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Category : Publishing
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Continue Reading "How are literary agent's roles changing in the new world of publishing?"How are literary agent's roles changing in the new world of publishing?
I’ve had a number of people write to me in response to my recent post about 2013 publishing predictions, asking how I felt the role of literary agents is changing. It used to be that an agent basically offered four benefits: (1) an editing/sounding board for writing and ideas; (2) access to publishers; (3) contract and statement assistance; and (4) some type of career advice. There are a bunch of other ideas people bring up (such as “maximize the advance!” and “be the tough guy when things get ugly!”), and no doubt several other iterations of the ideas above, but I think those are the four big content areas in which agents have generally served.
But now we’re in a new era. The way books are produced, marketed, delivered, and sold to readers has changed considerably over the past few years. The sales channels are completely altered. Publishers have overhauled their staffing and methods. New jobs exist that didn’t used to exist, and old ones have faded out of existence. The advent of digital publishing has not just created this new product called “e-books,” but have helped reshape the entire industry. So it only makes sense that a literary agent shouldn’t be doing his or her job the same way it was being done ten years ago. To that end, I thought I’d try to offer thoughts on how I see an agent’s role in contemporary publishing.
First, a good agent is still doing editing, but perhaps even more book and project concepting. Idea development and packaging are an essential part of the role now. Your agent needs to be talking with you not just about “how to do an ebook,” but how various projects and packages fit into your overall business plan.
Second, I think the notion of an agent giving an author access to publishers has evolved into an agent as interactor — networking with various publishing types,
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Continue Reading "Brilliant Predictions from 2009"
Brilliant Predictions from 2009
So a few years ago, I posted “predictions” for the future of publishing. I clearly don’t have the gift of prophecy, but thought it would be fun to go back and look at what I had to say, and how my predictions panned out. This is from Dec of 2009:
1. Borders will survive, but Barnes & Noble will take over. Um… wrong. Borders, a fun but poorly managed business, is gone. B&N has taken over, but we’ll see if that lasts.
2. A major author will self-publish. This seems comical now, with everybody self-publishing, but at the time there was a question if established authors would try self-pubbing or remain exclusively with traditional publishers. Score a small one for me.
3. Ebooks will more than double in sales. Ha! It didn’t take a genius to figure that out, apparently. Ebooks have doubled, doubled again, then doubled again. Now the growth is slowing, but it’s still the future. I was right, but a blind man could have picked this horse.
4. Authors and publishers will offer a lot of free ebooks to boost readership. Again, this seems stupefyingly obvious now. So I was right on the basic idea. I just didn’t realize a million wannabes would glut the market with crummy free books, and therefore dilute the value of free ebooks.
5. Libraries will move to ebooks. Well… who knows? They want to, apparently, but publishers are worried about usage and lost revenues, so it’s still not clear how libraries are going to work (or if we need all of them, in an age when anybody can google a topic on their laptop). No points for me on this one.
6. Apple will create an e-reader. Um… score big on that one. This prediction was made before anyone had heard of an iPad, by the way. Again, it might be obvious now, but at the time it was a guess
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Continue Reading "Career Planning in the Wild, Wild West"
Career Planning in the Wild, Wild West
While on an agent’s panel at ACFW in September, I sat next to Lee Hough, one of the smartest and hardest working agents in the business. While we all fielded the typical questions we get as panelists, someone asked a question about the current state of affairs in publishing, and how agents are faring.I tend to take a positive, entrepreneurial, and philosophical approach when answering questions about the challenges of publishing.
Lee, however, hit the mark when he said “It’s like the wild, wild west out there right now.” His summation about the new landscape of publishing has really stuck with me. In fact, it’s a new constant on the landscape of my daily work life these days — right alongside MacGregor Literary’s long-standing company philosophy that “good is always better than fast.”
As positive as I try to remain, I’ll admit, it’s felt exceptionally difficult to place books and find homes for authors these past few months. Even with the successes I’ve enjoyed this year in spite of it all, it feels like I’m on more uneven ground than ever. And I know agents aren’t the only ones who feel this way.
Marketers are constantly scrambling to orient themselves to what it takes to get readers to buy in a noisy online environment. Sales teams are faced with succeeding in spite of the literal crumbling of their brick & mortar customer base. Publicists are being asked to do more with less. Editors are overworked. Authors are no longer just invited by publishers to help market their books, but are expected to do so. In fact more and more, the strength of an author’s proposal is weighed as much for the type and number of readers they bring to the table as it is for the quality of their writing. Maybe more.
Top that off with the consideration that authors are not only competing with other authors for
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Continue Reading "How can I make a living at writing?"
How can I make a living at writing?
When you look at writers who are making a living at their writing, you find they come in two basic types:
TYPE 1 is the writer who writes all over the map. There are plenty of examples of this in publishing – writers who do kids books, teen books, women’s fiction, romance, thrillers, study guides, and the occasional novella. They publish with multiple publishers, self-publish some titles, do some work-for-hire or collaborative writing, and cobble together a living. This author has good years and bad, makes decent money, is certainly out there a lot. On the nonfiction side, you find this much more with journalistic types — they’re taking on a variety of projects in order to make a living.
TYPE 2 is the writer who figures out what she wants to write, then writes it. She focuses on a genre, figures out her voice, and writes to that audience. An example of this is Terry Blackstock (there are plenty of others). Terry is writing suspense novels, everybody recognizes her voice, and she’s focused on that one audience. Another is an author I represent, Lisa Samson. Lisa writes literary fiction, knows who she is and what her style is, and focuses on it.
I’ll tell you right now that TYPE 1 writers rarely hit it big. She might make a good living, but it’s tough to really hit the big time when you move around in categories. You know that feeling of being overwhelmed because you’re doing six books in four different genres? Well, that’s the sort of life a TYPE 1 author is going to lead forever, because she finds it tough build an audience. Readers have trouble following her. Bookstore owners have a hard time getting behind her because they don’t know what her next book is going to be. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do this — frankly, it may be the only way to make
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Continue Reading "Lisa McKay talks about her memoir…"
Lisa McKay talks about her memoir…
In a memoir that reviewers have called a “modern-day fairytale”, a single thirty-something receives an email from a distant stranger proposing they date. As they get to know one another entirely via email they must confront troubling questions about purpose, passion, and what it really means to commit to a person or a place.
Love At The Speed Of Email is the story of an old-fashioned courtship made possible by modern technology:
Lisa looks as if she has it made. She has turned her nomadic childhood and forensic psychology training into a successful career as a stress management trainer for humanitarian aid workers. She lives in Los Angeles, travels the world, and her first novel has just been published to some acclaim. But as she turns 31, Lisa realizes that she is still single, constantly on airplanes, and increasingly wondering where home is and what it really means to commit to a person, place, or career. When an intriguing stranger living on the other side of the world emails her out of the blue, she must decide whether she will risk trying to answer those questions. Her decision will change her life.
I sat down with the author, Lisa McKay, to chat recently.
Chip: Your first book, my hands came away red, was a novel. Why did you choose to write a memoir this time around?
Lisa: I didn’t intend for this second book to be a memoir. In fact, I was working on a novel on human trafficking when my husband, Mike, and I became engaged. But as we began to plan our wedding I found it increasingly difficult to flip in and out of such vastly different worlds – the happiness of the one I was living in and the harshness of the one I was trying to write about.
After months of trying to force myself to persevere with the trafficking novel, one day I stopped
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Continue Reading "Amazturbation and Other Perils of Publishing"
Amazturbation and Other Perils of Publishing
Lisa McKay is a psychologist and the author of the award-nominated novel My Hands Came Away Red. A memoir, Love at the Speed of Email, will be released in June 2012. She lives in Laos with her husband and infant son. To learn more, visit www.lisamckaywriting.com.
When my first book, My Hands Came Away Red, was published, I fell prey to an addiction that afflicts many authors at some point during their publishing career. It’s a behaviour I now call amazturbation – obsessively checking your own Amazon ranking to see how your book is stacking up sales-wise against the hundreds of thousands of other books that Amazon sells.
I visited Amazon to check the rise and fall of this number first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
I checked it when I was feeling glum and when I was feeling all right.
I checked it at work and I checked it home. I even checked it on my phone.
I checked that number at breakfast and I checked it at lunch.
I checked that number a whole, whole bunch.
My Amazon addiction started the way most addictions do – with a rush. Right after the book was released I was in Ghana, traveling for work. When I got access to the internet for the first time in a couple of days I dropped by my Amazon page to see if anyone had left a new review, and was amazed to see that my sales ranking was way higher than it had ever been before.
After an exhausting and stressful week of leading workshops on trauma, seeing that happy number was a huge rush. And I wanted more of that feeling.
Understandable? Yes. Dangerous? Also, yes.
We authors have never had so many ways at our disposal to track and quantify our own popularity. We can find out Amazon sales rankings as well
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Continue Reading "How does my book get selected by a publisher?"
How does my book get selected by a publisher?
Cheryl wrote to ask, "What is the process of getting your proposal selected by a publishing house?"
Think of a publishing house as being an actual building. Your proposal probably isn't walking in the front door. More than likely it's sliding into the building by way of a window known as an acquisitions editor (often an acquaintance of your agent, sometimes a person you met at a conference, or maybe a guy who lost a bet). He or she will read through it, make some suggestions, talk it over with your agent, and eventually make a decision on whether or not they think it's worth pursuing.
Most publishers are relying on agents to do the initial filtering of junk, so the slush pile has sort of moved from the publishing house to the agent's office…which means you're going to have to sell it to an agent first, therefore adding one more step to this process.
Once it's in the building, if the acquisitions editor likes it he or she will take it to some sort of editorial committee, where they sit around grousing about their pay and making editorial jokes. ("I'm having a DICKENS of a time with this one!" "Yeah, let's catch a TWAIN out of town!" Editorial types love this sort of humor. That's why they're editors and not writers.) Eventually they'll run out of bad puns and be forced to discuss the merits of your proposal. If it's a non-fiction book, is it unique? Does it answer a question people are asking? Is there a perceived market for it? Does the writing feel fresh and offer genuine solutions to the question that's posed? If it's a novel, does the story have a clear hook? Is there a well-defined audience for it? Does it feel new, or as though it's a story that's been told a million times? (The fact is, it probably HAS been told a million
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Continue Reading "How does my book get selected by a publisher?"
How does my book get selected by a publisher?
Cheryl wrote to ask, "What is the process of getting your proposal selected by a publishing house?"
Think of a publishing house as being an actual building. Your proposal probably isn't walking in the front door. More than likely it's sliding into the building by way of a window known as an acquisitions editor (often an acquaintance of your agent, sometimes a person you met at a conference, or maybe a guy who lost a bet). He or she will read through it, make some suggestions, talk it over with your agent, and eventually make a decision on whether or not they think it's worth pursuing.
Most publishers are relying on agents to do the initial filtering of junk, so the slush pile has sort of moved from the publishing house to the agent's office…which means you're going to have to sell it to an agent first, therefore adding one more step to this process.
Once it's in the building, if the acquisitions editor likes it he or she will take it to some sort of editorial committee, where they sit around grousing about their pay and making editorial jokes. ("I'm having a DICKENS of a time with this one!" "Yeah, let's catch a TWAIN out of town!" Editorial types love this sort of humor. That's why they're editors and not writers.) Eventually they'll run out of bad puns and be forced to discuss the merits of your proposal. If it's a non-fiction book, is it unique? Does it answer a question people are asking? Is there a perceived market for it? Does the writing feel fresh and offer genuine solutions to the question that's posed? If it's a novel, does the story have a clear hook? Is there a well-defined audience for it? Does it feel new, or as though it's a story that's been told a million times? (The fact is, it probably HAS been told a million
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Continue Reading "How do you negotiate a book contract?"
How do you negotiate a book contract?
Kevin wrote to say, "I'm about to negotiate my own book contract! What is important for me to know?"
If you're at the stage of negotiating your own publishing contract, congratulations. It means you've created a strong proposal, shopped it to publishing houses, and found an editor interested in your work. Those are huge hurdles, so you've already done well. Now what's going to happen is that the publisher is going to approach you with some details and numbers. Let me offer a handful of thoughts for you…
1. Have a Plan. A contract negotiation isn't just a bunch of random conversations, helping two people move things forward. It's one piece of a larger discussion about your book — how both sides view its value, what it will pay, how it's going to be produced and marketed, etc. Therefore, do your homework before you go into the negotiation. You should have researched what the market is paying (so you get a fair deal, but you don't ask for the moon), you should know what rights you want to keep or give away, and you should have a familiarity with the issues that will be involved in a publishing contract. All of this takes time (and all of this is why authors get agents who, presumably, know this stuff).
2. Take a Positive Approach. Too many people seem to have learned all their negotiation strategies from watching television dramas — the two high-powered lawyers point fingers, pound the table, make demands, and generally act like jerks. That's not an approach that's going to work very often in publishing. From my point of view, you have to develop a relationship with the person you're going to negotiate with. That way there's a sense of trust on both sides. You really want to establish some rapport with the person you're negotiating with, so that you both keep in mind the big picture
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Continue Reading "How do you negotiate a book contract?"
How do you negotiate a book contract?
Kevin wrote to say, "I'm about to negotiate my own book contract! What is important for me to know?"
If you're at the stage of negotiating your own publishing contract, congratulations. It means you've created a strong proposal, shopped it to publishing houses, and found an editor interested in your work. Those are huge hurdles, so you've already done well. Now what's going to happen is that the publisher is going to approach you with some details and numbers. Let me offer a handful of thoughts for you…
1. Have a Plan. A contract negotiation isn't just a bunch of random conversations, helping two people move things forward. It's one piece of a larger discussion about your book — how both sides view its value, what it will pay, how it's going to be produced and marketed, etc. Therefore, do your homework before you go into the negotiation. You should have researched what the market is paying (so you get a fair deal, but you don't ask for the moon), you should know what rights you want to keep or give away, and you should have a familiarity with the issues that will be involved in a publishing contract. All of this takes time (and all of this is why authors get agents who, presumably, know this stuff).
2. Take a Positive Approach. Too many people seem to have learned all their negotiation strategies from watching television dramas — the two high-powered lawyers point fingers, pound the table, make demands, and generally act like jerks. That's not an approach that's going to work very often in publishing. From my point of view, you have to develop a relationship with the person you're going to negotiate with. That way there's a sense of trust on both sides. You really want to establish some rapport with the person you're negotiating with, so that you both keep in mind the big picture
