The Business of Writing

From Publisher’s Weekly:

I once published an article under my byline that a ghostwriting client read. “I really liked it,” she said, “but it didn’t sound like you at all.” No, I thought. It didn’t sound like you at all!

Because I have collaborated on a dozen books, I carry a lot of voices in my head. Many people believe ghostwriting is stenography. The “author” talks, the ghostwriter types, and voila! A book is born.

. . . .

That’s not how it works. In the best collaborations, the client opens up about failure and answers the most personal and mundane questions, like, “What office equipment did you use in 1973?” They inherently understand that it might take being asked something multiple times to get to the nub.

But a good ghostwriter has to be ready for the unpredictable. Taking on a book project is like buying a house without an inspection: you know you’ll later discover a faulty wire, a leaky pipe, or a damp patch in the basement—you just don’t know which it will be, or at what point.

When I signed on to my most recent ghosting gig, Up Close and All In: Life Lessons from a Wall Street Warrior, a memoir with former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, I braced myself for him to be, well, scary. The nickname he earned during 40-plus years on Wall Street was Mack the Knife, and I was the fourth ghostwriter he had hired for this project.

The unexpected element surfaced on the day we began. I suggested a plan of action, and his response caught me off guard. “You’re the expert,” he said in his North Carolina twang that reminds me of a banjo. “I’m in your hands.”

The man who hung up on the U.S. Treasury secretary, the Federal Reserve chief, and the president of the New York Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial crisis clearly knew what he knew—and knew what he didn’t know. Banking was his bailiwick. Writing was mine.

For me, interviewing clients is just the start. I internalize their voice, how they talk, and the words they use. I immersed myself in John’s world to put readers on the trading floor, in board meetings, and at conference tables with powerful clients around the globe. I don’t have a background in finance, and because Up Close and All In was aimed at a general readership, not just at Wall Street veterans, this gave me an edge. I described the financial realm with fascinated eyes. My daily reading became the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, and I acquired a library of business tomes.

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

A trendy word in publishing recently is “autofiction,” short for “autobiographical fiction.” The term isn’t new. It was first invented in 1977 by author Serge Doubrovsky when talking about his memoir-sh novel, Fils.

And what about those Creative Nonfiction essays that fill literary magazines? (A goldmine for memoir writers.) Can you call them autofiction?

Unfortunately, “autofiction” is not an official category in the publishing world, according to Publishers Weekly.

That means authors still have to decide if what they’ve written is fiction or nonfiction before they publish it, so bookstores will know whether to put it on the fiction or nonfiction shelf.

Guidelines say if there are real people in it and all the incidents really happened, you can call it nonfiction, even if you’ve changed the names of the real people. But if some events or characters are made up, you’re better off calling it fiction.

Readers Often Expect Fiction to be Autofiction.

Authors have a more complex issue than the the shelving dilemmas of bookstore clerks. (Although I relate. I worked in many bookstores over the years.)

The problem is a lot of readers think all fiction is based on the author’s life. Especially if it’s written in the first person.

Even more readers expect authors to be like their protagonists. I’m amazed at how many readers expect me to be an ultra-polite New York fashionista like my series heroine, Camilla. (People who actually know me are laughing hysterically here.) I even once had a beta reader make condescending comments that were obviously aimed at a ditzy debutante, not a 30-year veteran of the publishing industry, educated at Bryn Mawr and Harvard.

I’m not alone. Canadian humor novelist Melodie Campbell has written about meeting fans of her satiric “Rowena” fantasy series. They were sadly disappointed because they expected her to be just like her hot and horny heroine, Rowena, whose bodice is literally ripped in every hilarious book.

There is Plenty of Thinly-Disguised Autofiction Lurking in Popular Fiction.

Readers can be forgiven their delusions. Some novels are indeed thinly disguised autobiography — including classics. Look at David Copperfield, Look Homeward Angel, On the Road, and The Things They Carried.

Scandals can erupt when people recognize themselves in autobiographical fiction. There was major drama around the story Cat Person, by Kristen Roupenian, that ran in the New Yorker in 2017. People found it “eerily accurate” in its description of contemporary dating. Many thought it was a work of autofiction, or a disguised personal essay. Ohers treated it like nonfiction.

In 2021, a writer named Alexis Nowicki wrote an article for Slate claiming Cat Person was inspired by stories from her own life that she had confided in the author.

That’s the kind of situation where authors can run into trouble. We’re exposed to stories every day — in the news, on the Internet, overheard in cafés, etc. Those stories nestle in our subconscious minds. Long after we’ve forgotten their origins, they creep into our fiction. That doesn’t mean we’re “stealing” them on purpose.

There has been ongoing saga concerning a character in Donna Tartt’s famous academic mystery, The Secret History. The character is Judy Poovey, the wild California girl with the red Corvette. Apparently people have even started social media accounts in her name on TikTok and other sites.

Last year, Lily Anolik wrote an article in Vanity Fair that documented the search for the “real” Judy Poovey. Everyone was sure she was a thinly disguised real person. Anolik claims that Donna Tartt’s characters, like Mary McCarthy’s in The Group have “feet of clef.” (You have to use the French pronunciation to get the joke.)

But guess what? Nobody has found the “real” Judy Poovey. And that’s probably because Donna Tartt is a talented fiction writer who can make stuff up.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris

From Jane Friedman:

Is it querying? No.

Networking? No.

Marketing? No.

Of course such skills are terrific assets, but if I could wave a magic wand, I’d grant all writers the skill of negotiation. By and large, writers don’t even consider trying to negotiate; they just accept the terms/contract/pay that is initially offered.

This is partly a quirk of an industry where writers regularly get stepped on and asked to work for free in exchange for exposure. Writers might see themselves as without power or agency, which is not unfounded, but it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can’t wait for permission or the “right time” to negotiate a better deal for yourself. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Here are common barriers when you’re negotiating for yourself.

Fear that you’ll lose the opportunity

You’ve spent years trying to secure an agent or publisher, then the contract arrives from the other party. You may be tempted to quickly accept and sign. Because if you make a “fuss,” you’ll look ungrateful, right? If you ask questions, you’ll be a nuisance, a problem person. Maybe the other party will be offended if you ask for a better arrangement, or even retract the offer.

If you’re dealing with someone who works in the business, such as an agent or publisher, they will not be offended by questions or an attempt to negotiate. Just about every arrangement is negotiable on some level (with exceptions for blanket terms of service agreements from tech companies, among others). But few writing contracts or agreements are “take it or leave it”; those that are deserve to be questioned. Many “take it or leave it” situations arise, in fact, from either inexperience or fear. “My lawyer told me not to change the contract” is a familiar line from small publishers operated by people who may not understand the contract they’re sending you.

So what happens if you do encounter someone angry or offended by your attempt to negotiate? First, examine your approach. Is it respectful and in good faith? If you negotiate by saying, “How dare you insult me with this offer! Are you a second-rate operation? Don’t you know who I am!” then you might find the other side less cooperative. But if your approach isn’t combative, and the other side is resistant to answering questions or having a conversation, you have to ask yourself if that’s a business partner you want to move forward with. Your difficulties are likely to compound after signing with a partner that’s non-communicative.

When I negotiated contracts at a mid-size traditional publisher, most authors did not attempt to change the boilerplate contract. Nor did they ask any questions about it. Usually, when they did push, it was for a bigger advance. But they could’ve asked for something much more valuable in the long run: better royalty rates and escalators (increased royalties when certain sales thresholds are met).

But more surprising? Not even the majority of agents negotiated the contract as well as they should have, because they were so advance focused. I wish I could say that your agent will definitely negotiate all the finer deal points, but that’s not the case in my experience. So even if you do have an agent, you should be asking them questions, too.

You don’t know what’s negotiable or what’s reasonable to ask for

One of the big problems in publishing is the lack of transparency around earnings and what other people are getting paid. While there have been community efforts to dismantle this cloak of secrecy, there’s an additional challenge: so many scenarios and terms are unique to each publisher, agent, author, and book. And this is why agents can be so invaluable: they have experience that helps them know where and when to push on behalf of their clients (despite what I mentioned above). So what can you do when working on your own?

Aside from educating yourself by reading model contracts from the Authors Guild, Writer Beware, and other advocacy groups (as well as asking around privately), research your potential business partners to the best of your ability and ask a lot of questions about the agreement or terms, like “Is this typically what you offer?” or “Where is there flexibility in this deal?” You’ll be surprised at how willingly people offer up this information.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

As PG mentioned in the ancient past, negotiation is an acquired skill. It comes more easily to some people than it does to others, but everyone can improve their ability to negotiate.

A great many business schools, at least in the United States, have classes devoted to helping students improve their negotiation skills. Some have departments of Negotiation Science or something similar.

PG’s first exposure to negotiation studies many years ago was from an individual who headed a Negotiation Studies Project at Harvard Business School. A Project was something less prestigious than a department and PG recalls that the Project staff consisted of this individual and a couple of graduate students.

The individual made a presentation at an American Bar Association meeting that PG attended. After the presentation, PG cornered the negotiation expert for an extended conversation and ended up writing a story about Negotiation Studies for The ABA Journal.

Things have changed a lot since then. If you conduct a Google search for “Negotiation Studies”, you will find a plethora of different results, including the following from Harvard, which PG has included with links should you desire to dig deeper:

What are the Types of Negotiation?

In business, there are different types of negotiation, each needing distinct approaches for success.

When preparing to negotiate, business professionals often wonder what types of negotiation are available to them. Some of the most common are distributive negotiation, integrative negotiation, team negotiation, and multiparty negotiation. 

In distributive negotiation, parties compete over the distribution of a fixed pool of value. Here, any gain by one party represents a loss to the other. You may also hear this referred to as a zero-sum negotiation or win-lose negotiation.

Integrative negotiation gives us one of the biggest chances of a win-win. In these types of negotiation situations, there is more than one issue to be negotiated, and negotiators have the potential to make tradeoffs across issues and create value. In many cases, distributive negotiations can become integrative if we take the time to search for additional issues to include. 

Team negotiations are those types of negotiation situations where the negotiating parties are made up of more than one person. These might include union contract negotiations or major business negotiations.

Lastly, mulitparty negotiations include, as you might imagine, multiple parties. These types of negotiation situations might include municipal projects or international negotiations. Multiparty negotiations do require more complex negotiating skills, but there is also more opportunity to find tradeoffs and create value. 

One of the final types of negotiation that you may encounter is the “one-shot” negotiation where parties have no intention of continuing to work together. One-shot negotiations often carry a risk of unethical behavior and hard bargaining if parties believe they have no need to build a trusting relationship.

Learn how to negotiate like a diplomat, think on your feet like an improv performer, and master job offer negotiation like a professional athlete when you download a copy of our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

The following items are tagged types of negotiation:

Why Negotiations Fail

POSTED JANUARY 10TH, 2023 BY KATIE SHONK & FILED UNDER NEGOTIATION SKILLS.

When we think of failed business negotiations, most of us picture negotiators walking away from the table in disappointment. But that’s only one type of disappointing negotiation. Failed business negotiations also include those that parties come to regret over time and those that fall apart during implementation. The following three types of negotiation failures are … READ WHY NEGOTIATIONS FAIL 

Women and Negotiation: Narrowing the Gender Gap in Negotiation

POSTED DECEMBER 20TH, 2022 BY KATIE SHONK & FILED UNDER BUSINESS NEGOTIATIONS.

Men tend to achieve better economic results in negotiation than women, negotiation research studies have found overall. Such gender differences are generally small, but evidence from the business world suggests that they can add up over time. … READ MORE 

How to Set Negotiation Goals as a Manager

POSTED DECEMBER 6TH, 2022 BY PON STAFF & FILED UNDER BUSINESS NEGOTIATIONS.

To encourage the negotiators they supervise to do their best, managers routinely rely on performance benchmarks, the promise of bonuses, and other types of goals. … READ HOW TO SET NEGOTIATION GOALS AS A MANAGER 

When Negotiation Mistakes Compound over Time

POSTED NOVEMBER 15TH, 2021 BY PON STAFF & FILED UNDER BUSINESS NEGOTIATIONS.

When we think of our worst negotiation mistakes, they tend to be recent blunders. But what about negotiation mistakes whose repercussions accumulate over years, even decades? A failed negotiation case study from 1976 shows how carelessly negotiated deals can lead to long-term headaches and losses. A Short Season In 1974, brothers Ozzie and Daniel Silna, Latvian immigrant … READ WHEN NEGOTIATION MISTAKES COMPOUND OVER TIME 

Right of First Refusal: A Tool to Negotiate with Care

POSTED JULY 12TH, 2021 BY PON STAFF & FILED UNDER NEGOTIATION SKILLS.

Among many useful negotiation skills and strategies, a right of first refusal can often benefit negotiators. In a right of first refusal, the right holder is typically given the power to buy an asset on the same terms that the grantor would receive from any other legitimate, prospective bidder, according to Harvard Business School and … READ MORE 

From Writer Unboxed:

Rachel Toalson is an especially prolific poet, essayist, and award-winning author of picture books and of middle grade and young adult fiction. Lest you think writing books for young humans means toning down reality, Rachel has mastered the art of hard topics — how to convey them, how to guide a young mind through them — in a way that helps to instill hope and to set young people on a path of functional thinking.

“Toalson handles difficult, complex subjects with nuance and care, never losing sight of who her readers are, and striking the delicate balance between honesty and hope.”

—Jordan Leigh Zwick, The Book Seller (Grass Valley, CA)

Her next work of middle grade fiction, The First Magnificent Summer, is the story of an awakening–of sexism, as a twelve-year-old girl realizes her own estranged father may be treating her as Other because of her gender. It releases on May 30th.

If you need some inspiration, please settle in; you won’t be disappointed. Many thanks to Rachel for sharing her journey and her many profound insights about the writing life.

GW: Thanks for agreeing to share your writing and publishing experiences with the Writer Unboxed community. I like to start by asking writers about their author origin story; it’s kind of like a superhero origin story but with a pen. What’s yours?

RT: The sole purpose of my first dabbles in story was getting me out of trouble. I was an imaginative, precocious middle child with an older brother and a younger sister. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, which meant trouble was right at our fingertips. After a Pecan Battle (we were supposed to be gathering pecans so my grandmother could make her delicious pecan pie), my sister ran into the house wailing. I’d launched the fated pecan that hit her brow, but I made up an elaborate story that blamed my grandmother’s boyfriend for the wound that required ice and a Band-Aid. There was a giant hole in my story: My grandmother’s boyfriend hadn’t been outside all morning.

But I was good at telling stories. I told them for entertainment. To everyone—my siblings, my mother, the kids at school. I documented things that happened on the playground. I retold important events with a little flair and exaggeration. And in the margins, I worked on my Great American Novel at the age of seven. It sounded a lot like Little House on the Prairie, which my mother was reading to us at the time.

My mother saw a spark (and probably a way to get me to stop talking so much). She made sure I always had sharpened pencils and a stack of stapled computer paper. I told everyone I knew I’d be a writer someday.

In high school some amazing English teachers affirmed my writing gift. In college my love for it exploded under the direction of some magnificent professors. And I found my people, which is important in any origin story. Who are we without our people?

I’ve been through some trauma in my life. Writing helps me process the narrative and reframe it. That’s probably the simplest answer to why I keep picking up a pen.

GW: I don’t think it would be an understatement to say you’re a prolific author. Tell us a bit about your journey to publication; how did you land your agent? Your first book deal? And, how have you managed to be as prolific as you are with six children at home?!

RT: I spent the first decade of my career as a journalist and an editor for some Texas newspapers. But after the birth of my sixth child, I faced a job lay-off. After catastrophizing, as I’m wont to do, my husband said, “Why don’t you go for your dream?” And I thought, Yeah. Why not?

All those years I’d been writing books, of course. I’d written two adult novels that went nowhere—no agent even asked for a full manuscript (Today Me recognizes they weren’t any good). But I had another novel—one written for kids—that I thought might be something special.

It was. I queried twelve agents I found through Twitter’s #MSWL and Writer’s Digest listings. Ten requested the full manuscript. I got two offers and signed with my agent in 2016. We went out on sub with my first book, a novel in verse called The Colors of the Rain, in early 2017 and had an offer by May. It published in September 2018.

However. Traditional publishing is a slow process. I’m a very productive writer. So I also self-publish fiction under a pen name and write poetry and essay collections under my full name.

As to how I stay productive with so many kids, I send them to public school so I can write. Half-joking aside, I protect my writing time. Writing centers me and helps me process emotions and heals old wounds. My family gets a better version of me, and I get to live my passion and dream. Everybody wins when I get to write.

One more note: Early in our marriage, my husband and I decided that his career was not more important than my career, just because he’s a man. We do what we can to support each other and raise our kids jointly.

GW: How has publishing been different than you’d anticipated? Is there something you didn’t know back then you wish someone in the business had told you?

RT: I was only marginally aware of how much patience traditional publishing would require. In theory, I knew it could take a year or more to sell a book, then a year or more to see it published. But in practice, I found myself unpleasantly surprised—maybe because I’m a very productive, task-oriented person, and I write quickly.

Waiting is hard for me. And I’ve actually been pretty fortunate in how long I’ve had to wait for books to sell and to see them publish.

Because I’m such a productive writer, I have a huge bottleneck; I have nine middle grade, five young adult, two chapter book, and three poetry manuscripts ready to go to my agent. But it’s not the right time yet. So I have to wait. It’s torturous.

To help manage the bottleneck, I also self-publish books, under a pen name. It helps me maintain a modicum of control and care for myself mentally and emotionally. Writing is therapeutic for me. So is publishing.

Also: We, the writers, are in charge. I know it doesn’t feel that way when we’re in the querying trenches or out on submission; those are vulnerable places to be. But the truth is, we don’t have to take the first offer that comes our way. If an agent or an editor is asking for an edit to your book that doesn’t feel “right,” you don’t have to take the deal. It’s your book. Agents don’t have a job without writers. Editors don’t have books without writers. It’s not about finding an agent or editor; it’s about finding the right one. I know I’m in a privileged place to say that, being an agented writer with multiple books published. But it’s something I wish someone had told me in the beginning.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

From Publisher’s Weekly:

The common wisdom tells us that time is money, but for a writer, money is time. Writing is not the same as typing—it takes much more time: time to gaze out the window awhile thinking, reflecting and dreaming your way onto the page for instance, to pause, reconsider, order your thoughts, conduct research, to write, of course, but also to read what you have written, consider it, change it, polish it. This is what grants and advances against royalties are for.

I was in my early 30s when I received my first advance. I can’t remember the exact figure. Something like $14,000, and, of course, I only got half of that on signing. While this does not seem like very much now, in 1974, cobbled together with renting rooms in my house, workshop fees, and lectures, it allowed me to focus on writing my book. Since, as it turned out, Woman and Nature took me four years to write, the advance did not last long enough. But with a bit of luck and lots of nerve, I managed. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts during one of those years made a big difference.

Over time, as I gained readers, the advances increased. I received a relatively larger advance for 1981’s Pornography and Silence, and that one took me far less time to write. During the period it took me to write that book, I felt relatively flush. But soon after it was in print, I was close to being broke again.

If writing as a profession is often less than profitable, it’s also wildly unpredictable with regard to finances. For my next book I had several ideas, none of which I was able to sell. I did not develop any of these proposals. Finally, during what was understood as a crisis caused by a nuclear arms race, I decided to write about the intersection between gender and weapons of mass destruction. I knew I had the right subject when I realized that whether I found a publisher or not, I was going to do it. I did receive an advance for that book eventually, though the money disappeared long before I completed A Chorus of Stones, which came out in 1992. That book took me 10 years to write, during which it often seemed I was living off the fumes from my passion for the subject.

The research alone took me at least three years. It was a perilous time, during which more than once either my health or my spirits faltered. Yet I never regretted my decision. The greatest reward writers receive is not monetary. Like farmers who love their work, most writers are less motivated by profit than by love of the work itself.

Though A Chorus of Stones was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is taught in many classes throughout the country, it was not a bestseller. It was what is called a midlist book. I was turned down for more than one grant, most probably because—as its subtitle, The Private Life of War, indicates—weaving public and private histories together, the book fell outside familiar categories.

Over the last two decades, as the publishing industry faltered in the wake of the internet, most large publishers stopped giving midlist writers advances large enough to last more than a few months. Even though, in the first year after they are published, midlist books do not sell as many copies as bestsellers do, they often stay in print for many more years, catching up in sales over time.

But there is another, more compelling reason to support the midlist. Though some bestsellers break boundaries and explore new ideas, many tend to align with what is already popular, what we already know and want to hear more about. By contrast, as they venture into the unknown, midlist books often take greater risks, inventing new forms, revealing unique ways of seeing. Isn’t this what we need now as we find ourselves sinking under the weight of a history of unfortunate decisions our culture has made in the past?

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

Or, you could self-publish, release your books when you decide they’re ready, not pigeonhole yourself in the midlist, charge less so more people could buy and read your books and still earn more money than you do on the midlist dusk of traditional publishing, to say nothing of living with a sense that your work is not treated as particularly important by your publisher, upon which you are totally reliant for your ability to continue writing.

[The previous paragraph qualifies as PG’s longest run-on sentence of the day. He hopes no English teachers were harmed.)

PG suggests that, if you want to make a career writing books, you will complete and publish more books via the self-publishing path and end up earning a significantly higher lifetime income from your writing, than you will by being one of the also-rans in a traditional publisher’s stable of authors.

(Another run-on, but nothing to brag about.)

If you’re Barack and Michelle, by all means, go to a traditional publisher who will pay you a $65 million book advance which will never earn out, but you’ve already got the money in your pocket, so you don’t really care.

(PG has runonitis today.)

From Jane Friedman:

My neighbor and I were slouched on my couch, watching The Holiday and eating under-baked brownies from the pan, when the email came that changed my life.

For seven years, on and off, I’d been pitching national publications, hoping they would accept my essays and journalism. Local publications gave me no trouble. I enjoyed great relationships with my small city’s newspapers, websites and magazines, but I never could get the far-flung big guys to take a pitch. Instead, the fancy editors always ignored my emails. I couldn’t even get rejected.

Understanding the problem did not help. There’s an ancient catch-22 that says: You can’t write for large, popular, national publications until you’ve written for large, popular, national publications. It’s like when you’re applying for your first job. You need the job to get experience, but can’t get the job without experience.

I could see no way out of the bind, so I just kept on pitching into the void, growing more disappointed and bitter by the week. If only I’d gone to an Ivy League school, or had the cash to move to New York after college! If only I’d had well-connected alcoholic socialites for parents! I was sure my writing life would be different. Easier. Cooler. The opposite of desperate and doomed.

And then, in 2015, seven years into my pitching efforts, I dashed off an essay for a tiny personal-finance website about, of all things, my mortgage payment. My husband and I had recently bought a modest house in our hometown, and the monthly payments were low, running to just $624, or 58 percent less than what was then the median U.S. mortgage payment of $1,477.

My essay’s title was simple, classic clickbait: “Tradeoff: The True Story of My $624 Mortgage Payment.”

The day it came out, Yahoo! picked up and ran the story, too, which I learned when coworkers began forwarding me the link. And that night, while my neighbor and I were complaining about Kate Winslet getting stuck with Jack Black, my inbox pinged. A senior editor at New York Magazine had emailed me. She’d seen the mortgage piece.

“Pitch me,” she said.

Wordlessly, I handed over my phone so my friend could read the email, and the next moment, we were flying off the couch, stomping and whooping like football players doing an endzone dance.

The next morning, I shot the editor a pitch—for another internet-friendly essay about money because, by this point, I’d gotten religion. She accepted the idea, and about a month later, I got my first big byline. Then I used that byline to get my next byline, to get my next byline, until I had enough bylines that I was able to sell my first book to a Big Five publisher. And to think it all started with an essay about my mortgage. Oh, the glamour of it all.

The internet has changed since 2015, but the great human interests have not.

What allures people, what do they want to read about? Money, sex and death, but especially money. So when you write about money, you put the odds of a breakout on your side. It was true centuries ago and it’s still true now.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

Why am I writing a series? It’s dead simple. Because my agent wants me to.

Why does she want me to?  Here goes:

WHY WRITE SERIES BOOKS?

First and foremost:  Money.  Publishers love to market a good series because (hopefully) there is an audience built in from the first book.  The branding is established.  People who bought the first book will buy the second (assuming they liked the first.)  And in years to come, people who buy the new release at a festival or launch will hopefully go back and pick up the backlist. (I made a lot of my income from readers picking up my backlist.)

Readers get attached to the characters and want to be with them again for another adventure.  And writers?  Well, I adore revisiting the characters I came to love in the first book.  Sometimes, it’s like they’ve become my friends, welcoming me back to their worlds with open arms.  At times, I can’t believe they aren’t real. 

. . . .

You’ve heard writers declare that characters will sometimes take over a book and tell their own story.  True, some characters are the bane of my existence, ungrateful whiny creatures who permeate my brain and insist that I tell their stories rather than move on to new projects.  So before you decide to write series, make sure you like your characters enough to live another twelve round with them.

BUT SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T

Let me put it this way.  Some genres lend themselves to series better than others.  Literary does not tend to be a genre for series books, for instance.  (Note my point on character arc below.) Where we do tend to find series books is in Mystery, Romance and Fantasy/Sci-fi.

Let’s look at those genres specifically.

SERIES BOOKS IN MYSTERY AND ROMANCE

Series in Mystery and Romance are different from series in Fantasy Sci-fi, because of the rules of the genres.

In Romance, there must be a HEA (happy ever after.)  The book must end with the story of the couple getting together romantically.  However, you can write a story about their friends…secondary characters who come forward to have their own stories.  (This is common in Paranormal Romance.  A vampire series may feature a clan of vampires, each of whom finds their own love in successive books.)

In Mystery, the crime must be wrapped up at the end of the book.  BUT, you can have the amateur detective or PI or same group of cops go on to solve more crimes in future books.

Example: Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.  Sherlock Holmes.

Big plus in Mystery:  Series books lend themselves to television series! (Especially in Britain, the lucky ducks.) And you don’t need me to tell you that’s where the money is.

That takes care of Mystery.  But what about Thrillers?

For that, we need to go back to the differences between Mysteries and Thrillers.  Here’s a definition commonly used:

Mystery fiction is a puzzle story

It starts with a murder (or crime) and emphasizes the solving of the crime. The protagonist’s job is to discover who committed the crime and why.  The reader and the detective both receive the same information at the same time (anything else is not playing fair.)

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris

From Writers in the Storm

The advice you can find about the “rules” of writing and publishing goes from one extreme to another. Some say there are no rules. Others give you a list of rules. 

Traditional Publishing

When you consider traditional publishing, remember that these big publishers are corporations and they have both public and more private rules. They call their public rules “submission guidelines.” Often those guidelines are about how to format your manuscript. 

The harder to find or see rules are those common to corporations. Certain departments handle certain things. One publisher may tolerate stories that include guns or sex scenes. The next one won’t. Often these corporations do not share internal policies such as risk tolerance or political leanings or their alignment with causes you care about. 

Even the editors you submit to have rules. They don’t call them rules, yet they have certain expectations. They expect stories to be entertaining, to progress from beginning to middle to the end. Each editor has genre expectations and life events that influence their interpretation of your story. Some editors are flexible and open to having their expectations exploded by a skillful author. Others will not be.

What can you do? Know what’s important to you. Research the publishers and editor you’d like to publish your work. Ask questions of authors, agents, editors, and librarians. Can’t do it in person? Try social media.

Don’t be so eager to be published that you sign your first contract without knowing what it means to your book and to your values. Decide which issues are a no-deal for you in advance.

Rules in Independent Publishing

You may get the impression that there are no rules in independent publishing. You’d be wrong. There are tons of rules. Amazon has a set of rules. So do Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Draft to Digital, and Ingram Spark. There are cover sizes and images they will and will not tolerate on covers. Genres they will and will not allow on their sites. Advertisers have rules, too. Those are a tiny part of the rules associated with independent publishing.

While independently published authors don’t have to contend with corporate editors, we have to please the readers of our genre. Readers have expectations and those are their “rules.” 

There are also the expectations or rules we impose upon ourselves. Sometimes, independent author-publishers impose harsh, unrealistic, unsustainable rules on themselves. 

What I Wish I Knew About the Rules Before I Published

The anonymous “they” say that you need to know the rules before you break them. I wish I’d understood the unsaid part of that advice. If you break the rules, there are consequences. Sometimes, the consequences are that the editors and readers love what you did. But if you break too many rules and expectations, you may alienate some editors and readers. Your book may not sell.

As an independent publisher, it’s up to you to understand the rules and what consequences may result if you decide to break a few.

Things I Wish I Knew About the Writer’s Life

No matter the publishing path you follow, you are a writer. A writer’s life is not as advertised. Hollywood films set up expectations that writers solve crimes or have exciting adventures. Magazines and other media hold up the rags to riches stories of fabulously successful and wealthy authors as something all writers can become. 

Hollywood vs. Real Life

While it depends on what you call adventures, few writers get much in the way of real-life adventure. Many of us do some traveling associated with our writing, but it’s rare that a writer is a successful detective or devious murderer or a terrified kidnap victim.

Most of the time, we sit at our writing device of choice and write. If we aren’t careful, we develop physical limitations because of too much sitting. Most of us self-isolate. It’s nearly impossible to get into the creative zone and socialize at the same time. 

It used to be very unlikely for a writer to earn a living. Thanks to independent publishing it is less rare today, but for every Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, there are thousands who do not earn enough to break even.  

Link to the rest at Writers in the Storm

From Written Word Media:

What publishing trends will 2022 reveal? What will change for indie authors in the coming new year?

Every year at Written Word Media we analyze our own data and talk to industry experts to get an idea of what’s going on in the world of publishing, and what publishing trends authors and publishers can expect in the upcoming year. Here are our top eight publishing trends for 2022.

. . . .

Direct Sales for Authors Continue to Grow

More authors saw success with direct sales from their own websites in 2021, and we see this continuing in 2022. Bryan Cohen of the Sell More Books Show says that authors with a following could see the largest gains here.

“Many higher-end authors who are looking to expand their brand will consider the wild world of direct sales on their own website,” said Cohen. “The learning curve there is steep, but these authors will embrace the value of growing their team to help them pull off the seemingly impossible.”

Mark Leslie Lefebvre of Draft2Digital also sees direct sales growing in 2022.

“As tools and platform availability make it easier, such as plug-ins for WordPress or other sites, and as savvy authors continue to build upon their author newsletter strategies, they can drive more people to get their books direct,” said Lefebvre. As more tools, like Shopify and BookFunnel proliferate, direct sales become a more viable channel for authors.

. . . .

Book Prices Will Increase

At Written Word Media we’re big believers in discount promos or free first-in-series books, but we also see some authors increasing their set prices in 2022. An increase in price can make a discount promo even more appealing, especially a Kindle Countdown Deal where readers can see how much they are saving, and it can signal quality to readers.

Craig Martelle, best-selling author and 20 Books Vegas host says that changes in the entertainment and social landscape in 2022 will contribute to price changes. “Prices will go up. We’ve already seen that with paperbacks since paper and shipping have both increased in cost, but we’ll see it with ebooks, too,” said Martelle. “Entertainment value for discretionary income leads us back to quality over quantity. Good books will always be able to find an audience.”

In 2022 we see more authors increasing the prices of backlist titles to increase revenue and experiment with better margins.

. . . .

Bonus Trend

More authors will consider writing and publishing serializations via reading apps
This trend comes to us via Jane Friedman who thinks that more authors will experiment with new formats in 2022.

“If you have kids who read any fiction at all, they likely have read something at Webtoon, Tapas, or Wattpad,” said Friedman. “While many see online literature and webcomics as separate from the traditional publishing market, that thinking is likely to change. Webcomics companies are adapting popular novels into their format, and popular online stories are moving into print.”

While Amazon’s Kindle Vella hasn’t had the readership many authors hoped for, a slow start doesn’t mean serialization, or Kindle Vella, are dead. In fact, Friedman says that serialized storytelling is poised for continued growth and sees signals coming from international markets.

“Webtoon, Tapas, Radish, and other online reading apps have seen dramatic growth during the pandemic and operate profitably. While online and serialized literature continues to be more popular with writers in Asian markets, they also attract US authors, especially genre fiction authors, who can earn extra money from serializations and adaptations into mobile storytelling formats. Royal Road is now seen by digital-first publishers as rich territory for mining talent (like Wattpad before it), and Inkitt received millions in funding for its serialized storytelling app, Galatea,” said Friedman.

Link to the rest at Written Word Media

From Jane Friedman:

The apparent conflict between art and commerce is probably as old as commerce itself. Many writers tense up, glaze over, or even freak out when they think about “the business of writing.” Creative writing is, after all, creative. But here we are in a capitalist soup, love it or hate it, and you have to find your place herein. I choose to be an empowered creative, envisioning innovative ways to work within and transform the system.

So what does creativity have to do with business? A lot, it turns out. It’s just a different kind of creativity than you engage with when you write. Imagining dynamic characters, creating distant or exotic landscapes, and devising whimsical or harrowing scenarios uses another part of the brain than conjuring up a business idea or planning for your new product or service. But you are still imagining, still wondering, still dreaming.

I’ve had to remind myself of this as someone who started out as a poet. Poetry is the writing form probably most seen as antithetical to business. But as I’ve gotten older, the distinctions between creativity and business have started to soften and melt away. I am not only a poet but also, as a person who runs a private online writing school, very much a business person engaging in commerce.

. . . .

Thinking about audience gets me thinking about purpose. I ask myself, “Why am I writing this, really?” Connecting to your purpose as a writer offers another bridge between creativity and commerce. I want my writing to have impact—preferably to inspire. I want to stimulate my readers to think differently about themselves and the world. I want my words to remind them of their inherent creative genius, their innate imaginative power to manifest real change. Why are you writing? To inform, instruct, engage, encourage, motivate? Whatever your intention, if you can touch repeatedly into the heart of your desire around writing and hunker down in that love of process (yes, even when it sucks) I think you’ve struck gold, and audience blooms forth as a natural extension.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG asks, “Do you want people other than your parents to read what you write?”

If the answer is yes and you think there’s something unseemly about commerce, post your writing online all over the place, announcing that it’s in the public domain and you claim no rights to it and people will read it.

If that’s not what you had in mind and you want to see your writing in your cozy little local bookstore, then you’re interested to a greater or lesser extent in commerce. PG will assure you that every single author of the books you see in your cozy little bookstore is interested in commerce.

Tolstoy, Dickens, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were each interested in commerce. Are you a better writer than each of them?

Shakespeare was very interested in commerce and this interest rewarded him richly. One of his principal reasons for writing writing plays was to get paying customers to show up at the Globe theater. Shakespeare was part-owner of the Globe.

The Globe was a large commercial enterprise. Attendees paid one penny for standing room, two pennies for entry into a part of the theater where they could sit down on a hard bench and three pennies for a balcony with cushions to sit on and a decent view of the stage.

Additionally, The Globe had a separate entrance for the more refined members of the audience who sat in yet another balcony. Entry to this part of the Globe cost one shilling – twelve pence.

If a new play was premiering, the standard prices were doubled. Additional money was earned by the sale of food and drink by vendors walking through the crowd.

It’s estimated that Shakespeare earned 40 pounds per year from his ownership interest in the Globe. This was enough to support a gentleman’s lifestyle in London.

In addition to money he received from the Globe’s entrance fees, Shakespeare earned a fee as the author of his plays, likely 8 to 10 pounds per play.

In one more addition, Shakespeare and other authors received all of the Globe’s receipts from the second night of a new or rewritten play. Records show that the second night of Othello earned 9 pounds and sixteen shillings. A printed collection of all of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in 1623 and sold for a pound.

Shakespeare was also a professional actor and was paid additional money for his performances at the Globe, whether in his own plays or plays written by others.

In addition to performances at the Globe, Shakespeare’s plays were also performed at the royal court for a fee. Queen Elizabeth typically paid ten pounds for each performance.

Putting all of this together, Shakespeare’s annual income is estimated to to have totaled about 100 pounds per year. This is roughly equivalent to the amount of money earned by an internationally best-selling popular author in the world today. As you’ll see below, 100 pounds would buy you a very large house.

In 1597, Shakespeare repurchased his original family home in Stratford-upon-Avon (which his father had lost due to poor investments), known as New Place, for about £120 in 1597.

New Place was the largest house in the borough, and the only one with a courtyard – a significant purchase for the 33-year-old Shakespeare in 1597. There were ten hearths, which means it had between 20 and 30 rooms, plenty of space for the whole of Shakespeare’s family. Towards the back of the courtyard stood a large, late-medieval Hall, the main gathering point of the Shakespeare’s’ family life.

See much more about how Shakespeare earned his money here.

See more about Shakespeare’s house here.

Here’s a drawing of New Place:

From The Wall Street Journal:

Ralph Waldo Emerson is rarely invoked when people are discussing business and national economies, but he captured a nice point when he observed that “distrust is very expensive.” When individuals lack confidence in the quality and reliability of the products they’re buying—from meatloaf to mutual funds—commercial exchange is impeded and economic growth thwarted. It’s no coincidence that countries with high levels of distrust have high rates of poverty as well.

The U.S. experienced an episode of mass distrust in 2008, when collapsed confidence in the banking system sent the economy into a tailspin. Today, with the products and policies of major companies becoming ever more deeply integrated into our lives—particularly companies in the technology sector—there is ever more need for chief executives and their teams to build trust and maintain it.

That is the backdrop to “The Power of Trust” by Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta, a Harvard Business School professor and research associate, respectively. The authors provide an overview of trust’s role in business, drawing on academic studies and describing companies that have fostered trust, lost it or regained it. Their goal, they say, is to provide readers with a road map “to build, improve, recover, or sustain the trust of the people and groups who rely on you, and whom you rely on, to build a thriving business.”

That is the backdrop to “The Power of Trust” by Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta, a Harvard Business School professor and research associate, respectively. The authors provide an overview of trust’s role in business, drawing on academic studies and describing companies that have fostered trust, lost it or regained it. Their goal, they say, is to provide readers with a road map “to build, improve, recover, or sustain the trust of the people and groups who rely on you, and whom you rely on, to build a thriving business.”

The road map they provide follows a four-part design in which each element contributes to trust in business. The first part centers on competence, which refers to a company’s ability to deliver what it has promised. The next part takes up motives: Does a company have what the authors characterize as “good intentions”? The third part addresses means—“the fairness of your processes and treatment of people when distributing rewards and pain points.” The fourth part registers the “impact”—both intended and unintended—of a company’s actions on the consumers it serves and the communities in which it operates.

None of these elements alone is sufficient to achieve trust, the authors say, and progress in each ultimately depends on companies having their houses in order: “To establish trust with your customers,” Ms. Sucher and Ms. Gupta write, “you need to first establish it with your employees and create processes and standards internally to ensure your products or services are up to standard.”

In their chapter on competence, the authors lavish praise on the Ritz-Carlton, pointing to robust management training that results in its employee turnover rate being much lower than the industry average. They describe the company’s simple “Three Steps of Service”—warmly greeting guests, using their names, and bidding them a fond farewell—as a “brilliant piece of behavior engineering.” The motives chapter features an inspiring story of Tommy Hilfiger producing a line of clothes designed to be easily accessible to people with conditions such as muscular dystrophy and Parkinson’s disease.

But much of the book’s narrative focuses on companies that have lost trust. In the “means” chapter, Michelin is criticized for its move in 1999 to lay off 7,500 Europe-based workers in order to slow (or reverse) its erosion in market share. As for an example of the “impact” effect on the broader society, there is the tale of Volkswagen, which, in 2008-15, used software to cheat on emissions tests. The authors quote a European government official saying of the company’s actions: “We felt betrayed.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (This should be a free link to the OP. If it doesn’t work, PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

While not necessarily directly related to the work of authors, PG thinks trust is an important component in the ongoing success of an author.

One of an author’s most important business assets is the group of readers who enjoy the author’s books and tend to purchase more than one of them. These readers may sign up for an author’s newsletters so they know when a new book will be released. Amazon’s algorithms are likely to point a reader who has purchased one book to other books written by the same author, whether already available or released at a later time.

PG will rely on the comments of visitors to TPV to provide more informed comments on this topic, but he thinks that reader trust will be enhanced by a consistent level of quality in the author’s books. Cranking out a potboiler may undermine this trust.

Additionally, consistency in the types of books an author writes, an ongoing leading character, secondary characters or a setting that appears in more than one book may also contribute to readers developing a trust that an author will deliver a new, but familiar general experience with a new story. Agatha Christie comes to mind as an example. Arthur Conan Doyle is another.

PG understands than an author may begin to feel emotionally or creatively trapped by feeling forced to write what seems like the same book over and over again.

From Jane Friedman:

The most significant choice of your writing career happens long before your story makes its way into the world. This choice impacts every single aspect of your career, and it is a choice you make over and over and over again. This choice could leave you a husk of a writer, ravaged by the publishing industry, bemoaning the success of everyone else around you; or it could propel you to the next stage of your career and embolden you to try things you’d never thought possible. The funny part is this choice has nothing to do with the act of writing, but everything to do with words.

The most important choice you will make in your writing career is how you choose to talk to yourself about said career.

And for 99% of writers I know, the default setting of this conversation is: doubt, worry, and frustration. Fears on repeat include: Why would anyone ever buy my book? My story isn’t important. I’m never going to get an agent. I don’t know how to do this. Somebody already wrote a story like mine…

When we’re Uninitiated and breaking into the industry, we all have these thoughts, and we often feel powerless. But that feeling of powerlessness dissipates when you master your interior dialogue. You go from being a pawn in a multi-billion-dollar industry to an active player with a say in how your career unfolds.

You can change your default mental settings, and as you rewire your brain you may even learn to enjoy the current stage of your writing career.

But the jump from Why would anyone read my work? to My work is great is not natural. If you try to go directly from the former to the latter, you’re probably going to feel delusional, as opposed to empowered.

Rewiring progresses quietly, in stages. Mindset milestones include: That will never happen to me. Maybe that could happen to me. I can do this. I’ve already done it.

Here are a few exercises for both inside and outside your brain to lead you from That will never happen to me to Maybe that could happen to me.

Inside your head

• Acknowledge how you think is a choice. Negative narrative is on auto-pilot by now, but someone had to turn on the auto-pilot function and that someone was you. Are you ready to turn it off? Does that idea terrify you? What about those negative thoughts are you holding on to? The choice is yours, all you have to do is make it.

For me, clinging to negativity offered a sense of security. I knew how to be an aspiring writer. But owning the fact I was a working writer put me out of my comfort zone. It forced me to realize people may actually read my work and that triggered a fear of judgment on about ten-billion different levels. But stasis equals death doesn’t just apply to our characters. And it’s only by making a choice to think and therefore act differently that I was able to move forward.

• Notice when you’re having a crap-tastic garbage person way of talking to yourself moment and shut it down. Take a deep breath, and say out loud with your voice-box, “I choose not to participate in this conversation.” Add a physical movement, like snapping your fingers, as well. If you’re in public and catch yourself thinking negatively, you can use the physical movement to interrupt the negative pattern. That way people aren’t staring at you for uttering, “I choose not to participate in this conversation” when you haven’t been conversing.
• Replace trash talk with a new line of dialogue. Once you’ve asserted your choice to disengage from self-trash-talk a few times, take it a step further. Replace your negative monologue with a question of possibility. I like Why not me? If somebody else has done it, there’s no reason I can’t do it too.

Rewriting your brain is hard work. It is physically exhausting to create new neuro pathways. That old wiring for negative thinking will always be there, so rewiring is something we have to practice as frequently as we practice our writing craft. And, just like mastering our craft, adjusting our thoughts and tweaking our mindset is never done—but with practice, your transition time from self-doubt to self-empowerment increases exponentially.

You can do some serious rewiring work on your own, but it has even more impact when you step outside your own brain.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman