox News, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and features on her have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, including USAToday, Stern, L'Official, Poets and Writers and Publishers Weekly.

Rose graduated from Syracuse University and spent the '80s in advertising. She was the Creative Director of Rosenfeld Sirowitz and Lawson and she has a commercial in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. She lives in Connecticut with Doug Scofield, a composer, and their very spoiled dog, Winka.

Secrets to Writing Best-selling Thrillers

by Gayle Lynds

Ever wonder why so many thrillers top the best-seller lists? It’s no secret — the best are not only pulse-pounding page-turners, they’re vested with the excitement of characters who are alive and intriguing. If there are any rules, that is the first one.

At the same time, whether you’re writing about spies, as I do, or lawyers or scientists, the second rule is to be captivated by your subject. If you’re not, how can you expect your reader to be? There’s nothing duller than a novel about espionage when the author has no real interest in intelligence, or about art thieves when the writer has no emotional connection to art.

But if you’re curious about how a spymaster convinces an “asset” to work for him even though it’s against the asset’s best interests, or how a thief can identify a real Georgia O’Keeffe from a fake one, then you’re embarking on an adventure — and readers will be excited to join you on the ride.

Most thrillers share several common traits. One is a “high concept.” Unfortunately, that’s a term tarnished by Hollywood’s misunderstanding of it. A high concept is simply a wonderful, catchy idea that immediately appeals to the imagination. For example: A young man returns home from college to find his uncle has killed his father and married his mother.

I’m sure you recognize that famous story — Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare was the king of high concept. Here’s mine for my most recent novel, The Last Spymaster: America’s most honored and famous spymaster is arrested for treason, sentenced to life at a fortresslike maximum security prison — and escapes.

Another commonality you’ll want to consider is high stakes. If you’ve attended novel-writing classes, you’ve no doubt heard endlessly the admonition, “You must have conflict!” Indeed. But not just any conflict. Thrillers are writ large, with big ideas, and ultimately big characters. So the conflict must be large, too — for a group.

In The Last Spymaster, I write about a dangerous arms shipment that could shift the balance in favor of terrorists. That’s a frightening thought, isn’t it? Ah-ha — then it’s worth writing about. In a thriller about art thieves, it could be a shipment of paintings that will bring down a government once it’s revealed the leaders have been participating in illegal trafficking of all sorts.

But high stakes are meaningless if they’re not also attached to characters we care about. The idea that thrillers are empty-headed chase books is antiquated. Yes, there are always weak and even bad books in all fields, and the thriller genre is no exception. But at the same time there are highly literary and important novels in all fields, too. I’m sure that’s what you want to create.

As you develop a main character and a few subsidiary characters that your reader will care about, remember they must also have a personal stake in the story. In my novel, Elaine Cunningham is a CIA hunter who is assigned to secretly find and bring back the spymaster. Her involvement becomes personal quickly, because it seems the spymaster has reversed the game and is hunting her. In our art thief’s book, the heroine could be a museum curator who’s about to be charged for stealing two multimillion-dollar Georgia O’Keeffe paintings.

Heroes and heroines come in all sizes and shapes, and they don’t have to be superhuman — not even in thrillers. They can start as ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. As the story unfolds, they find unknown courage and strength and ultimately risk their lives to act extraordinarily. Many of us do not see those qualities in ourselves, but the truth is that for some people, just rising out of bed every day to face what seems to them a cold and unfriendly world is a large act of bravery.

Thrillers also tend to be written in multiple viewpoint. In other words, through the eyes of each major character, almost as if you’re creating a separate novel about each character. Then the stories intersect at dramatic moments. Multiple viewpoint gives a sense of sprawl, of momentousness, and it’s a tool to involve the reader deeply, because readers make an emotional commitment to characters when they’re inside the character’s mind, thinking and feeling along with the character. Once you become skilled at this, you’ll discover that when two characters have a confrontation, the reader will be invested in both. When that happens, the reader is riveted, unconsciously rooting for both — even if one is the villain.

In all books, from so-called literary to the lowest of pulp novels, the villain drives the plot. In multiple-viewpoint thrillers, the villain’s role is particularly crucial. If you don’t respect your villain, if you don’t fear him or her, neither will your reader. Too often I see manuscripts in which the author has unwittingly used details that weaken the villain or even poke fun at him or her. Don’t give your villain a toupee. Don’t let him or her act like a fool or be stupid. Make your villain smart, a more-than-worthy opponent, because without your villain — you have no story.

Thrillers are known for their exotic settings. All of us like to travel in our minds to other worlds, other experiences, and have an adventure. Thrillers by their nature guarantee that, and it’s one of the reasons readers love them.

Still, you don’t have to place your novel in Timbuktu or Paris, although you certainly can. An exotic atmosphere can arise from what appears to be an ordinary setting — a zoo, a newspaper city room, a morgue, an abandoned ghost town, a barrio, a palace. Part of your job is to make that environment fresh, to give details that open your readers’ eyes so they feel the spine-tingling excitement of being on a journey of discovery.

Perhaps the most critical tool in your thriller arsenal is suspense. I keep two words clipped to my bulletin board — “jeopardy” and “menace.” Simply put, your hero and heroine must be in jeopardy, and your villain must provide menace. Never use heavy-handed techniques such as “Had I but known....” Readers are far too sophisticated — and you are, too — for that.

One way to build suspense is through detail. For instance, in The Last Spymaster, the spymaster goes into a beautiful forest to escape a “janitor” — a hired killer. Still, I never refer to the forest as beautiful. In the spymaster’s frame of mind, as he’s being shot at and chased, he’s not going to see the loveliness of it. Instead, he’ll see the shadows as dark and forbidding, and the sound of a squirrel rustling away as a warning that his hunter is closing in.

We can analyze and dissect endlessly, trying to understand each individual trait, but in the end, a book is a single piece. As you grow as a writer, the bits weave together more easily, and the tools I’ve discussed become so natural that you must think less and less about them. That’s not to say that writing thrillers — or writing any book — is undemanding. We write because we love to read, and a fine thriller, for me and millions of others, gives me many hours of reading joy.

© 2006 Gayle Lynds

New York Times bestseller Gayle Lynds is the award-winning author of eight international espionage novels, including THE LAST SPYMASTER, THE COIL, MASQUERADE, and MESMERIZED, which are published in some 20 countries. Her books have won such awards as "Novel of the Year" (THE LAST SPYMASTER) given by the Military Writers Society of America, and have been People magazine "Page-Turner of the Week" and "Beach Read of the Week."

Publishers Weekly lists her work among the top ten spy novels of all time. BookPage concurs: "Gayle Lynds has joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carre." With Ludlum, she created the Covert-One series and wrote three of the novels. One of them, THE HADES FACTOR, was a CBS miniseries in April 2006.

A member of the Association for Intelligence Operatives, she is co-founder and co-president (with David Morrell) of International Thriller Writers, Inc., and is listed in Who’s Who in the World. Born in Nebraska, raised in Iowa, she now lives in Southern California. You can visit her at www.GayleLynds.com.

Writing = Emotion

Now for something a little lighter . . . . .

Over and over again at the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar last week, agents emphasized how crucial it is that our writing engenders an emotional response in our readers. Without that connection, writing is just words on a page.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share one of the most emotionally moving and inspiring musical performances I've ever seen. Enjoy!

Fraud In Publishing (Jeff Moores)

Anyone who’s ever been a victim of fraud can probably still taste the feeling. It's like biting into rancid meat. The sort of taste all the Tic-Tacs and Altoids in the world won't cure. It makes you feel vulnerable, alone, insecure, perhaps even damaged in some small way. It makes you gun-shy, unwilling or unable to trust. It makes you cynical.

Why is fraud so rampant in the publishing industry?

Is it because writers want so badly to be accepted and successful? Is it because there’s so much to learn, and so few places and people to teach it?

I’m not sure. I wish I knew, and I wish there was a way to put an end to it all.

Fraud is like a cancer that keeps coming back. We can excise it, but it blooms again in another spot. We can treat it, but we can’t always stop it. We can try to prevent it, but we’ll never rid the world of it completely.

We’ve all heard the stories of people pretending to be legitimate literary agents, then charging bogus fees to unsuspecting writers, or recommending freelance editors who give kickbacks in the form of crisp US currency.

There are websites where authors can go to compile information on these people, to help prevent it from happening again, to educate, to make one another aware.

Our good friend David Kuzminski runs just such a site called Preditors & Editors where aspiring authors can research agents and editors they may be unsure of, especially in cases where there’s conflicting information, or little to no information available.

Two wonderful women, Victoria Strauss and Ann Crispin, maintain a website called Writer Beware which is part of a larger organization, The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

So we seem to have a decent handle on prevention, but as we all know, sometimes these cancers, these hucksters, these thieves, slip under the radar. Sometimes they can’t be prevented until they’ve already stolen someone’s hard-earned money.

Backspace was recently fooled by a man named Jeff Moores who claimed to be a literary agent, but had gone into business as a literary consultant. We did our homework. We checked Publishers Marketplace to ensure Mr. Moores had a legitimate track record selling books to reputable publishers. He did. We checked Preditors & Editors to ensure he wasn’t listed in the negative. He wasn’t. We asked around if anyone had worked with him, or knew of him, and knew for any reason why we shouldn’t accept him. No one did.

So, we let him into our virtual home. We allowed him to interact with our good friends, and because we did several people had their hard-earned money stolen right out from under their noses.

Mr. Moores pretended to be a freelance editor, and who wouldn’t want an editor with such solid ties to publishing? Who wouldn’t want an editor that used to be a literary agent?

That’s what we thought, too.

Mr. Moores took several writer’s hard-earned money in exchange for a promise to edit their work, but he never followed through. When deadlines were missed and those writers tried to contact him at first they were given the run-around: health problems, family problems, he’ll get to it ASAP. When more deadlines were missed, Mr. Moores stopped returning emails from the writers whose work he was supposed to be editing, and when those writers began to speak out about this fraud, this theft, Mr. Moores disappeared altogether.

So, what are these writers left to do? They can contact P&E. They can contact Writer Beware. They can contact the Better Business Bureau. They can go to public forums like Absolute Write and let everyone know not to fall for these scams. They can send Mr. Moores an email at jeffreymoores@gmail.com. Maybe they can even contact Google and explain to them that someone is using one of their email accounts for fraudulent purposes, to rip people off?

But, as of right now, what they can’t do is get their money back. They can’t get back their trust, and they can’t get back the confidence and security that were stolen from them by a liar and a cheat. There are few, if any, regulations in publishing. There are even fewer in the world of literary agenting, and even fewer still when it comes to freelance editors.

Don’t make the mistakes that we made. Don’t trust someone unless you know for sure that someone else you trust can vouch for that person, or company, or organization.

Don’t let these frauds and thieves steal your money, your confidence, and your joy.

Writing is a tough business. The economy is in shambles. In order to weather the storm we must pull together, work together, stick together and help each other out.

Please send this post to everyone you know who is an aspiring writer or published author. Link to and/or reproduce this post on your blogs. Send it out to your mailing lists. The more people who are made aware of Mr. Moores' thievery, the more people we can prevent from being ripped off and taken advantage of in the future.

If you have any information on Mr. Moores, please don’t hesitate to contact me at chrisg@bksp.org. We’d love to hear from you. We’d love to set this straight.

And, if you happen to have a few bucks lying around, why don’t you consider donating some of it to Preditors & Editors for the wonderful service they provide? It seems P&E is being sued for supplying writers with information on companies and individuals that are in the habit of stealing from writers, and they can certainly use your help (details below).

*****
Christopher Graham is a former independent bookstore owner and co-founder of Backspace and The Backspace Book Promotion Network. He has written for a variety of newspapers and his short fiction has appeared in BluePrintReview. He’s currently busy gearing up for ski season, living with his wonderful wife and two crazy dogs in rural Pennsylvania, and hard at work on a thriller.

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Help Defend P&E

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How to do Drive-By Book Signings

by J.A. Konrath

Your book has made it into the stores! Congratulations!

Your publisher/distributor/sales reps have done their jobs---now it’s time to do yours.

Four out of five books don’t earn back their advance. Half of all books are returned, remaindered, or destroyed. You can accept this as a fact of the business, or you can take the wheel of your career and do something to improve your odds.

Autographed books sell better than their unsigned counterparts. Customers regard authors as celebrities, and a signed book is a value-added purchase.

But how likely is it that your publisher will set up a signing at every bookstore in America? Especially when each store carries just three copies of your magnum opus?

The answer: The Drive-By Signing. You drive up, you go in, you sign the stock, you get out.

For my thriller novels Whiskey Sour and Bloody Mary, I’ve done over 400 drive-by signings in the past 18 months, leaving my signature on several thousand books, meeting thousands of people.

Sound impossible? It’s actually pretty easy to do, once you know the routine.

1. Find the stores.

Go to www.bookweb.org, www.booksense.com, www.bn.com, www.waldenbooks.com, www.american-stores.us/book, www.borders.com, www.booksamillion.com, and search for stores by city and zip code. Or go to the public library and look through the phone books. Try to list all the stores within 50 miles of your home, or within 25 miles of the town you’re visiting.

2. Call the stores you intend to drop in on.

You need to find out if the store still exists, what time they close, and if they carry your books.

DO NOT tell them you're the author. Why? All that does is complicate things. They'll say you have to speak to a manager, or an events coordinator, or they'll say you aren't allowed to come in unless it has been cleared by your publisher, or they'll say that they don't do signings, or they'll set the books aside and then no one will be able to find them when you come in, or you'll set everything up and when you get there no one will know who the heck you are, or... you get the point. Bookstores and publishers have a set of rules about author signings.

You want to bypass those rules. So call and see if they have copies, and ask how many. I wouldn't drive 20 miles to sign three paperbacks, but for three hardcovers I would.

Call a day or two before you plan on dropping by---calling ten days before may result in your books being gone by then.

3. Map out your route.

Use city maps, or Internet sites such as www.mapquest.com, www.maps.yahoo.com, www.maps.google.com. Plot a course going location to location. A GPS navigation unit is heaven sent for touring authors, and saves a lot of time and effort.

Many Barnes & Noble and Borders stores often have locations just a few miles from one another.

Shopping malls often have a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton.

Independent booksellers are generally happier to see you, and more eager to sell your books. Fit as many of these into the drop-in tour as possible.

4. When you get to a store, find your own books.

Booksellers are busy, and you want to be low maintenance and take up very little of their time.

Take your books to the Information Desk, or to a counter, and say your spiel to an employee. Mine is:

"Hi! This is me. (Smiling, pointing to my name on cover.) I'm an author. Great to meet you. (Shake hand.) Thanks for carrying my books! Do you mind if I sign them?"

Start signing when you get the 'yes.' You’ll always get a ‘yes’ (though once I was asked for ID, which I provided.)

Then ask them if they like your genre, and tell them about your books.

While talking to the employee, give them something---a card, a bookmark, or in my case, a drink coaster with my book cover on it, and SIGN THE ITEM. Signing it will hopefully prevent them from throwing the item away, on the off chance that one day you'll be famous and they can sell it on eBay.

Also, ask them if they can check to see if there are any more in the store that you couldn't find. Be patient---if the store is busy, let them take care of customers before you. That gives you a chance to pitch to customers as well.

When the books are signed, ask if they have stickers that say "Autographed Copy". If they do, help them sticker the books. If they don't, use your own stickers, which you took from the last store you signed at.

Barnes & Noble have square green stickers. Borders and Waldenbooks have red triangles. Sometimes Waldenbooks have blue rectangles, and Borders have brown rectangles. Don't get confused.

5. After the books are signed and stickered, ask the employees to read them.

"You’ll enjoy this, I promise."

A bookstore employee who meets you and reads you is one that will forever sell you.

Often they'll make a display for you. Don't suggest a display yourself--let them suggest it. This appeal for help is important--it shows you're not a snooty author, but a regular person who needs them.

I also tell employees that whoever sells 20 copies or more will be mentioned in the acknowledgements for my next book, and give them my personal email so they can contact me.

6. Meet as many employees in the store that you can.

Thank them profusely for selling your book, and for the great job they're doing. Take their business cards, and add them to your email newsletter list.

But don’t overstay your welcome. They’re there to work, and so are you.

7. If you're at an independent bookstore, never leave without buying something.

If you want them to support you, you should support them.

8. Keep a log of where you visited, who you met, and how many copies you signed.

Share this info with your agent and publisher. You don't have to give them the full list, but an email saying, "I was just in Arizona for the weekend and signed stock at 21 bookstores" will impress them.

9. Return to stores a few months later.

Often they’ll have new stock and new employees. Many stores automatically buy more copies after a book sells. I’ve visited some stores five or six times, and I always meet new people and sign more books.

Obviously, your local bookstores are the ones you’ll visit the most. But whenever you leave town on business, or for vacation, check to see what bookstores are in the area before you go.

Final Words: If you’re planning on touring, you’ll get the most bang for your buck with large cities. A major metropolis like Chicago or Manhattan has over 100 bookstores. Even smaller cities like Phoenix, Denver, Houston, or Indianapolis have a few dozen stores, which is well worth your time.

When planning a drive-by tour, sooner is better. If you wait six months after your book comes out, you may discover your books are no longer there.

If you don’t have time to tour, try to visit every bookstore in your area, and set aside time during business trips and on vacation to hit a few stores in the area. The more places you visit, the more it will help your career.

Contrary to popular belief, signed books can be returned or destroyed. But it’s less likely they will be, especially if you were nice to the staff.

In today’s market, even bestselling writers must do their own publicity, or else they won’t be writers for very long. Drive-by signings are only one weapon in your publicity arsenal. But if done correctly, they can be the most powerful weapon you have.

© 2006 J.A. Konrath

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Joseph Andrew Konrath was born in Skokie, IL in 1970. He graduated from Columbia College in Chicago in 1992. His first novel, Whiskey Sour (2004), introduced Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels. Others in the series include Bloody Mary (2005), Rusty Nail (2006), Dirty Martini (2007), Fuzzy Navel (2008), and Cherry Bomb (2009). The books combine hair-raising scares and suspense with laugh out loud comedy.

Joe is also the editor of the hitman anthology These Guns For Hire (2006). His short stories have appeared in more than sixty magazines and collections, and his work has been translated into ten languages.

Under the name Jack Kilborn, Joe wrote the horror novel Afraid (2009).

Joe's been nominated for several awards, including the Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, Dagger, and Barry, and has won the Derringer, Bob Kellog, EQMM Reader's Choice, and two Lovie awards.

His blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing (jakonrath.blogspot.com), has had over 400,000 hits since 2005.

Joe is married, has three children and three dogs, and currently lives in a suburb of Chicago. He occasionally teaches writing and marketing at the College of Dupage.

You can reach Joe at joekonrath@comcast.net.

Done Yet? Struggling with the Novel

by John Dalton

In May of 1994 I returned to St. Louis, after a six-year absence, and tried to rent an apartment. The search took me to South City, to neighborhoods I’d barely explored during my childhood and adolescence in St. Louis County, to lane after lane of stately, affordable, near-identical two-family flats -and to a prospective landlord who studied my credit application with a degree of weariness and skepticism. I’d left the line for employer blank.

It was the first time that I’d had to explain, in any official capacity, that I was a writer. Attaching myself to the occupation sounded preposterous. Nevertheless, I told him that I was writing a book, a fiction book, a novel, and that I was being funded for a year by a writing award from James Michener.

The news didn’t appear to lessen his doubts. "Fine," he said. "I’m going to need to talk to this James Michener."

In the end he settled for a phone call to the writing program at the University of Iowa, through which the award had been granted, and I bought a pick-up truck load of salvation army furniture and moved into my second floor flat on Sutherland Avenue. I’d inherited a large office desk from my father. I set it up in the second of two bedrooms and got down to work.

+ + +

Each writer has his or her own big idea. Mine originated with an actual incident. I was living and teaching English in Taiwan in the late 1980’s, when, one evening, a Taiwanese businessman appeared at the restaurant where I and a group of other expatriate teachers dined each evening. He pretended to want to learn English. In fact he’d befriended us in order to make an extraordinary proposal. Months earlier he had gone to the Mainland China to seek out business opportunities and had met and fallen in love with a beautiful young mainland woman. He wished to marry her. At the time such a marriage between a Taiwanese and a Mainland Chinese was extremely difficult, if not impossible. He suggested that one of us go to China, find the woman, marry her (as Americans, Australians, Canadians, we would not face the same obstacles as he) and bring her out of China back to Taiwan so that they could begin a life together. Was he sincere? Hard to know. It was late. We’d all drank a lot of beer. Some in our group were interested, others not. Eventually the matter was dropped. But the proposal itself seemed to me to be a kind of gift, an evocative idea that I might someday build a novel around.

+ + +

The best way to describe the slow evolution of a beginning writer is to say that you write with a misplaced belief in your own work. The scene, the characters, the story become vivid for you, and this allows you to inch forward and create connections and insights that you hope are distinguished, perhaps even exceptional. Except they’re not. At some point you’re able to reread your work with a cold, critical and fairly impartial eye and understand that what you’ve created is thin, unfocused, pale, unexceptional. The realization hurts. The uncommitted writer gives up. The committed writer continues on, because, after a day to two of moping, you recall a technique used by a favorite writer, and you read over a particular passage from that writer, and a light bulb goes off, and you think maybe you’ve discovered a way to correct one of several glaring problems in your novel. You forge ahead. You think you may just have solved the problem. Except you haven’t. This is what writing is, a long series of hopes and sudden disappointments on a small, daily scale and also on a large scale that occurs over the course of many years. This is difficult to bear. And yet the opposite condition -always believing that the work you produce is distinguished-is far worse because it allows you no room for growth and dooms you to certain failure.

+ + +

Eventually the Michener award money ended, and I went out and did what nearly every struggling writer does: work in a bookstore, wait tables, adjunct teach. On Friday morning I might stand before a class of undergraduates and extol an incisive and passionate story by Alice Munro or John Cheever, and then later that night, embarrassed, I might be called upon to serve one of these students pasta at Farottos restaurant. Perhaps to compensate, I told friends, family, students and coworkers I was writing a novel. At home I worked nearly everyday on the book, four hours on the days I taught, more on the days I didn’t. I worked most weekends. I worked steadily throughout the day, three hours in the morning, several more in the afternoon and a few hours in the evening. The pages began to stack up. "Done yet?" my friends and family asked. "Almost," I answered. My girlfriend, Jen Jen, moved from Taiwan to St. Louis and began her own career odyssey-banking, hat sales, pharmaceutical franchise work. By early summer 1996 I had nearly 280 pages. Just before a weekend trip to Iowa City, I took a few days to sit down and read what I had accomplished so far.

For the first time I saw --or allowed myself to see-- enormous problems in the book. To begin with I was writing a novel that chronicled a Christian volunteer’s experience in Taiwan and then progressed into a journey across mainland China, and yet, foolishly, I’d begun the book with eighty pages set in Red Bud, Illinois and another thirty in a Taipei parish --all pages designed to convince the reader that my protagonist, Vincent, was serious about his vocation. But good writers could accomplish the same thing in a few paragraphs or short scenes. And much of the rest of the novel was functional but not really good.

This dismaying discovery settled in in waves. All weekend I brooded. Then I confessed my misgivings about the book to Jen Jen. The next Monday I cut the first 110 pages and started over.

+ + +

The writing proceeded slower now because the sentences needed to be more articulate, more reflective of a character’s thoughts and feelings, wiser, deeper. In good books each sentence is doing three or four or sometimes ten complicated things at once. The demands of good prose --clarity, compression, precision, evocativeness-are almost overwhelming. Some days it is impossible. Most days it is close to impossible. And when you are successful in shaping a sentence, a paragraph, a passage or a scene, to your satisfaction, it immediately outshines the less developed writing it stands beside. Thus you’re always rewriting, bringing the level of your prose up to match the very best writing. And so I kept on. I taught. I waited tables. I lived my life. I continued to work on my book. In1998 I reached the halfway point. By then I’d been working on the book five years. Friends and family, who’d once been encouraging, now, out of concern or embarrassment, avoided the topic of my novel. That summer I grew tired, more than tired, fatigued, and a doctor discovered the source of the fatigue: a benign tumor near my thyroid. The ordeal was frightening. The surgery took time to recover from. In spring of 1999 I was passed over for a tenure-track teaching position at a local university. Why? I had no published book. I’d been teaching all the fiction classes at this university for two years, and these classes now belonged to another teacher.

+ + +

It is somewhat romantic to be a struggling artist in your mid-twenties, less so in your early thirties. By thirty-five you begin to realize that, while the rest of your friends are laying the foundation for a secure life -a viable career, a house, children-you have taken what is turning out to be an enormous gamble. There is a popular and entirely false belief that every talented person who follows a dream eventually meets with success. In truth, talented and determined people fail all the time. Perhaps they didn’t get their lucky break. Think of the talented shortstop who, because there was no big league injury, did not get invited to play in the majors and did not bloom. Or in the case of writers, perhaps the work is too eccentric or demanding for publishers to deem profitable. Perhaps the novel is set in wearisome Akron, Ohio rather than alluring Paris, France or China. The other misconception is that artists are free spirits, that a life in the arts is less stressful and competitive than a career in business or law. Consider though that Master of Arts programs in writing graduate thousands of new writers each spring; yet only ten percent, perhaps less, will have a career via their work or through teaching writing.

After the loss of my teaching job, Jen Jen and I upped the stakes in our gamble. Among other fine qualities, South St. Louis had been wonderfully affordable. We’d managed to save some money, and we decided that I would focus almost exclusively on the book while she quit her jog and pursued a masters degree in Public Health. Privately, I had little hope that the gamble would pay off. But then something curious began happening. At the low-point of my career as a writer, the writing itself was getting noticeably better, deeper, more mature. The reasons for this, I suspect, are complicated and mysterious. Maybe all the struggling -and the compassion that struggling engenders-- was allowing me to see deeper into my story and to craft sentences that reflected some of that wisdom. Whatever the case, there were no big breakthroughs, no moments of "Eureka!" that allowed me to race through to the end. Instead there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of small breakthroughs that occurred over time, especially when I struggled the most, when I spent all afternoon or evening perfecting just the right phrase or thought. Those small victories, accumulated over months and years, made all the difference.

+ + +

I began querying agents in the summer of 2001. It was eight months before one of them, a woman at a large New York literary agency, agreed to read the first 500 pages. I finished the novel in June of 2002, and she sent it out, all 667 pages, to more than a dozen commercial publishing houses. Nearly half were interested in publishing the novel. She sold Heaven Lake in six days.

I asked a writer friend of mine, who’d endured a seven-year struggle and the rejection of his first book, how he felt when his second novel was at last accepted. He said, "The nightmare is over." I felt differently, though probably no less relieved. I felt rescued. I felt as if I’d survived my gamble by the skin of my teeth.

+ + +

Acquaintances are often startled when I tell them it took eight years to write my first novel. Writers barely lift an eyebrow. Some beginning authors write two or three books before they’re able to publish. Others, like myself, write the same book over and over. And I was far luckier than most in ways I haven’t yet mentioned. During those eight years, I received two fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center on Cape Cod. Even though I’d lost out on a teaching job, the university that denied me also provided me steady employment as a visiting writer for two years. Friends at UMSL and Wash. U. and the St. Louis Writer’s Workshop invited me to read and teach various classes. Far more valuable, I had a partner in the struggle, Jen Jen, a girlfriend who became a wife, who didn’t complain about the gamble or the setbacks and worked full-time most of those eight years while my teaching and part time jobs brought in little income, while my writing brought in nothing.

In truth, I was never really tempted to give up, though I often feared circumstances might force me to give up. And it wasn’t because I knew it would eventually work out, or that I was being brave and determined. It’s just that, year after year, I meant to finish and was dismayed and ashamed when I did not. I wish, in retrospect, that I hadn’t felt such shame at not finishing. To be a struggling writer is an honorable enough thing, no more or less honorable than any other honest endeavor. All along I felt toward the book the way a railroad hobbyist might feel toward the elaborate model railroad he’s building, piece by piece, in his basement. I wanted it to be detailed and beautiful and convincing. As creator, I’ll never know to what degree I was successful. Nor is it possible to escape the struggling that comes, inevitably, with each new book, including the second novel I’m writing now. But how lucky I’ve been. And what a privilege it is to choose your own project and sort through life’s dilemmas in the form of a grand story. What a pleasure to spend the morning shaping a scene, a description, a bit of dialogue, writing, rewriting, struggling, and feel, for the time being at least, that you’ve gotten it just right.

Posted with permission by John Dalton, September 2004

John Dalton was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children. Upon graduation from college, he received a plane ticket to travel around the world, a gift from his brother, Jim. So began an enduring interest in travel and foreign culture. During the late 1980’s, John lived in Taiwan and traveled in Mainland China and other Asian countries. He also met his wife, Jen Jen Chang, in Taiwan. After returning to the U.S., John studied fiction writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and was awarded a James Michener / Paul Engle fellowship. He published short stories in Story, The Alaska Quarterly Review and other literary magazines and received a Henfield Transatlantic Review Award and first and second year fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. John completed Heaven Lake over the course of eight years while living in St. Louis, waiting tables, working in a bookstore, and teaching writing courses at local universities. Most recently, he has taught fiction workshops at Washington University’s Summer Writing Institute and the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival. He lives with his wife, a public health researcher, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. During the 2004-05 school year, John Dalton will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where he will teach undergraduate and graduate fiction writing. He is at work on a second novel.

AN AGENT DOES THE MATH: Why Do Memoirists Face Such a Rough Market?

by Kate Epstein

There’s nothing I like reading more than a good memoir. I think memoir is the most exciting genre in the bookstore—a place to read about self-discovery and exciting experiences, a place of unadorned, transparent, perfect prose. Memoirists have taught me about myself and about people I never could have expected to understand, and shown me a remarkably good time. For me, memoir ranks as the genre most likely to turn a bad day into a good day.

Add to that the fact that a fair number of bestsellers are memoirs, and it’s not surprising that I would seek to represent memoir. Or that I would love so much to find a publisher for those memoirs I have on my list. What might surprise is how low my excitement can be when I find a memoir in my slush pile.

I might be more excited if I didn’t get so much of it. Here’s the first truth about memoir math: supply outstrips demand. I’ve gone through about 90 queries in the last three weeks, and 28 were memoir submissions. The numbers may work out differently for agents that represent fiction (or maybe not—at least 20 of my submissions were genres I don’t represent, mostly fiction), but I think anyone that represents memoir sees a lot of it.

Of those 28 memoir submissions, I looked at pages for four, and offered representation for one. I’d consider my list unbalanced if I had more than two, maybe three at the outside, memoirs at a time. I have about 30 authors on my list (it depends on how you count) so this may seem like peculiar math. But let me explain.

Memoir is the obese kid on the seesaw. Many authors approach me with a complete manuscript, and that can be necessary to sell certain memoirs, but preparing a full manuscript for submission requires a good deal more of my editing effort than preparing a proposal. And it’s generally best to have a proposal as well as the manuscript, so the editing work more than doubles.

On top of that, the work of making the argument for the book tends to be more complicated with a memoir. Remember in “City Slickers” when Billy Crystal says that “women need a reason to have sex” but “men just need a place”? People need a reason to buy a book, and publishers need a reason to take on books. With a lot of book topics, writers need a reason to write them, and that reason tends to be related to the reason people would buy them. But sometimes it seems like, for memoir, writers just need a place. Their own stories fascinate them. (And that’s normal.)

So if a memoirist is a man that’s eager for sex and a book buyer is a woman that’s eager, a man with a place certainly may be able to find a woman with a reason—there are many good reasons. Good writing. Remarkable insight. Exciting stories. But that the fact of an eager man doesn’t imply the likelihood of an eager woman.

(None of this is to say that I agree with Billy’s reactionary, simplistic views about men and women, but I digress.)

This complication may be part of the reason that as a rule memoir is more difficult to place with a publisher than other kinds of nonfiction. Another factor is that publishers as a group seem to be less interested in the idea of memoirs with relatively modest, slow-growing potential.

Just to oversimplify, the big publishing conglomerates are only interested in books that they can believe will sell in high numbers in a short time. The mid-sized publishers do make offers on books with considerably smaller potential, making up the difference primarily in lower costs for marketing and by paying a lot less for placement in the bookstore. For some reason, fewer mid-sized publishers are interested in memoir than in a number of other nonfiction genres. They don’t seem to believe in the kind of modest, respectable, steady sales for this category that they bank on in other categories like pets, health, self-help, and many others. It’s as if they think every memoir is destined to either hit a bestseller list or sink like a stone. I don’t know if this is a reasonable point of view based on past publications, or if it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this belief is a reality I’m aware of when I evaluate submissions.

So what’s the sum of memoir math? I have to be madly in love with your memoir to take it on. I must not only be able to imagine it in the bookstore, but I have to imagine that if I saw it in the bookstore I would be banging myself over the head with the hard covers in fury at my failure to offer you representation. When I look at your baby, I have to not see the randy cowboy in a City Slickers parody. I have to see a beautiful, precious work of art. I have to feel all the pride of an aunt, to see you as a sister or brother with your progeny. And that’s when I’ll throw out all of the math for the chance just to hold your baby for a while, and help her grow, and love her all the while.

KATE EPSTEIN represents the memoirs Rock Star Mommy (Citadel, 2008) and The Day After He Left for Iraq (Skyhorse, 2008). Another that made her day is Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. Kate Epstein doesn’t benefit any if you buy that one.

© 2007 Kate Epstein

Kate Epstein is the founder and president of The Epstein Literary Agency. Kate travels periodically to her native New York City--an easy train ride from her Boston-area location--and is actively building relationships with editors at publishers large and small. The Books section of her website reflects agency sales to date. The particular strengths she brings to authors include:

* Intelligent and insightful editing of proposals and sample material.
* Concept sharpening when required.
* An imagination for companion books when the time comes.
* An understanding of editors that comes from having been one.
* A willingness to work with independent publishers that offer good distribution, as well as larger publishers.
* Enthusiasm and attentiveness.
* A passion for working with authors and for defending their interests.
* An understanding of authors' emotional experience of the publishing process.

Kate has participated in writer's conferences through such organizations as Backspace, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Washington Independent Writers. Upcoming appearances at such events, if any, are listed in the News section.

Epstein Literary offers a standard agency agreement that follows AAR guidelines and charges 15% commission on sales to North American publishers. No fees, ever. Standard expenses are charged against sales, not billed directly.

Kate Epstein founded the Epstein Literary Agency in October, 2005, after four years' acquisitions experience at Adams Media, a medium-sized publisher of nonfiction on a wide variety of topics. The books she acquired while employed by Adams Media included The Badass Girl's Guide to Poker, Pregnancy Sucks, and The Tao of Horses.

Kate Epstein holds a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from the University of Michigan. She lives with her husband and two children outside Boston.

1000 True Fans

by J.A. Konrath

Someone sent me this article, and I'm returning the favor.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archiv..._true_fans.php

In a nutshell, it says that all any artist needs to be successful is 1000 rabid fans.

It might not perfectly apply to writers, but there's a lot of good ideas there.

To get to that magic point where word of mouth kicks in, you need to have people toot your horn (other than you, which is annoying.)

But it's impossible to get people to talk about you, or your books, when they don't know who you are.

I've always believed that authors can help their situations by promoting themselves in a smart way. You have the power to make someone a rabid fan, not only through your writing, but through networking.

If your rabid fan is an influencer (a book reviewer, media personality, bookseller, librarian, bestselling author) then they can sell books in your stead. The more of these people you can accrue, the better off you are.

There are things you can do to find these people, and to help them find you.

Bookstore visits, mentioned in a few other threads, may not always pay off. But every so often they do. I know dozens of booksellers who have each handsold hundreds of copies of my books. A handful have sold over a thousand, out of a single store. I name characters after these folks, and try to thank the others in my acknowledgements.

Any chance you have to speak in public--if you can do it well--invites more chances to speak in public. The more people you can get in front of, the better off you are.

Having an internet presence that provides information and entertainment, rather than an ad and a link to Amazon, will lead strangers to you. It's about what you have to offer, not what you have to sell. But the more you offer for free, the more you will sell.

Your publisher has the power to reach more influencers than you do, but they don't have the power to affect influencers as much as you do. Their approach is mostly of the shotgun variety. You can be a sniper, and zero in on people, giving them your full attention.

If you want to make a living in this business, you need fans. With enough rabid fans, self-promotion becomes a question of choosing what to do next, rather than trying to dream it up.

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Joseph Andrew Konrath was born in Skokie, IL in 1970. He graduated from Columbia College in Chicago in 1992. His first novel, Whiskey Sour (2004), introduced Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels. Others in the series include Bloody Mary (2005), Rusty Nail (2006), Dirty Martini (2007), Fuzzy Navel (2008), and Cherry Bomb (2009). The books combine hair-raising scares and suspense with laugh out loud comedy.

Joe is also the editor of the hitman anthology These Guns For Hire (2006). His short stories have appeared in more than sixty magazines and collections, and his work has been translated into ten languages.

Under the name Jack Kilborn, Joe wrote the horror novel Afraid (2009).

Joe's been nominated for several awards, including the Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, Dagger, and Barry, and has won the Derringer, Bob Kellog, EQMM Reader's Choice, and two Lovie awards.

His blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing (jakonrath.blogspot.com), has had over 400,000 hits since 2005.

Joe is married, has three children and three dogs, and currently lives in a suburb of Chicago. He occasionally teaches writing and marketing at the College of Dupage.

You can reach Joe at joekonrath@comcast.net.