What Jackie Collins can teach you

One of the challenging things for many writers is learning to talk about themselves, to show off without coming off like a braggadocio.

Finding it hard to promote yourself? Think of your book as a product or service that will delight/entertain/enthrall readers. You are simply a mouthpiece to help get that product into readers’ hands. (It’s not you talking. It’s your avatar!)

Writers have told me that by thinking of themselves in a more distanced way from their work, they find it easier to give interviews about their books. Of course there are other writers who have no issue with the fine art of self-promotion and if you count yourself among them, then this post probably isn’t for you and more power to you. (Do, please, come by again another day.)

Places you can’t avoid talking about yourself: in your author bio, Twitter profile, Q&A for your press materials, and the”About” page on your blog. If you feel ambivalent about writing about yourself, then that sentiment will, of course, come through in the text.

Start by shedding all that modesty. Think of yourself as a stranger you’ve just met—such an interesting and attractive person!  Take notes about your past: What are the most compelling thoughts/actions/experiences you’ve had? Take time with your bio. It will take tweaking to get it right. (Oh gosh: take a look at Jeopardy to see how not to approach an author bio. I’m always cringing at the embarrassing or silly stories some of the contestants choose to tell about themselves. Am I alone in that? I find it a very worrying part of the show.)

Here are some excellent and useful posts on the importance of a compelling bio and how to build a better Twitter bio.

And here are some examples of how focussing on creating a great bio can increase your exposure. Sea Change author Jeremy Page wrote a bio that appears on blogher.com. The appeal of his warm and approachable self, as revealed in his bio, prompted the site’s editor to run it as he wrote it. (I love the line about his three small boys launching themselves at him like variously shaped missiles.)

And of course, sometimes less is more, as Jackie Collins’ Twitter profile proves. It reads thus: @jackiejcollins Hollywood, CA Kick-ass writer! This is a lady who has no problem talking about herself. Learn from a master!

Why spelling matters

As part of my day job, I get pitched business ideas by email all the time. And while it should be an obvious comment to those who want my attention, it is not: Please spell my name correctly. (Oooh. I just got my schoolmarm on, didn’t I?)

Similarly, when you’re pitching the media about your book, make sure you not only understand and have read the media you are pitching, but have also spelled the recipient’s name accurately.

A reviewer called me to task when my book, Publicize Your Book, was first published, saying that telling people to spell correctly is an obvious statement. Wrongo.  So many among us just don’t get this right. Even the New York Times cops to it, 460 times in the first ten months of this year. And the blog Terribly Write documents it with a roster of misspelled names on Yahoo!

I had a terrific professor in college, Robin Winks, who taught a course called The Writing of History (and you’ll see an image of his marvelous book, The Historian as Detective, above.) There were lots of great takeaways from that class, which I still think about whenever I doublecheck the spelling of someone’s name. Professor Winks often reminded us in Very Firm Tones that we must spell names correctly in order to avoid offending those we are writing about and to be responsible historians. So often I think I’ve got a name right only to find I haven’t. So do take time to doublecheck. Or else your otherwise beautifully crafted pitch letter simply won’t get read.

And lest anyone is still wondering, “Hey what’s the big deal with spelling a name wrong?”, check out the hugely funny and indignant posts on this site. If you’ve ever misspelled someone’s name, you won’t again after reading it. Or on a deeply somber note,  read the Huffington Post piece about the 9/11 victim whose name was misspelled on the memorial. Misspelled as in etched into stone. Not good.

OK… I’m getting down from the spelling soapbox now. But do please tell me if you find any spelling errors on my blog. I shall be most grateful.

Should you create a book trailer?

A book trailer might be a mini commercial for a book or more editorially oriented, like a short piece of programming. Should you spend your time and money creating one?

It’s important to remember that, as an author, you’re part of the media business. You are competing for attention with artists from all fields—music, film, gaming to name just a few. Your book trailer needs to stand on its own merit as persuasive and engaging. Don’t sweat it if you think this is beyond your reach. Videos are not for everyone and your book’s success does not depend on having created one. But if you have a touch of the showman or showwoman in you, along with a filmic message that has the potential to go viral, then by all means put all that to good use.

Here is an example of an effective editorial book trailer for Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, one that capitalizes on the author’s storytelling skills as well as on her very interesting story:

Here are two more that are more commercially oriented, from novelists Douglas Clegg and Brad Meltzer for Inner Circle (below.)

You may rightly say these are big time books and authors and you don’t have the resources they did. But you don’t have to spend a lot of money to create a video. Here’s a good example—not from an author. (And we should always be looking for inspiration from our colleagues in other fields.) Kevjumba (Kevin Wu) created a series of home-spun videos about his college and home life that are utterly engaging and which he is now parlaying into a media career. Here’s one:

The takeaway: With pointed humor, this lighthearted little video exposes cultural and racial stereotypes. (Take a look at the rest of his video library—the ones with his dad are a hoot—and you’ll see that all his videos are inexpensively produced.) What works is Wu’s ability to tell stories with verve and humor. He’s had 5.2 million views for the above video alone.

Before you commit to creating a book trailer, have a plan for what you’ll do with it. You can post it to your website or blog, post it to YouTube, get your publisher to post it on your book’s product page on Amazon or bn.com, and upload it to Goodreads and other social reading sites. Those are good possibilities to start with. And do your research. Study book trailers from other authors to see which ones catch your attention and which leave your bored or indifferent.

If you want to explore videos further and need some professional assistance, here are two video production companies to look into: Turn Here and Circle of Seven.

Again, a book trailer is not going to make or break your book. Rather it comprises just part of a robust campaign around your book to get the word out to as many of your potential readers as possible.

Which are your favorite author videos? Have you bought a book after having seen one?

Two important blog posts you should read

The first is Seth Godin’s announcement that he’s ending The Domino Project, his publishing imprint powered by Amazon, and it’s replete with terrific advice for authors. Godin’s blog is always a fertile source of ideas about marketing so you just might want to add it to your favorites.

The takeaway for authors? Building your tribe, your followers, your email list, the group of people who want to hear from you—whatever you want to call them—is the best investment of time, if not money, you’ll make in forging your writing career (apart from writing your book, that is.)

The second is a post on Kindle Review about the shift in control over the publishing business away from publishers towards retailers and why this shift potentially diminishes the value of the book.

The takeaway for authors: While getting published today is relatively easy (you can self publish your books instantly as ebooks) discovery remains a tremendous challenge. How will readers find your great work among all the undifferentiated stuff out there? That’s the ongoing issue, not only for authors, but for every publisher, product and brand in the market today. You’re in good company.

To opine or not to opine? Writing an op-ed.

Recently a writer asked me how he might go about getting an op-ed piece published. It’s a fairly straightforward process, as newspapers clearly state their guidelines for submitting opinion pieces. Note in the links to the op-ed rules, below, that the papers require exclusivity so you’ll need to submit to them one at a time. If the link to the paper you’re interested in isn’t here, simply search online for “name of the paper” and “op ed submissions”.

The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, (Toronto) Globe and Mail

But the more important issue is whether should you try to publish an op-ed piece at all. It will require significant work on your part and each paper receives many more submissions that it could ever publish. Here are the reasons to consider writing one.

1. An op-ed can be an effective way to establish your authority in your field and expose your book to potential readers. This is particularly true when your expertise connects with current news headlines. For example, here is a piece by Erin Aubry Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times about Section 8, black poverty and the concept of black unity. Her byline mentions her book, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line. Another example: An op-ed piece about the Mississippi flood of 1927 and its parallel with recent floods appeared in the (New Orleans) Times Picayune. The writer is John Barry, who is also author of a book about those floods called Rising Tide. As you’ll see from the comments posted after his article, an op-ed can generate strong feelings among readers, so be prepared for that possibility.

2. You are an established author (whether in your local community or even nationally known) and can use the op-ed as a platform to espouse a cause you believe in. An example: Author Brad Meltzer wrote about the importance of supporting local libraries in the Miami Herald. Jonathan Kozol frequently writes about education reform, here in the New York Times in connection with the No Child Left Behind Act. Tim and Nina Zagat, as shown in the image above, write about wage fairness and restaurant tips. They are, of course, creators of the Zagat guides.

3. You can fight your corner. Here is Joe McGinniss in USA Today defending his use of unnamed sources in his biography of Sarah Palin.

You don’t need to be a writer of non fiction to qualify as an expert for an op ed (and of course Meltzer is a novelist.) In writing your novel you might have conducted research relevant to the news, and that means you qualify. You might be a children’s book author with a strong reaction to the media’s coverage of children’s book apps. You might be experimenting with ebook technologies to publish your short stories and have a cogent argument about ebook pricing and discoverability. There’s lots of approaches you can take, just so long as your piece is cogent, authentic and of course, well written. Here’s another example, this one by Dennis Lehane defending an artist’s right to his own perspective.

As for how to write an op-ed, I can’t do better than the Office of Communications and Marketing at Fairleigh Dickinson University which has outlined a clear approach. Universities have a natural interest in getting their faculties noticed, so you’ll find good direction from other campuses, too, such as Duke.

Bottom line: If you have something meaningful to say, then an op-ed is a good way to say it and get some attention for your book, besides.

Celebrating p books

Remember a time, not so very long ago, when you didn’t have to say “p book” to make it clear you were talking about a printed book?

Though my son tells me I’m strange and he’s never heard anyone call them “p books”. So perhaps there’s hope for us all yet: A book is a book, no matter its form.

Regardless, this post is a celebration of why a book in its physical form is an efficient, attractive, enduring technology. Here are three reasons why:

1. It’s a thrill to get a signed book from a writer you admire. To wit: read the recent Twitter post from LouiseMensch. She is the British novelist and Conservative Party MP whom you may have spotted questioning the Murdochs in the House of Commons Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee earlier this year—the one where the foam pie was thrown. She writes, “just discovered have been sent a signed book by my hero John Grisham – be still my beating heart!” And the image above shows my own signed copy of Alex Haley’s book, A Different Kind of Christmas. (I don’t care about the controversy surrounding the provenance of Haley’s blockbuster Roots: His was a significant voice at an important time and he was, besides, a kind and generous man.)

2. This video offers essential how-to instructions on using a book that come straight from the medieval help desk. Enjoy. Laugh. Share.

3. Tom Chivers of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper explains why he loves both print and ebooks.

So enough with the gloom, please, all you doomsayers among us devoting those precious column inches to predicting the downfall of the p book.  It’s a facile argument when based almost entirely on incomplete data or on corporate press releases or your feelings or fleeting impressions. Really, enough. (Though one shall always happily listen to a well-reasoned argument based on a true interrogation of the presented facts.)

Media outlets you may not have considered

Teamgloria‘s comment that she looks to the Financial Times (FT) for book recommendations sent me scurrying for the link. Glad I did otherwise I would not have encountered this curious book about conference tables in the most powerful rooms in Europe. (The Table of Power 2 by Jacqueline Hassink)

When you think about building your media lists or unearthing suitable media contacts to pitch your book, don’t just follow the beaten path. Look for unobvious yet potentially important platforms.

They might include:

1. The hyperlocal influencer

For example, this might be the person who is active in her reading group, someone who contributes regularly to a local online news organization, or else someone active in his local church or community group.

In other words, look to your local community to build attention among pockets of interest there.

2. The hypernational influencer

This was Oprah when her network show was still on air. With her cable talk show soon to launch, she may yet reclaim that place. Meanwhile, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can move a lot of books when an author appears on their shows. Granted: Getting a coveted segment on those programs is out of reach for most authors. But you would do well to look at other, more reachable mega influencers. For example, the BlogHer network reaches 31 million moms. The site hosts a book club and should be on your media list. Another example: Syndicated columnists can be another potent source of exposure for your book. Start by typing “syndicated columnist” along with “your book topic” in your web browser.

3. The vertical influencer

This is the person who is a recognized big mouth in their field. It is someone like Guy Kawasaki who blogs about technology and the workplace whose early recommendation for The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, by Robert Sutton, helped propel that book onto bestseller lists. It may be someone like like Marion Nestle or Mark Bittman or Michael Pollan, who are leading voices in the current food politics movement. No matter the field you’re writing about, there are key voices you need to reach with your work. And it’s worth your time researching how to get to them to press a copy of your book in their hands (or on their screens.)

Thankful for books

How lucky we are that books are such an important part of our everyday lives. Today, and it’s not yet 8 a.m., there have been media stories on the NYPD’s destruction of the Occupy Wall Street library of 3000 books (which is going to emerge as a significant if not permanent symbol of the conflict;) on the Big Read in Tucson where the city has embraced the poetry of Emily Dickinson—from pizza parlors to high end eateries to libraries to all manner of tributes and parties; to tomorrow’s Black Friday sales on ereaders and tablets—there is serious money competing for our bookloving eyeballs.

So thank you Alan Furst, Kate Atkinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Aravind Adiga, Gerald Seymour, Stella Rimington, Kelvin Christopher James and all my other current favorite writers.

Which authors do you want to thank?

Great Twitter feeds for fiction writers

As I started to research this post, I came across an excellent freshly-published article called The Best Literary Blogs and Websites by Jane Friedman, who teaches in the Electronic Media division at University of Cincinnati and is a former publishing exec. She knows her stuff and you should follow her. If you’re a fiction writer and looking for relevant people to follow on Twitter, then Jane’s list is an excellent place to start. (Most of the recommended blogs have a linked Twitter account.)

To that list I’d add:

Sarah Weinman, who reports on the publishing industry and reviews mysteries for the Los Angeles Times and is as astute a book critic and publishing analyst as you’ll come across.

Douglas Clegg, who is way smart about building readership for his thrillers and fantasy novels. Recently he wrote 20 Tips for Writers which you can read on Scribd. It’s a good example of how he uses various media platforms to reach readers.

Mashable, which offers a list of fiction writers who Tweet in interesting ways. (Note that not all author links are still active. Twitter being a fluid medium, people come and go. For instance, after it was created, the novelist Alice Hoffman got into a Twitter war over a bad review and closed her account. Read the snarky version of those events on Gawker and a more level-headed report at the LA Times.)

There’s a lesson here: Don’t have fights in public. No one looks good and no one wins.

Another lesson: Social media are all entwined. Writers link their Twitter accounts to their Facebook accounts to their websites to Scrid to Tumblr and so on. So once you feel comfortably established on Twitter, you may want to build another platform—one more substantial—to recommend to your followers. A place where you can house all kinds of background info about you and your book, as well as share insights longer than 140 characters. Uh-oh…you might be feeling a blog coming on.

Tried Twitter yet?

Some scoff at it from afar. Others become obsessed by it. Others check in daily to see what their friends have posted. Others use it like a news aggregator.

Confused yet?

Not to worry. All you need to know, if you’ve never tweeted, is that Twitter offers you a very useful tool to get attention for your work.

To my mind, Twitter is a giant cocktail party that never stops. You hear snippets of all kinds of conversations (or monologues)—some smart, some funny, some political, and others just plain raunchy. You choose who to listen to by selecting the people you want to follow. And of course, you can join in, too. Just keep your comments to 140 characters or less.

I follow people who cover the publishing industry and so the main part of Twitter’s functionality for me is serving as a news source for my business and to help me figure out what book to read next. Plus I get a mild kick from following some celebrity tweeps (people who tweet) like Lily Allen and Martha Plimpton.

For authors (or others) who want to build an audience, Twitter can connect you with people who might care about your work. And here’s where the cocktail party analogy comes in handy. You wouldn’t go to a party with a megaphone and start shouting your name and book title and telling the crowd to go buy it. Similarly, it’s not a good idea to sign onto Twitter and immediately start blurting about your book.

The better approach: Join the Twitter party long before your book comes out and gradually build your network and following. (Celebrity authors get this, too. Mindy Kaling joined Twitter many months before her book came out.) Then follow people who interest you, share your links and ideas. Look for others who tweet about your interests. For example, you’ve written a book about global warming. Then search for users tweeting about that topic. Follow them. Talk to them.

There’s lots of great info on how to get started on Twitter. Here’s the official version from Twitter.  And here’s an excellent set of tutorials from Mashable, which covers digital culture and technologies.

In the end, Twitter may not be for you. And if not, that’s ok. Not all social media is right for everyone. But do give it a go before you turn your back on it. You might find that it’s just the right social network to reach your potential audience.