Tag Archives: first authors

Do I Have A Best-seller? You Can Tell me the Truth

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Writers approach me, describe their book or send me a sample and ask “Is this publishable work? Do I have a best-seller? Tell me the truth!”

I can tell you if I think your idea has market potential. I can tell you whether I laughed or  cried and wanted to keep reading your manuscript.

But then people say, again, “Tell me the truth. It’s okay, I can handle it. Does this book deserve to be published?”

So here is the truth. Books, like people, do not get the fate they deserve. Horrible books have won readers.  Astonishingly good books remain unpublished and unread.

I usually say, “Would you be glad you wrote this book if you knew no publisher will buy it?”

It happened to me. My agent loved my book and was confident she could sell it–but six months later no publisher had signed on.

In the past, the story ended there. You might look for another agent to represent that particular book. You might self-publish, as I did, on Lulu and later through Amazon. I was delighted to see my book in paperback and hardcover and e-reader form, and pleased by many positive responses from readers. My name did not become famous nor my pockets fill. But I am still glad I did it.

You have an advantage if you can sell your book to a name-brand publisher, but big sales are only likely if that publishing house decides to turn you and your book into a star. The publishing world–not readers–decide who wins this game.

Occasionally we hear about self-published books that rise via word of mouth. One way or another, you will need a good book, luck, and time to do considerable publicity.

As the publishing world changes, the best advice to writers hasn’t changed. Write a book because you want to. Try to get it to readers any way you can. Don’t count on justice.

Why Should I Pay?

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We live in a world where we hear that the best things in life are free–and yet we pay money for more and more goods. Once upon a time, you’d never have paid for water, right? Now, we believe that the only good water comes in a bottle and costs at least a $2.00.

I live in New York City, which has an excellent water supply and I love that. It’s a luxury. I don’t need to pay for water.

So why should you pay for responses to your writing?

Because, alas, good critiques don’t flow from any city taps. You can find generous writing groups and friends and family who will give you precious help. But you won’t get serious copy-editing or line-editing from friends. It’s a skill. I charge from 4 cents to 10 cents a word, depending on what you want and need and can afford and I spend my work hours working for you, not a half hour before I run to the gym.

As for critiques, you don’t want too much advice and you don’t want bad advice. Sometimes we just need a magical word or two from a friend, or a kind stranger on the train. And sometimes we need concentrated professional help–whether to massage your stiff neck, redirect your career, perfect your tennis game, or preserve your marriage. The choice here is not all that different. Do you want “tips” or hours of expertise?

I read a funny comment on a writers’ list-serve this morning: Marry an editor! It’s true: Writers need people in their lives who will give them huge amounts of time and attention.

Paying doesn’t guarantee excellence. But paying should mean that you will both be focused on the job. You may find that you up your game when your cash is on the line. Ask yourself: Will I do my best to deliver a publishable manuscript? Will I make good use of the response I get? It’s an investment.

On the other end, a professional editor wants your good word-of-mouth to grow her business and should see her work for you as part of her mission in life. A good editor knows she’s damn good and will prove it to you. She has a bigger stake than a volunteer.

So I’d recommend that you get all the free help you can, and then hire an editor if you can afford one. I also take my own advice. For my own novel, I paid. Every writer needs an editor. Better writers need better ones.

Choose An Indie Press

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We tend to focus on the big-name publishers like Random House or Knopf. But there are thousands of other well-respected presses with long histories that I would be proud to see publish my own writing. The difference between a “small” or “indie” press and a “vanity” press is whether you must pay the publisher. You might choose a “vanity press,” for convenience and service, over self-publishing.

An indie press should have good relationships with distributors that will get your book into stores. An indie press can also release your book in an electronic form and help you with marketing it online.

You can’t just mail your manuscript to the big New York houses; you’ll need to get an agent first. But indie presses will accept unsolicited manuscripts and are more likely to take on a book that a mainstream house will consider too risky. They may be looking for experimental or shocking work, but not necessarily. The widely-popular novel The Time Traveler’s Wife was first published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing. Water for Elephants was first published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

For a comprehensive database of small and independent publishers, go to Duotrope.com. Before you send out a manuscript, look at the publisher’s list and see if you sense a similarity in taste. In your cover letter, you’ll want to say, sincerely, that you chose this publisher because you admire the books it brings to the public. Make sure that your manuscript is truly ready for serious readers. You’ll need to copy-edit it carefully or hire a copy-editor and you may first want a critique from a writers’ group or a professional editor.

Your imagination, story, and writing skills will sell your novel or memoir, and your knowledge and insight will sell your non-fiction. But taking care of the details and getting high-quality help will ensure that you’ve given your work its best chance. All writers–at all levels–need editors.

Only people with little knowledge of writing or the publishing world think that they can pour out their hearts, mail Random House a fat mound of paper with typos and weird margins that no one else has seen, be received with open arms and go on to make millions. It’s a lovely fantasy. Write a short story about that writer! With the fantasy off your chest, you can take your next steps.

Being Yourself–On Purpose

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It’s a funny phrase, “Be yourself.” How can you not be yourself?

I like the phrase “being yourself on purpose.” I’m going to be myself, the good and the bad, but if I intend to be myself, I can highlight the good.

One way to be yourself on purpose is to find the routine that is you and stick to it. Routine is the secret to better writing. Find a time that you can write every day. I wrote my first novel on a half hour bus commute. I wrote my second novel by waking up an hour earlier each morning. I write my journalism assignments by setting my own deadlines, well ahead of the deadline assigned by the editor, whenever possible.

Play around with it, and stick with the routine that works best. Many writers think they have a complicated psychological reason for “writer’s block” when the problem is simple: they’ve changed their routine or haven’t found the right one. If you haven’t found your routine, ask yourself, When do you think about your writing project? Just before you go to bed? In the morning when you wake up? Or after your shower and breakfast? Be attentive to the details and create forty minutes close to that time.

Why Write a Memoir?

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Why do people write memoirs?

For the same reasons we gossip, go to movies, read fiction and biographies and memoirs, attend the theater, follow the lives of celebrities or get wrapped up in soap operas. Because we’re sociable! And when it comes to our own lives, we feel clearer-headed and happier when events that affected us deeply are refined into a story that we can share.

You may think your life isn’t worthy of a memoir unless you did something that has already put your name in the newspapers.

But there are all kinds of memoirs, and you can choose your kind. Write about your childhood, like Frank McCourt did so movingly in Angela’s Ashes. Write about your travels, as Elizabeth Gilbert did in Eat, Pray, Love. Write about a connection with a strong personality, as Lorna Kelly did in The Camel Knows the Way, which tells the story of her time with Mother Teresa. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith traced a murder in Girls of Tender Age.

Many memoirs are about illness, or coping with the illness of others in your life. You can write about the importance of friendships or siblings or a marriage.

In fact, if you write about seemingly unremarkable events in your voice–distilling your honesty, humor, insight or compassion-your book can be as inspiring or touching as a story about high drama. You can bond with readers, who like you, have not lived through extraordinary events, but the ordinary events that make life extraordinary.

Writing a memoir is an act of believing in yourself and the value of your life for others.

Perhaps you are haunted by a mistake–writing a memoir may be a confession, and a way to give readers the benefit of your regret.

Perhaps you are happy about your role in events you couldn’t reveal until now.

Perhaps you are perplexed about the role someone else played in your life and need to tell the stories so you can see past blame or shame.

The challenge is coaxing the story out. As you write, you will hear yourself think. Eventually you will decide what is most important, to you. One person’s version of events can be completely different in meaning and tone than another’s. Your story is yours.

A clear story has a theme, though it may be subtle. You will choose to include some details and leave others out. Much of your story’s impact will come from your choice of words, pacing, and statements about the world, as well as the twists and turns of circumstance.

People are most often drawn to memoir and autobiography in older age, when we have time for reflection and may want to leave a story for our children and grandchildren to read. If you write down your stories, they are not lost. They are not lost in your memory–you can reread them as long as you are alive. And it is very likely that someone in your family will read your book and keep it close at hand when you are gone.

In my own family, my grandmother’s memoir became very important to us after she died, and helped us sort out mysteries about her past. My mother died before my nephew Ben met his fiance–so she never met his beloved New York grandmum. His fiance has read her autobiographical play as a way of getting to know her.

A good therapist can help you work on a memoir, if you are facing pain or confusion. A writing group or class can be inspiring and provide structure to keep you on a work schedule. A sympathetic, talented professional editor can copy-edit, line-edit, or critique, applying writing skills that bring out your meaning and perfect your language, so you can communicate powerfully and clearly even if writing is relatively new for you. Writing about yourself can bring up all kinds of self-doubts. After all, you probably haven’t spent your life writing–you’ve been living the stories you will tell!

Do you want to be a published author? You can self-publish, find an agent or publisher–or simply, gladly, write for yourself.

Write Like a Poet

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Whether you are writing an op-ed, business paper, nonfiction book, memoir or novel,  being alert to the sound of words is essential.

There is poetry in all effective language, even if it is not organized on the page to look like a poem.

Words are not just their meanings; they are sounds. As such, they can have the emotional power of  music. I believe that brain chemistry will one day explain what poets know, that words arranged with full use of their musical qualities allow us to think and feel simultaneously in a unique way.

Music with good lyrics isn’t the same, though related. And no one can argue with the power of “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”!

So why is it that most people today feel cut off from poetry? That’s a big topic. For now, as writers let’s recall that nearly everyone knows the lyrics to a favorite song and language is king among rappers and at poetry slams.

Even old-fashioned poems can still hit a popular nerve:  W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” captured a wide audience when it was recited in the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” Another popular poem is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Events like 9/11–or the death of Princess Diana over a decade ago–produced outpourings of poems scrawled on walls or safety-pinned onto teddy bears and bouquets.

Many people who do not ordinarily read poetry turn to it when mourning a death or lost love. A friend I’ll call Lily discovered the Robert Frost poem “Reluctance” during a painful break-up in her twenties. When another affair ended decades later, she sent the poem to her ex and found herself repeating its conclusion like a mantra: “Ah, when to the heart of man/Was it ever less than a treason/To go with the drift of things,/To yield with a grace to reason/And bow and accept the end/Of a love or a season?’”

Treason. Reason. Season. Rhyme links disparate themes. It’s a mental jump from treason to reason, helping us step (not jump) ahead emotionally in the process of getting over anger.

A metaphor describes one thing by calling it another, again linking our minds and emotions. Here, love is a season. The comforting message is that love will come again, as spring follows winter. The message is more comforting because it is unstated.

Use metaphor well and move your reader. Cliched and mixed metaphors have the opposite effect. Our emotions shut down.

We’ve all been taught to avoid repetition. It’s a good rule, unless you use repetition well.

Repetition can be soothing, like the rocking of a chair or a child’s lullaby. “That’s why we say ‘there,there,’ instead of just ‘there,'” says the poet Kate Light.

Another kind of repetition can be energizing. Think of the repetition in sermons in black churches or Churchill inspiring the British to resist the Nazis: “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.” We shall fight, we shall fight – perhaps along with the rocking cradle, we feel the love that gives adults courage.

The key here is that the language builds to a crescendo, as in martial music.

As your editor or copy-editor, I will alert you to ways you can finetune the music under your words.

My Favorite Book About Being A Writer

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There are many books about writing. They inspire with the example of their eloquence as well as their advice.

A book (or a blog like this one) about writing can be your secret friend.

My favorite book of this kind is called Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. Neither of the authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are primarily writers, although the book is beautifully written.

And their observations about making “art” struck me as completely apt to writing.

At the time I found it, I was not a beginning writer. I had been slogging away for more than a decade, and my chest relaxed a little at the opening quote, from Hippocrates: “Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Then the book begins: “Making art is difficult.”

Unlike so many others, this book acknowledged my difficulties and didn’t seem overly optimistic. It wasn’t written to sell books.

Many years later, the truths in this book still seem true to me.

Much of your work will seem a mistake.

“To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.”

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”

The big danger is quitting.

“Those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue–or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.”

“Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when the lose the destination for their work–for the place their work belongs.”

“Quitting means not starting again–and art is all about starting again.”

The best way not to quit is to find comrades and develop and stick to useful habits.

Share your work in progress with other writers or with a writing coach or editor. If you write best in the mornings, stick to the routine. Wear the same pair of slippers that seemed to make you write so well the other night.

“The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over–and that means finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.”

Keep revising.

“Tolstoy, in the Age Before Typewriters, re-wrote War & Peace eight times and was still revising galley proofs as it finally rolled onto the press….Lincoln doubted his capacity to express what needed to be said at Gettysburg, yet pushed ahead…”

“The piece of art which seems so profoundly right in its finished state may earlier have been only inches or seconds away from total collapse.”

Review your own work.

“Your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work. There is no other such book and it is yours alone.”

“Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.”

“Look at your work and it tells you how it is when you hold back or when you embrace. When you are lazy, your art is lazy; when you hold back, it holds back; when you heistate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes.”

Stay true to yourself.

“You make your place in the world by making part of it–by contributing some new part to the set….Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.”

Be brave.

Brave is not the same as fearless. You will be afraid if you are taking risks.

“Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind.”

How Can I Find A Book Agent?

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The best advice I’ve ever seen on finding a book agent is perfect common sense, once you hear it.

First, imagine the bookshelf of your ideal reader. What do you see there? What’s your reader reading now (because your book isn’t yet published, of course)?

If you don’t know, browse Amazon or Barnes & Noble.com or —while we still can–go to the book store.

The books your reader likes are probably books that you like–but it’s important to think about your reader, too.

You might want to think about authors, or topics, or the writing style or purpose of your book.

Once you’ve found a book that your reader would buy, look at the acknowledgements page. Many authors thank their agents by name. They may not always say “my agent, Gloria Sanctus Deo.” Sometimes they just say, “Gloria.” But if you read through the directories of agents obsessively enough you’ll start recognizing the names.

To find a particular author’s agent, you can also try googling and checking lists like this one.

When you write those agents, immediately congratulate them on their good taste and well-deserved good fortune in representing the author of the book your reader likes. Then say that you think your book will reach the same audience and explain, succinctly, why.

You don’t need to say why your book is better. Remember, this agent represents the other author, who isn’t your rival. Authors of books you like are your friends in sensibility. They lead you to your readers.

If you are taking classes with published authors or know any personally, you can also ask them to recommend you to their agents. Personal connections help in the literary world, as they do elsewhere. But in the end, the agent will have to fall in love with your book. You need to find someone who has already fallen in love with a book that reminds you of yours.

As your editor, I will be thinking about the bookshelf (or nowadays Kindle or Nook library) where your book belongs and help to make it the prettiest girl in your class.

Maybe there is no book like yours ever written. In that case, we will look for the agent that has represented other books that are unlike any book ever written. You get the idea.