Posts Tagged ‘author’
Book Deal Fail: Lessons in Publishing Every Writer Needs to Know
I think would-be authors spend so much time working on their masterpieces that they may well be blind-sided when their book deals fall apart. It can happen to every author and aspiring author.
This past summer a book deal of mine fell to pieces in grand fashion over the course of a week. It was quite difficult, but at the same time I think matters ended on pretty good terms for all parties involved.
The planets had aligned perfectly for the deal to fail. So it goes.
Here are a few lessons to save in your bookmark folder so that you’re prepared should this ever happen to you:
Book Deals Can Fail, and It’s OK
Your career can survive and you can end the deal on good terms with your publisher. Really, I mean it. It can be a bit embarrassing to admit that your deal fell apart, but you can survive it. If you’re approaching your career wisely, you’ll already have another project or two in mind that you can jump into.
Give Yourself Time to Process
I needed about three days to process my situation before I felt able to have a constructive conversation and make a good decision. Expect to be angry and a bit low. It will pass, and in fact, it has to pass. You have books to write!
Seek Advice
In my own case I consulted my agent and several other agents at her firm. They helped me sort through my options and the appropriate responses. Every e-mail I sent to the publisher was filtered through them first. In addition, there were other authors and publishing professionals who offered me some good advice and even did some helpful research on my behalf.
Know Your Publisher’s Interests and Trends
If a publisher wants to terminate your book deal, take some time to look at it from the publisher’s perspective and examine the publisher’s concerns and goals. Perhaps you and your book aren’t a good fit with this publisher for the coming years anyway.
Prepare a Plan B, C, and D
Your book project does not have to die with this contract. Spring into action and seek out other publishers and if not another major publishing house, look into smaller press, ebook, and self-publishing options. The technology and marketing tools are out there for many authors to sell quite a few books on their own.
Even if your book never sees the light of day, you can always cannibalize chapters for submission to magazines that may provide a larger audience of readers and a comparable amount of money in the long run. Perhaps you can also steal a few chapters and stories to write your next book, which you should have already been working on anyway.
End On Good Terms
Life is too short to play the blame game. Publishing is a really tough business and sometimes book deals fall apart. Maybe it was your fault and maybe it wasn’t.
You gain nothing by burning your bridges with your former publisher, and you also never know how well connected they may be in the larger publishing world. Even if you lost the deal, you can still hold your head up high by moving on and resolving to make the next deal work.
Selecting Influencers for a Book Release: The Solution
Wrapping up my 3-part series on selecting influencers for a book release…
The goal of an influencer mailing for a newly published book is to put your book into the hands of folks with trusted names, contact with a large audience, and a willingness or ability to endorse your book. Missing any of these three things will mean your book either ends up on someone’s shelf or at least doesn’t reach a wide group of potential readers.
The solution is to carefully balance the kinds of influencers you contact. It is rare to find an influencer who meets all three criteria perfectly. Nevertheless, it’s worth sending copies to well-known influencers in the media or in your field, especially if you’ve had contact with them in the past.
Let’s say you send out 5-15 of your 50 influencer copies to folks in this camp. Maybe they won’t have the time to take a look at your book, but should they endorse it, you’ll have a chance to reach a broader audience. It may be worth taking a chance on some radio personalities, especially if their shows connect with your potential readers.
The next 20-30 copies should go to those who have a solid following or niche that trusts them and will be willing to interact with your work. There are a lot of very good blogs and podcasts out there with readers and listeners who may very well give your book a shot. In fact, because these are highly interactive networks with a higher trust factor than perhaps those with a bigger name, the potential readers in these networks may be more willing to buy your book.
I think this segment is easy to overlook because their reach may be in the hundreds or low thousands. However, keep in mind that these influencers will be easier to contact, more likely to interact with you, and have a lot more to gain if you can provide content for their blogs/podcasts as opposed to a major media player with lots of options for their shows. In addition, providing these bloggers and podcasters with a free book or two to give away always helps.
Lastly, never underestimate those the power of those with small audiences who are still very trusted and willing to endorse your book. Be sure to set aside about 10-15 copies for this group. With Twitter and Facebook even the smallest blogs can easily plug a book among hundreds of people. If you can provide an influencer who is passionate about your book with some great interviews, excerpts, and a free copy to review, your book may receive a lot more attention than a brief endorsement from a well-known influencer.
At the end of the day, it’s most important that authors connect with influencers who are passionate about their work and willing to talk about it. If you can put a free copy of your book into the hands of someone willing to talk about it, you’ve done the most important part of an influencer mailing.
Nevertheless, your work is not done. Authors need to make themselves available to help each influencer talk about their work, supporting them, and driving traffic to their web sites. Book publicity is always a two-way street. There is no room for the entitled author.
Previously…
How to Write a First Draft of a Book
Writing a book is a long, drawn-out process. It’s hard to say when you’re “done” other than that moment when the book arrives in your mail box and sits on your coffee table like a long lost friend. Nevertheless, along the way there are certain mile stones to aim for and to celebrate.
Yesterday I wrapped up the first draft of my next book Saving Evangelicals from Themselves. The first draft often entails the lion’s share of the book writing process. There is research, brainstorming, organizing, stream of consciousness writing, editing, reorganizing, more writing, and more editing and polishing.
By 5 PM yesterday I had my draft completely finished and ready for the publisher. It even came close to the 60,000 word count with a total of 61,610 words. I’d like to share a little bit about the process of writing a first draft of a book. I hope this helps as you plunge into your own projects.
Read… A Lot
You don’t need to quote directly from every book or cite everything, but read, skim, or browse as many books as you can in your topic area. You want to communicate your own ideas in fresh ways, while giving credit where it is due.
Research
Set up Google Alerts for your subject areas, read and tag articles using del.icio.us, dig through surveys, and look up articles in key papers and magazines such as Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and any other magazine closely related to your topic. For myself I keep a close eye on Christianity Today.
Organize and Outline
You need to know where your book is going, and so a rough outline is necessary. Don’t be afraid to delete, add, or reorder chapters as you set out. Better now than later. Set up a rough idea of each chapter’s trajectory.
Write, Write, Write
I like to just cut loose and write a ton once I have some research and outlines to provide general guidance. I end up scrapping at least 25-35% of what I write, but the core that remains is generally pretty solid. Let your mind wander, write about things you care about, and think deeply about your topic. Always keep in mind your one-two sentence summary of your book from your proposal (you did put together a proposal first, right? If not, do that NOW!)
Fill In Gaps
After you have a good chunk of material together, you need to fill in the gaps with more research, quotes, and stories. Try to get a sense of the flow of your chapter. Are you on target? Can readers follow with you? Are they still interested? Have you backed up your claims? This is the time to ask hard questions and to be critical of your work. I have a scrap folder for each book with a document that matches each chapter. Many scrap documents have at least 7 pages of material in them. That means you need to keep adding content to your chapters, making sure you’ve sharpened your points.
Seek Opinions
When you’re relatively confident you have a solid chunk of chapter, seek out a friend or two to read it. Ask them to point out places where stories don’t work, ideas need to be developed, or the whole thing falls off course. I recommend at least two different readers since people can be very different in how they read something.
Never Stop Researching
Hopefully you’ve been keeping up on your field while you’re doing the heavy part of the writing. By saving key stories and articles on del.icio.us I have saved myself on several occasions. You never know when a crucial piece of information will surface.
The Critical Read-Through
Keeping in mind your book’s focus, reader-benefits, and goals, read through each chapter with a critical eye to anything that doesn’t fit, discredits you as a writer, loses your readers, or doesn’t sound quite right. Kill adverbs without mercy, tighten up sentence structure, delete a lot, insert strong verbs, and make sure you begin and end with bang.
Hit Send, Tell a Friend, and Buy Yourself a Treat
It’s a wonderful feeling to hit the send button when you’re done with a key phase of a book project. Celebrate the moment, treat yourself to something you enjoy, and share the joy of the moment with your friends. Chances are you won’t be celebrating when your editor writes back in two months with the revisions you need to make…
Lessons from the Past Six Months on Writing
By the time Coffeehouse Theology was released in September 2008, I was well on my way with my next book project—writing stories, searching for articles, and testing out ideas. I had one foot in marketing and the other in a new project on evangelicals: Saving Evangelicals from Themselves: Where We’ve Gone Wrong and Why We Have Hope. Without the head start seminary afforded on Coffeehouse Theology, I learned a few lessons in the course of writing a first draft for a book completely from scratch.
Using del.icio.us to not only tag and organize links, but to also set aside material worthy of a quotation made the research process much easier. At first I just tagged everything that looked relevant, but soon I realized that it helps to read the articles first rather than assuming I’d read them later. I rarely did that! So I read through, highlighted the section I wanted to quote, and then tagged them. By highlighting a section, I could then find it on my del.icio.us bookmarks without have to reread the whole article.
Small sticky notes make it much easier to find quotations from books. I had a system of using small sticky notes as tabs sticking out of books. I’d typically stick the note to the page, make a bracket around the relevant text, and then jot a few words connecting the quote with a particular chapter. I later found that many of my quotes didn’t fit, but without taking the time to mark everything that seemed important, I doubt I would have been able to find enough helpful quotations to pull from the many books I read.
Lining up readers for your drafts is absolutely essential. I received invaluable advice from my readers who soldiered through my early drafts. One chapter needed to be deleted, while another began with too much intensity. In both cases my readers helped prompt significant changes to my book that I believe will make it more successful.
Writing down many of my stories and anecdotes months before I began seriously working on the chapters helped me sort through the most important topics to be covered in the book. This book could have taken a couple of different directions, but I wanted it to unfold as organically as possible, letting my stories direct and shape the overall direction and point of the book. By starting with a solid core of stories totaling 30,000 words, I quickly ruled out certain chapters that would not have enough substance to work within the parameters I had established for the book.
Anything written can be deleted. I have found that I am continually amazed at what ends up working and what ends up being tossing into the “scraps” folder. Never tire of using the delete button.
Thanks for Visiting!
Ed Cyzewski is a freelance writer and author of Divided We Unite: Practical Christian Unity, Coffeehouse Theology and A Path to Publishing. He also blogs on Christian belief and practice at www.inamirrordimly.com.Other Projects
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