Frustrations of Writing, Publishing, and Promoting
Posted on 21 January 2011 by Karen Risch | 2 responses
We just finished a highly unscientific but fairly revealing experiment, polling other nonfiction writers, authors, and wannabes about what burns them up about this business. (To be precise, it wasn’t even officially an experiment, or a formal poll, either. It was just a question I asked a bunch of people, including members of a group I belong to on LinkedIn, LinkEds & Writers, and I paid attention to the answers. Finding those answers interesting, I thought I’d write about them here.) Now that I’ve read or heard more than 200 responses, we’re going to start addressing each issue, offering advice and resources.
“This writing business. Pencils and whatnot. Over-rated, if you ask me.
Silly stuff. Nothing in it.”—Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
In The Last Lecture, the late author and Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch made a point of saying that you have a choice to be either an Eeyore or a Tigger. You can be either a complaining, lumbering fellow who sometimes loses his tail or an exuberant, optimistic cheerleader who can pluck someone’s last nerve. Here, we’re going to try to find a middle ground, empathetic to the quite real annoyances and difficulties of making a living from writing but also chipper as a tour guide in showing you the possibilities for greater fulfillment and financial reward in this field. Read more
New York Times Bestseller List: How It’s Made
Posted on 14 December 2010 by Karen Risch | 2 responses
On Facebook yesterday, I posted a link to this video about the secret strategies of the New York Times in compiling its bestseller list.
This prompted a response from a friend who’s an acquiring editor at one of the Big 5 publishing houses. She gracefully informed me that the video was poppycock. (What she actually wrote was that the video’s talking head didn’t REALLY know what she was talking about.) So I asked my friend for the scoop.
She mentioned that Bookscan makes this process of measuring book success fairly transparent. In case you’ve never heard of this company, I’ll explain: Bookscan compiles numbers for the industry, specifically sales from most outlets, although some big-box stores are excluded. (For example, Target and Costco report to Bookscan, but not Wal-mart.) Publishers and agents refer to these numbers all the time as a fairly reliable gauge of how well a book has sold.
But about that bestseller list … Read more
“Write Your Book in 30 Seconds!”
Posted on 4 November 2010 by Karen Risch | No responses
Yes, that’s ridiculous. No one writes a book in 30 seconds. Nor in a minute. Not even in a minute a day, despite what one get-writ-quick scheme promises. Seriously! I saw that at a wannabe authors’ event I attended recently; the one-minute solution was part of a $2,500 package that included a bunch of other, uh, stuff that was supposed to help you produce a bestseller in no time.
Let’s get real.
These authorship “programs” that try to convince you that writing a nonfiction book is easy—a snap! anyone can do it!—and you can do it fast, such as in one week, or in one-minute sessions, are at best misleading.
True, writing nonfiction doesn’t have to be agonizing. It can be fun and interesting, amusing if challenging. It can also come quickly, in a blaze of insight. You can rough out the text for your book lickety-split IF you know exactly who your target audience is and have your own message nailed down, with ready examples and metaphors and references. And IF you’ve already found your voice and can write in that voice consistently. There are a few other IFs, but those are the biggies.
Don’t you want to write something you’ll be proud of? If cranking out junk isn’t the objective and writing something of substance and meaning is, then be prepared for it to be hard occasionally. Frustrating. Irritating. Elusive. Not all the time, but as mama said, there’ll be days like this.
Allow yourself the time to refine the message and the space to let the thing evolve. You’ll think of better ways to phrase and explain your ideas, improve on your presentation syntax, find opportunities to loop back and reinforce points or to add the bit of detail that grabs your readers by hand, or heart, and pulls them into your book so they can’t wait to keep reading. It’s also possible that you’ll wind up completely deconstructing your first draft and rebuilding it into something much finer, stronger, and more compelling.
In the next few months, Vicki and I are going to be reviewing a lot of books and multimedia programs to see what we think will actually be helpful to people who want to write, publish, and promote their books. Something you can do to help us choose the best ones to include here is to answer one question for us:
What one thing frustrates you the most about writing, publishing, and promoting your book?
Please make your comment here on this blog, or feel free to email us at writers@justwritebooks.com.
Banned Books: Don’t Read This!
Posted on 28 September 2010 by Karen Risch | 9 responses
Okay, read this, but please be sneaky about it. Oh, what the hell. Go ahead and read it all out in the open. It’s pretty short—and it’s not sexually explicit, offensive, or inappropriate to the age of my intended audience. Namely, you.
Although to ensure lots of people read this, I should make it raunchy, in your face, and out of line—and then get some group to make a big stink about it.
I’m not saying anything new by observing that whenever people are told they “shouldn’t” read something, it becomes the very thing they want to read. It’s true for me: tell me a book is boring or badly written, and it might give me pause; tell me it’s shocking or strange or hard to get through because the ideas are so foreign or it’s too anything, and I’m the first one to bust out my flashlight to read under the covers. Figuratively, of course. Now that I’m a woman of a certain age, I don’t have to hide my books, though sometimes it’s prudent to wait till after my five-year-old son goes to bed.
“You can’t read that.”
“Oh, Yes I Can!”
Obtaining Copyright Permission
Posted on 23 September 2010 by Karen Risch | 6 responses
Let’s start with the most basic bit, the question of whether you need to seek permission or not. Most of the time, if you’re quoting judiciously, sparingly, and not much from the same source, the answer is no. Similarly, if the piece you’re incorporating won’t become the centerpiece or main substance of your work, it’s still no. However, there aren’t any hard and fast rules about how many words or how many lines of text you can quote without infringing on someone else’s copyright. If you ever read that there are such rules, don’t believe it!
Keep in mind that I’m not a lawyer, so this isn’t legal advice, but I’m going to tell you under what circumstances I seek permission. This is based on years of securing permission for non-fiction books, magazine articles, and blog posts in which all kinds of other people’s material has been excerpted and reprinted—with clearance from the copyright holder when necessary.
Write Your Non-fiction Book for a Specific Audience
Posted on 7 September 2010 by Victoria St. George | No responses
A few years ago, I worked on a book that described how to use traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to treat infertility. The ideal reader was a woman, probably in her thirties, middle to upper income, who had been experiencing infertility for five to ten years. She had gone through a great deal of emotional pain around her inability to conceive and bear a child. She may or may not have tried fertilization treatments. She probably knew little to nothing about traditional Chinese medicine, but she was willing to look outside Western medicine for help in getting pregnant and having a healthy baby.
Understanding all this was crucial to the writing of the book, influencing everything from structure to voice to what stayed in versus what we edited away. And it proved essential in creating a book that this audience wanted to buy, to read, to apply, and recommend to friends.
In my last post, I gave three reasons you must know your reader and audience. But how do you put that knowledge into practice? How do you create the equivalent of eye contact—“I” contact, if you will—that sense of author-to-reader intimate conversation?
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