Time to Write

CBS President's Words of Wisdom

In an article in the June 2007 issue of Wired magazine, CBS President Les Moonves (left), is interviewed about the future of media. There were a couple of things he said that make great advice for writers about how to think about the new media (or media in general):

"You have to look at it in two different ways. One is content that you will get paid for directly, and the other is promotional content. Our attitude is, either pay us for it or give us promotional value that will eventually lead to our getting paid for it."

For writers, this could involve a blog like this one, that I hope will eventually prompt you to buy my new book, "Your Writing Coach," or my ebook about time management for writers, or one of the trance downloads at www.timetowrite.com. It could also be a podcast that reinforces your credibility, or a website, or articles for other people's websites.

Asked which distribution channel is most valuable, Moonves gave an answer that probably applies equally to writers, too:

"There're all good. We don't care how you get our content--over the air, over cable, satellite, the Internet, or on your cell phone--as long as we get paid for it."

Books Publicity - Do Something Different

I saw in a newspaper article recently that a book store owner burned some books because he has a warehouse full of 20,000 that he couldn’t even give away. The libraries and charity shops he approached said they were full. Lamenting the decline of book reading, he called his fire “the funeral pyre for thought in American today.”

The story was picked up by the Associated Press and featured in newspapers all over the country (I’m not sure whether there was a news team filming it as well, but I wouldn’t be surprised).

I have a hunch that he’s now going to be contacted by a lot of people offering a good home for the rest of his books, maybe even offering to buy them.

As much as I cringe at the thought of books being burned for any reason, I have to give him credit for getting publicity. The lesson is clear: if you want the media to give you attention, do something different (ideally, visual and dramatic).

(If you'd like 100 examples that show you how to do something different in order to get inexpensive publicity for your product or service, see my book, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT, published by Virgin Books and available online and in many book stores.)

Garrison Keiller on Writing (Again)

In an article on the Kansas City Star's website, Garrison Keiller gave some advice about writing. In part, he wrote:

"Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours? A long walk also brings you into contact with the world, which is basic journalism, which most writing is. It isn’t about you and your feelings so much as about what people wear and how they talk. The superficial is never to be overlooked."

"Walk briskly and it will improve your circulation and your brain will remember the basics of good writing: Cut to the chase. Cut the introductions. Cut the agonized introspection. When in doubt, write something that is fun. Write on a computer if you must but correct by hand on a typescript with a yellow No. 2 lead pencil."

Not surprisingly, these musings were prompted by the fac that he has a deadline for delivering another book very soon.

Using Images to Make Your Writing More Real

In his blog, film-maker Chris Jones says:

"I am working on my film Rocketboy with concept artist, Matt Allsopp, and have again been struck by much impact large colourful and imaginative images from the story [such as the one at left] can have. We are talking to film companies and we often get ‘WOW, let’s do a meeting…’ after they see it. But the biggest impact comes with private investors. This artwork tends to make the movie ‘real’ in their heads.

I am working now with another film maker friend, on a huge trilogy, and again, this artwork just gets people excited. The lesson? A small investment upfront can make all the difference to getting your movie funded."

Chris reports that he's in discussions about getting $20 million of backing for this project, so having these pictures may really pay off in a big way! (Fingers crossed, Chris.) One of the "rules" that most scriptwriting teachers tell you is "Don't use any graphics--just the script!" That's fine in the conventional studio/network setting, but Chris' experience suggests that private investors don't know this 'rule' and get excited by good images. So the sub-lesson: sometimes it's good to ignore the rules.

Chris' strategy doesn't apply just to film-makers, there are ways to use images to help you sell all kinds of writing projects. If you're pitching a book, including some visuals (when appropriate, of course) can also help, and magazines and newspapers always give preference to article pitches for which the writer can also supply interesting photos or other graphics. And in a recent post I shared with you a video I sent to a publisher to help increase interest in my new book proposal--that's another kind of image that may be useful.

When Being in Print Is Being Out of Luck

Imagine that you have a publisher who tells you that, due to the availability of print-on-demand, your book will never be out of print. Great, right?

Not so fast!

Normally, when a book's sales slow down a lot, the publishers allow it to go out of print. The author gets to buy the remaining copies at a low price and the rights revert to him or her...meaning that you, the author, can take the book to another publisher who might be interested in slapping a new cover on it, or marketing it in a different way, and relaunching it. Or you may decide to update the book, maybe add new content, and go out into the marketplace with it once more.

Now consider the alternative that is proposed by publishers Simon & Schuster--and that has the Authors Guild up in arms. S & S says that as long as anybody can get a copy of a book via print-on-demand it's in print Even if years go by and nobody orders it. The upshot: you don't ever get back the rights to your book.

Other publishers have set a minimum number of print-on-demand orders that have to come in per year for the book to be considered still in print. That seems like a fair solution...we'll see whether Simon & Schuster can be won over to that point of view.

The Writer (Doctor) is In

An article in the New York Times reveals the popularity of books written by doctors.

Why do doctors often make good writers? Literature professor Kathryn Montgomery points out: "Doctors are storytellers. They spend all day long listening to stories and telling stories."

And, of course, the stories they tell interest us because someday they could be about us--about illness, courage, fear, and--if we're lucky--recovery. It doesn't get much more dramatic than that. That's also why so many TV shows are set in the world of medicine.

Some of the medical-themed books referenced in the Times articles look below the surface and expose the fallibility of doctors--a view we tend not to get on TV. Scary stuff, but fascinating, too.

If you happen to work in the medical field, this could be a great time to get writing. However, you don't necessarily need to be a doctor yourself to write about this field in either fiction or non-fiction. Research, interviews, and a dedication to accuracy as well as a sense of drama could also allow you to exploit our interest in this arena. (How to use your specialized background--or ability to research--is something I cover in my new book, YOUR WRITING COACH, now available in the US as well as the UK.)

Books: What Sells?

Would you have guessed that a book that tells boys how to skip stones, understand Latin phrases like "Carpe diem" and how to catch and cook a rabbit would be a big seller these days?

Me neither.

We would both have been wrong, of course, because "The Dangerous Book for Boys" has been a huge hit in both the UK and now the US. Written by English brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, the book has a retro look and feel, as well as content, that make it seem like you could have plucked it from a dusty shelf of a shop specializing in Victorian volumes. Fathers (perhaps nostalgic for a childhood they never had--let's face it, how many of us really did go hunting with Dad?) are buying the book, but by all reports modern boys love it, too. That's why there are now more than 400,000 copies in print.

Screenwriter William Goldman is famous for saying, "Nobody knows anything" (about which movies will be successful)--maybe that applies to the publishing world, too. For writers with an offbeat topic, it can only be heartening when books like this break out.

The Secret of Best Sellers

Shira Ross has an article in the New York Times, called "The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller." Her conclusion is that so far nobody has solved this particular mystery, but she exposes some interesting facts:

* Publishing is not a very profitable business. Publishers do very little market research and seem resigned to the notion that it's impossible to predict which books will do well and which will fail.

* The advance payment to the author often is an estimate of the first year's royalties (ten to fifteen percent of the anticipated gross sales).

* The publishers make much of their slim profit margin on surprise best-sellers (not on the obvious best-sellers by big names, because these cost so much to acquire). One example: "The Nanny Diaries," which sold for an advance of $25,000 and sold more than four million copies.

* Betting big on a previously-successful author doesn't always pay off. Example: Charles Frazer's "Cold Mountain" sold 1.6 million copies in hardcover. Based on this, he got more than $8 million for his second novel, "Thirteen Moons." The publisher printed 750,000 hardcover copies. So far only 250,000 copies have sold, which means at this point the publishers are out about $7 million.

What's in a Name? (There's creativity in spam)

My gmail filter is pretty good at sorting out junk mail, but I do have a glance at the list and lately I have noticed impressive creativity in the names of the supposed senders:

Fireplugs M. Roualt

Chicago G. Freeloading

Radiogram O. Wheaties

Merlin Percival (I think that might be him to the left)

Hurricane A. Ingrown

Prepositions L. Deposed

Flora E. Otter

Glenda Numbers

Feel free to borrow any of these if you're running short of character names--I'm kind of partial to Glenda Numbers myself...I think maybe she runs a beauty parlor...

FOCUS with Jurgen Wolff

I have a new book brewing, called FOCUS, and in order to help sell it to the publisher I added this little video to my book proposal. This is in line with my 'do something different' marketing philosophy--I'll let you know whether or not it worked!

What John Simmons Learned Underground

John Simmons spent a year as the Writer In Residence for London Underground (no, he didn't live down there...), and in an article in Creative Review, he revealed some of the lessons he learned from the experience of getting employees to express themselves via writing exercises and workshops:

1) Creativity is stimulated when you find a different place. For him, the different place was the Underground, for the employees it was a Quiet Room in which they could think and write.

2) There is security in privacy. He started each session with five minutes of writing that would never be read by anyone else.

3) The spur of competition can be positive.

4) Writers need confidence--too often teachers, family members and others knock it out of us and we have to re-discover it.

5) Constraints are liberating. The constraints of time and form helped participants break free of their inhibitions about expressing themselves.

Writers and Branding (Extreme Case!)

In my recent workshop on creating a brand for yourself as a writer, we talked about coming up with a Unique Selling proposition. I've recently run across an extreme example.

The man's name is Scott Ginsberg. One day he forgot to take off a name tag--"My name is Scott"--he had been wearing at some meeting, and he noticed how much friendlier people were. He wondered what it would be like to wear a name tag all the time.

I mean, REALLY all the time. So he did.

Then he started writing about it, and doing a podcast about it, and getting speaking engagements to talk about it...and eventually he decided the only way to make sure he had a name badge on all the time was to get a tattoo of it. Yes, that picture is real.

He's now making a good living from his speeches and his books and articles. You can find out more about the whole thing (including some good free downloadable material about writing and speaking) at www.hellomynameisscott.com.

You may not want to go quite as far as he's done, but if you haven't thought about what your USP is, maybe it's time.

Handling Big Scary Writing Projects

Do you have a big, scary writing project in mind? So big and scary that you're having trouble getting started? Writing on beliefnet.com, Stephen Ruppenthal had this tip:

"Just start. Don't think...get a pad of paper and pour out all the nagging resentments, fears, and worries that block you from starting an important project. Acknowledging feelings can enable us to move past them and really get started."

Even if you're not convinced, give it a try. Then use the same pad to jot down some of the key things you want to include in this writing project: it could be characters, settings, moments of action, lines of dialogue, whatever comes to mind. When you run out, stop. The next day, add to it. Keep doing that until you feel like you want to start writing--and then do!

Audio Books: New Strategies

Usually audiobooks are published after print books, but recently Mignon Fogarty, who hosts a popular podcast called Grammar Girl, reversed the process.

She found out that she was going to be on the Oprah Show before her print book would be ready. So she'd have something to promote on the show, she put together a little audio book in record time. The day she was on Oprah, the iTunes home page featured "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing," an hour-long audiobook that sold for $4.95. By the end of the week, they had knocked "The Secret" off the top spot on the chart.

Jon Stewart's "America" was also released in audio form ahead of the book and the publisher believes that this helped build a buzz for the print edition. According to an article in the International Herald Tribune, there are also an increasing number of audio projects that stand alone. They cite the example of a collection of Jimmy Carter's adult Bible class lectures, and a collection of audio-only Stephen King short stories (read by him).

It's another sign that there's a shake-up going on in publishing, and alert writers will be thinking of how they can turn these developments to their advantage.

Mark Twain's Rules for Writing

On the "Happiness Project" blog, I found a list of Mark Twain's writing rules. Apparently he included them in a rant against James Fenimore Cooper. Here are Twain's "large" rules:

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.

3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

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Still good, aren't they?