In Betty Kelly Sargent's 30 years as an editor in the traditional book publishing world, she's seen skilled editors transform hundreds of manuscripts from ordinary to extraordinary.
Links of the week November 13 2017 (46)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
20 November 2017
Encouraging you to complete your first draft is just the beginning of what a good editor can do for you. In my 30 years as an editor in the traditional book publishing world, I've seen skilled editors transform hundreds of manuscripts from ordinary to extraordinary. Maybe it is a question of reorganization, or maybe the bad guy just isn't convincing enough, or maybe the title is way off the mark. Incidentally, two of the titles Fitzgerald was considering are Trimalchio in West Egg, and The High-Bouncing Lover. See what I mean about editors and titles?
If you plan to pursue writing as a professional, long-term career, I recommend starting and maintaining an author website even if you're unpublished. Your website serves as an online home and hub for everything that you do, whether in real life or in the digital realm. You fully own and control it, tell your own story, and connect directly with the media, readers or influencers. It's hard to overstate its importance over the long term
Your first attempts at creating an author website probably aren't going to be that great, and that's okay. Plus, it's unlikely you'll get much traffic. Instead, the point is to practice your skills at expressing who you are, and what you do, in a public space. Over time, your ability to do this will improve, assuming you tend to your website periodically and don't abandon it. (And why would you, if you're still writing and publishing?)
If you start the website development process early, before you really "need" a site (before people seek it out), you can enjoy a gentler learning curve, as well as the power of incremental progress. You don't have to launch and perfect everything at once. Start small, and build your skills and presence over time. You want something doable and sustainable-and sustainability is key.
How do romance authors and editors address tricky issues of communication and safer sex without killing the mood?
Writing prompt: Two characters, en route to falling in love, are about to fall into bed together. Make it steamy. Make it satisfying. Oh, but don't forget to have them talk about safe sex and make sure there's affirmative consent. And don't make it weird.
Although romance has been dubbed "porn for women" by critics as diverse as the Family Research Council and the New Yorker, the fact is that the genre was less complicated before things got hot and heavy on the page.
For decades, mainstream romance novels skirted the issue of sex with a suggestive kiss and a fade to black. Then, in 1972, Nancy Coffey, a 25-year-old editor at Avon, published a book that broke down the bedroom door and changed the genre forever.
If you have a message to share, a story to preserve, or you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, there's no better vehicle than a book. While some believe that writing a book is a long, difficult process, reserved for the talented few, I believe anyone who can talk and type can write a book. What's more, you can do it in a year. By following a simple technique, you can get your book written and into the world this year! The powerful method comes from The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, and it's called "planning to the now."
What is Planning to the Now?
Planning to the now is a tool for focusing all your efforts toward your ultimate goals and ensuring that you're doing the ONE most important thing right now that ties directly to those big goals. The concept is deceptively simple and incredibly effective. Starting with an audacious Someday Goal, you work back in time to right now, tying each nearer term goal directly to your grand plan.
Using this method you lay out exactly what needs to be true at the 5-year, 1-year, 1-month, and 1-week marks-finally landing on what you need to do today to hit all of your milestones. With each step closer to now, you focus on one, and only one, thing you can do to advance toward your goal.
GREAT HONORS ARE flowing to Ursula K. Le Guin. Last year, the Library of America began a publishing program devoted to her work, a rare achievement for a living writer. The second and third volumes, containing much of her classic early SF, are now out. Her collected shorter fiction has been published in two volumes by Saga Press. In 2014, she received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This year, once again, she was on the betting list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Le Guin lives quietly in Portland, Oregon, with her husband of many decades, Charles.
I was very careful in those years not to work to a deadline. I never promised a book - ever. I left myself what leeway I could in what I did when. My actual time to work on my writing was going to be limited to what was left after the needs of my kids. I don't want to be pollyannish, but the fact is both jobs were very rewarding. They were immediately rewarding. I enjoy writing and I enjoyed the kids.
13 November 2017
Probably, the best advice I've ever come across from a writer on writing is Elmore Leonard's suggestion, "If it sounds like writing, rewrite it." Second best is Mark Twain's illustration of how to show, don't tell, followed by Margaret Atwood's close third, "Do back exercises. Pain is distracting."
Whether you are a seasoned self-publisher or a first-time indie author, and whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, chances are you agree with Hemingway, who said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Nobody said this writing business was going to be easy. For Hemingway, the secret to effective writing was to forget about the flowery prose of the literati and keep your writing simple, short, and clear. When he went to work for the Kansas City Star in 1917, he was given four rules for effective writing, and he stuck with them his whole life.
"Seventy-seven percent of Americans, a new high, believe the nation is divided on the most important values," according to a Gallup poll in November of 2016. It is certainly no secret that our country is suffering from a plague of constant bashing and a fervent desire to "tribe-up." Is it social media's fault or is there something bigger (or smaller) at play? The answer has been staring us down almost since it began.
Today, upwards of eighty percent of Americans get their news (at least part of the time) through a digital medium, according to The Atlantic. Strangely enough, Millennials strongly prefer print textbooks. So much so, that Student Monitor found that eighty-seven percent (that's right, 87%) of all textbooks sold in 2014 were old-fashion print. In fact, Americans as a whole prefer to read paper books, be it for pleasure or pursuit of knowledge, then books in any digital format.
Why has the percentage of Americans who have read a book in the last twelve months (73% according to Pew Research) stayed mostly unchanged since 2012? A United States Post Office & Temple University study (2015) and a separate study by Bangor University & a branding agency, Millward Brown (2009), came to a similar conclusion: paper has an emotional impact.
As a literary agent, I receive roughly 500 queries, or book pitches, a month. After 11 years of doing this job, I have seen a lot of book ideas. Obviously I've noticed trends (did you know all vampires live in Seattle now?) but there are other similarities outside of pop culture or critical mass made evident by the slush pile. When an agent or editor says they are looking for something they've never seen before, these are the things we don't mean.
If what you're already writing looks like something on this list, don't panic. To misquote a friend, publishing is a rich tapestry; lots of books like these have been published (you can probably think of a bunch off the top of your head), and some are even great. Your book might be great, too! But if your gut tells you it isn't after reading this list, don't fall back on the assumption that publishing will make an exception for you just because all the other options are terrifying. Take some time to think about it and adjust your course as necessary.
In its quest to launch a hit fantasy series of the Game of Thrones caliber, Amazon has closed a massive deal - said to be close to $250 million - to acquire global TV rights to The Lord of the Rings, based on the fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. The streaming service has given a multi-season commitment to a LOTR series in the pact, which also includes a potential spinoff series.
The LOTR original series, a prequel to Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, will be produced by Amazon Studios in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust; HarperCollins; and New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which produced the hugely successful LOTR movie franchise.
Amazon, Netflix and HBO had been approached by the Tolkien estate, who had been shopping the project. It came with an upfront rights payment said to be in the $200 million-$250 million range, and I hear Amazon landed the rights by paying close to $250 million. That is just for the rights, before any costs for development, talent and production, in proposition whose finances industry observers called "insane." It is a payment that is made sight unseen as there is no concept, and there are no creative auspices attached to the possible series. On top of that, the budget for a fantasy series of that magnitude is likely to be $100 million-$150 million a season.
Writing a book and getting it published used to be a huge endeavor. You had to pitch it to a literary agent who would then pitch it to a publisher and it could sometimes take years to get it accepted. These days, with kindle and the online world at everyone's fingertips, getting your book out to the world is quicker and easier than you might think.
If you're an entrepreneur, having a book for your business has many perks such as the added credibility, expert status and the ability to use that book to attract your ideal clients. Some even say that a book is now like a bigger, better business card.
Used correctly, your book can help you attract your tribe for years to come (so long as you continue to market it, but that's not what we're talking about today).
So first, Why self-publish?
For one, YOU KEEP ALL THE CREATIVE RIGHTS. You have the freedom to do what you want with the title, the cover and the content of your book. Why give that away?
Secondly, while it may seem enticing to use a publisher because you think they would promote your book, that%u2019s just not what happens. They don't promise to sell any copies of your book. In fact, when you pitch to them, they want to see how many people follow you on all your social media channels and they want to know how many books you think YOU'LL sell.
Lastly, self-publishing means you can get your book out faster. The exact day you're done writing, you could upload it to amazon (though I wouldn't recommend that - you might want to let it sit a couple days and do some editing. But that's totally up to you).
Yesterday, FSG published Susan Sontag's Debriefing, a new collection of the writer's short fiction. I'm always excited to read more of Sontag's work-which is convenient, because it seems there's always more to read. Sontag, who died in 2004, was remarkably prolific, especially if you count her journals, which I consider ecstatic texts in and of themselves. Speaking of ecstasy, Sontag is also a figure of worship for a lot of writers, in part because of the many, many opinions she had on writing, and what good writing should be. All of which, despite their occasional contradictions, are probably correct. To celebrate her new book, I have collected some of these below.
On what gets her started writing:
Reading-which is rarely related to what I'm writing, or hoping to write. I read a lot of art history, architectural history, musicology, academic books on many subjects. And poetry. Getting started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing.
RUPI KAUR made her name on Instagram by attacking Instagram, a fitting ascent for the provocative 24-year-old poet who releases her short verses onto the slippery, reactive sphere of social media. In 2015, she uploaded a picture of herself lying in bed on sheets stained with menstrual blood. The post was removed, and she promptly hit back. "I will not apologise for feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but will not be okay with a small leak," she wrote on Facebook and Tumblr. Vitriol and death threats came in droves, but so did followers. Today's count is 1.7m.
Ms Kaur's success is singular, but it is also a reflection of the times. Poetry is in the midst of a renaissance, and is being driven by a clutch of young, digitally-savvy "Instapoets", so-called for their ability to package their work into concise, shareable posts. Taylor Knott Gregson, a best-selling poet, boasts nearly 600,000 followers on Instagram, where he posts verse scrawled on scraps of paper or printed using a typewriter. R.M. Drake - who counts Ludacris, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashian clan as fans - has a following equal to that of Ms Kaur.
No one imagined that the Japanese translation of the book, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861), would become a long-selling hit in Japan when it was first published in 2013. It is the life story of a slave girl in the United States in the 1800s, and not something one would expect to strike interest in Japan, which while struggling with its own issues of race, has a 98% ethnically Japanese population.
The book that fascinated Horikoshi has been compared to The Diary Of Anne Frank. It is considered a remarkable work in how it sheds light on the female experience of slavery, including the never-ending threat of sexual exploitation. It was thought to be a work of fiction but many believe the authenticity was definitively established in 1981.