Business
The news about Facebook’s embroilment in a data-harvesting-cum-political scandal kind of makes us all want to unfriend the platform for good.
For sure, our collective conscience would be cleaner and we’d all be a lot less distracted without it. Some of us would probably even feel a vengeful twinge of self-righteousness seeing Zuckerberg and his cohorts caught at last with the smoking gun that proves their invention is not only bad for us, but just downright bad.
While a breakup with Facebook might inflict some short-term suffering on most folks — pain from the loss of online friendships and a hollow void in that space between minutes that status updates used to fill — for writers and authors, it would pose a nearly existential dilemma.
For better or for worse, Facebook is still the platform for authors from a community-building and visibility perspective, with its unsurpassed power to spread the word, engage readers, and generate promotional opportunities. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat combined could never pack the same punch that Facebook schmoozing can.
Throughout all my years as a writer and a publicist helping writers, a few constants about Facebook have reinforced this belief:
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I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve gotten the note: “Make your character less difficult. She’s not likable enough.” I didn’t do it on purpose; it’s just that my female characters tend to be complex, like the women I know. It happened when the female leads were opinionated. They had standards and held fast to them. They want. They railed against those who got in their way.
They were not compliant.
There aren’t that many female characters in literature or TV that can be considered difficult. Check out this list of unlikable characters from literature. There are female characters on there, yes, but the only female on it is Bella Swan of Twilight (a box I’d rather not open on this particular post).
Male characters with those difficult attributes are generally embraced by the public. Think Sherlock Holmes. A Man Called Ove. House. Sheldon Cooper. Nobody would ever call them compliant, yet they are beloved. Even those who may not be beloved (Dexter, Don Draper, Walter White) are still pretty darn popular.
What’s the Explanation?
Unlikable female main characters only seem to inhabit a limited number of genres. If you’re writing women’s fiction and not a thriller or literary fiction, you’re likely to find resistance with an unlikable female lead. Why is that? An editor might tell you that an unlikable female character won’t engage the average reader, and therefore not sell books. Upmarket fiction is a blend of literary and commercial: think generally the type of novel with a theme meaty enough for book clubs and enough plot to keep the average reader engaged. In this genre, I would bet that most female characters are likable.
Non-compliant women threaten to overturn our social norms. My guess is because although American society has made great inroads since women got the vote, it still hasn’t been all that long since women were considered property. Even those who consider themselves feminists are not always completely able to shake free of sexism. We don’t like it when women defy social norms. Celeste Ng’s terrific Little Fires Everywhere explores in part how the bourgeoise take down those women who defy unwritten cultural rules, fearing that their own lives will be called into question.
Also think of Elizabeth Strout’s character Olive Kitteridge. Nobody could call Olive likable. She’s thorny, with standards that others find it impossible to live up to. She messes up her relationships. And she doesn’t care what others think. Essays have been written about her unlikability. Same with Claire Messud’s Nora in The Woman Upstairs. Messud told Publisher’s Weekly, “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?’”
Should Your Main Character Be Likable?
That’s up to you. Perhaps an unlikable narrator is just not right for your story. Or perhaps you’ve written a deliciously non-compliant difficult woman for a thriller, and you want to keep her that way. Whether or not your character is likable in the traditional sense, their actions must be borne out of a grounded place. And of course, even if your character’s unlikable, they must still be interesting.
But […]
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image by CannedTuna
Author interviews are very much on my mind these days from two perspectives: as the interviewer and as the interviewee.
As the interviewee, I’m talking a lot these days about my novel GIRL IN DISGUISE, coming out in paperback Tuesday, March 6. A paperback launch doesn’t involve as much publicity and marketing as a hardcover launch, at least in my case, but it does involve interviews. Which is great for me! I love interviews.
I also have a major interviewing project underway where I’m talking to authors about their novels, not mine. Each day in March, in honor of Women’s History Month, I’m posting an interview on my blog with an author whose work is inspired by amazing women in history. 31 interviews is, well, a lot of interviews. (The #womenshistoryreads project may even extend into April — I keep thinking of more authors I want to include, and they keep saying yes!)
Plus I’m now doing author interviews for the Chicago Review of Books, like this one with Leslie Pietrzyk, whose riveting, evocative novel SILVER GIRL just came out last week.
So that’s my situation. What about yours? If you’re an author, should you care about author interviews, from either side of the table? If you’re an avid reader and blogger, should you conduct them?
Here are a few lessons learned from my recent experiences, both asking questions and giving answers.
They’re almost always a good idea. Sure, there are counterexamples. If you’re an author, giving a very long interview to a website with very little reach may not be worth your time. You can always say no. But as an effort-to-yield undertaking, in general, interviews are great. So many readers turn to the internet as a way to connect with writers whose work they admire or enjoy. Your interview will be there when they do. Reviews are good too, but I’d rather interview a fellow writer than review their work. A review implies evaluation of the work, determining whether or not it’s worth someone’s time. Interviews provide a lot of information without judgment. That’s great for writers and readers alike.
If you do them, E-mail is easiest. Is it great to have the back-and-forth of talking to someone live? Yes. Is it worth the hassle of transcribing, trying to capture spoken words and get them precisely right, to get that energy?
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Please welcome literary agent with Trident Media Group Mark Gottlieb to WU today, speaking about something most writers need to understand: How to write (and even verbally deliver) an effective hook.
More about Mark from his bio:
Mark attended Emerson College and was President of its Publishing Club, establishing the Wilde Press. After graduating with a degree in writing, literature & publishing, he began his career with Penguin’s VP. Mark’s first position at Publishers Marketplace’s #1-ranked literary agency, Trident Media Group, was in foreign rights. Mark was EA to Trident’s Chairman and ran the Audio Department. Mark is currently working with his own client list, helping to manage and grow author careers with the unique resources available to Trident. He has ranked #1 among Literary Agents on publishersmarketplace.com in Overall Deals and other categories.
Learn more about Mark on the Trident Media website HERE.
How to Write an Effective Hook
I offer up this article on hook writing, also known as the elevator pitch, to lend the reader a feel for comfortable writing and public speaking in the fashion of selling a book idea to an agent, editor or publisher.
First I would like to share some real hook examples I’ve worked on with clients that have recently sold to publishers to lend a sense of what goes into a knock-out hook.
LILY & KOSMO, pitched in the tradition of A TALE DARK & GRIMM, FLORA & ULYSSES, and ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS, in which to join Kosmo’s “Spacetronauts,” an all-boy crew of child space cadets, aboard their floating tree house in the stars, a girl from Brooklyn must prove that she can hold her own among the galaxy’s unruliest rascals…along the way, she and another will evade the clutches of merciless minions, find themselves marooned in The Murky Way nebula, and ultimately face the vilest villain of all, “His Meanness” The Mean-Man of Morgo.
THE REMAINDERS, pitched as DARK PLACES meets GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, in which the daughter of a famed serial killer is compelled to meet the husband of one of her imprisoned mother’s victims, only to find he was murdered—she is made the prime suspect and is forced to flee, knowing she has very little time to find the truth before the police—or the real murderer—gets to her first.
Social media @XplodingUnicorn leader James Breakwell’s ONLY DEAD ON THE INSIDE: A PARENT’S GUIDE FOR SURVIVING ZOMBIES, styled in the tradition of Max Brooks’s THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE and THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO SURVIVAL HANDBOOK, providing practical advice on how to raise happy, healthy children in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, by joining the genres of parenting advice books and undead survival manuals in an unholy union that is both ill-advised and long overdue—the narrator, an inept father of four young daughters, uses twisted logic, graphs with dubious data, and web comics that look like they were drawn by a toddler to teach families how to survive undead hordes.
The nuts and bolts of what makes for a great hook
Let’s dissect what goes into a knock-out hook. The above examples (children’s book, adult fiction and nonfiction) demonstrate the construction of […]
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Disclaimer: Hating marketing is not required to use these tools. In fact, if you enjoy marketing, you’ll have a blast using them.
I’m active in several online writing communities, and one of the most frequent things I read about is how much authors hate marketing. It’s usually accompanied by talk about art and creativity, and once in a while someone tosses this suggestion across the virtual meeting room: all you have to do is write a great story and they will come.
Except, thousands of writers have written thousands of great stories and no one, except their parents and their Uncle Bobby in Poughkeepsie, ever came. The hard truth is—whether your path to publishing is via the traditional, indie, or hybrid route—if you want a sustainable writing career that involves receiving income and reaching as much of your target audience as possible, you’ll need to do some marketing. If your target audience is Uncle Bobby in Poughkeepsie, you’re probably that one writer who won’t need to market.
Mention marketing to many authors and the conversation comes to a screeching halt. Marketing can seem like a complex equation that includes long and short-term strategies, talk of ROI, and aliens. Okay, maybe not aliens, but for some, marketing can feel otherworldly. But in its simplest form, marketing is just this: it’s the stories we tell about our stories. How, when, and how often we tell these stories become our marketing plan, whether we ever intentionally create a plan at all. If you’re a writer and you’re on social media, have a website, blog, or even just talk about your work with friends, you’re already marketing. So here are five inexpensive and relatively easy-to-use tools to help optimize the marketing you’re already doing.
Facebook Shop Template
Most of us know we can create an author page on Facebook, and while recent changes to the platform’s algorithms make Facebook pages feel even more inaccessible, it still makes sense for authors to have one. For starters, it can be an effective way to communicate with fans, especially if you use it to create a private Facebook group. But one underutilized benefit of the author Facebook page is the ability to sell books from the platform. You’ll need to start by making sure you set your page up as a shopping template. Written Word Media has a great post that walks you step-by-step through optimizing your Facebook page as a sales funnel. You can find that tutorial here.
Random fact: A bandwagon was literally a wagon that carried a circus band. Or so says the Internets. They were part of circus parades at first, and then politicians discovered them, as politicians are wont to do. According to todayifoundout.com, here’s what happened next:
“Politicians started to use bandwagons in parades through towns on their campaign trails. It’s believed that Dan Rice, a famous circus clown, was the first to rent out his bandwagon to a political campaign.
As a campaign became more and more successful, other people and politicians sought to rent seats on the bandwagon and ride it through town. In doing so, they received face time with the public and believed that the success of the original campaign would rub off on them.
There are records of the phrase used in political speeches throughout the 1890s, usually in the form of warning potential voters not to ‘jump on the opponent’s bandwagon in haste.’ Because of the negative connotations associated with the phrase, many didn’t admit to having a bandwagon of their own despite it becoming common.”
(Emphasis added because ‘famous circus clown’ is my new life goal.)
And hence, the phrase “jump on the bandwagon” was born. Cool!
So, why am I telling you this arcane bit of etymology? Because I want to talk about genre, and specifically, genre-bandwagoning (Is that a thing? If not, it is now!) and it’s opposite: genre-abandoning.
Imagine that you’ve been seized with an idea. One of those Ideas, ideas that won’t leave you alone. You write your story without worrying too much where it fits in the market because, hello!, that’s what we’ve told you to do and you’ve been listening. You write and polish and beta, and then there you are with your bright, amazing story that you are ready, finally!, to take out into the market. And then your agent (if you’re lucky enough to have one), or some well-meaning book-friend tells you, “No one’s buying Steampunk[1] anymore.”
Ka-chunk. (This is the sound my brain makes when I’m panicking. It’s kind of like that sound in Law & Order, only scarier).
“But, but, but,” you say. “There are Steampunk novels sitting at #1 and #2 on the NYT right now. And this is my best work ever.”
“Sure, the last gasp. Editors are buying for 18 months from now.”
“So what are they buying? What’s the next trend?”
[Insert Agent/Friend shruggie here.] “They don’t know.”
“But, but, but, I saw in the deal news that here were, like, at least two other Steampunk titles sold this week.”
[Insert Agent/Friend giving you “the face.” You know, that face that makes you feel like a moron so you don’t ask what the face means. To quote/paraphrase Watson in Sherlock. “No, I don’t know what that means. That’s why I find the face so annoying.”]
You decide not to ask any more questions. You slink out of the meeting you were excited for feeling slightly sick.
But what do you do (I mean, after the drinking)? You have to do something. Do you simply accept that Steampunk is over and stick this novel right in the drawer (along with the others)? Do you push back against the rising tide and insist that your agent take the novel out anyway? Or do you cast […]
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‘Data Overwhelms, It Overflows’
The writing community, as a whole, can get tired of something. Just like a person, the whole crowd, from their outlawed prologues to their too-late afterwords, can talk itself into one planetary yawn.
And this is the case with platform.
Years ago, platform was the word, and the word it was, and its buzz vibrated in our nightmares and its phantasms implied our inadequacies and its terrors launched a thousand online courses for writers, many of those seminars and webinars and training bazaars run by people who had less platform than the people paying for them.
One of the problems was that it took us a long time to get the right words to explain what a publisher or agent might mean when sending us into Munchian screams by quietly asking, “And how’s your platform, dear?” We work with words for a living, you know. And so we couldn’t find the right ones. The right words. For platform.
This was always clearer in nonfiction, of course. That superb medical guidebook you wrote, for example. You mean you’re not a doctor? And no one more than three blocks from your home has ever heard of you?
And yet even in nonfiction, we failed to get the right messages across. I was asked recently by a very fine writer–and not without stern indignation–whether it wasn’t the publisher’s job to supply the platform for an author on current politics. This reflects a confusion we’ve allowed to linger. The answer is no. Not even one of the Big Five can make you a veterinary surgeon Great or Small, or a Skyfaring pilot, or a Fiery and Furious media pundit.
Here’s something else we got wrong. Platform is a factor in the salability of fiction, too. While you may not be dispensing twice-weekly advice on dog health or air travel or a failing presidency, you can still be asked, How many followers did you say you have? And Who knows you? And Why would anybody pick up a book with your name on it?
Particularly in the case of a strong debut, yes, we can look to the publisher help carry the load of establishing an author’s platform. And in all cases, publishers must market their books, and vigorously, and in alliance with their authors and their agents. And this is something everybody isn’t clear on yet, either, as you may know.
But if we look at platform now, things have moved along since the days when these were our fretful focal points. There’s a new factor to consider. Allow me to scare you, won’t you?
We have some very fine, if worrisome help on that, some new data, as it were.
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Last year, as a way of giving myself a meaningful deadline and my writing broader exposure, I signed a contract to participate in a multi-author boxed set. In theory, the expectations around my story were quite doable: a half year in which to write and edit a 20,000-word contemporary romance novella. I even had the nugget of an intriguing idea and began writing without delay.
For a time, progress was excellent.
Famous last words, right? Because of course, with three months left on the calendar, the challenges began.
First, with 30,000 words composed, it was obvious I was on my way to writing a full-length novel.
This wasn’t a deal-breaker, however. I knew where the story was headed (look at me, becoming a grown-up outliner and such!) and I was still in love with the idea. It felt like a fresh take on a hot trend (office romance), and it was exciting to think of writing a marketable book I also adored.
The bigger issue, and the one I needed to solve immediately, was that my characters were becoming emotionally removed. They did stuff, but they had stopped explaining the why of their actions.
The solution was one I have employed to good result in the past: write in first-person, then convert the passages to third. (This approach can provide added benefit by deepening the third-person point of view.)*
And lo, when I tried it, the heavens did part and the pages did sing. I suddenly had character motivation, emotionality, and internal consistency.
I also had the passages in first-person present tense—a problem because, try as I might, I couldn’t get them to match the preceding 30,000 words, written in third-person past.
With the deadline approaching, I could see four options:
What was an author to do, especially an author still building her audience? An author who didn’t want to sacrifice quality, and who hates missing deadlines?
Honestly, the conundrum made my head hurt. This was the first time as an indie writer that I urgently longed for an agent or publisher’s advice.
Here’s how I compensated:
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Did you hear? Scrivener 3 for Mac released in November (Windows is in beta now and due out later this year), and the upgrade brings some cool new features.
Below are some of the tools (available for both Mac and PC) that I found most exciting while parsing through the changes for a free mini-course I created to help Scrivener 2 users transition to the new version.
Writing History
You’ve always been able to track your word count and progress in Scrivener, but if you wanted to keep a log of your daily word count, you had to manually enter it into a spreadsheet. By popular request, Scrivener 3 solves that with Writing History.
You can now view your word counts for each project by day, month, or day with monthly subtotals. Better yet, you can export the data to a CSV file for viewing in any spreadsheet program.
To access Writing History, go to Project>Writing History.
Styles
Scrivener users have been begging Literature & Latte for true, word-processor-like styles for as long as I can remember. Wish granted. With the old presets, Scrivener didn’t “remember” how a section of text came to be formatted—whether manually or via preset. You could apply a preset for quick formatting, but changing the appearance of, say, all email exchanges between your characters meant combing through the manuscript for every instance.
With styles, if you change the format of (i.e. redefine) a style, it updates all text formatted using that style throughout your manuscript.
You can also change how text formatted with a certain style appears when you compile.
I needed this recently for a manuscript that contained text messages between characters. I wanted the text formatted one way for ebooks and another for print. With the new styles function, problem solved. Slick, right?
Searchable Snapshots
Snapshots have always been a great way to keep versions of your scenes, but they had one flaw. You couldn’t search all snapshots at once. Let’s say you knew one of your early scenes mentioned a specific event that you’ve since written out of your manuscript. Now, you want to grab a conversation from that old scene, but after copious revisions you can’t remember which current scene it spawned.
Previously, you would’ve had to view the Snapshots for each possible scene and then you could run a search on the list using Command+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows).
No longer! To search all snapshots in a project for any word or phrase, go to Documents>Snapshots>Show Snapshots Manager. Type the desired text in the Search box and you’ll get a list of snapshots meeting the search criteria. Click any snapshot to view its contents.
Quick Search Bar
I didn’t even know I wanted this until I saw it.
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Image: Procter & Gamble, Business Wire, the 2017 Times Square holiday restrooms, a promotion for Charmin. The line too small to read in this image is: “The best seats on Broadway.”
This “media opportunity alert” arrived in my inbox:
Hi, Porter, Thought you might have interest in checking out this event spotlighting Mark Ballas and girlfriend BC Jean.
The singer-songwriter duo has teamed up with Charmin for the December celebration of restrooms in Times Square–an entire storefront of unique, unforgettable, state-of-the-art bathrooms free to the public (timely for the holiday season in NYC).
On December 19th, Jean and Ballas will perform singing and dance routines on-site.
Happy to have you there for a front row seat/interview with BC and Mark.
Please let me know if you’re interested?
I wrote back:
Hi, Nadia, I cover the international book publishing industry. Despite what many may think of books these days, our publishers do not believe we’re talking about toilet paper. Yet. Thanks, though.
With the help of AdWeek, I’ve learned that from 2006 to 2010, Charmin rented space in which to create bathrooms for seasonal shoppers in Times Square. It has revived this holiday tradition this year at 1601 Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets with 14 “themed bathrooms” open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for shoppers, through December 24.
The first thing we learn here is that if you work for a toilet paper company, you’d better love bathroom jokes. This is Procter & Gamble at work, squeezing the Charmin for every last available pun. All’s fair in love and advertising.
But the second thing we learn here–and the reason I’m subjecting you to this plumber’s view of American marketing–is how a publicity person/PR agent should not be operating. If you’ve got a publicist for your books or are thinking of hiring one, you need to know what this dynamic looks like from the journalist’s side of the stall door.
My provocation for you today comes in the form of three questions with which to quiz your publicity person.
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Television gets a bad rap. Some of it is deserved—I’m looking at you Sharknado—but some of it comes by way of the rarified air some writers breathe. You know the air; it smells a little like antique books and pretension. It’s the air that convinces some of us that if the masses consume it, it can’t be any good.
Sharknado notwithstanding, there is good television out there. There are widely-known, critically acclaimed shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, and there are lesser known shows, some long-canceled, like Firefly and A Different World, that changed the way viewers engaged with each other and the world. What these shows have in common is their ability to entertain, and we can learn a lot about writing—and our writing careers—from studying them. In an effort to keep this post from being the length of a novel, I’ve focused on a showrunner, two shows, and commercial breaks to provide examples of how television can inform the way authors write and share stories.
1) Shonda Rhimes and the power of a recognizable brand
If you’ve watched anything on ABC over the past few years, you’re probably familiar with Shonda Rhimes. Her shows, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away with Murder, have been rating powerhouses for ABC, reshaping the network’s evening lineup. But what we can learn from Shonda extends beyond powerful writing. If Shondaland, Rhimes’s production company, is associated with a project, viewers know to expect strong but flawed female leads, a diverse cast, and soap opera-like drama. This is Shonda’s brand on ABC, and she delivers it faithfully to her dedicated fans. Know your audience, create what they enjoy, brand it, and repeat.
2) The West Wing and characters we care about
This Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning TV show is a master class on pacing, dialogue, and creating characters people care about. Here’s a scene that accomplishes all three.
Image – iStockphoto: Runna
Where Politics Can’t Stop Us
A funny thing happened on the way to isolationism. Some in the business believe there’s new interest in work from other languages.
I’m hopeful that some of what’s lost in the dynamics of vulgar nationalism can be found in translation.
Threatened with the un-American idea that we shouldn’t have people from “foreign” venues among us, Americans, it seems, may be waking up to the fact that we’re all foreigners here, united in world history’s grandest handshake.
And not just in the Newer World, either. In the UK–perhaps an early warning of the Brexitian crisis–The Bookseller’s Tom Tivnan and Felicity Wood were reporting a rise in revenue of 6.2 percent in translated books in the first part of 2014. At that point (about 19 weeks into that year), 112 translated books had been part of the Top 5,000 titles tracked, over 63 translated titles in the same period of the previous year.
At world trade shows this year, the “rights centers,” those big, noisy kasbahs in which books are bought and sold into new languages, have been growing fast, to the point that at the largest, Frankfurt Book Fair, we had sold out all 600 tables in its Literary Agents and Scouts Center, called the LitAg, some six months before the fair this year.
Tomorrow (Monday, November 20), we’ll have news at Publishing Perspectives of Wattpad phenom Anna Todd selling the first book of a new series rapidly into international territories, and it’s not even releasing until June 1.
The National Endowment for the Arts‘ translation fellowships in 2018 will award 22 new grants of $12,500 or $25,000 each for a total $300,000 to help defray the costs of translation from works in 15 languages and five continents. In fact, here’s a bright spot amid the crushing distress of “your tax dollars at work” in so many wrong places these days: since 1981, the NEA has awarded 455 fellowships to 404 translators working into English from 69 languages and 82 countries. NEA literature director Amy Stolls calls this “expanding the range of ideas and viewpoints.” And that’s how you build open doors, not walls.
Meanwhile, Vermont College of Fine Arts has announced what’s thought to be the world’s first low-residency international MFA program in creative writing and literary translation. Hong Kong author Xu Xi, a visiting faculty member, is helping to head up the new program. In a prepared statement about the new MFA, Xu is quoted, saying, “The literary world is global and writers need to broaden their perspective beyond their own borders through immersion in other cultures and languages, and through interactions with writers from other parts of the world.”
Do you know Three Percent? It’s Chat Post’s site and project, based at the University of Rochester, that’s the closest thing we have in the States to an authority on translated books. Post, always struggling for adequate resources of time and money, diligently tries to track and evaluate the work going on in this country in translation. He also publishes translation from Read More
Doubtful About Doulas?
The Matera Women’s Fiction Festival in Italy includes an international writers conference. The conference was on hiatus last year. A lot of us were glad when the event’s longtime (tireless) driver Elizabeth Jennings and her fine associates including Rebecca Riches and Mariateresa Cascino were able to get it back onto the calendar this year, in late September.
The conference’s programming was even better filled out than in the past and included its traditional one-on-one sessions with speakers. I enjoy those because they give me a chance to meet attendees. Jennings and her administration provide simultaneous translation in English and Italian (and a translator at the table when I meet with an Italian speaker in a one-on-one).
And while it’s set in the context of the Women’s Fiction Festival, this is a good event for guys to attend, too. Nothing being offered at the conference won’t help male writers as well as women, don’t let that scare you off if you’re a man and thinking about going in the future.
In walking into the Fondazione Le Monacelle with Jennings just before I spoke, she mentioned to me that a topic of interest this year at the event was the concept of the “book doula.”
Part of the interest had been sparked by Olga Mecking’s writeup in London at The Guardian about doulas earlier last month.
And if you’re feeling hesitant about all this, doula Ariane Conrad’s site won’t do a lot to make you feel better. She’s all in. Although she’s doing this for nonfiction, it could just as easily be fiction, and she’s talking “bookbirthing” (one word).
Some of her descriptive copy will put off anyone but your Kumbaya-singing aunt. Such as:
“You will probably make me cry…in a good way. We will probably crack each other up. I will tell you when there is spinach in your teeth. We will probably become lifelong friends.”
And:
“We might plan a week-long retreat to refine the concept, draft an outline, or power through some writing. We might schedule weekly Skype meetings to keep you buoyant and productive. If cajoling doesn’t work, I will be stern about deadlines.”
And here’s a ghostly line:
“You might ask me to write a draft that you can make your own. I might interview you and shape a strong, consistent narrative from the material. I will probably do background research, editing, proofing.”
As much as I do to encourage and promote professionalism in writing–because I want the industry to have to respond with its most professional service and support for its authors–I’m skeptical of this.
For one thing, I worry that there’s an unintended sexism in this metaphoric conflation of childbirth and writing, a suggestion that women might need special help from a literary midwife. Perhaps that’s too strong a reaction. But I can’t see a guy heading out for a retreat with his doula, can you? Am I knee-jerking? Okay, a lot of us are super-sensitized to the sexism ingrained in our culture right now.
But if we put aside the gender question (how about a “book mechanic” for the guys?–shoot me now) what sort of need is being answered here, even ostensibly?
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One of the things I am most grateful for in my post-writing-life adventure of running a small but busy literary PR agency is the wonderfully talented team that makes it all possible. Their creativity, insights, storytelling acumen and dedication are a gift to all those who work with them. Today I’m filled with pride and gratitude as I introduce Emily Adams, of my firm, who crafted this post based on her spot-on observations of certain industry trends and is a strong emerging voice in the business-of-writing conversation. Take it away, Emily!
There’s a lot of uncertainty when it comes to shelling out for a publicist. Don’t get us wrong, we’re firm believers in the power of publicity! But if you hire a good publicist, they will be the first to tell you that there are no guarantees where media attention is concerned. News cycles can change in the blink of an eye, which means that even if you want everyone to be looking at your book, no matter how good it is or how well it is being pitched, the media may have their eyes glued to the president’s latest gaffe, a major celebrity divorce, or what Stephen King just tweeted. Throw a new Ann Patchett novel into the mix and it’s absolute madness.
Because of the relatively high uncertainty factor, we get a bevy of questions from authors who retain our services. Most are new to hiring PR professionals and so, understandably, they look for ways to understand what we’re doing and to gauge and track our progress.
A vast majority of the questions we receive revolve around who we are pitching. This is a sensible question — you can’t get your book into the hands of a reviewer unless that reviewer is pitched. We even hold a call with our authors to determine what their “wish list” is — combing through outlets and contacts they’d like to make sure we include in their press lists.
But there’s one question we rarely hear, and as PR insiders, we think of it as the magic question — the litmus test
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