“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.

This way, please.

First, here’s a look at the frustrations people shared with us.

Writing Woes

• Lack of respect. Other people equate writing with typing and think anyone with a word processor can do it, and should, if they want to.
• Lack of time. It’s hard to find the time to do it. My life is too busy, other demands too great.
• Lack of discipline. I procrastinate. I have too many interests and lack focus.
• Loneliness. It’s such a solitary act. And when criticism or rejection comes, I feel that much more alone.

Publishing Peeves

• Pitching. Agents are slow to respond, if they respond. It feels as if book publishing is an “exclusive club,” with “subterfuge” and “coded language,” which you can’t get into unless you know someone who knows someone. It’s all so damned mysterious.
• Process. This is a complex industry, and I don’t fully understand how all the pieces fit together or exactly what the agent and publisher want. In self-publishing, there’s a whole business to master, and the distribution piece is the hardest one to conquer.
• Protection. Wherever there are dreamers, there are scammers, and this is no exception.
• Pay. The money for freelancers who write short-form pieces (articles, blog posts, etc.) isn’t commensurate with the skill it takes to do a good job. It seems that a lot of people are willing to write for next to nothing, and that drags everyone down.

Promoting Problems

• Temperament. The truth? I don’t like marketing, and I’m not interested in learning about it.
• Talent. It’s hard to be good at both things, writing and marketing. It would be so much better if I could focus solely on writing, which is what I enjoy and what I know.
• Time and energy. Marketing a book takes more time and energy than writing one. It’s exhausting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 …

The NYT list-makers tend to ignore backlist sales, so you won’t find old editions of classics, for example, on the paperback bestseller list, unless someone brings out a new version or translation. They also don’t pay attention to bulk-sales purchases from Amazon, because it’s so easy to manipulate the numbers. Have lots of money? Just buy lots of copies of your own book. Some authors do this, of course, because success begets success, right? If I have an Amazon bestseller, even more people will by my book, in theory at least. So, it makes sense that a list that’s trying to measure genuine public INTEREST in a book would ignore such sales.

The list-makers do pay particular attention to certain bookstores (most certainly not just independents, although most indies report sales to the NYT), so publishers tend to focus promotional efforts on those stores. Which stores are in the mix is unknown to the general public, but I gather that publishers are well aware of which stores count and are counted.

My editor friend assures me there’s no mystery here.

Still, there is a fair amount of insider knowledge necessary to understand exactly how you’d land on the New York Times bestseller list. But I like what super-seller Tim Ferriss (now in the midst of the mother of all book launches for his new release, The Four-Hour Body) wrote fairly recently: marketing can secure some readers, but a great book is what draws the masses.

“It’s the product that will create long-term word-of-mouth and the groundswell needed for a global phenomenon.” So, he urged, “Don’t save your best for volume two.”

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.

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!”

In honor of Banned Books Week, held every year the last week of September, I’m reflecting on the only book I remember my parents saying was off limits in our house, Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. Perhaps it goes without saying that I read this autobiography, published the year I was born, surreptitiously when I was in sixth grade (rebel!) and then told Mom and Dad about it, proud of my fait accompli.

To their credit, their only response was, “Do you have any questions? Anything you’d like to talk about?”

I didn’t. Although I do have one question now: Why that book? Of all the stuff in our home library, why was that one forbidden fruit? I could make some guesses: there was the scene where he lost his eye (impaled on a pointy decoration in the center of his steering wheel—awful), some bits about his sex life (I don’t even remember), and drinking, and converting to Judaism. And then the guy was black, of course, and he married a white woman at a time when that was not at all common. But these weren’t the kinds of things to make my folks blanch, normally.

I’ll never know why. But it makes a point: censorship is all about the censors, has next to nothing to do with the book or the reader.

What has been your experience with censorship? Has anyone ever told you not to read something? Or told you not to write something? How did you respond?

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.

I do seek permission:

• Any time I’m quoting poetry or song lyrics, or reproducing an image (graph, photo, or illustration) owned by someone else. These pretty much require permission no matter what, no matter how short or small.
• Any time I’m quoting a decent-length (note ambiguity here) passage from an essay, because the proportion of text in relation to the original is considered relevant in copyright cases.
• Any time I’m quoting in such a way that I see the possibility that I’m reducing the original writer’s ability to make money from publication of the original piece.

EXCEPTION: Any of these can be exempt from the need to obtain permission if they’re in the public domain.

That’s it. If the item doesn’t satisfy one of those criteria, then no worries. No permission required, as I see it. (You may wish to read the copyright law and draw your own conclusions. In fact, I recommend it. At the very least, skim it.)

However, if you do need to seek permission, then here are the steps:

1. Know how your work will be published (by whom), how many copies will be printed, and the price per copy. You’ll need to include that information in your permission request letter.
2. Decide what clearance you’ll need: does your publisher require permission to reprint in all editions, all languages, for all time? Or is it just for English language, North American rights, hardback only? This is important. I just recently had to go back to a few publishers who granted permission to ask for more clearance because I hadn’t originally asked that it cover the book in digital (ebook) form, something publishers are planning for now, right from the first printing.
3. Discern who can grant you permission. This can be an estate (as is the case with anything by long-deceased people), a publisher (as is the case with most poetry), or an individual (as is the case with most photographs). If you’re pulling something from a book, start with the publisher, who will refer you elsewhere if the copyright is managed by another agency.
4. Write a letter to the copyright holder specifying the following information: the title of your work, the publisher, the price for all editions for which you’re seeking clearance, the number of copies for each edition (you can estimate, and I suggest you estimate a little high so you don’t have to go begging later; assuming you aren’t self-publishing, consult with your editor). Include the line or passage you’re quoting, and specify how it will be used and the clearance you’re seeking. (Want to see an example of a permission request letter? Email me, and I’ll send it to you.) Also be sure to ask for redirection should the recipient not be entitled to grant permission.
5. Wait patiently, perhaps up to eight weeks. If the response comes back with “I don’t own the copyright to this particular bit,” then begin again at step 4.
6. When you receive the copyright permission agreement, review the document carefully. Make sure they’ve stipulated the rights you’ve requested or, if it’s lesser clearance, that it’s still agreeable to you. Pay attention to the fee and any other requirements, such as the need to return signed copies in duplicate, to send the agreement one place and payment to another, or to provide a copy of your work after it’s published.

A note about fees: they range wildly, depending on how closely the copyright holder guards usage, how popular or famous the original maker is, how you’re using the material (a quote in the text versus an epigram at the start of your book, for example), and, to be honest, other factors I have no inkling of. For rough reference, here are some fees we’ve paid recently: $500 to a photographer for the use of three images in all editions and translations of a book; $90 for the use of three lines of poetry in a hardback edition, English language only; $425 for the use of an abbreviated excerpt from three paragraphs of an essay in all editions, English language only; $500 for use of an entire poem as a coda to the text in all editions, all languages.

Ideally, you’ll secure similar clearance from all sources for your book so that you avoid the headache of keeping track of who said you could use what for which editions or translations. Fees and terms are generally negotiable, though if you’re happy with them, I don’t suggest haggling just for the sake of it. Given the time it takes to go back and forth, you’re better off saving your breath for negotiations that really matter.

Best of luck to you in this and all your publishing adventures!

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?

Here are some ideas for putting yourself in your readers’ shoes so your non-fiction book speaks to to your audience directly and insightfully, as if you were talking to this reader and no one else, paying attention to his or her particular needs, hopes, and deepest desires.

Before you write:

• Know your audience’s demographics and psychographics and be able to state them clearly. This will help you in selling your book to a publisher or targeting lists to market to later. Ask yourself: Is my audience primarily male or female? What is their age range and income level? What is their educational background? What’s important to them? What are their wounds, the things they feel are missing or difficult in their lives? What are their goals and desires?
• Create a picture of your ideal readers. Who are they? What do they care about? What are their problems that your book will solve? What may they already have read or tried? What kind of a response do you want them to have to your book?
• Know your readers’ level of information/sophistication. Are you presenting new material to an audience that you need to educate? Are your concepts going to fit neatly into what they already know, or are you going to explode their old ways of thinking? How much do you need to explain so they understand your material and message?

While you’re writing:

• Keep the image of your ideal reader in your mind. Get clear on the value you’re providing and the impact you’ll have when this specific person reads your book. In your mind’s eye, see him or her reading and enjoying your book.
• Use stories that will have an effect on your ideal reader. Stories, examples, metaphors, and analogies are some of your best tools for getting your points across.
• When in doubt, explain terms and concepts that your reader needs to understand.

After you’ve written (let your draft rest for a day or two before you do this):

• Reread with the reader’s image in your mind. Imagine him or her reading your book; what kind of reaction do you want him or her to have? Does what you’ve written inspire that kind of response?
• Are there any concepts that might need to be explained better or differently? Do you need to add stories, metaphors, examples, analogies to make your points clearer?
• What can you take out? You may have over-explained or explained your point in a previous chapter. Respect your reader’s intellect while striving to be clear and concise.

Given what we knew about our reader for the TCM book, its tone was warm, comforting, and personal. We didn’t go into every detail of how traditional Chinese medicine works; instead, we explained its fundamental principles and described how its holistic approach—of making the body healthy and ready to bear a child—differed from Western medical treatments. Every medical term, both Western and Chinese, was explained in lay terms. We then offered recommendations and suggestions for various conditions that can cause infertility (fibroids and endometriosis, PID, PCOS, and so on) to help relieve women’s symptoms and return their bodies to healthy functioning once more.

Because we wanted to make sure readers could identify with the TCM process and imagine themselves engaging in it, we used many stories of women who had been treated in the author’s clinic and had successfully gotten pregnant. These stories chronicled the different emotional stages of the process and offered a sense of hope and optimism, tempered by a clear promise that no treatment works every time. The goal was for the reader to feel hope and encouragement so she could look for other ways to support her body in bearing a child.

The book continues to be a top seller in its category and has helped many women. I believe that part of its impact comes from knowing its readers and matching the writing to their needs. Knowing your readers will help you shape your material and reach the goal of every non-fiction author: creating a book that others will read, understand, appreciate, and apply.

Check it out:

Secret #1: There Is No Try. Do! In other words, don’t promise in your proposal that you intend to do something (like guest blog or set up a Web site or whatever) sometime in the future, after a publisher gives you a contract. Instead, start doing it now so that you can include in your proposal what you’ve already done. This post includes a useful handout describing what goes into a book proposal.

Secret #2: Numbers Always Need Meaning & Context. Tell the story behind your statistics; don’t just throw around meaningless numbers, which we all know from watching coverage of the BP oil spill can be made to look good for either side of the argument.

Secret #3: Always Evaluate Online Competitors. In your competitive analysis, you need to assess the online presence of competing and complementary experts in your field, not just their books, to see what kind of communities they’ve built and what kind of reach they have on the Interwebs.

I bet this series will continue. We’re on top of it and will modify this post to include all of the secrets as they come.

Nice work, Jane Friedman!

There’s quite a long list of possible online promotion mechanisms, and I thought you might like an inside look at all the moving pieces in a major push to point, pull, prod, and otherwise lead as many people as possible toward an author and his book, which comes out in the spring of 2011. This list focuses on social media and the author’s own site.

Here’s our checklist, with some explanation so you can see how it would apply to you, too.

1. Update your existing Web site: tease book release, promise excerpts and other book extras, invite people to sign up to be notified whenever something new about the book is available and to be among the first to know when the book goes on sale.
2. Plan future revision of your Web site home page to include the book cover as soon as it’s available, as well as further site build-out to include a page dedicated to the book with links to excerpts, extras, endorsements, photo albums, purchase (Amazon, Borders, Powells, etc.), Q&A, and media kit.
3. Make the most of a blog. Carefully research keywords and use them well. Make smart choices about your blog post titles; specifically, don’t be overly clever/obtuse but instead make your post titles out of search terms. (In this case, we also moved the client’s blog into the WordPress format so that it could be self-hosted, meaning it lives at the same domain as the client’s Web site, making that site more robust and improving SEO.)
4. Update Wikipedia entry and any other places where biographical information appears online, including in special groups of which you’re a member. Add your name to any applicable Wikis.
5. Make it easy to update all social networks at once: e.g., the Facebook public profile page feeds to Twitter which feeds to the Facebook personal page, which feeds to the … and so it goes, making a chain to all social networking sites and pages.
6. For the six months prior to the book release, increase your communication with potential readers. We’ll ramp up blog posting to two per month (and promote the posts on social networking sites as well as by e-mail), increase Facebook/Twitter posting to at least several times per week, comment in other groups or blogs at least twice a month, and guest blog at least once a month. After the book launch, we’ll keep up the pace for at least another six months.

Just for grins, here’s a list of the online accounts we had to establish to make all this (and a few other bells and whistles) happen—all of which are free, except the e-mail marketing sites.

• Amazon to create an aStore (Don’t know what that is? Browse ours.)
• Constant Contact (Other good e-mail marketing programs exist, such as iContact.)
• Facebook, which can also feed to a Web page or blog
• Feedburner to create an RSS feed for the blog
• Flickr (BTW, we compared with Picasa and chose Flickr because of the larger community and greater SEO potential.)
• Google Analytics to tell us how well the Web site and blog serve traffic
• Google Profile (Everyone should do this! Here’s mine.)
• iTunes to create a special playlist
• Twitter, which can also feed to a Web page or blog
• Wikipedia (You need a login to edit entries.)
• WordPress
• YouTube

To keep all the login information straight for these and a few others, such as the ftp info for my client’s Web site, I created a spreadsheet in Excel.

Hello. We haven’t even touched traditional promotion, publicity, and public relations. Thank goodness Bigtime Publisher has a whole department devoted to that!

Collaborating with David was a great lesson, one I continue to apply as a ghostwriter and editor fifteen years later. Whenever I’m working on a book or book proposal with someone, one of the first questions I ask is, “Who’s your reader?” Of course, knowing the target audience for your book is Marketing 101. However, if you take the question a little deeper, your knowledge of your reader can help you create a more powerful and effective book.

There are three reasons to know your reader/audience. First, for positioning. In today’s customized world, a reader looks for material appropriate to his or her particular life situation.

• Who will be your primary audience? If you’re writing a relationship book, for example, is it for people just becoming romantically involved, getting married, having been married for a long time, or getting divorced?
• Is your book primarily for men or women (knowing that women buy far more relationship books than men)?
• What’s the target age range? If it’s women in their twenties—who were raised with the Internet, email, and the “short and sweet” form of communication—you should write differently than for Gen Xers or Baby Boomers.
• What are the demographic and psychographics of the readers who will be most receptive to your material? If you’re writing a business book, is the target audience new entrepreneurs, middle managers, top-level executives, or new hires? What problems and/or wounds do your readers experience (and you will help them fix)?

The second reason to know your reader is to make your writing personal. The greatest compliment an author can receive is for a reader to say, “It was like you were writing it just for me.” Part of this comes from creating a clear, personalized picture of your ideal reader. A dear friend who has written several best-selling personal development books told me that when she was working on her first manuscript, she visualized her ideal reader as a woman in pink, fuzzy slippers, sitting by a fireplace. Every time she sat down to write, she’d call up the vision of the lady in the pink fuzzy slippers, and write for her.

• Who is the ideal reader for your book?
• Where will he or she be when they open your book for the first time?
• Write as if you were sitting next to your ideal reader, telling him or her your story. This kind of personal perspective will help you keep your writing immediate, fresh, colloquial, and clear.

The third reason to know your reader is to make sure the information you’re presenting is what they need to know, and what they will understand. You can’t assume your readers know everything you do about your subject. After all, if they did, they might not be reading your book. If you truly know your reader, however, you’re more likely to explain what needs explaining, and to avoid explaining what they already know. For instance, a relationship book for couples who have been married for a while and want to recapture the magic will not have to include the perils and pitfalls of moving in together—something a relationship book for new couples might need to discuss. On the other hand, a newly married couple probably won’t need a chapter on renewing a routine sex life.

Imagine your reader perusing a chapter in your book.

• What kinds of questions might he or she have about your topic?
• Is there anything you need to define or make clear, especially if you have a different and new perspective on the term or subject? A business book for high-level executives may not need to define terms like market share, performance reviews, quarterly earnings reports, and so on. However, if your topic is integrity in business, you should define exactly what you mean by integrity and how it affects those areas. (By the way, I’m a big believer in over-communicating in your first draft and including definitions for anything and everything your reader might need to know. You can simplify or eliminate superfluous definitions in later drafts.)

One of my most important jobs is to be the readers’ representative, so I always try to put myself in readers’ shoes and write the book best suited to communicate the author’s material to them. Take a few moments at the start to get very clear on who your reader is, and you’ll write a better book—one with much greater potential for impact and success.

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Anyway, I did find five superior sites to share with you.

My Criteria for a Good Site to Promote Books and Authors

1. Appealing and easy to navigate
2. Offers a way to purchase the book
3. Builds/reinforces the brand identity with graphic continuity
4. Identifies the author by name
5. Puts the product (meaning the book) front and center
6. Includes a way to stay in touch: email, RSS feed for a blog, or other way for the author to contact readers who want that
7. Gives media folks what they need to do their jobs
8. Stays current: somebody’s paying attention and updating regularly

Here are the best sites, along with what you can learn and apply from them. Ta da!

Oh, but wait. Here’s a bonus. If you do a (yes, lazy) Google search on the term “best author sites,” you’ll turn this up, just like I did. But I’ll save you even that small effort and give you a link right here to the site promoting stories by Miranda July. Clever, clever! And I want to give mention to another fiction author who nails it, mystery writer Ted Dekker. Take a look: what he’s done with his online presence easily translates to non-fiction book promotion.

Top 5 Sites … Countdown

#5 Joanne Stern. All the essentials are here, and the author has effectively used video to help readers and media grasp her message quickly. Full disclosure: my husband and I worked on this one, so of course I love it, and I ranked it #5 because to put it higher would be unseemly. (Wouldn’t it?) But it’s seriously good and effectively promotes Dr. Stern and her book, Parenting Is a Contact Sport.

#4 Susan Orlean. Look, ANYONE could build a site like this. Not everyone can write as prolifically and insightfully as this New Yorker contributor and author of The Orchid Thief, but that’s another thing altogether. The organization of the site is simple, and she makes heavy use of linked text, which many online marketers believe is the best way to move your reader around your site. One criticism: her Tweets @susanorlean are pretty funny. I wonder why she doesn’t make the connection on her site?

#3 Anthony Bourdain. The celebrity chef has two sites—AnthonyBourdain.net and BourdainMediumRaw.com—one for the general hoopla and the other for the specific hoopla, namely promotion of his latest bestseller, Medium Raw. Both are good, but what keeps ’em out of the top echelon is that they don’t work together. No mention of the chef’s current bestseller on AnthonyBourdain.net, and nowhere does the book’s site point back to the main site. Weird. You’d think that the Food Network folks and his publisher would realize there was some SEO hay to be made here. (For the uninitiated, that stands for Search Engine Optimization, the process of improving your Web pages’ rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like.)

#2: Freakonomics. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s site for Freakonomics: Things You Always Thought You Knew But Didn’t and Superfreakonomics: Things You Never Knew You Wanted to Know But Do, has it all: bold graphics that reinforce the brand, heavy promotion of the current offering, navigation that makes sense, seamless links out to related sites … and a blog. Plus a way to get your book signed, study guides, and a list of upcoming appearances. The “join our email list” link is buried under the “Contact” page.

#1 Malcolm Gladwell. At first blink, Gladwell.com looks as if it might be trifling, with main navigation that points only to his book titles, a blog, and an ambiguous “Etc.” But it’s not; someone made the brilliant decision to take an array of books and credentials and arrange them so it looks simple on the home page, and then built out with secondary navigation that gives you everything you could possibly want: excerpts, bibliographies, reading guides. “Etc.” includes the author’s bio, pix for media use, a link to his speakers bureau, all that promo stuff. (Why no calendar of events, though?) And, of course, there’s a blog.

Have any favorites of your own? Please share. Want to mention your book site here? Be my guest. All comments and questions are welcome.

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