Caroline Leavitt, Best-selling Author, On Overcoming Nasty Writing Teachers, How to Write a Bestseller and Never Giving Up
21013 NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza Winners
It was an dreadfully difficult decision. Over 600 entries. Astounding pitches of every ilk. Just as in National Novel Writing Month, we consider everyone who submitted to be a winner. But we had to pick one. And readers had to pick one. So… (drumroll) our winner is:
Stacy McAnulty. Her awesomely awesome pitch about a boy who hatches a dinosaur egg made our lizard brain hum and our caveman heart laugh. Congratulations!
Our popular winner was Katie Nepiris, for her stunningly stunning pitch about a group of friends who undergo seismic changes in the year after high school. She got over 1,000 votes!
FYI, we’re honored to be doing a Lights & Letters Webinar on May 14: The Art of the Edit: How to Revise Your Novel Successfully. It’s going to be a blast, we promise. Here’s what we’ll be covering:
- Starting off with a bang, Character arcs, Pacing, Building suspense, Opening & closing chapters, Avoiding repetition, Great titles, Knowing when to show and when to tell, Avoiding clichés, Keeping dialogue real, Checking for words you use over and over and over again, Reading aloud, Killing your babies, Finding beta readers, Getting objective,Using your pitch to perfect your plot.
The Book Doctors will also randomly select a number of first paragraphs from attendees’ manuscripts during the webinar to demonstrate what a professional edit would look like. Send your first paragraph in the body of the email to nanowrimo@thebookdoctors.com when you sign up.
And as always, any Wrimo who buys a copy of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published gets a FREE 20 minute consultation with the Book Doctors. Just email proof of purchase to sterryhead@gmail.com.
Thanks to everyone for participating. See you next year. And keep on writing!
The Book Doctors with Mark Coker of Smashwords on Huffington Post
David Henry Sterry on Public Radio w/ Tips on Pitching
Me on Public Radio with tips on making a great pitch at Anderson’s bookshop http://bit.ly/WZe2gf
FridayWritingTips: Making Your Book Great, Getting Rejected & The Sweet Revenge of Success
FridayWritingTips: Making Your Book Great, Getting Rejected & the Sweet Revenge of Success
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Whenever you send your book to someone to read, it becomes your identity. It is the billboard that is attached to your forehead and
represents who you are as a writer and many times, no matter how fictional your work is, it becomes melded into the way you are perceived. However, this is one characteristic that you can control. So, be sure to put your best foot forward. You want your book to be wearing its Sunday best when it’s out in the world. From the cummerbund to matching socks, you want your book to be wrinkle free of spelling and punctuation errors. You want it suited up to be in the best presentable format it can be in. You want to seduce your reader like a James Bond in a classic Aston Martin. And the best way to do that is to start by getting lots of peoples’ input. So many people send out manuscripts that are half-baked. If someone was coming to your house for dinner, you definitely wouldn’t serve your friends a nasty, mushy, half-baked cake. But we see writers who want to get published do this all the time. Unless you have recently turned up in the pages of People magazine or have already sold a treatment of your unwritten novel to a Big Hollywood Film Studio, chances are you’ll need to write the whole enchilada before you start trying to sell it. You will probably have to keep editing until it has been road tested and test-marketed by as many readers as you can get and it has been proofread and edited by trained professionals. Yes, of course, take all suggestions with many grains of salt. But if 10 people say your ending is not satisfying, guess what….Chances are, your ending is not satisfying. Writing a good novel takes a long time. Use that time to develop contacts by reaching out to people and doing nice things for them. People will be able to help you. As you are writing the book and making it perfect and rewriting the book and making it even better, you are collecting your tribe of people so that when the book is finished, you arrive at a publisher or an agent or a publication date if you decide to self published your book, with your tribe in tow, ready to go.
As you start to send your baby out into the world, constantly remind yourself that the greatest writers in the world, from Dr. Seuss to Stephen King to even J.K. Rowling, were rejected a multitude of times before becoming trend setting bestsellers. What makes you think you are any different? Jack Canfeld and Mark Victor Hansen (authors of the, now franchise, Chicken Soup for the Soul) were rejected a whooping 140 times before being published. Publishers are terrified of stepping out of their comfort zone, especially since they have no idea of what will work and what will fail. It’s a sweet irony that as soon as you sell a bunch of books, the same people who rejected you will be all over you like a gaggle of hormonal teenage girls trying to get a date to the prom with the cool kid.
“No one wants to give you your first job. Everyone wants to give you a job after you’re already successful. A couple of nutty brothers wrote a script that was made into a movie, and suddenly they had the ear of some Hollywood muckety-mucks, all of whom wanted to know, ‘Where’s your next script?’ The brothers had been working on a big, crazy science-fiction idea they wanted to direct themselves, but the idea was so huge and unusual that no one would give them the money for it. No one would risk giving them their first directing job on a film so large and strange. So they wrote a smaller, easier-to-make movie, much of which takes place in one apartment. Because the budget was so small, and the movie was so good, it made money. So now those Hollywood muckety-mucks, who wouldn’t give hem money to make their crazy science-fiction movie before their success, were more than happy to give them $70 million. The nutty sci-fi film? A little movie called—“
Want to know what movie? Or just learn more on this topic? Just turn to page 157 in your copy of “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published” by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. Don’t have your own? Buy a copy of the book at your local bookstore or from: http://thebookdoctors.com/
Happy writing! See you at the bookstore. The Book Doctors
Richard Nash on Small Presses & the future of publishing with The Book Doctors on HuffingtonPost
Richard Nash, publishing savant, on how to get love from independents and the future of the book business with The Book Doctors on Huffington Post
The Book Doctors Bringing Pitchapalooza to Alaska!
We are so excited to be coming to Alaska to Pitchapalooza!
FridayWritingTips: Self Publishing Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know: The Mysterious ISBN
Those famous black lines, the compilation for numbers that make no sense, the coding that is on almost every book out there… This is the allusive, little understood but weirdly all-important ISBN.
The ISBN or International Standard Book Number started some thirty years ago as a way to create a computerized system for cataloging books. The number is not actually a code but literally just a number that has evolved from a 10 digit number to a 13 digit number. Although you don’t have one to print a book, it is nearly impossible to successfully publish and market without one. The number is the universal identity of the book and allows for instant recognition in bookstores, libraries, online sales platforms and databases.
When assembling your book, it’s important to obtain one for yourself. The U.S. ISBN Agency issues the numbers and purchasing one from them makes you the “publisher of record” as well as gives you all the rights to the number and your book.
(http://www.isbn.org/
Many self-publishing companies also are willing to give you a free (or cheap) ISBN if you choose to work with them. However, this makes them the “publisher of record” and does not allow you to your print book on your own. Or much worse, be published by anyone else. The “publisher of record” automatically retains the rights to your title. Although this may not seem like a problem if you plan on sticking with the company, it can cause trouble if you decide to leave…and you don’t want to ever be stuck. Look, if your book blows up and Harper Collins/Random House/Penguin come calling, waving a checkbook, you want to be the ““publisher of record”.
Another thing to keep in mind is that ISBNs do not carry with the title across format boundaries. Print and e-book versions of the same title each need their own ISBNs.
When it comes to self-publishing and help with things such as ISBNs or topography, the self publishing guru, Joel Friedlander, “The Book Designer”, can be a great resource for information. His blog http://www.thebookdesigner.
Happy writing! See you at the bookstore. The Book Doctors
Fridaywritingtips: The Book Doctors on Not Following Trends & Seth Godin on Finding Your Tribe
Fridaywritingtips: The Book Doctors on Not Following Trends & Seth Godin on Finding Your Tribe
One chart-topping-block-buster can create an epidemic. When Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series blew up, the market was inundated by vampire stories, vampire TV shows, vampire clothing, vampire make-up, even vampire-approved toothpaste. All trying to cash in on the seemingly unquenchable blood lust for all things vampire. As a result all manner of shoddy vampire books were pumped out, failed, and a vampire saturation point was reached and surpassed. The vampire glut became unbearable. And then came Suzanne Collins and her Hunger Games. Suddenly there was a rush to produce YA dystopian stories, shows, clothing, make-up and toothpaste. Saturation is being approached. Then along will come the next Big Thing.
But what do these fads and trends have to do with your book, especially when you are trying to be the unicorn in the vast field of donkeys? Well these books were able to create a niche by connecting with their core audience of readers and as their fans/audience grew, so did the popularity of their books, until they broke out, entered the mainstream and took over the world.
Lots of writers ask us what kind of book they should be writing, what’s “hot.” Our advice is, don’t follow trends, set them. Yes, be aware through research what’s going on in the marketplace. But write something that you’re passion about, that’s familiar yet unique, and that’s totally you.
As you’re doing that, the next most important question is: who’s your audience? Who’s going to read your book? Even more important, who’s going to buy your book? Describe your audience-and their motivation to buy- as specifically as possible. Prove to an agent or an editor that people are hungering for your book and that you’ve been actively connecting with your audience and listening to what they say through your company, your workshops, your blog, your social networks or whatever others means you have.
Marketing guru Seth Godin puts it this way: “If you don’t have a better strategy for your book promotion than, ‘Let‘s get on Oprah,’ you should stop now. If you don‘t have an asset already–a permission base of thousands or tens of thousands of people, a popular blog, thousands of employees, a personal relationship with Willard Scott . . . then it’s too late to start building that asset once you start working on a book.”
You can use a famous book as a model for creating your own readership and audience. And that’s what it’s all about these days. Connecting with and cultivating your tribe of people. Nowadays, a great way to do that is social media. Sadly, right now, in 2012, the best pitch you could have for book is:
“I have 1,000,000 Twitter followers and they all want to buy my book.”
If this is true, it doesn’t even matter what your book is about, you will have a book deal in a nanosecond. Because then you and your book have the potential to be the new trend.
Want to learn more? Find this and other helpful tips in “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published” by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. Buy a copy of the book at your local bookstore or from: http://thebookdoctors.com/our-book & get a FREE 20 minute consultation with The Book Doctors (with proof of purchase)
Happy writing! See you at the bookstore. The Book Doctors
Fridaywritingtips: A Great Title Can Sell Your Book, Find Out How
Silence of the Lambs, Who Moved My Cheese? What Color Is Your Parachute? Women Are from Venus, Men are from Mars. As an agent for over 20 years, Arielle saw time and again how a great title alone can sell a book to a major publisher, a bookseller, and of course to a reader. One of the books on that list of titles above is quite frankly not a very good book. And yet, it sold millions and millions and millions of copies. A great title has to be poetic and informative, familiar yet unique, attention grabbing but not offputting. And of course it has to display accurately what your book is, while the same time compelling a reader with a force they can’t control to read your book. Road test your title. Test market it. Run it up the flagpole and see if the money salutes. If you’re having trouble coming up with the right title, we have a great parlor game that always works. It helps if you add alcohol to the mix, but it’s not necessary. Hopefully you have some smart, literate, fun, quick witted, and articulate friends. If you do, invite those people over to your house for a party. If you don’t, try to get some new friends, but until you do, invite the ones you have. Get a large chalkboard or dry erase board. Start writing down every single word you can think of that relates to your book. Plot, characters, themes, little phrases. Write down as many different iterations of words as you can. Brave, bravery, bravest, braving, bravosity, bravitude, bravitude. Then start mixing and matching, and having people brainstorm. It’s great fun, and it always works.
Also, in this new electronic era, when one of the best ways to get a book deal is to create a successful blog, it’s important to make sure that your title is BSF (Book-Store-Friendly) especially when you are moving from blog to book.
“If you’d like to go from blog to book, make sure you have a name that’s bookstore-friendly. Matthew Gasteier’s blog enjoyed so much success that it was snapped up by a division of Random House. But he ended up having to change the title of his book to FU Penguin (and F*** You Penguin for the British edition) because some bookstores won’t carry books with curses on the cover. Bummer”
Want to learn more? Find this and other helpful tips in “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published” by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. Buy a copy of the book at your local bookstore or from: http://thebookdoctors.com/
Happy writing! See you at the bookstore. The Book Doctors