Old World - New World

Anne McDermid & Associates is partnering with One Writer’s Voice to issue a series of posts on the business of writing based on the premise that writing, like publishing, is undergoing profound change. The series will post weekly alternating between the McDermid blog and One Writer’s Voice.

Old World - New World is the second post in our series.

We look forward to dialogue on this topic amongst the community of writers, agents and publishers.

Good Writing isn’t Enough

PART 1 OF A SERIES

Anyone who has read about the life of writers knows that it takes more than literary talent to become a published author. Luck, passion, discipline, persistence, and connections are some of the attributes required. Today however, when publishing and book retailing are under siege, when technology is turning the traditional system upside down, and when authors are self-publishing in astonishing numbers, writers who want to be successful need to do more.

In this brave, new world, writers must also be business and technology savvy, know how to promote themselves, how to connect with customers, how to analyze their competition, how to determine and develop their brand and how to make money. In essence, they need to be entrepreneurs.

Chris Bucci, a literary agent with Anne McDermid & Associates Ltd. and a seasoned industry professional, along with Mary Tod, a writer of historical fiction and former management consultant, are beginning a series on the business of writing. Based on the premise that writing, like publishing, is undergoing profound change, this series will look at writing not from the perspective of craft but from the perspective of entrepreneurship.

Chris and Mary will consider the factors affecting writers, new writer-reader relationships, how to develop a business plan, the dynamics of profitability, the democratization of influencers and a host of other topics related to writers as entrepreneurs. The series will post weekly alternating between the McDermid blog and Mary’s personal blog.

We hope these articles will inform, spark dialogue and facilitate new thinking amongst writers, literary agents, publishers and retailers.


Mary Tod blogs about writing at One Writer’s Voice and is currently at work revising her first two novels, Lies Told in Silence and While the Secret Sits.

Books by Those Who don't Like Books

By guest-blogger Laura Penny

When I was pitching my second book, More Money Than Brains, I thought I had a pretty good line for the marketing types. I kept saying it was a book for readers, a book for people who really like books. Sounds totally sensible, right? You have doubtless heard countless commercials touting steak for steak-lovers and booze for real boozers. I was just trying to do what capitalism said on the teevee!

This is one of the many reasons why I have an agent.

The bizarro market of publishing functions differently. There is actually plenty of money these days, it seems, in catering to the tepid/sporadic reader or the people who despise bookish elitists and their snooty tomes.

I leave it to others to debate whether or not big hits, like Twilight and Dan Brown's oeuvre, eventually convert book-a-year folks to reading on the regular. I'm more interested in the latter phenomenon. Two of the biggest recent publishing success stories, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, are stellar examples of people who write books for people who hate book people.

Beck has managed to move millions and millions of units of his own merch, which includes sentimental slop (The Christmas Sweater), pseudo-history (Glenn Beck's Common Sense), and bloviation (Arguing with Idiots). His latest bestseller is an ostensible thriller called The Overton Window. This sounds Ludlummy, but it is actually a think tank term for the acceptable spectrum of policy ideas. Anything too wacky is “outside the window”, so to speak.

The function of many think tanks and lobbies and clowns like Glenn Beck is to open that window, and encourage America to jump through it, into free-market free-fall. Which is precisely why the plot of Beck's book is that the left---the liberal, progressive elites who really run the government and big corporations---are forcibly defenestrating a once-great nation.

Beck has also become like unto the Oprah of the wingnuts; to bum a comparison from USA Today. His say-so has propelled all sorts of crazy stuff up the bestseller lists. Perhaps the best example of a Beck favourite is Cleon Skousen's The 5000 Year Leap, which he has described as “divinely inspired”. Now there's a blurb to set the marketing department all a-flutter!

Alas, Skousen was far more inspired by the John Birch Society than that hippie from Nazareth. Skousen was an anti-commie zealot, too right-wing for the Mormon establishment, and precisely the sort of conspiracy crank old-school cons like William F. Buckley snubbed and marginalized in order to develop an electable conservative movement.

The titular leap is the miraculous birth of the Constitution, issue of the holy union of the Bible and the Founding Fathers. Hundreds of 5 star Amazon reviews from Beck's faithful insist that the book should be taught in schools. It's important for kids to know that the Thomases Jefferson and Paine loved Jesus more than reason. A special American Jesus that wants to abolish welfare and taxes!

If the common man actually spoke in the style of Sarah Palin's smash hit, Going Rogue, I woulda superglued my Sonys to my ears quite some time ago. One of the most scathing reviews of the book, by conservative journalist Claire Berlinski, argues that the problem is not that the book itself is cliched, intellectually lazy, vulgar, and phony as Tiger Woods' apologies.


That's bad, but what is worse is that millions of North Americans believe this cheesy ghost-written, committee-cobbled blend of pap and polemics is “real” or “authentic”. Berlinski contends that this is evidence of something much more dire than bad literary taste: it is a “communism of the soul” to pretend the doggedly ordinary are Presidential material.

Palin's next book involves even less pesky authoring. America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag, scheduled for release in November, is a mixtape of texts that have inspired her. It should not cost much, or take interns much time, to collate quotes from her dad, the John Birch Society newsletter, jock bios, Reagan speeches and the Taco Bell menu.

The fact that Palin and Beck cannot be bothered to write their own badly-written books might give book people the vapours. But the kind of people who buy Beck and Palin in bulk sneer at the suggestion that writing is a valuable skill or job, or. that publishing is an actual industry. Publishing is just a way for coastal elitists to get money for nothing and chicks for free.

This is simply to say that these recent publishing successes are actually based on venerable American marketing traditions best described by P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken. And while ghostwritten pap or paranoid crap are certainly not new, it is a bummer to see publishers underwriting and promoting products that insist the product—writing—is immaterial or inherently elitist and antique.


Laura Penny is the author of Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit and More Money Than Brains: Why School Sucks, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They're Right. She teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University and the University of King's College, in lovely Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Hardcover and eBook Sales at Amazon

I was planning on blogging and doing a round-up of reactions to Jeff Bezos' announcement that ebook editions are outselling hardcovers at Amazon, but I found that someone did it faster and better. Guy LeCharles Gonzales has a great post on the Digital Book World site titled eBook vs. Hardcover: Beyond the Headlines. He also included links to articles by most of the major commentators, so I'll leave it to them.

Just one quick point: Bezos does say that Amazon's "hardcover sales continue to grow", so its not quite the end of the world.

While you are there check out what DBW has to tell us about Google Editions -- the next supposed 'game-changer' in the ebooks world.

Agents get Paid?

Earlier this week literary agent Colleen Lindsay started a great discussion on Twitter by asking how things would change if agents started charging based on billable hours (much of the discusssion is collected here #agentpay) rather than commission. Part of the point is that as publishers seem to be offloading their responsibilities agents have seen theirs expand without an equal increase in pay. Of course at the same time authors advances seem to be going down (unless of course you are Sarah Palin. WTF?!!!) so they probably don't want to pick up any additional costs.

So what to do?

Thankfully the internets have allowed a number of smart people to chime in on the subject. I particularly like the point-counterpoint pieces Digital Book World have provided. One, by Victoria Strauss, founder of Writer Beware, is titled 'Are Agents Due for a Raise?' The other, by Jane Friedman of Writer's Digest, is titled 'Agents Need to Develop Alternative Models.' Both make some great points so read them. For the record, I couldn't agree more with Jane's title (as for Victoria's lead question: yes please!).

Kidlit.com also has some interesting thoughts on paying agents by the hour. As do KT Literary, author Jodi Meadows, and the people at Wylie-Merrick Literary (this is the internets after all).

Now I want to know what you think?

Guest Post: Mary Tod

Chris Bucci’s recent post, Some Social Networking Pros and Cons, offers an important reminder that social media, while an intriguing and useful tool, is not a panacea. I am delighted to guest post on the Anne McDermid & Associates blog and offer additional perspective sparked by Chris’ insights.

Today’s excitement about social media reminds me of the dot-com bubble in the 90’s (yes, I’m old enough to have lived through that) and the excitement about e-commerce several years later. Hype upon hype, traditional business models threatened, get in while it’s hot, the allure of easy money followed by toppled careers and lost fortunes.

Early in my business career I worked for IBM, a paragon of sales and marketing, and recall attending a lecture on the buying cycle as part of sales training. According to our instructor, the cycle consists of five steps: (1) awareness, (2) knowledge, (3) liking, (4) commitment and (5) buy. In other words, there are many steps before someone buys and each step requires deliberate planning and execution to prepare for success. I believe this cycle applies to books just as it applies to computers or laundry detergent.

As Chris points out, social media is only one part of a complex equation the variables of which are the strategies and tactics of positioning, marketing, promotion and sales applied not once but consistently over time.

As I explore the business of writing, I am beginning to see myself as an entrepreneur with products to sell. From that vantage point, writers – myself included – need to consider a host of questions related to marketing and sales:

- how are you positioning your book(s) and in what market segments?
- what differentiates you from your competition?
- what are the key messages you wish to convey through the buying cycle?
- what type of media, including social media, will you use to promote your work?
- what is your plan in terms of timing, frequency and people involved?
- how will you use PR to assist your efforts?
- what will you do, what will others do on your behalf, how will you integrate their efforts with yours?
- how will you build a community of potential readers and interact with them?
- what channels will you use to distribute your works and how will they affect the marketing you do?
- will you form any alliances to help you reach your target markets?

These questions stem from materials I’ve used to help clients build a sound business plan. Imagine convincing investors to put money into your writing business. Before securing their endorsement, they would want answers to questions like these and many more. Wouldn’t you?

Mary Tod blogs about writing at One Writer’s Voice and is currently at work revising her first two novels, Lies Told in Silence and While the Secret Sits.

Some Social Networking Pros and Cons

Earlier this week I shared a link to a post called The Hidden Costs of Social Networking on our facebook page. I thought it might be an interesting corrective to some of the more far-fetched claims made for the efficacy of social networking as a marketing tool.

In part this was also inspired by a couple of conversations I had while at BEA in NY. The first was with a prominent agent who has had at least one NY Times bestseller attribute a great deal of her book's success to the social media work she put in before and after the book's publication. But my agent friend went on to stress what a time-suck these eforts can be for all involved and relayed the story of another client who had done all the right things according to the "social media bible" and still the book disappeared without a trace. It seemed to me that the obvious lesson was that social media isn't going to sell every book -- like just about everything else it works in some cases and not in others (and don't spend all your time twittering).

Discussion number two was with a high-powered publisher who was frustrated that authors expected too much from their social media efforts, and often didn't bother to co-ordinate them with the publicity and marketing efforts of the house. Again it seems that one rather obvious lesson is make sure you plan your efforts with your publisher's efforts in mind.

HOWEVER in spite of these stories, and the link I refer to above, I do think that social networking is a useful tool for many authors. No its not for everyone, and no it won't work equally for everyone (in spite of equal efforts) and please don't let it suck away all the time and energy from your writing. It requires planning and foresite, but also creativity and experimentation. Be wary of the evangelists claims but also be wary of the naysaysers.

To respond to just a couple of Rob Eager's points from the post: I think his numbers mean next to nothing. First he says that "at Book Expo 2009, John Sargeant CEO of MacMillan Publishing stated, "Viral Marketing doesn't sell a ton of books."" Sargeant goes on to talk about a very popular Macmillan video that only sold an extra 200 copies of the book. Eager then goes on to talk about a client with a blog boasting over 50,000 monthly readers, but has not seen an increase in book sales.

These anecdotes lead to a number of questions, like: 2009? I think facebook and Twitter, to name two, have grown by millions of users since then, might things have changed? Of course they will change again by this time next year - maybe for worse. Perhaps videos don't sell books? And maybe your client has just tapped out his market -- if he wasn't blogging maybe his sales would be falling. But what is more interesting to me is that I just can't seem to believe any of the numbers that claim to tell me how many books a certain form of publicity or marketing or social media actually sells.

I used to work with some old-school publishing types who liked to repeat the nonsense that "An ad never sold a book." (I suppose that's why we are inundated with thousadns of ads everyday) even though they never attempted to prove that statement. Anywhoo, the point is that one ad in the wilderness will not sell a book - a well planned ad campaign might. A well planned ad campaign, plus reviews, plus publicity and a well planned marketing campaign, plus having some books in stores probably will. Throw in some of that social media stuff and you'll probably sell even more. But will we ever be able to measure ROI on that? Not until we have chips planted in our brains that track every decision and the circuitous routes they take from first becoming aware of something to the point where we actually buy it. One mention is almost never enough to get someone to buy something (unless you're my 8 year old apparently, and even then he needs me to actually buy it) but a number of re-inforcing mentions in influential places might. Of course that's where social media can help.

That was a long post. What the hell was I talking about.