How to Organize Your Own Book Tour

Today we are going to talk about how  authors can organize their own book tour. We’re speaking with book marketing maven, Carl Lennertz.

Carl has worked with Random House, Knopf, and HarperCollins, as well helping independent bookstores through the American Booksellers Association. He is now Executive  Director of World Book Night U.S.; more on that in a moment. Over time, he has helped organize over a thousand author tours.

Andy: Carl, when my clients prepare a marketing plan for their book proposal, they usually have something in there about their willingness to go on an 8 city publisher organized book tour. I have to tell them that this is probably unrealistic these days unless you are a very big celebrity. When I owned Cody’s, we had touring authors every night. What’s happened?

Carl:  Cost. Hotels, airfare, gas; they all went way up in price. At the same time  authors and agents didn’t have the right frame of mind about them. It all became about selling stacks of books and making ‘the list’ – which was a recipe for disaster. I’ll come back to this, but author events are NOT about selling  large numbers  of books at reading events; they are ALL about making relationships with the booksellers and reaching a few new readers each time.

Andy: I always thought  publishers in these hard times encourage authors to organize their own book tours, right?  But some of my clients have tried to do this and have gotten flack from their publishers. Why is that?

Carl: No, please don’t. The publisher is on the hook for hundreds of  dollars in promo money owed to the store for an event, AND there is no guarantee the books will arrive in time if not coordinated with the publisher. There’s a better way; read on.

 Andy: I’m all ears, Carl.

Carl: Let me suggest something different, something I call a muffin and coffee tour. Get in your car (yes, book sales and book buzz can be built locally/regionally), and just visit some stores. Do this before publication date, if you can, with some galleys from the publisher. If you’re doing this  after publication, do NOT stroll in and ask to sign your books. Just introduce yourself and state specifically that you are NOT there to sign books (this lowers bookseller stress significantly). Instead, walk in with some locally made cookies or muffins, or even ground coffee (and yes, I’ve known authors who put images of their book cover on the coffee bag!) Just say you wanted to thank the booksellers for their hard work…and then let it flow from there. The owner or manager may or may not be free to greet you, but let serendipity reign. You might get the part-time info desk person with attitude, or your new best friend. Then walk the store. Enjoy yourself; you’re a booklover, right? Half the time, they will find you and say, hey, we have 2 of your books; would you sign them? And you will, and thank them profusely.

Andy: As a former bookseller, I can vouch for that. Cookies make a difference.  It didn’t happen all that often, but when it did, I never forgot that author or that book. I remember whenever Meredith Maran had a new book out, she kept coming into the store with homemade cookies. And by the way, she also bought books on consignment from us whenever she did a reading and sold them for us at her readings. In return we promised to report the sales to Bookscan. You better believe that everyone in the store knew about Meredith and her book.

But still, my authors want readings! What do they do?

Carl: Now, say you DO actually get a reading booked. Rule # 1: It’s not about the reading; it’s about the things that happen because you go there, especially making a bookseller friend who will hand sell your book afterwards. Expect 0 people  to come to the reading and be surprised. If it’s 1 person, give the reading of your life. Don’t read for more than 10 minutes; talk about the book, how you came to write it; be funny, and take questions. And feel like the luckiest person in the world. Do you know how many authors want to be in your shoes at that moment?

Andy: Carl, again I can speak from experience as a bookseller. Cody’s had over 5000 author readings during the time that I owned it. Particularly with debut fiction but sometimes with National Book Award winners, we’d get 10 or 20 people in the audience and sell 5 books. Of course, if you are a local author, you could pull in all of your friends and contacts. And they’d buy books for sure. But I digress. Let’s assume you have scheduled a tour at your own expense. How do you collaborate with the publisher to make that experience successful?

Carl: The publisher will get books there, if you keep them advised. And send along press materials. And please, pick tour cities based on where the book is set, where you have friends, where you may have lived at one time or gone to college. And let the publicist know if any friends now work in the media in the area. Disgorge every connection you can think of. (I got the front arts page of the St. Louis paper for my lil’ book because I’d lived there years ago and was friendly with the booksellers there.)

Still – and I love publicists; they are genuinely helpful but overworked people – it still falls to you to work your social media before and after the event. To visit other stores in the area (with muffins), depending on time and geography. And, dear god, send a written thank you note afterwards.

Andy: Do you have any other wisdom to impart?

Carl: The key is still managing expectations: yours, that is, and appreciating the hard work of the booksellers in each store. Meet them, talk, be generous. Don’t mention some other website while there. And most important, work your social media before and after the event. Praise the store on Twitter and Facebook, and yes, broken record, mention other authors’ works to the bookseller, to those in attendance, and on FB, etc. It’s not all about you or that day; it’s about all those who can help sell your book for many moons to come if you build up a reservoir of good will. Take the long view. Praise others.

 Andy: You are director of World Book Night. Can you tell us a little about this event.

Carl: It’s a volunteer, grass roots effort to hand out a half million books in the US all one day: April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday. It started in the UK 3 years ago, and we just finished our second year here. 25,000 volunteers applied online via essay, telling us where they would go to find light or non-readers. We did it all by social media: ourselves, indie booksellers, librarians, and publishers, and it was extraordinary. We got books to shelters, underfunded schools, food pantries, and hundreds of other locations. Don’t take my word for it: check out our FB page of testimonials and our YouTube 52 second videos. There is also a book list, FAQ’s, notes about process and materials at our website – and you can sign up for a newsletter so you can here when to apply to be a giver next year:

 World Book Night books are chosen by a panel of independent booksellers, Barnes and Noble buyers,  and librarians in two rounds of voting, working off a  long list of paperbacks drawn from IndieBound picks, BN Discover picks, ALA prize winners, Pulitzers, ReadingGroupGuides.com favorite picks and Above the Treeline top category sellers.  The previous year’s givers also vote, and there are no publisher nominations for the title selection. The voting gets down to 50 books and I choose the final 30 in order to insure balances in gender, ethnicity, subject matter, age group, and geography, as well as a literary and commercial balance. We also want at least several indie press books in there, as well as books in Spanish.

Andy: Carl, thank you so much for sharing this with us. And keep doing that good work with World Book Night.

 

Rayme Waters Talks About Promoting Her Novel, The Angels’ Share

Rayme Waters

Today we are interviewing my client, novelist Rayme Waters, whose new book, The Angels’ Share was published by Winter Goose Press this August. The novel is the story of Cinnamon Monday, a girl born into the 1970′s Northern California counterculture. Her family, originally owners of a great Nob Hill hotel, have suffered a reversal of fortune. Her parents are hippies without reliable income and have fallen into drug and alcohol dependence. After nearly dying of meth addiction, Cinnamon finds work at a small Sonoma County winery and rebuilds her life through her  own resilience and  courage.

When I decided to represent Rayme, I read her manuscript at the request of a mutual friend (not in the writing world) who asked me  to do him a favor and take a look. I could tell by the end of the first page that Rayme had talent and that I really wanted to work with her.

The publisher, Winter Goose, is small, so most of the work in promoting  The Angels’ Share is going to fall on the author. By the way, this is no less true with authors published by large houses. The single most common complaint I hear from published authors is that the publisher didn’t do anything to promote the book.

Today I want to talk to Rayme about her experience and wisdom in promoting her literary novel.

Andy: Rayme, when I first finished reading The  Angels’ Share,  I was sure that you must have been a recovering meth addict. The scenes  describing Cinnamon’s addiction were utterly convincing. When we finally met, it was clear that you just weren’t that kind of girl. How on earth were you able to describe the experience with such verisimilitude?

Rayme: Before the explosion of vineyards, the two main crops in Sonoma County were apples and marijuana. However, when I was in high school in the 1980s, meth—speed is what we called it—was suddenly everywhere. Meth was cheap and took the edge off rural boredom. Girls thought it would make them skinny. Although I was more a wallflower at the drug party, I watched childhood friends take Cinnamon’s path. In a way, The Angels’ Share honors the memories of these friendships and wishes  those friends a happy ending.

Andy: Let’s talk about how you, as a first time published novelist, have gone about promoting your book.  I know you have been pretty relentless about it. What are the first steps?

Rayme: This is my first rodeo and I am certainly learning as I go. That being said, there are some marketing strategies that I’ve employed: create marketing materials that have your basic information displayed pleasingly and professionally, have an “elevator” pitch ready and deliver it with enthusiasm, and work your network—find out who reads, or who would be willing to read your book, then ask them to buy it. Then, if they love it, ask them to recommend it to other readers they know. You have to really ride that fine line between being assertive and aggressive—it’s tough.

Andy: Ok. Stop. “Elevator Pitch”. I hear that word a lot at writer’s conferences and by people in film. What’s an elevator pitch? Why do you need it? And tell us the elevator pitch for Angel’s Share.

Rayme: Elevator pitch is slang for a two to three sentence description of a novel. Everyone  will ask you and you never know who might be able to help you find an agent, be a popular book blogger or be the decider for their next book club pick.

I describe The Angels’ Share as the story of a young woman rebuilding her life while working at a small Sonoma County winery. With elements of a mystery and a love story, the novel is a great pick for book clubs.

A reader said I should pitch The Angels’ Share as Breaking Bad meets Jane Eyre. I think that’s great, and if I’m ever in an elevator with a Hollywood producer I’d add that in.

Andy: Everybody says that an author has to have their own website. Yours is pretty stunning. Can you tell us what goes into making a good site and what features are most effective?

Rayme: I really wanted something that didn’t have a “template-y” look to it, so I went to a pro. Ilsa Brink, was willing to do the design work to make my website unique. She’s fantastic and had already done websites for many other writers. It is good to post early reviews or advance praise on your website because you can point people to it when you let them know the book is for sale.

Andy: Can you tell us what one can expect to pay for this kind of professionally produced site?

Rayme: I saw offers on Etsy.com to design a very simple website for three hundred dollars but if you go with a lot of custom design work and content creation I’d say you are looking at closer to two thousand. I provided much of the content for mine and the price fell somewhere in the middle.

Andy: What has been your experience with social media? Are you active on Facebook? Twitter? Goodreads? What else?

Rayme: This was a huge topic of conversation at AWP (Association of Writing Professionals) this year in Chicago. Social media can help expand your potential audience, but really how many more books do you sell by Tweeting three times a day? No one can say. My advice would be to do as much social media as you can stand. I have a Twitter account and a fan page on Facebook. I could do more, but just these two outlets keep me as distracted as I want to be from my writing.

Andy: What about writers conferences? Have you gone to any? Are they worth it? What should a writer expect to get out of one?

Rayme: I have been to Sewanee, Tin House and the John Milton Writers’ Conference. They were excellent networking opportunities and most of the advance praise and university speaking invites I’ve gotten so far came out of the contacts I made at these three conferences. One regret I have is that I didn’t go to more of them and make more connections before the novel came out. I highly recommend them.

Andy: Give me a few more details. What is the value of networking opportunities?  Other than networking, what kind of concrete and useful information to you walk away with?

Rayme: While you can certainly make connections online, when you meet someone in person the bond is so much stronger. At conferences, I met editors of literary journals who I could send stories to directly, agents who wanted to see my work and my workshop leader at Sewanee, Diane Johnson, gave advance praise on my novel. I could have emailed all of these people and asked for the same opportunities, but because they had met me I had a much better chance of success.

After meeting people, the next best thing to come out of writing conferences was advice on improving my craft. This came sometimes through critique I received in workshop, but more often in the lectures and panel discussions. It was also very affirming to meet other writers who were in my same situation or a little ahead of me in the process. Stories they told of their own tenacity were encouraging.

Andy: Rayme, thanks so much for sharing with us.  The Angels’ Share is available for purchase in either paperback or e-book edition. Check out Rayme’s public appearances coming up.

Self Publishing at Book Santa Cruz Using the Espresso Book Machine

Casey Protti and the new Espresso Book Machine at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Today we are going to speak with Casey Protti, owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, one of the truly iconic independent bookstores in America. The bookshop just acquired an Espresso Book Machine, a new technology which is able to create a perfect bound paperback book in minutes. The quality of the books produced are indistinguishable from paperbacks published by major publishers.  It’s a new technology that has the potential of redefining the role of local bookstores.

Andy: Casey, Can you tell us a little bit about the Espresso Book Machine.

Casey:  I’m really excited about our new machine. It is a remarkable technology that allows Bookshop Santa Cruz to print books on site, and on demand.  We can just hit a button and it prints, binds, and trims a paperback book in just a few minutes. What I love about this technology is not only the convenience factor of being able to give a customer a book when they want it, but more importantly, our ability to become a community publishing center- a place to have human to human interactions to create and distribute books.

Andy: The machine allows the local bookstore to become a self-publishing venue? Really.  Tell us about that.

books printed and bound in 5 minutes on the Espresso Book Machine

Casey: For those authors who have a novel or memoir or book of poetry that they want to make into book form, we can help them to bring their work to life through every step of the publishing process.  And not just people who think of themselves as authors. This could mean people who want to create family histories, compilations of family recipes, businesses who want to customize journals, student groups who want to make zines or graphic novels, or teachers who want to put together an anthology of their students’ work.

Andy: Other than self-publishing, what else can you do?

Casey: There are 8 million titles available including works in the public domain and hard to find and self-published titles.  Just the other day we had a man who had been searching for a hard to find book for over 20 years in used bookstores.  We had it on the EBM and printed it for him in 5 minutes.  Although other stores with Espresso Book Machines have seen self-publishing account for 80-90% of all the activity on the machine, more and more publishers understand the EBM as a good way of keeping their backlists available.

Andy:  That’s a good point. It seems to me that as publishers get more commercial and media –obsessed, they are putting their slower moving back list titles out of print faster. Will Espresso change that?

Casey: I think publishers see the EBM as good way of keeping their backlists available even if demand for a given title has waned. It’s economical for them, because they don’t have to warehouse titles or incur shipping and handling costs.  With EBM  we only produce as many copies as are sold.   We want to be able to sell a book that a customer asks for right away. It is of huge benefit to us, to publishers, and to the customer. And he gets the book a lot faster than he would if he purchased it online. And   we’d love to bring books back in print that have local significance and could sell well to the community but that may not  warrant a traditional print run.

Andy: What’s the quality of the books produced by the Espresso?

Casey: Books produced on the EBM are virtually indistinguishable from traditionally produced paperbacks.

Andy: Some people have said that this is a real transformative technology. Can you tell us what this means.

Casey: Six years ago, when I took over Bookshop from my father, I could never have imagined a technology like this.   In the age of the Internet,  our customers are looking for instant gratification, but also personalized services that you can’t get online. The EBM plays to the typical strengths of indie bookstores in terms of community connections and relationships with local authors but then brings it further with new products and services that meet new customer needs.  Our hope is that as more publishers add content to the EBM, we will one day be able to say that we can print any book ever published on demand.  That’s transformative!

Andy: What about ebooks? Aren’t they going to make print on paper books obsolete? That would make the Espresso machine a kind of dead end technology.

Casey: It has been  fun to see people  so excited at watching a physical book being made. Seeing this excitement puts to rest the idea that the book is dead.  Although people rightly want to publish their books electronically, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn’t also want people to see their books in physical form in bookstores.   Publishers will tell you that local bookstores are the showrooms for books. Online  stores can’t duplicate that experience.

Andy: Let’s say that you want to use the machine to publish your own book. What do you need to bring to the bookstore?

Casey: The EBM machine prints from PDF files that authors can either choose to format themselves (following the EBM submission guidelines) or by getting help from their local EBM operator.

Andy: And how about distribution of the book after it has been printed? Is the store involved in this?

Casey: Authors using the EBM can upload their titles to the main EspressNet catalog making their work available at other EBM locations worldwide and  authors printing their books  at Bookshop Santa Cruz can also enroll in the consignment program to have their books added to the shelves of our store.

Andy: How will Espresso allow Bookshop Santa Cruz to compete with companies like Lightening Source and Create Space?

Casey: The self-publishing services we offer are much more one-on-one and personalized then most of the online self-publishing companies. We can walk through a project with an author insuring that we are able to assess and meet all his needs from cover design to purchasing an ISBN number. The authors never need to go it alone. They can easily reach their local EBM operator for trouble-shooting help and project support in person, over the phone or via email.  This part of the EBM service package is completely in line with what indie bookstores do best – building relationships, customizing services, and providing that human connection that you can’t get online.

Andy: How much does a book cost per copy?

Casey: The base printing price for the EBM is $5.00 + 4.5 cents a page, although we do offer some bulk discounts and price breaks depending on the nature of the project.  We also have publishing packages which include various levels of service including graphic design, proof copies, obtaining an ISBN, etc.

Andy: How long have you been operating the machine in the story? How much business has it been generating.

Casey: The Bookshop Santa Cruz EBM has been operational for about a month, and on a typical day we print anywhere from 20-50 books.

Andy: I hear that these machines are incredibly expensive. How much do they cost? Will they really support a viable business model?

Casey: Typically the machine, software and installation runs $100,00-$125,000. American Booksellers Association members receive a discount on the software.  With just over a month under our belt, it is too soon to determine profitability.  However, since the opportunities to connect with the community to publish works are endless, we think there is a good chance that the machine will be a profit center for the store.  In addition, the feeling amongst your customers that the store is trying to remain relevant and innovate is priceless. Since the margin is so small on books, bookstores of the future need to move further into a service-based model in order to survive.  This is a step in the right direction.

Andy: If you want to find out more about the Espresso machine or if you have a self-publishing project and want to work with the Bookshop, call Sylvie Drescher at the Bookshop at 831-460-3258  or email her at ebm@bookshopsantacruz.com.

Thanks, Casey. We’ll check back in a few months to see how this new technology is unfolding.

Interview With Kristen Iversen: Author of Full Body Burden

Today we are going to interview Kristen Iversen and talk about her new book, Full Body Burden (Crown Books, 2012)  and the challenges of writing memoir. Kristen is the director of the MFA program at the University of Memphis. She is also the author of : Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth .

We last heard about Kristen in this blog where we meet Kristen,  myself,  and several other writers and agents going from bar to sleazy bar in San Miguel de Allende. There was lots of writerly talk about how much money Kristen actually got in her nail biting auction for Full Body Burden. She won’t say. And we won’t ask her here.

Full Body Burden is an amazing book. It tells the story of  Kristen growing up in Arvada, Colorado just down-wind from Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility. She interweaves her  memoir  with the astonishing work she did as an investigative journalist uncovering the 50 year (and ongoing cover-up) of the horrific contamination caused by the negligence of the plant as well as  the accidents that almost resulted in nuclear catastrophe.

The book has  received effusive reviews.

Andy: Kristen, tell us a little more about  Full Body Burden  and  how you came to write it.

 Kristen: I’ve carried this book in my head and my heart for a very long time.  Ten years of research and writing went into Full Body Burden, but it really began all the way back when I was around eleven, looking out from our back porch at the Rocky Flats water tower. Rocky Flats was a great mystery to me; no one in our neighborhood talked about it.  It was operated by Dow Chemical, and like many families, we thought they made household cleaning supplies. My siblings and I spent our childhood riding our horses in the fields around Rocky Flats, swimming in the lake, and floating on inner-tubes down the canals that carried water off the plant site.  We had no idea that Rocky Flats—which secretly produced more than 70,000 plutonium pits for nuclear bombs—was contaminating the environment with plutonium, carbon tetrachloride, and a host of other contaminants.

Later, like many of the kids in my neighborhood, I worked at the plant myself.  Even then I was unaware of how dangerous the plant really was  I eventually learned that there was nearly 14 tons of plutonium  onvsite, much of it unsafely stored.  The day I quit was the day I knew it was time to write the book.

The book isn’t just about Rocky Flats.  It’s also about my family and the secrets that nearly destroyed us.  Two things frightened me as a child: Rocky Flats, and my father’s alcoholism.  Both were forbidden topics.  Full Body Burden turned out to be a book about the destructive power of secrecy at the level of family and government, and the high cost we pay for those secrets as individuals, as families, and as a culture.

 Andy: Can you bring us up to date on the on-going saga of Rocky Flats, things that you didn’t cover in the book?

 Kristen: I mention in the book that production at Rocky Flats halted in 1992, following the FBI raid and grand jury investigation and discontinuation of the W-88 missile program.  A “cleanup” was declared complete in 2005.  But the site has not been cleaned up so much as covered up.  In 1995, when I worked at Rocky Flats, the Department of Energy estimated it would take 70 years and $36 billion to clean up the site—and they weren’t sure they had the technology to do it.  A modified cleanup agreement allowed the company Kaiser-Hill to do the cleanup in less than ten years for roughly one-fifth of the cost.   But after this cleanup,  they left a very high level of plutonium in the top soil levels and removed very little contamination below 6 feet. 1,300 acres of the site are so profoundly contaminated that they can never be open for human use.  The rest of the site—roughly 4,000 acres—is now the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, slated to open for public hiking and biking.

Andy: Your book was the object of a very intense auction with multiple New York and UK publishers involved. Did you have any idea that the book would attract such a feeding frenzy? How did it feel?

 Kristen: I had no idea what would happen with the manuscript.  I’d lived with this book for more than ten years. I wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in it.  It’s deeply personal, and very controversial. I wasn’t sure a publisher would take a chance on it.

My agent sent the book out to publishers and I expected to wait several weeks at least.  Only a few days had passed when she called.  Stay by the phone, she said.  Several publishers are interested. Things are heating up. “Some of the editors will want to talk to you,” she added.  She decided to auction the book, and set a bidding deadline of 5 p.m. New York time.

What happened that afternoon felt like a little piece of heaven suddenly opened up. I talked to editors in New York who not only had read the book but had read it closely and deeply. And they liked what they read. (“We were just blown away by the book.” “It’s a work of art, and a work of public service.” “I loved the way you deftly wove your own personal story into the Rocky Flats story.” “It’s effortlessly written.” “It opened my eyes to powerful subject matter.” “Beautifully rendered.” “The reader is right there with you, all the way through.”)

Between editor calls, my agent called to discuss each offer with me. We closed the deal at 4:59, New York time, with Crown.  And then she called with congratulations from her cab as she was on her way to the airport, heading off to the London Book Fair to negotiate potential deals with publishers from the UK.

How did it feel?  It was one of the best days of my life.  It still feels like a dream.

 Andy: Let’s talk about writing memoir.  What is remarkable to me is that you have managed to combine 3 different genres  that normally don’t work well together into a totally unified and compelling narrative. The book is family memoir, a work of tough minded investigative journalism and an absolutely gripping narrative work that brings to life the horrors that went on at the plant. Was that your intention? It’s sort of like The Glass Castle meets The Silent Spring meets The Hot Zone.

 Kristen: The story itself is what created the form.  I wanted to put a human face on an inhumane story.  Who wants to read a book about plutonium?  Numbing facts and statistics are part of what’s helped to obscure the Rocky Flats story.  My intention was to tell the story from the perspective of the people whose lives had been impacted by Rocky Flats in one way or another.  I wanted the reader to share my experience of lying across my horse,  Tonka’s back on a hot summer day, listening to the meadowlarks.  I wanted the reader to understand, as fully as any of us can understand, what was going through the minds of Bill Dennison and Stan Skinger when they went into that burning building on the Mother’s Day fire of May 11, 1969, and knew it was likely they weren’t going to get out.

I’m not an activist; I didn’t write the book to be polemical in any way.  I tried to tell a good story, and it’s a true story.  I wanted to stretch the narrative form as much as possible and keep the reader glued to the story.  That’s what I love about creative nonfiction.  The structural possibilities are incredibly exciting, and yet you’re always working within the invisible web of staying true to the facts and the investigation of the facts.

 Andy: I think writing memoir is tough. Everybody thinks their life is a hero’s journey. (And it is), but it’s devilishly hard to have  any perspective about themselves. How can they shape their story into a compelling one that readers will want to read without throwing in all the crap that is only important to the writer?

 Kristen: It’s so hard to leave things out!  Many, many pages ended up on the cutting room floor—entire scenes that may eventually turn into essays or stories or maybe another book or two. Or not.

I had to write my way through all of it—every thought, every scene, every wrong turn–to find the real story thread.  Then I lopped and cropped and snipped until each scene, each paragraph, each sentence moved the story forward or illuminated a character in some way.

Andy: I also think that it is really easy to fall into narcissism. I tell memoirists that they have to look outside themselves. The story can’t just be about dysfunctional families.  Comments?

 Kristen:  Andy, I don’t entirely agree with you there. All our great stories are about dysfunction.  Every family has its secrets.   Each person has his or her secrets.  I think good storytelling, in fiction or creative nonfiction, is about drama and conflict, repression and desire, things hoped for and things lost.  Memoir is at the core of good storytelling.  Writing from an authentic first-person point of view is emotionally powerful and yet incredibly challenging.

I think the memoirist has to ask some hard questions each step of the way.  What is it about my story that makes it relevant to others?  What hard truths have I learned about myself, and why should anyone care?  You can’t worry about making yourself look good on the page or slip into any kind of bravado or self-pity.  You can’t fall into stereotypes or clichés.

 

Daniel Boyarin on Why the Gospels Are Jewish

Today we are interviewing Daniel Boyarin, whose new book, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, was published by New Press this April.  In The Jewish Gospels, Daniel  presents an astonishing argument that the concept  of the Trinity was not  original  to Christianity   at all but came out ideas that were commonplace in the Jewish tradition long before the birth of Jesus.  Daniel is one of the world’s most renowned, original, and admired scholars of ancient Judaism.  He is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Rhetoric and of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. Daniel is not shy of taking provocative and controversial positions. His work was recently alluded to in the Oscar-nominated Israeli film, Footnote, where it was the subject of an argument. He has described himself as a  Trotskyist, anti-Zionist Orthodox Jew, a set of positions and commitments that has excited both exaggerated interest in his work as well as scurrilous public attacks (mostly by pro-Zionist Jewish professors). Let’s hope today’s interview will engender both.

Andy: Daniel, everybody knows that Jesus was a Jew. But in The Jewish Gospels you are saying something quite different and original, even revolutionary. Can you explain your argument?

Boyarin: When people say that Jesus was a Jew, they usually mean that he came out of a Jewish milieu. Some think he completely revolutionized that environment, while others think it was the Gospels that produced that overturn,  making a Jewish teacher into a god. I am arguing that the portrait of Jesus we find in the Gospels (especially in Mark) is one that could completely fit into the context of Second-Temple Judaism in which a Messiah who would be divine and human at the same time is not a foreign notion. I argue, moreover, that there is nothing in Mark or Matthew (or probably in Luke as well –  but this is a harder argument to make) that suggests that Jesus was setting aside or abrogating the law of the Torah. So it’s not only Jesus who was a Jew but the Christ (and Christ is not Jesus’s last name but his title!)

Andy: So let me get this straight. In the early years of Christianity there was no real distinction between Jews and Christians.  There just happened to be some Jews who thought that a particular guy, Jesus, was the messiah.  And these Jesus Jews weren’t really all that distinctive within the world of Jews at the time. Is that correct?

Boyarin: Yes. Fairly frequently I’m asked by Christian folk why the Jews “rejected” Jesus. I answer this (as Jews stereotypically are wont to) with another question: Who do you think accepted Jesus, the Zulus; the Goths? Jews were expecting a Messiah—this is one of the central arguments of the book—and many of them, moreover, had come to expect him to be a divine being in human form or even embodied in a human. Some Jews who came to know Jesus were so impressed with him that they accepted the claim (if he made it) or made the claim themselves that this Jew from Nazareth was the one that they and all of the Jews were expecting. Not altogether surprisingly a fair number, probably most, of the Jews around at the time were more skeptical. Today we call the first group of Jews Christians, the second Jews, but then and for a long time, they were all Jews.

Andy: When I studied The New Testament, I was always taught that St. Paul was the person who really made Christianity distinct from Judaism.  And that happened early on. Apparently you see it differently. When did Christianity have its irrevocable break with Judaism? And why?

Boyarin: In some ways it was Paul who effected the revolution with respect to the Torah that we don’t find in the Gospels. But it needs to be remembered that Paul was an embattled figure, marginalized and considered a heretic by most followers of Jesus for decades if not  longer. I would tentatively suggest that it was the entry of myriads of Gentiles into the Jesus movement, folks who had no interest in or attraction toward the traditional  ways of the Jews that ultimately precipitated a gradual and finally total separation of the communities. One of the important arguments of the book is that the Gospels are misread as portraying Jesus as rejecting the Torah and Jewish religious practice; it was Paul who did that, and even with Paul, a plausible argument could be made that he intended this rejection only for the “believers” from the Nations (the so-called Gentiles) and not the Jewish followers of Christ. Jesus, I argue, defended the Torah against the reforms and traditions of the Pharisees whom he saw as substituting their own traditions for what was clearly written by Moses!

Andy: A lot of your book is a close look at the language of the Gospels, particularly The Gospel of Mark. I always thought that the Gospels tried to distinguish Jesus’ ideas from the Jewish thinkers of his time, particularly the Pharisees.

Boyarin: Yes,  but precisely the argument is that the Pharisees were not “the Jewish thinkers of the time;” they were some Jewish thinkers of the time. Jesus, I argue, was much more conservative in his approach to Torah than the Pharisees who were descended from Jews who had returned from the Babylonian Exile with some quite new ideas about the way the Torah ought to be practiced, especially their notion of a “Tradition of the Fathers”—later on called Oral Torah—that dictated some practices that certainly seemed different from the literal meaning of the Torah itself. So Jesus was portrayed as being in conflict with those Pharisees but that hardly marked him off as in any way not Jewish in his religious thought, any more than the attacks on the Pharisees in the Dead Sea Scrolls make those texts not Jewish or less Jewish than the Talmud!

Andy: When you think about this, it seems pretty provocative. How do you think Jewish and Christian theologians are going to respond to it?

Boyarin: Don’t have a clue. I mean that literally. One never knows the effect of one’s work in advance. I’m not even sure what effect I’d like it to have on theologians. I hope to have helped promote for folks a livelier sense of the ways that Jewish history took place in the first century and how contingent historically the invention of Christianity was, how unpredictable from the Gospels and the evidence that they provide. I sometimes like to relate the following counter-historical parable. Constantine, instead of adopting Christianity as the religion of the Empire, chose Mithraism which became in its further evolved form the religion of most of the world. The last persecuted followers of Jesus, sometime in the fifth century, running for their lives, carefully packed their holy books, the Four Gospels and the Letters of Paul into clay jars and buried them in the desert of Judea where they and the very existence of the sect were forgotten by time. Some time around 1948, a Bedouin shepherd discovered these clay tables by accident and an unknown Jewish sect was revealed to history. In Jerusalem there was built a Shrine of the Book and the manuscript, the only one, of the Gospel called Mark is displayed proudly there while hundreds of Jewish and Mithraist scholars all over the world devote themselves to the study of these ancient, exciting, wonderful documents of Jewish religious imagination and spiritually that had been lost and were now found.

Andy: I remember reading in The New York Times last year of a discovery of a tablet predating the birth of Christ which said that a Messiah would rise from the grave after 3 days. You were quoted in that article. Do you see this as an archeological confirmation of your ideas?

Boyarin:  I would if I were more convinced of the accuracy of that reconstruction of the tablet. The tablet is, indeed, no forgery, but it is broken and hard to read and other reconstructions of its text are at least as plausible as that one, so I can’t rely on it much as I would love to.

Linda Gray Sexton Talks About HALF IN LOVE, Her Memoir on Suicide

 It’s hard reading about suicide. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me think about the frailty of life. It also makes me feel anger at the person who has taken or has attempted to take her life.   I always identify with the victims –  the families –  because of the anguish, grief, and guilt that they experience.  I’ve just finished reading an astonishing book that has forced me to look at my feelings and think about suicide in an entirely different way.

Linda Gray Sexton has written a personal memoir about suicide. The book is entitled:  Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. It has just been released in paperback from Counterpoint Press. It’s a book that Linda is singularly qualified to write. She is the daughter of Anne Sexton, one of America’s great poets, who committed suicide in 1974 after a long battle with depression.  Linda was 21 years old at the time.  Linda, herself, suffered from depression for much of her life and attempted to commit suicide several times. Half in Love is her remarkable story that brings to life the feelings and thoughts of her troubled mind and how she was driven to make the final and seemingly irrevocable decision to end her life. The book is beautifully written, deeply moving, honest, and courageous, and will change the way you think and feel about suicide.

AR: Linda, it is puzzling to me that both your mother and yourself were driven to suicide. My initial inclination is to view it as a kind of family curse, something out of a Greek tragedy. But you seem to see it quite differently. Is it more than a coincidence that you and your mother were haunted by the desire to end life?

LGS:I don’t see it as a curse, but I do see it as a legacy.  Suicide and mental illness were handed down in my family, from generation to generation.  My mother’s aunt, whom she called Nana, was afflicted with depression, and labeled “insane.”  She was eventually institutionalized and died within those walls.  My mother’s father intermittently sat in the kitchen of my childhood home and told my mother of his deep depression and anxiety.  Her great aunt Frances killed herself with a shotgun when I was a teenager, and her sister killed herself with an overdose of sleeping medication following my mother’s suicide.  So there was a lot of mental illness and suicide in the family well before my mother finally killed herself, after many attempts, in 1974, as she was turning forty-five.  Suicide was so much a part of our family construct, and for so many years, that I can’t even begin to imagine my life without its influence. Despite my early deep conviction that suicide would never be the route I would take, I found myself grappling with it when I was forty-five. It came knocking at the door in the same year of my life that it had finally taken my mother in hers.  I, too, found myself sinking into the abyss and came to believe the only way to escape the interior mental anguish was to end my life.

 AR: In the course of reading your book, I came to feel compassion for your condition. But I was also constantly fighting off a sense of anger at you. You had a family whom you loved. A husband. Two children who were at a tender age when you sought to end your life. And you were aware, when you made the decision, of the hurt that it would cause.  Under the circumstances a lot of people would say you were being selfish, self-absorbed, and weak. I would imagine that with the publication of Half in Love,  you came in for some pretty heavy criticism.   Can you tell us about the kind of reactions other people had after reading your book?

LGS: You would expect that I would have had a lot of that kind of  criticism.  But really, that’s not what actually happened.  I had a lot of email, and responses at readings, as well as reviews, that were compassionate with the predicament I had found myself in, much more than judgments by others that I had been self-centered in my decision.  That’s not to say that there weren’t people who perhaps felt that way. It’s simply that those weren’t the people who spoke up.  Perhaps the book convinced them that suicide isn’t a selfish act, but rather a desperate one, one that the ill person feels driven to by his or her pain.  I think “Half in Love” sheds new light on the hopelessness the suicidal person feels, the sense that there seems to be no way out of the pain except a final escape.  I was deluged with mail through my website   from people who felt that their story had at last been told.  They said that I had spoken for them, for their families, their friends.  It was a very moving experience to receive these notes from the heart, and I answered them all.  I was grateful to know that I had reached so many people and that they were open to hearing my message.

AR: And what kinds of reactions have you had from people in the helping professions who have to deal with these feelings in a therapeutic context?

LGS: Actually I have had a great deal of positive reaction and support from those who are therapists, psychiatrists, nurses, and even those who run suicide hot lines, or national suicide support groups.  Everyone seems gratified that the subject, for so long taboo, has at last been brought out into the light and discussed in something other than professional terms.  They have often told me they either recommend, or even give, “Half in Love” to patients, and/or their families and friends.

 AR: You say in Half in Love that both you and your mother suffered from bipolar disorder, a medical condition that was responsible for your extreme depression. Does it run in families?

LGS: Bipolar disorder has now been classified by the medical profession as heritable.  This means they have run studies to see whether or not it can be passed from generation to generation.  They have even constructed studies around twins who were separated at birth to see whether there is more than a purely environmental link—in other words, these studies of twins show us whether it is “nature” rather than “nurture” that accounts for the higher percentage of bipolar disorder among family members.  And indeed, twins separated at birth do still seem to share the link of mental illness, and especially, bipolar disorder, even though they were raised in entirely different environments.  So in recent years we have learned that it is not only the ways in which people are raised that accounts for the illness, but that there is also a genetic component.

 AR: I must make a confession here. My mother suffered from bipolar disorder. She never attempted suicide, but she once left a suicide note. Even though she lived to a ripe old age, I’m still angry with her for this. Truth to tell, I’m angry with myself as well for not really dealing with it in the best manner.  Is that an unusual feeling? Do the survivors often blame themselves?

LGS: I think your reaction is not an uncommon one.  In “Half in Love,” I talk about how angry my sister and my father and I, and indeed the whole extended family, were after my mother made a suicide attempt.  We were not counseled by the medical profession that it was natural to have these emotions  We were only taught that it was “not her fault” and that we should stifle any feelings we might have.  Naturally, this helped us not at all.  We were sad and grieving—and angry, angry, angry.  We felt that she had tried to desert us in a very selfish way.  As I say in “Half in Love,” suicide used to be, and still is to some extent, a deeply taboo subject.  Through the ages, for instance, suicides were not allowed to be buried in churchyard cemeteries but had their bodies interred in the crossroads, where it was hoped that the four winds would disperse their “diseased” souls.  I recently wrote a blog for my website that deals with this very question of anger and guilt within the family after a successful, or even failed, suicide attempt.  And, in addition to feeling anger, survivors of a successful suicide often blame themselves for not having been there enough emotionally for their loved one.  They believe that if only they had done something differently, the person would have lived. Both guilt and blame are nasty emotions—they take hold and are difficult to eradicate no matter how much we console the one suffering from them.  I think this is why “Half in Love” helps so many people: it allows them to see that the suffering of the one they love is not due to them, but is an interior force that can overtake and destroy a life regardless of what others attempt to do to help.

AR: But there is one thing of note about my mother’s condition. During her “manic” periods, she would spend her time writing poetry. Unlike your mother’s, hers was shockingly bad and an embarrassment to the family. But it was a form of creativity nonetheless. Do you think that this disease would explain some of your mother’s (or your) creativity?

LGS: No, I think in fact it is the opposite. Creativity does not bring about mental illness but creativity is often present in the lives of those who are touched by the fire of this disease.  Interestingly, my mother often found herself equally as unable to do any serious writing when she was manic as when she was depressed—at which time she was unable to do much of anything at all.  Though the surge toward mania often produced extremely intense creative activity, once she was in a full blown manic attack, she abandoned writing for scattered activities and scattered language.  She didn’t have the ability to marshal all her strengths and gifts necessary for creating poetry.  I find this true for myself as well.  When I was very depressed I was unable to work on “Half in Love” at all, which is why the book took nearly ten years to write.  When I was on a manic surge, I found myself at my most productive, often getting up in the early, early hours of the morning to sit down at my computer.  But once the mania had set in, I spent my time moving furniture from room to room, or cooking vast quantities of anything at all, which later had to be pitched.  My capabilities with language languished, as I wasn’t able to corral my abilities with words into some kind of recognizable work product.

AR: You also talk about “cutting”. This has struck me as odd and inexplicable behavior. It also seems to be almost the opposite of suicide. Suicide is an act that seeks to end the pain of life. Cutting is an act that creates more pain. Can you talk about this a little bit?

LGS: Cutting is something few people understand.  Why inflict pain on yourself when you already are in pain?  The only explanation I can offer is that creating the pain is one way of “letting the pain out,” of controlling it.  It is as if the pain is a poison inside of you, and by cutting you release it to flow from your body and your mind—and, in fact, from your life itself.  I found, as I describe in a chapter in “Half in Love” called “Cutting,” that once I had finished using the razor blade, I felt a tremendous sense of relief, both physical and mental.  In fact it kept me from making more suicide attempts—it was a replacement, in a way, that kept me alive.  Unfortunately, I had a psychiatrist who couldn’t understand what the cutting did for me, and thus forbade me to cut.  When I inevitably did again, once more in an attempt not to take my life, he “fired” me as a patient.  It was only later, when I found a new therapist who did understand my feelings about it, and my explanations for it, that I was able to relinquish cutting without making further suicide attempts.  I think it was at this point that I seriously began to get well. 

AR: I read a lot of memoirs. Some of them are just plain silly or exploitative. And then there are those like yours that are brutally honest, that deal with the most personal of all feelings, and that are courageous enough to talk about mistakes, flaws, and weaknesses without resorting to self-justifications. Isn’t it scary to do something like this? To expose yourself this way? To take this kind of risk? Why did you do it?

LGS: Of course, the answer is “yes:” it is very frightening to expose yourself, especially about an aspect of your character that is terribly unappealing.  You have to be willing to bring your flaws and your weaknesses into the light, without trying to self-justify, as you say, and be able to take the heat.  Ultimately, if you want to reach people, you have to be willing, as I say, “to get naked.”  And you have to do it in front of a lot of people.  Many people ask me, “why didn’t you protect yourself from public scrutiny by writing this as a novel instead?”  My answer is always that I thought it would be more authentic, more moving, if I weren’t hiding my life behind the life of a character. And, in the end, I think I was correct.  I don’t think I would have received the outpouring of mail if I had fictionalized this aspect of my life.  People responded because I had been willing “to get naked.”  They felt that if I could do it, so could they—in talking with their family members, their therapists, their friends.  And for the public, who knew so little about mental illness and suicide, the book opened the topic and so made it less taboo.  I made myself public so that the topic would be public.  I wanted to help the people who couldn’t help themselves, to give them a voice.

 AR: Well, at the end of all this, you are still here and seem to have triumphed over your desire to end your life. It sounds like you have come to love life. How did this change come about?

LGS: It took a long time.  I wrote “Half in Love” from the depths of depression and then as I began to come out of it.  I wrote it as I began to move away from death, and emerge toward health.  I did that with the help of a great therapist, and a loving husband, and an extended family that eventually began to understand what had happened to me and to forgive me.  And then there were the all-important medications, which took a long time to regulate and to get in the proper “cocktail,” but which my very skilled and compassionate therapist juggled until she had it just right. I feel grateful for all the emotional support I have received and for my ability to receive the medications that, even today, make my health possible. To return to the book’s title, which takes its source from a poem by Keats, at one time I was “half in love” with death—and now I would have to say that I am quite in love with life. 

Linda will be appearing at and discussing Half in Love at the following events:

Books Inc.,  Palo Alto.  January 11,  7:00 PM

Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Boston, Ma.  February 29, 8 PM

Brandeis University, Waltham Ma. March 1,  4 PM

Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, Ma.  March 5, 7 PM

Newtonville Books, Newton, Ma. March 7

National Alliance for Mental Illness, Sacramento, Ca. May 14

 

 

 

Mary Jo McConahay Talks About Maya Roads and the People of the Central American Rainforest

 Today I am going to interview Mary Jo McConahay, author of Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest. The book was published this month by Chicago Review Press and has been receiving rave reviews.  Don George of National Geographic Traveler said in his review: “Every once in a while I stumble upon a book that is so beautifully written and infused with so much intelligence and heart that it leaves an indelible mark on me. Mary Jo McConahay’s Maya Roads is such a book. In its hungry passion and wide-eyed wonder, it’s an extraordinary literary journey and a moving testament to a region and a life.”
Mary Jo has led an extraordinary life. She was a correspondent in Latin America during the Eighties and covered the insurgent wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All of her work, but particularly Maya Roads, is imbued with her love of the region and its people and a fierce and courageous commitment to social justice.
Andy: Mary Jo, will you describe for us in your own words Maya Roads?
Mary Jo: Maya Roads is my story of falling in love with the rainforest and things Maya as a young woman, then returning to them after a career as a war correspondent, seeing the world of ancient and modern Maya in Central America through my own new lens of experience, investigating their recent history of violence, but never losing my wonder at their world view, customs and resilience as a people, and new discoveries about their beginnings.
Andy: What led you to write this book?
Mary Jo:  I had been “saving string” on the Maya for years, reading and writing, listening, travelling to their places, much as anyone might do with the object of an obsession. But as a freelance journalist I felt I never had the time to put it all together in a book. One day I woke up and said, “When exactly do you think you will start this book?” Hemingway said if you answer the phone you can stay in journalism forever.  I stopped answering the phone.  Fortunately, it worked out.
Andy: What strikes me most about this book and what differentiates it from so many other “travel books” is that it really has a political bite to it.  Tell us a little about this.
Mary Jo: I am a journalist by profession, and where others may see politics I see history.  The reader can’t be expected to understand the context of the violence in some chapters without knowing about key events, such as the 1954 C.I.A.-organized coup that overthrew a democratically elected president in Guatemala and began a 30-year nightmare reign of the military.  The reader won’t truly understand the significance of the revolt of thousands of Maya peasant farmers in 1994 — Zapatistas — without some account of decades of official Mexican corruption.  We can’t speak honestly about the current drug networks operating in Maya geography without saying they exist to serve the United States market. I don’t consider writing about such facts politics, but as providing the whole picture.
Andy: But what is even more remarkable is that the book is never preachy and and your observations about the   exploitation of the Maya is always told along with your amazement at the beauty of the land and your love and fascination with the sadly disappearing indigenous culture.
Mary Jo: Should the indigenous culture truly disappear it would be a tragedy, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. Now that certain dangers of the civil war are over, some Maya in Guatemala are more open about their identity. In Mexico, there is pride among many indigenous, Maya and not, in the Zapatista uprising and the way some communities are progressing independently of the government. When I interviewed Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, a K’iche Maya, on the day she won the prize in 1992, she told me there was no reason why Maya could not enjoy the good things of modern life, even participate in scientific and technological advancement, and still maintain their ancestral culture. “Look at the Jewish people,” she said.
Andy: Do you think there is a possibility of a “happy ending” to your story?
Mary Jo: The Maya view of time is cyclical, not a straight line as we might think of it.  Thus there is no “ending,” happy or not, to the greater Maya story, but moments of transition and change.  What is clear is that the Maya have survived not only the decimation of the European conquerors, but centuries of racism and violence, and in Guatemala, recent incidents of genocide perpetrated by their government, which was supported by ours.  Today the Maya have recovered their pre-conquest numbers. They participate in political life and go to university. In southern Mexico, indigenous Zapatista revolutionary communities are raising a generation of literate young for the first time in history.  This is all “happy” stuff, but an ending it is not.
Andy: Are there any works of travel journalism that have particularly influenced you? Any that have as much focus on social issues the way Maya Roads does?
Mary Jo: I think it was a certain era of travel writing, rather than any particular book, that put me on the track.  In college I studied English Literature with a focus on the Eighteenth Century, which among other things was the period of trade and empire expansion. Readers were fascinated by descriptions of new lands and cross-cultural encounters, and in the best work, led to examine who they were in relation to other people and landscapes. Think Johnson and Boswell, Captain Cook, educated women on the Grand Tour.  So from the beginning, I never considered travel writing a secondary genre. I believe in what I call deep travel, knowing as much as possible about the people I’ll be among, especially their recent history.  To me it makes for a richer experience, a way to make connections with other ways of life.

The Indie Publishing Option

Laurie McLean is a literary agent specializing in genre fiction and  middle-grade/young-adult children’s books. She has really become a guru on this subject and is the agent I always turn to when I need to know the ever-changing fads and fashions of fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction and young adult fiction. A few months ago we had a great interview with her about the subject on “Ask the Agent.”  If you want to know whether the vampire train left the station, ask Laurie. 

Laurie has been a literary agent for 6 years and works at the Larsen Pomada Agency in San Francisco.  She has a fantastic blog, Agent Savant,   which is a good place to start learning about genre fiction.

Laurie has started a new consulting business separate from her agency called Agent Savant Inc. She specializes in creating custom digital marketing plans for eBook authors, authors with significant back lists of titles who want to get their rights reverted and sell them as eBooks and POD books, and midlist authors who want to know how they can market their books more effectively online.

Today the publishing landscape is changing almost weekly. Commercial publishers are struggling to redefine themselves in the new digital marketplace. And new venues seem to be sprouting up almost daily that give writers alternatives to traditional publishing. Today I want to talk about what these transformations mean to writers. Both the challenges and the opportunities.

 Andy: First of all, Laurie, congratulations on your New York Times best seller. Tell us a little about it.

 Laurie: My client, Julie Kagawa, writes amazing young adult fantasy. Her Iron Fey YA series, with The Iron King, The Iron Daughter and The Iron Queen out now and The Iron Knight coming out in the fall, has really resonated with today’s teens. She put her own spin on the traditional mythology of Oberon, Mab and the summer and winter fairy courts by adding a new dimension—The Iron Fey. They are cobbled together out of what kids truly believe is magic today: technology.  The Iron Queen is the book that landed Julie on the NYT bestseller list a mere year after her debut, and we just sold three more books in this series plus three more in a new post-apocalyptic series.

 Andy: It seems to me that there is an awful lot of good writing being done today and most of it is having a hard time getting published in traditional channels. That’s true isn’t it?

Laurie: That’s one of the reasons I am so bullish on digital publishing and eBook publishing. A writer commented during a writers conference workshop I was giving several years ago that the worst part of my job must be reading so much bad writing, and I replied, “No. The worst part of my job is reading good or very good writing and knowing that I was going to have to reject it because it either wasn’t marketable at that point in time or because it wasn’t perfect.”  The bar has been placed so high for writers,  it’s made it nearly impossible for even the strong writers to break in. You must be good at every facet of writing and marketing and know the publishing business inside and out to even have a chance at the brass ring. But now opportunities have opened up with eBook and POD (print on demand) indie or self publishing, and the successes of some of the early adopters have destroyed that notion of who is a published author and how you can make a living as a writer. You can publish your book on Kindle Direct Publishing,  Smashwords,  or Barnes and Noble PubIt! sites and, voila, you are now a published author. Does that mean you don’t have to put in the hard work of always improving your craft and marketing your books? Hell, no. Cream will always rise to the top. You still have to learn and grow and pay attention and be diligent.

Andy: I know this changes every week, but can you go over the kinds of options available if you can write great books and still can’t find a publisher?  Tell us the pros and cons of each.  (POD, ebooks, smashwords, etc.)

Laurie: Boy, I could blog about this for weeks on end, Andy. So instead I will challenge your readers to discover how easy it is to post an eBook themselves. And I’m not doing this to be mean. Part of do-it-yourself publishing means you have to roll up your sleeves and actually do it! No agents or editors or cover designers or sales force will be there to hold your hand and make it happen. Give one more polishing edit to that  work in progress –or to an old manuscript, novella, short story or article that has been sitting in a digital drawer on your computer–and at the very least go to Kindle Direct Publishing  and then Smashwords  and see how simple and straightforward it is to take your MS Word document, cobble together a cover from clip art or the like,  and publish that book. Oh, and did I forget to mention that  IT IS FREE TO DO THIS? Well, it is. Price your book anywhere you like it or give it away for free to generate some buzz. Then dive into social media (Twitter, blogging, Facebook, etc.) to let the world know you’re out there. If readers request a print copy of your book, go to Lulu.com, CreateSpace, Author Solutions or directly to a printer and make POD available. Some options will give you a number of books in return for a price and then you keep 100% of the sales dollars, like in the old days of vanity publishing, but newer options like Lulu cost you nothing up front and you collect a small royalty on each book you sell and they ship.

 Andy: So it is pretty cheap and easy to get your book published either in print on paper or in e-book format. But the real challenge is how do you get the word out. Can you give some advice to the reader on marketing your books?

Laurie: Here’s a link to my blog post  that presents a digital marketing plan writers can use as a starting point. I spent 20+ years in high tech marketing and publicity before I became an agent, so this has a lot of knowledge behind it.

Andy: Internet gurus used to use the term “disintermediation” to describe the new world of Internet commerce. What they meant was that the Internet would eliminate the middleman and allow consumers to buy direct from the producers at a reduced cost. It hasn’t exactly come out that way. In our business Amazon.com is a classic middleman. A typical retailer, really. But with the explosion of self-publishing, disintermediation seems to be a real possibility, no?

Laurie: That’s the billion-dollar question, Andy. How will this incredibly disruptive technology change the publishing industry? No one knows the answer, even though many offer their guesses daily. My informed opinion is that indie publishing will progress along the same lines as indie movies and indie music. You’ll have some overnight indie sensations that either thrive (for example American Idol megastars Carrie Underwood or Jennifer Hudson) or fizzle (can anyone remember AI runner ups?). For every  self published Amanda Hocking superstar (and if you don’t know who she is, please find out), you will have hundreds of eBook authors making a decent wage and doing what they love without the baggage of being a household name. Yet, like Carrie Underwood, 26-year-old Minnesotan Amanda Hocking now has an agent who is about to sell her next series to a traditional publisher for seven figures.

Andy: Laurie, if Amanda Hocking is doing so well self publishing, why on earth should she bother to sign a contract with a commercial publisher. I bet she is getting better royalties on her own.

 

Laurie: Why? Because Amanda would rather spend her days writing than tweeting, giving media interviews, working with cover artists and editors, and negotiating with foreign publishers. There is so much work that must be attended to if you want to become successful in publishing—whether indie or traditional. And so when fame finds them, I predict indie authors will eventually straddle the line. They may continue to self-publish work that the traditional publishers don’t think will sell (short fiction, non-fiction, blogged books of advice, experimental writing, co-authored work, etc.), but their bread and butter mainstream books will come out in digital and print from established multi-national conglomerates. That’s why this chaotic stew is driving publishers insane. It’s impossible to predict the outcome of any decision. Everyone’s experimenting from authors to agents to publishers. I think your concept of  ”disintermediation” is really a fancy word for do-it-yourself. And some DIY projects look homemade, while others look crafted. It all depends on skill level and attention to detail.

Andy: Other than Amanda Hocking, are people really making money doing this kind of self-publishing?

Laurie: Some are, some are not.  Self-publishing juggernaut Author Solutions estimated that the average number of books sold by their customers last year was 150. That’s not a lot. It’s not going to make you rich. But one of my new clients, Kait Nolan, sold 1,000 copies of an e-novella herself in January at 99 cents each. And she’s sold more copies of her three short stories in the first three months of 2011 than she did in all of 2010. So her momentum is growing to the point where I found her because of her awesome social media presence last month and offered her representation before she had even written one query letter to an agent or editor! The point is that some indie authors who really work at it are making money. Some are not. Which one will you be?

Andy: You have set up a separate business recently to help people navigate the new landscape. Can you describe what you do?

Laurie: Anyone interested in Agent Savant Inc. should  check it out. For a flat fee I help authors discover their unique author brand; I help them publish their writing online as an eBook; and then I create a customized digital marketing plan to help them sell their eBooks and POD books more effectively. I don’t do the work for them. I create the plan and get them started. Sometimes all it takes is a push with some direction behind it to take off.

Andy: Thanks, Laurie. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have to go make a phone call to Amanda Hocking to see if she needs a new agent. I think I’ll tell her that I can get her an 8 figure deal!

Books into Movies: Everything You Need to Know Part 2

Today we are continuing our interview with John Marlow, author of Make Your Story a Movie: Adapting Your Book or Idea for Hollywood. We are discussing the mechanics of the Hollywood dealmaking process as it applies to book adaptions.  If you want even more information about this subject, I highly recommend John’s Self-editing blog.

 Andy:  What is an “option,” and what are the steps that get taken before a decision is made to make a film or tv show?

  John: In the case of a book or manuscript or screenplay for that matter, an option is just that—an “option” to secure all film-related rights to the work, for an agreed-upon price, at a later time. Let’s say you have a story that I want to option as a producer. I pay you—or provide some valuable service to you—in exchange for exclusive permission to buy the film rights to your story at a later time, typically within 1-3 years.

 The option payment itself is relatively small, but if the option is “exercised”—that is, if the film rights are actually purchased before the option expires—you get paid a lot more.

 Why is it done this way? Let’s say you’ve written something like Nano, my own first novel. That might cost in the neighborhood of $100 million to film, which means it’s not going to be a tv series; it has to be a movie. As a producer, I don’t have that kind of money, so I’m going to have to take a hard look at this book, and figure out how to adapt it in a way that appeals to multiple buyers who do have that kind of money.

 I may want to approach other producers, directors, or actors to get them interested in the project, because if they’ll “attach” or commit to being involved—and if I’ve chosen them well—that makes the project more attractive to potential buyers.

 I might want to involve a manager or agent to help “package” (attach desirable people to), pitch or sell the project. I might hire a screenwriter and work with them to develop the story and adapt it into a screenplay, so I have something solid to show to the people I want to involve. Because unless the underlying property—the book, in this case—is already very well known and very successful, I’m unlikely to sell the project without having a screenplay.

 If I’m looking at independent financing, it’s almost impossible to approach investors without a screenplay—because what are they investing in? My notion that this book would make a cool movie? Amateurville.

 Doing all of this takes time and money. Having an exclusive option allows me to invest the time and money required to make things happen, because I know that if I can pull it all together before the option expires, I can sell the project, get my name on the screen as producer, and maybe make some money in the bargain.

 Andy: So let’s go through the steps between the option and the decision to produce.

 John: Again, let’s assume I’m the producer. When everything goes right, what happens is this I secure the option up front, do the producer thing, and find a buyer. That buyer then pays me a producer’s fee and exercises the option by paying you the full purchase price. Then they make the movie. The process is much the same for tv series.

 Books are almost always optioned, not bought—because as you can see, there’s a lot of work to be done downstream. Screenplays are often optioned as well, but you also have the opportunity to sell the script outright—which almost never happens with adaptation rights to books, unless the book is already huge.

 Andy: What are the typical deal points in an option contract, and what is a good negotiating strategy?

 John: Real Hollywood “long-form” option contracts run about 20 pages, with far too many deal points to cover here. What it boils down to is this: the eventual buyer (the one who exercises the option) wants to acquire all rights, except those specifically exempted or “reserved” to the author by the terms of the agreement.

 You typically get to keep book rights; live stage and radio rights; sequel, prequel, and character rights in book and ebook format; and so on. Everything else (movies, tv, merchandising, soundtrack, etc.) belongs to the studio. You might get to keep additional rights if you’re already massively successful, or wind up dealing with a very small or very independent company. But when it comes to the studios–to whom many of the small indies sell their movies–it’s their way or the highway.

 Andy: This is a little bit of a problem if you have a published book. Typically a book contract will grant to the publisher all print and electronic verbatim book rights but also a bundle of subsidiary rights: abridgements, serial rights, sometimes merchandise, non-verbatim multimedia rights (being used in “enhanced e-books or aps), and audio for verbatim. Which of these rights should the author try to reserve if they are seeking a movie deal?

John: It’s only a problem when you don’t know any better, which many new writers don’t. As you know from experience, publishers are almost always willing to back off on things they ask for in the first contract they send out. Things like—for example—film and merchandising rights A good agent will know which of these rights can and should be reserved for the author.

 Short version: the studios want everything that moves; they are not, for the most part, interested in any format that consists primarily of words and letters—unless it’s a screenplay, or a novelization or other adaptation based on the script or the movie itself. So whatever you want to do with your book is fine—print, ebooks, serializations, audiobooks, sequels and prequels, live stage, musicals for the most part, non-dramatic adaptations and so forth.

 Whether dealing with New York or Hollywood, it’s always a good idea to involve an attorney familiar with the field; in most cases, an “entertainment attorney” is what you want, and they’ll be very familiar with Hollywood’s requirements. Non-entertainment attorneys will be clueless, because it’s a very specialized field of law. If you can’t afford their hourly rates, many—including some of the best—will work for a 5% commission if you already have a deal on the table. They should save or make you more than that.

 Andy: What does a production company need in order to make an option offer? Do they need a manuscript?

John: That depends on the production company or the individual producer. Some will option books without scripts, some won’t. Hollywood is very heavy into adaptations right now, which is good for authors. At the same time, it’s important to realize that there is a vast difference between the amount of money you will be paid for film rights to a manuscript or book, and the amount you will be paid for a screenplay.

 Rights to unpublished manuscripts generally fetch the least, unless the manuscript just sold for a bundle. Film rights for an unknown or modestly successful book may—and may not—fetch $50,000 if the option is exercised and the movie is made, which takes years. The average price for a first-sale screenplay, on the other hand, hovers between $300,000 and $600,000, with some going well north of $1 million. And you get quite a big chunk of that—typically a third or more—up front. That’s yours to keep, even if the movie is never made.

 Andy: Can you describe the process that a writer should take in order to convert his or her novel into a film script?

 John: There are three basic approaches: do it yourself, hire a consultant, outsource. The basic differences are time, money, and quality. Doing it yourself costs nothing but time—and it will take an enormous amount of time. Very few writers are capable of doing both books and screenplays well. This is why so few famous novelists adapt their own books, and also why virtually no screenwriters pen novels.

 The formats are almost mutually exclusive, and demand opposing skills. Authors must expand upon things, provide rich detail, and delve into the minds of their characters over hundreds of pages; screenwriters must compress a story into 120 pages or less, guide the director but avoid stepping on his toes, avoid minute detail, make everything visual, create compelling characters while externalizing thoughts and portraying them through actions—all while showing deference to the actors and being ever-mindful of budget.

 The hardest transition of all is going from novelist to screenwriter, because most of the things that make for a good novelist make for a lousy screenwriter. This can be overcome, but—like learning to write novels—often takes years. If you have that kind of time, read good, recently-sold scripts and lots of adaptations, and give it your best shot.

 The second option—hiring a consultant to guide your adaptation—will speed your learning curve, and might just save you years of work. He or she can evaluate your book, help develop an outline for the adaptation, and act as a coach along the way. While it’s possible to do this with a pure screenwriter, you’re likely to get better results with someone who writes both books and screenplays. Ideally, you find someone who’s done that and also specializes in adaptations—an “adaptation specialist.”

 If you can do that, you’ll have someone on your team who not only knows where you’re going, but also where you’re coming from—and how to get from there to where you need to be. This doesn’t mean your job will be easy, but it will be easierThe consultant approach will cost you a bit of money, but save you a lot of time.

 The third option is to outsource the writing entirely—find a screenwriter or, preferably, an author-screenwriter adaptation specialist. Work with them to develop a detailed adaptive outline you’re happy with—so you know where things are going before the writing begins—and turn them loose. Let them write the script for you, checking in every 30 pages or so just to make sure everything’s on course. After a few months—viola!—you have a finished script in your hands. Which is where most successful Hollywood stories begin.

Doing it this way is also a fast-forward learning experience, because there’s nothing quite like seeing general principles and specific techniques applied to your own work by someone who really knows their stuff. This is of course the most costly option in terms of money, but the least costly in terms of time.

 Andy: Can you talk a bit about your work as a developmental editor and adaptation specialist, and specifically what’s involved in the process of turning a book into a screenplay?

 John: I do a lot of development and editing work on books and screenplays, and I write both. I’ve done adaptations going both ways—book-to-screen and screenplay-to-book. The first one I did was my own, adapting the Nano novel into a screenplay. I was fortunate enough to get some recognition for that from the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowships Program, which got me and my script mentioned in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, and led to a development deal with Jan de Bont, who directed/produced Speed, Twister, Minority Report and other films.

 That interest helped sell the book to Macmillan. And it taught me that there can be a kind of synergy between New York and Hollywood, where interest on one coast can be used to bump up interest on the other. Which is why it’s best to have both a book and a screenplay to sell.

 When it comes to helping others with adaptations, I do a number of things. The most basic service is an adaptation evaluation; I look at what the author has—let’s say it’s a book or manuscript—and give them my take on the work’s adaptability:

 Does this look like it would make a good movie? If yes, how can we make it a great movie? If no, could it be a good or great movie—and what kinds of changes would we need to implement to make that happen? How can we make those changes while remaining true to the heart of the story or—if it’s nonfiction—the actual events? When you’re talking about taking a 300+ page book and turning into a 120-page screenplay, even a book that’s cinematic to begin with is going to undergo a significant transformation. Books that are not obvious movies will require bigger changes.

 I often consult with my significant other at this point, because she’s worked as story editor for a major producer, and also worked for Nielsen, which does most of the film marketing research for the studios. And she wrote and produced a number of tv documentaries. She provides a female perspective, as well as added story savvy.

 Then I generally get on the phone with the author and bat things around. If they want to go forward with the adaptation, and want me to consult/coach or adapt it for them, then we’ll work together to lay out the structure and “beats” or significant events of the existing story. We do this with what I call a digital outline or “beatline,” which is a lot easier to work with than a standard outline. For more on this, see my recent post The Digital Outline: Creating a Beatline for Your Story.

 Starting with that, the author and I will develop a working outline and a 7-point story structure. My recent post Story Structure: Laying Down the Bones goes into great detail on this.

 After that, we put our heads together, brainstorm and create an adaptive outline or beatline of what the script story should look like. Working in this format, where each significant event is a simple bullet-point, allows us to move quickly and change, rearrange, add or delete things on the fly. It also enables us to take in the whole story in a few minutes, instead of repeatedly plowing through 300 or 500 pages to see how many things any given change is going to affect.

 I’ll often bring my story editor in on this as well, so it’s a bit of a two-for-one deal for the client. We work ten feet away from each other, so it’s no big deal.

 If the author wants me to write the script, I go off and do that—and we check in every 30 pages or so to make sure everyone’s happy. In either event, we’ll put together a final logline and pitch sheet, do a final polish—and the author is ready to rock.

 Andy: John, thanks so much. There is so much in this interview. I hope readers will take the time to read your Self Editing Blog to go into this more deeply. Now if you will excuse me, I have Spielberg on the other line and have to give him my pitch pack.

 John: Tell him to wait.

 

 

You can learn more about adapting your book to a movie by reading John’s new book: Make Your Story a Movie. St. Martin’s Press, 2012

Purchase from: Amazon.com    Indiebound   Barnes and Noble   iTunes

Books into Movies: Everything You Need to Know (Almost). Part 1

 

 

A lot of writers I speak with  think of  their book as a story  that would make a good movie. It’s nice to think that Stephen Spielberg is waiting in the wings to scoop up your book, but it really doesn’t happen all that often. The movie business is like the book business, only with fewer movies than books. There are a fair number of “option” deals going around, but the real money most often comes with production, not with option.

 Today I am going to interview John Robert Marlow. John is the author of  Make Your Story a Movie: Adapting Your Book or Idea for Hollywood.   He is also the author of Nano, a technothriller  that he adapted for film. The script  has been honored by the same Academy that hands out the Academy Awards. The Nano script then went into development with a major Hollywood director. John optioned another script to the producer of Collateral, who wanted the script so badly that when she couldn’t reach John herself, she hired a private detective to track him down.

 John has written numerous articles about writing, self editing and adaptation, both for the Writer’s Digest Books annuals and for his wonderful Self Editing Blog.   This interview is going to be in 2 parts. Today we are going to talk about the how Hollywood deals get pitched and put together.

The next interview will be about book-screen options and how we move from a book to a screenplay.

 Andy: John, let’s say you have a novel. How do you determine whether it has any dramatic potential at all?

 John: Hollywood’s been at this game for a while now, and most of these folks are very clear about what it takes to make a book appealing on the screen. Some of the things that are important to Hollywood mean nothing at all to publishers—so the fact that a book is appealing to publishing houses doesn’t mean it will interest Hollywood. Which is one of the reasons that so few books are seriously considered by filmmakers.

 At the same time, if you know what Hollywood wants, you can incorporate those elements into your story as you write it, or make sure they’re included in any screenplay adaptation you may write or commission, so it’s never too late.

 Andy:  So what exactly are those elements?

 John: Hollywood looks for 10 things in any story, fiction or nonfiction: a cinematic concept that can be communicated in ten seconds; a hero that a large segment of the moviegoing public can relate to; strong visual potential; a three-act structure; a two-hour limit; a reasonable budget; low fat (no unnecessary scenes); franchise potential; four-quadrant (young and old, male and female) appeal; and merchandising potential.

 Seasoned vets with proven track records can sometimes skate the two-hour limit and budget points; newcomers cannot. Franchise and merchandising potential aren’t always necessary but are good to have, particularly at higher budget levels. The same goes for four-quadrant appeal; the more your movie costs, the bigger your audience needs to be to earn that money back. Avatar and Titanic are four-quadrant movies.

 I’ve covered these ten points extensively in my article,  What Hollywood Wants: 10 Things Studios Like to See in Adapted (and Original) Scripts 

Andy: What is the first step you take in getting interest from a production company?

 John: I can  pick up the phone or send an email. But for those who don’t have industry connections, it can be hard. The reason is simple: Hollywood, like New York, is full of people trying to sell things that aren’t ready to be seen. Some need a bit more work; others are train wrecks. And then you have the translation issue: some books are movies; most are not. Many could be movies, if carefully adapted—but until you see the adaptation, you don’t really know.

 There are more buyers for adapted screenplays than for book adaptation rights, so if I really want to get the attention of someone who’s got thousands of other people vying for their time, I’m going to do one of two things—and this applies equally to those with and without industry connections: approach them with a finished screenplay, or put together one hell of a good pitch pack.

 Whichever path you choose, you must have something professional to show, or there’s nothing to set you apart from the sea of amateurs with little more than an “idea” they think would make a great movie. And while some of those amateurs may be right, you can’t copyright an idea, and no one’s likely to pay you for it. Ideas are common; fabulous execution over the length of a screenplay (or novel, for that matter) is not—which is why New York buys books, Hollywood buys scripts, and no one buys “ideas” from strangers.

 Andy: Why is it best to have a screenplay?

 John: Because it’s closer to being a movie—the people looking at it can “see” the movie as they read. That’s vital, because the purpose of a screenplay is to roll a movie in the reader’s head, and to get them to take the next step.

If the screenplay is ready to go, the producer can skip a lot of costly and time-consuming development steps and go looking for attachments or buyers right now. Less trouble, fewer headaches, and a faster sale if things go well.

If you can’t write a dynamite script, or afford to hire someone else to do it for you, then you’re better off with the pitch pack—because a bad or even mediocre script is a swift path to rejection. There’s too much competition to get by with that.

 Andy: So what’s a pitch pack?

 John: The pitch pack is an attempt at a happy medium between raw idea and polished screenplay: unique enough to protect, and hopefully strong enough to generate real interest.

 It’s similar to a book proposal. It includes a pitch sheet with logline; synopsis or summary; an informal treatment or “scriptment” that’s basically a longer summary with perhaps snippets of dialogue or actual scenes; a bit of info on the major characters; box office figures for similar films already released; a “dream” cast list of the actors you’d want to see in the major roles, a few other things. And you let them know there’s a beatline available on request.

 If someone bites on that, you follow up with the beatline to demonstrate that you really do know what you’re doing; you’ve mapped out every scene in detail, nothing is vague or conflicting or unresolved. This kind of approach puts you light years ahead of the guy who bangs on Hollywood’s door and says, “Hey, I have a great idea.” It also makes it more likely that, if they do option or buy your pitch, they’ll give you first crack at writing the script—because it’s obvious you’ve worked this out in great detail.

I’ll be posting about this on my blog in the near future.

Andy: Okay. So you have your script or pitch pack Then what?

 John: If I didn’t have film industry connections, , I would either look for someone to team with, —someone more familiar with the territory—or go ahead and contact the producers and production companies myself.

 Keep in mind, though, that if you have a finished script, you can approach reps—meaning agents and managers. . If you find a good one to take you on, they will then approach producers and production companies on your behalf. And they’re likely to get faster, more serious reads from those people than you would, acting on your own.  So even if it takes you a while to land a rep, the total time needed to reach your target buyers could still be much shorter.

 Also, there are some very good reasons to avoid approaching producers or production companies by yourself—not the least of which is overexposure. A good rep—agent or manager—can get your script into the hands of all the right producers in a matter of days.

 Those producers will not have heard anyone talking trash about your script, because they’ll all get it at pretty much the same time, and they’ll feel pressured to get to it quickly because they know that the rep has also put it in the hands of their competitors, who may be reading it at this very moment.

 Some low-end producers also do bad things, like “shop” your script to everyone in town, hoping someone, anyone, will bite. This doesn’t help you, and can do quite a bit of damage when you later try to approach those same people with your project—particularly when you don’t know they’ve already seen it. I learned this the hard way.

 Q: How does the pitch in Hollywood differ from what is expected in book publishing?

 The Hollywood pitch happens in steps, because no one has time to listen to long pitches or read material that hasn’t been pre-screened or pre-qualified in some way. The first step is the logline, which boils your story down to a 10-second pitch. It sounds ridiculous, but it can be done, and is in fact a sort of art—one I cover in a blog post called Building the Perfect Logline.  

For example, this is how I would pitch The Fugitive: “A fugitive doctor wrongly convicted of killing his wife struggles to prove his innocence while pursued by a relentless US Marshall.” Or, to pitch a more complex adaptation with multiple protagonists: “A family struggles to escape a remote island park whose main attractions—genetically restored dinosaurs—have been set loose by a power failure.” Which is, of course, Jurassic Park.

 What you leave out of the pitch  is as important as what you put in. An agent or producer can read 700 to 1,000 loglines in the time it takes to read a single script. So, obviously, that’s what they do. If the logline grabs them, they take the next step, and ask for more info or the script itself.

 If they ask for more info, you give them a synopsis or a pitch sheet teaser, which is the equivalent of a movie trailer in words: your story in one minute. I recently wrote about pitch sheets in a blog post called The One-Minute Story: Crafting a Pitch Sheet for your Book, Screenplay, or Other Tale.  

If they like the pitch sheet, they’ll usually ask to see the script. In some cases, you can get by with a pitch pack in place of the script. In other cases, not. Without a script, for example, agents and managers have nothing to sell—unless they’re interested in selling the film rights alone, which is less profitable and therefore less attractive from their perspective. Though if you’re brand-name author, this may not apply.

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