The Writer Magazine Names The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published One of Its Top 10 for 2010
From The Writer Magazine…
We at The Writer work hard all year round to bring you reviews of great writing books that provide “advice and inspiration for today’s writer.” Among the 30 or so books we’ve featured in 2010 have been practical manuals to help improve your writing skills (The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel: A Step-by-Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work), books to refresh your grammar (The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English), books filled with insightful interviews from successful writers (Tales From the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories), and books that inspire by revealing important truths about the challenges of the writing life (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life).
While we seek to be your trusted source for suggestions about new writing books, we can’t possibly cover this massive landscape in the limited space we have (numerous writing books are published each year). As the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 12:12, “of making many books there is no end,” but our time (and editorial space) is limited. So we make choices as best we can, knowing full well we can’t cast our net over all the freshly spawned writing books that constantly wash upon our shores.
To help widen our net, we’ve pulled together a list of 10 outstanding writing books, the ones that almost got away. Whether you’re reading for your own pleasure, seeking to enhance your writing skills by incorporating the advice of experienced practitioners, looking for inspiration to get you through the rough patches, or simply searching for great, writer-friendly gifts for the holidays, this crop of terrific books should feed your appetite.
The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. Workman Publishing, 480 pages. Paper, $14.95.
Written by two veteran publishing insiders (Eckstut is a literary agent, Sterry a book doctor), this real-world guidebook demystifies the entire publishing process, showing you how to create an effective book proposal, comprehend the legal complexities of a book contract, develop the publicity skills you’ll need to succeed, and, if necessary, self-publish. There’s lengthy advice on using the Web to market your book, and even help with producing a video book trailer. The authors include interviews with hundreds of publishing insiders and writers. This valuable how-to also offers sample book proposals, query letters and more.
To read the rest of The Writer Magazine’s Favorite books of 2010, click here.
Book Doctors on Huffington Post: Popping My Cyber-Cherry on Twitter
Thanks once again to Huff Po! And thanks to the Book Maven for guiding us through our first live Twitter event, and leading us into the Future.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/my-first-time-popping-my-_b_791435.html
The Essential Guide Tour Miami #16: Versailles, cheesecake popsicles, and Sexo Para Dummies
The reports of the death of the book have been slightly exaggerated. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, we can tell you most assuredly that the book is alive and well, if the Miami International Book Festival is any indication. Hundreds of authors from Carl Hiaason to Patti Smith to Montclair New Jersey’s own Ian Fraser held court for tens of thousands of book lovers. Also on the scene were former president George Bush, Oprah-disser then Oprah-kisser Jonathan Franzen, and Clifford the Big Read Dog.
We arrived in Miami from Seattle on Saturday, and headed out to the old-school Cuban restaurant Versailles, where Jews and Cubans find a common ground: inexpensive and tasty food. Arielle’s grandmother took her there when she was a child, so this was a special familial ancestral residence for her as she dove into her black beans and yellow rice cooked in gobs of chicken fat. Yum!
On Sunday downtown Miami was buzzing with books, authors and those who love them. It was startling and inspiring to see all the different kinds of writers and books in their booths, from the highest brow to the lowest.
Out of the blue we ran into our compadre Roxanna Elden, who took our class in Miami and rocked our Pitchapalooza that was at one of our ATF bookstores, Books & Books, 5 years ago. Ever since the first time she pitched us, we knew there was a book there, long before she’d found an agent, written her book and got it published. All of which she did, step-by-step, yard by yard, mile by mile. It took her a couple of years and many rejections, but her book See Me After Class was published in June, 2, 2009, (David’s birthday) by Kaplan Publishing. It always makes our hearts happy when we see Roxanna not only because she’s such a funny, grateful, gracious, and exuberant person, but also because we have a sense of pride that we helped guide her from talented amateur to professionally published author. We’re very excited to report she’s working on a new book, a novel. Can’t wait to read it.
Our Miami event was our only non-Pitchapalooza, and we were sharing a panel with Betsy Lerner, author/editor/agent/quarter-century-veteran-of-the-publishing-wars. She has a new book out, or rather a new edition of what has become a publishing classic, The Forest for the Trees: An Editors Advice to Writers. It’s a must read for writers: veteran, neophyte or anything in between.
Five minutes before the event there were only 25 audience members, and no Betsy. Then suddenly the audience poured in like prospectors at the Gold Rush. In an instant there were 100 people. And there was Betsy. Right on time. There was no moderator, so it was interesting sharing a stage with someone else, just freeform talking about anything we wanted to talk about. It was a little like playing jazz with someone you never met before, and someone you played with for 10 years at gigs all over the country. Luckily, Betsy is a virtuoso, she had such smart stuff to say. For example, if you are querying an agent, don’t tell the agent that you two are soulmates. Don’t send a love letter. When the agent sells your book, then you can send flowers and candy and be best buddies. And don’t say you’re the next Eat, Pray, Love or Harry Potter. You are almost certainly not. Just makes you seem like an amateur. Think carefully about what your goal is as a writer. How do you define success? And for goodness sake, don’t rely on your husband/wife/mother/father for literary/publishing advice. Unless of course you’re married to Arielle Eckstut or Betsy Lerner. We focused on our 4 Principles of Successful Publishing: Research, Network, Write, Persevere.
We only had 50 minutes, so between the three of us, there wasn’t actually all that much time to talk before we opened up the room to a Q&A. At the end of the event, we tried a technique David used on his Art of the Memoir tour. We offered a free consultation to anyone who bought a book. At the signing table they lined up by the score. We must’ve sold 50 books. That may not sound like a lot. Until you’ve tried to sell a book. We’ve had events attended by 100 people and sold 4 books. People don’t understand that authors are generally not paid to do events. Authors do events to connect with their audience, to celebrate their publication, but they are there primarily to sell books. And despite having written the book on the subject, we have found this part of our job to be continuously challenging.
Afterwards we ran into our Hoboken homey, Caroline Leavitt, one of the nicest and most talented authors we know.
Her new book, Pictures of You, is already in its second printing and won’t even be published until January. We each bought each others’ books at the fair and Arielle started reading Pictures of You on the plane home. She got through 125 pages in 3 hours (and she’s a slow reader) because it was so crazily compelling. She finished it two days later—even though we came home to piles and piles of stuff to do after having been away for a month. She just had to finish it. For all those literary fiction lovers out there, you are in for such a treat. Pictures of You is Arielle’s favorite book of the year. It’s delectable!!!
It was tremendously gratifying/satisfying to end the first half of our tour with a great success. Riding high, we decided to cheat ourselves and go for it decadent brunch at the Ritz-Carlton in South Beach. It’s a pastel happy fantastical melting pot of Cuban ex-pat immigrants, flashy trashy fashion pioneers and victims, touristas, bikers, muscleheads and plastic surgery lovers. The brunch at the Ritz-Carlton has a very Fall of Rome feel to it. The people who work there don’t just serve, they seem like they’re happy to serve. Dining poolside was divine. California hand rolls, pancakes with fresh berry compote, roast beast, crab legs extraordinaire, and cheesecake popsicles. Yes, cheesecake popsicles.
David had a fascinating confrontation with a surgically enhanced 50-something. The server brought out two raspberry chocolate treats on a tray and presented them to David, Surgically Enhanced and her daughter. Surgically Enhanced grabbed both of them. Her daughter, clearly embarrassed, said, “Mom, maybe he wants one.” He being Me. Who said, “Yes, actually I would like one of them.” Surgically Enhanced just shrugged, took both chocolate raspberry treats and slouched away, clearly succumbing to one of the type 7 Deadly sins: Gluttony. Speaking of gluttony, stuffed and bloated we waddled out onto the beach. The ocean breeze was a gentle tonic, and we basked in the sun, sea and sand.
Finally, we wanted to give a shout out to the face, brains and heart of the Miami International Book Festival: Mitchell Kaplan. He’s is that rarest of birds: a brilliant businessman who also makes everyone he touches feel special. He had some fascinating things to say about the present and future of publishing. Amidst all the deathknell doomsaying about the book business, he said he can’t operate from a place of panic or doom. He just keeps doing what he does: loving and selling books. And keeps evolving, changing with the times, which are always a’changing. He was one of the first people to realize that a bookstore could transcend bookstoredom. So he brought in a great chef to Books & Books, and now people go there just to dine. The bookstore also has a beautiful courtyard where people can sit and read and write and talk in the sun. He’s brought in the greatest writers in the world not only to read, but into the bookstore to hang. So you never know who you might be sitting next to as you eat your quiche. Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie. Mitchell said he was starting to shift the fundamental way he does business. He thinks the agency model that Apple and others are using has great potential for independent booksellers as well (we’ll be exploring this more in another post).
We’d like to close by thanking all the booksellers, book buyers, writers, panelists, babysitters, our amazing Workman team, who has made all this travel possible. We’ll leave you with a few lasting images from the festival.
The Essential Guide Tour Pitchapalooza Phoenix #15: Irving Berlin, Women Who Run With Wolves and a Random Act of Kindness
Do yourself a favor and go to the Arizona Biltmore. Our now ecstatically beloved travel agent slotted us there for our Phoenix/Tempe stop, and it was SPEC-TACULAR! A protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright designed this spectacle. Adobe, tile and fountains set like Emerald City jewels into the 24 karat ring of monumental mountains and delirious desert. It’s been a playground for the rich and famous since the 1920s, and if you listen carefully you can hear the ghost of Irving Berlin singing White Christmas, which he famously composed there. Plus, there are not one but TWO golf courses. Sleep deprived as he was, David practically skipped like a schoolgirl to a Justin Bieber concert out to the links and with some high-end Ping rentals birdied three of the 12 holes he played. While David got his golf on, Arielle luxuriated in a tub with designer bath products that smelled like the Garden of Eden.
Arielle had flown the night before from Seattle to Newark, then the next morning, dropped the ridiculously exhausted three-year-old Olive off with her beloved babysitter, turned around and did Newark to Phoenix, having a severe case of simultaneous déjà vu and road burn.
David stayed in Seattle and hit up two great bookstores, Elliott Bay and Queen Anne. Even having been away from her for a mere matter of hours, David and Arielle missed Olive like a couple of stone cold junkies used to mainlining China White. Lucky for us, we got put in the Ocatilla executive suite wing where they do everything for you accept put on a private floor show while you poop. (Something, by the way, that Olive absolutely insists upon). They have an executive lounge where a continuous supply of high-end goodies are whisked out from behind closed doors, as if the caterer were Willy Wonka. We do believe in a classless society, where all are treated equally, and everyone gives according to ability and gets according to need. But there’s no way to deny that you just feel happy and pampered when you breathe in that rarified air.
Then we were whisked away to Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, where we were greeted and fêted like royalty. It’s a grand bookstore that makes you overjoyed to be in the ridiculous book business. Due to confusion beyond our control, the bookstore had not been alerted to the fact that we were doing a Patchapalooza, but there were still 30 able-minded writers waiting for us. When we asked them if they would like to pitch their books, giddy ecstasy swept through the room. Sure enough we heard a dozen most excellent pitches. Historical fiction, a suicide novel, a Crash-like Vietnam-based story, a warm and honest memoir/how-to from an ADD sufferer, and a money management tome. The winner gave a great pitch for her book about ordinary women telling extraordinary stories. Sort of The Artists Way meets Women Who Run with Wolves.
We sold books to almost everyone there, and Arielle was in rare form, cracking wise about the difficulty of communication when married to a clueless doofus.
We also had the great pleasure of having our friend Terry Whalin show up. Terry is the author of over 60 books (that’s not a typo, we meant 60)! He also has been an editor, publisher and agent, so knows every side of the publishing biz. We had just finished interviewing Terry over email the week before (check back soon for the post of this interview). So it was particularly nice to see him in person. Check out Terry’s website for lots of amazing tips on how to be a working and published writer.
After the PItchaplooza was over, the lovely folks at Changing Hands offered us each a free T-shirt. David, appropriately, chose one that said, “Fictional Character” on its chest. Then Shelly Segal, an employee at Changing Hands who also pitched a very cool kids book, gave us a ride back to Shangri-La even though she lived around the corner from the bookstore. Yet another random act of kindness from a stranger who became a friend! We dined late and high on the hog then collapsed back in the silky luxury of our beautiful cocoon.
As we left the next morning, our only regret was that we couldn’t move into the Arizona Biltmore and hold an event every night at Changing Hands.
The Essential Guide Tour Pitchapalooza #14, Seattle: Mexican Prisons, Sea-Salted Pate & Losing Your Innocence to Jimmy Carter
A cruel wind blew up our metaphoric skirts and chilled our gizzards with a damp shivery wetness as we stepped into Seattle. “Dad, it’s too cold!” Olive declared. We bundled and trundled into a taxi and cranked up the heat in our hotel, just off the blustery bay from Pike’s Place Market, where fish go to be turned into flying dead acrobats by monger/jugglers.
We decided to have a late lunch/early dinner, and wandered the market looking for something hot and excellent to eat. “Dad, it smells funny!” Olive declared. After a 10 minute walk that took about six weeks, with our extremities numbing and our bellies rumbling, we settled into a bistro called Pichet.
We struck pay dirt. Exquisite french fries. Creamy sea-salted pate. And the piece de resistance: French onion soup that was so transcendent when you close your eyes you could actually hear Edith Piaf singing like a little sparrow with a quivering voice and a broken heart. Sated, we went back to our room, tried to answer the 47,841 e-mails in our inboxes, while telling, re-telling, and re-re-telling Olive’s favorite new story: The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Then it was off to Third Place Books. We were a little leery because it was deep in the depths of the burbs. But we had a spectacular panel that had tweeted and Facebooked about the event, so a few dozen writers showed up armed and fully-loaded with their pitches. On of these panelists was Kurtis Lowe, the head honcho at Traveler’s Group West, a leading book repping firm. He is Workman’s West Coast rep as well as a writer’s best friend. Not only is he wildly knowledgeable and articulate, he just loves books and authors. He bought us tea, he promoted our book, he even found this a boo-yeah babysitter for Olive. He also brought in the other panelist Johnny Evison, author of All About Lulu and the forthcoming West of Here. Johnny is that rare bird: a great artist who’s also an extraordinary businessman. He understands the complexity of promoting, spinning, and the marketplace, and knows how to succinctly articulate complex ideas. Plus he’s funny as hell.
As usual we heard some first-rate pitches. A woman who was imprisoned in Mexico in the 70s and helped change prisoner exchange laws. A writer who told her heart-touching story of an American who relocates to Frankfurt after World War II for love. A memoir pitch about a woman who goes to Washington DC as a teenage intern in the late 70s, and loses her innocence to the Carter administration. A marathon coach who’s lived through shocking tragedy and now transforms women’s lives. But the winner, Courtney Happ, gave an airtight tour-de-force pitch for her multiple point of view YA novel about navigating love and hormones, called Spinning Voices. It was really a great night, and Third Place was first rate. We left the burbs of Seattle invigorated, refreshed, with hope for the future of books.
Pitchapalooza Washington Winner: GREAT Book Pitch About Love & Middle East
Hysterical Movie About Writing, Fame & Delusion by David Kazzie
the essential guide tour Pitchapalooza #13: coming home to Portland, autumn leaves, and packing ’em in at Powell’s
Portland, Oregon is one of our favorite cities in the world. In the name of full disclosure, David not only went to, but graduated from Reed College in Portland, and parts of his family has lived there on and off for a couple of decades. So it was a homecoming of sorts.
We landed in Portland on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. Frankly, we can’t remember which. Exhaustion was beginning to set in.
But as we deplaned, we witnessed a true miracle. Rain was not falling from the concrete Northwest sky. Our increasingly beloved travel agent put us in a gorgeous hotel right on the river, and the leaves were putting on a fireworks display of wild autumnal explosions.
Immediately we were struck by that unique combination of biking/hiking/outdoorsivity mixed with the attitude of chillaxation which makes Portland Portland. Plus the hotel had free, warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies that made you feel all warm and happy and cozy. David’s sister Liz came down and we all had a lovely dinner, as she regaled us with hysterical stories of insanity from her gradeschool teaching. Then it was off to our gig, with Liz in charge of Olive while we were doing our thang. Olive is at that phase where almost everywhere we go, she looks around in bedazzled wonderment and exclaims joyously, “Wow, this is BEAUTIFUL!” Although it might seem counterintuitive to recommend taking a three-year-old with you on a book tour, I highly recommend it. She has already, at this point, become the go-to person when it came to keeping it real.
Powell’s Bookstore on Burnside may well be our favorite book emporium in the galaxy. David’s been going there since he was in undergraduate in the 1970s, soon after Michael Powell had the outrageous, outlandish, much-ridiculed idea of selling NEW books side-by-side with USED books. Gasp! What started as a cockeyed dream and a small room full of books, has become over the decades a mecca, shrine and heaven for books and those who love them, as well as an intellectual center in a city full of writers, artists, and musicians. This was David’s third event at Powells, and it’s always a transcendent thrill to be presenting his book in the very place he dreamed of being a writer when he was a bent and folded 18-year-old.
We were blessed with a truly top drawer all-star panel. Michael Schaub of Bookslut, Alison Hallett of the Portland Mercury, and Lee Montgomery, book guru of the venerable and influential Tin House (Sadly, Lee arrived after we took this photo).
They were assembled by one of our ATF* booksellers (and an excellent writer in his own right) Kevin Sampsell. To illustrate what a book mensch Kevin is, he proposed to his wife in front of 200 of his closest friends at the book release party for his memoir, right there at Powell’s.
As Olive was whisked away by David’s sisters Liz and Kate (who had joined us at the bookstores), to have her own book adventure, we were overwhelmed with gratification when 100 people showed up to pitch. Standing Room Only.
There was an apocalyptic kid’s book. A rhyming Christmas kid’s picture book. A cancer survivor looking to help sick kids book. An intelligence of Turtles book. A 15-year-old with a YA book about a pop star trying to find true love. But the winner was a young adult graphic novel about low riders in outer space. Full of beautiful poetry and wild action. The panel rocked HARD. The hour went by and about 10 minutes. Olive had a mad blast with her aunties. Portland, as usual, was everything we expected, and more.
*All-Time-Favorite for those of you without texting vocabulary
NaNoWriMo Twitter event with The Book Doctors
Join us on 11/30 at 2 ET, for a LIVE 2-hour event as we celebrate the close to another successful National Novel Writing Month by answering YOUR questions about how to pitch your latest finished manuscript to agents and editors — live on Twitter with the hashtag #novelpitch! We’ll also choose 20 participants at random to give 140-character pitches and get feedback — and one of those people will win the grand prize of a half-hour telephone consult with us.
SF Litquake Pitchapalooza Winner Nura Maznavi w/ AWESOME Book Pitch
Litquake Pitchapalooza had many amazing book pitches but this was the best. Here’s Nura Maznavi rocking it hard.“>