If You Build It--You Might Get Published!

Go back with me now, to the days of yesteryear, when books were published because they had interesting ideas in them, and “literary” wasn’t a four-letter-word, and publishers actually promoted their books and their authors. “Did such a golden time ever exist?” you ask? Yes, it did. But, it is gone forever. “Oh!” You reply in shocked disappointment. “Replaced by what?”

The age of visual media killed that “golden time” deader than Arnold Schwarzenegger's marriage (never forget the dangers of having secret families!). The word on the page is almost secondary now to other factors. Not only are an author’s age and looks key variables in the sales equation but, increasingly, publishers are now looking for something more: writers who will not only churn out pot boilers, but who also come prepared to be active players in the sales cycle. We’re talking about: writers with a “platform.”

“Platform” is the new jargon, buzzword, and lingua franca, whatever you want to call it, of the publishing world. Having a platform is, in fact, often the determining factor in whether a book and author get a publishing deal! No longer is it enough to turn a nice phrase or have something interesting to say.

Now you need:

• An author website with full e-commerce capability, subscriber login, SEO (search engine optimization) design, and fully interactive, flash-enabled functionality.
• An author blog (minimal hits per day in the hundreds).
• Reciprocal links to other blogs who reference author’s blog.
• Link exchanges with other websites to cross-advertise website/blog
• An author newsletter (preferably with 3 thousand or more subscribers).
• Web statistics proving hits, subscribers base, and link exchanges and reach/frequency of author’s over all web presence.
• Social networking tie-ins (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace)
• Podcast library of quick tips/advice w/ subscription base (available on iTunes, etc.)
• Video/book trailers
• Free list building products (video clips of advice, sample chapters, etc.)
• Guest blogging on related sites
• PPC advertising
• Article marketing
• Lecture/keynote speaking at writer’s conferences, publishing industry panels, and other high-profile writing venues

All these new goodies are in addition to the traditional promotional elements used by publishers and publicists: radio spots, readings, print ads, reviews, etc. But, more and more, before any of the traditional promo is considered, authors are expected to have their platform already in place and humming, and thousands of moon-eyed admirers flocking to their various electronic feeding stations. “We are Borg—resistance is futile.” It may sound like I’m lamenting the loss of innocence of some bygone age of author-centric, when-book-was-king publishing. Not really. Even before the Internet age publishing was cutthroat and tough-as-nails, and many an author was chewed up in the machinery of the book-promo sales cycle. The ironic thing is that the new-media age has actually opened up real possibilities for authors to become more independent and more powerful in the sales and promotion of their work.

Many authors are deciding to just bypass the traditional publishing companies and brand themselves on the Internet through self-publishing options like iUniverse or CreateSpace, or simply through setting up their own boutique publishing companies. Hey, if we have to go to all the time and expense of platforming ourselves, why not just take the whole publishing enchilada in our own hands and live and die by our own bad selves? Rather than a bane, I think platforming may be a boon to writers. And if you haven’t already figured it out—you’re reading part of my own platform right now. And yes—you will be assimilated!

Afghan Women Writer's Project - Heroines in the Making

The next time I hear a writer whine about how hard it is to be a writer, or how difficult their lives are that they can't find time to write, or how much struggle there is in being a creative person—I'm going to punch them in the nose. And then I'm going to make them read every single blog on the Afghan Women's Writers Project blog site.

You think you have it bad? You think working a job, raising a family, working with reduced income and peevish spouses who pout because you spend too much time writing are all too much to bear? Well, my dears, how about this:

• Being told by your brothers they'll cut your legs off unless you stop writing.
• Being told if you try to leave or escape then they'll beat your mother to death.
• Being told by the Taliban to quite your job because you are a woman and you shouldn't be working, and if you don't quite they will kidnap you, your, brother and your father and KILL EVERYONE.
• Being married off to some old fart in your village for six thousand dollars and then being told you'll have to stop writing OR ELSE.
• Being afraid to go to an Internet cafe to write because women aren't allowed to be in such a place, and if you are spotted then you and your family will have to move to a new city because you'll ALL BE KILLED.

Okay you poor, struggling artist ... do you still want to complain? God I hope not, because I'll have to punch you in the nose!

I'm frustrated and in despair for these women. But, I'm also inspired, emboldened, out-raged, in-raged, liberated and humbled by their courage and spirit. They are the heroines and the role models writers everywhere can look to for the promise of the future. Creative people have always been on the cutting edge of freedom and insurgency, both politically and spiritually. Male or female, we all have something to learn from what the Afghan women are teaching us. The word is mightier than the sword, or the burqa, or the Taliban. They might cut off our heads, cut off our legs, murder our families, and rape us (yes, they do that to men and women), but they will lose. They have already lost. The women writers of Afghanistan make this obvious.

These women are my sisters. And I'm honored to be a part of that family ... even if I have never met them, or may never meet them. Fight for freedom, fight for dignity and fight for voice. Support the Afghan Women's Writing Project. Read their blogs, donate money, help us get them computers so they can write from home using safe Internet connections. For a little money we can send a message to the dark forces of the world that you cannot silence human dignity!

Here is information you can use to act, I ask you to do what you can:

Blog Site: http://www.awwproject.org/

Fight the good fight and add a few sisters to your family.

Book Trailers: A Critical Part of Your Author Platform

Trailers have been around forever, even for books. But, they have traditionally been reserved for celebrity authors, or trust-fund-baby authors who could spring for them on their own. And, these were usually TV commercials or radio promos. Expensive, effective, and sometimes paid for by publishers in the bygone days when pubs actually promoted author's work.


Now, as the publishing industry morphs into something still unrecognizable and as the Internet continues to level the publishing playing field, the book trailer is coming of age. The ubiquitous author platform (that animal every author needs, but that few author's know they need) now has a new essential component: the book trailer.

If you haven't seen one of these animals, go to Book Trailers, a Blogspot blog. This site lets you view a host of genres and associated book trailers. Novelist Masha Hamilton did her own book trailer for her new novel, "31 Hours," which cost her a pretty penny, but this kind of exposure and advertising is essential now to promote one's work. One of my favorites is a trailer for the New Zealand Book Council, promoting a New Zealand author Maurice Gee's new book "Going West." This is one of the most imaginative and effective trailers I have seen. But, it also illustrates the growing challenge for writers.

No longer can a writer get away with a low-quality, bare-bones marketing campaign. You have to have high production values, which means spending thousand on trailers, websites, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gurus, and maintenance costs maintaining all these new platforms (gotta pay some techie to make fixes, changes, etc.).

So, herein lies the new challenge: when publishers refuse to spend money promoting authors, and expect the authors to fund this themselves as much as possible, how is a first-time writer expected to compete if h/she doesn't have the marketing budget to set up a website, develop a book trailer, hire SEO experts to get their trailer/site visible on the Web, etc.?

"The publishing problem has been solved," as one publishing luminary has said. But, with more control and power over our work, with the ability to now publish ourselves in a professional and polished way ... the old phrase "with great power comes great responsibility" takes on profound new meaning. Because, with great power and great responsibility also comes great dollar expenditures. I'm not complaining. The new directions and opportunities for self-publishing and the power of the Internet to level the publishing playing field are awesome and exciting. But, the message to writers is loud and clear: we must start seeing our work as a business, as well as an art, and become writer-entrepreneurs. The days of "big daddy publishing" picking up the bills and doing all the work are long gone.

We are now our own publishers—it's a good thing, but gosh it sure gets expensive!

Blogs-to-Books: Cashing in on the Blogosphere

In the race to monetize new media, new strategies are emerging every month (or so it seems). One that is paying off for some writers is to transform their blogs into books. Several well-known blogs have already capitalized on this trend: Julie & Julia, PostSecret, and Stuff White People Like. In the case of Julie & Julia, the author, Julie Powell, has cashed in on a major movie deal with the result being a wonderful studio picture written and directed by Nora Ephron and starring Meryl Streep. Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, eh Julie?

Since 2005, publishers have been looking to the Internet for new opportunities and grist for the pub mill. What they are finding is that there is a lot of "talent" out there. "Talent" here does not mean we're talking about high literature; what it means is that bloggers are producing high-concept, commercial, and marketable fare that adapt well to traditional formats—voila, profit center. Make no mistake, some of these blogger/authors are writing some fun, entertaining blogs. Julie Powell's is a great example of a personal journey worthy of any literary treatment. Julie's story would have made a great book right from the git-go. But, if you look at the other two blogs mentioned earlier, you'll see instantly how they could adapt to a nonfiction format designed for any coffee table.

It should be noted that when I say blog-to-book I'm not talking about the numerous companies (Blogbinders, Blog Books, Blog2Print, etc.) "out there" who provide fee-based services for you to "transform" your blog into a printed book. These are fine for vanity projects, or folks who want a down-dirty hard copy. NO, I'm talking about a traditional publisher and/or agent making a deal with you to get your blog published in a traditional way.

So, what do you have to do to transform your blog into a book? Or is this some backward step in media evolution? Should authors shun "old" forms like print media and look forward—always forward?

Consider what several bloggers told Mashable: The Social Media Guide regarding their recent blog-to-book deals:

Blogger: Ben Huh

Blog: A collection of photos and videos depicting various kinds of failure. Huh acquired the blog in January of 2008 with his company, Pet Holdings — of I Can Has Cheezburger? fame.

Book: Fail Nation: A Visual Romp Through the World of Epic Fails, released in October 2009 by Harper Paperbacks, is basically the blog in book form — except formatted like a travel guide with landmarks and cultural notes.

Public Reaction: “We’ve helped infect the Internet with cat fever and popularize the word ‘FAIL’ world over.”

Highest traffic point: “Every month, we currently have 220 million page views and more than 12 million people coming to the Cheezburger Network.”

How did the book deal come about?: “We were contacted by several literary agents and we pushed it off for a while until we finally had the time to do it.”

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Blogger: Pamela Slim

Blog: Escape From Cubicle Nation shows readers how to do just that — bust out free from those three gray walls and start their own businesses.

Book: Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur, released in April 2009 by Portfolio Hardcover, is a guidebook containing Slim’s best material instructing corporate drones how to strike out on their lonesomes.

Highest traffic point: “At it’s highest point, it was about 100,000 page views a month. I have never had a tremendously high traffic blog or large number of subscribers. But I have a lot of really nice readers who happen to be the kind of people who pass on my articles to others.”

How did the book deal come about?: “I got my current book deal when my publisher (Penguin/Portfolio) approached me. I had dabbled in the idea of writing a book before and had met an agent through another author friend, but the effort didn’t really go anywhere. Frustrated by lack of action and no creativity in coming up with a good proposal, I just gave up and went back to blogging. About a year and a half later, I got an e-mail from Penguin saying they were very interested in my writing and wondered if I could put together a proposal. Since they were my number one choice for a publishing house, I moved like lightening. We closed a deal in six weeks.”
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Blogger: Walker Lamond

Blog: A collection fatherly advice on how to be a good man.

Book: Rules for My Unborn Son, released in October 2009 by St. Martins — like the blog — offers a collection of advice from father to son.

Public Reaction: “My mom really likes it. And as it turns out, quite a few other people too. Within a few weeks of going online, I attracted my core group of a few thousand readers–mostly thanks to the Tumblr community, which (contrary to popular opinion of bloggers) is incredibly supportive, especially to new writers and ideas. I thought more people might call me out on being too earnest or square, but the reaction from most people has been really positive. You need a break from the snark and irony once in a while.”

Traffic-driving methods: “Tumblr. Without it I have no idea how anyone outside my group of friends would have found the site. But the staff at Tumblr and a few of the popular bloggers saw it and wrote about it, and I was off and running. Twitter has been a surprisingly good way to get more readers. The content on my site seems well suited for it, simply because it is short and a whole post usually fits in one tweet. It doesn’t drive people to my website, but the content gets passed around and I think that has helped strengthen the brand if you will.”

Highest traffic point: “That’s like asking someone their salary. It’s not a runaway hit like Penguins or What Fat People Like or one of those hot memes, but I think more people have read my site than say, the books of Ethan Hawke. So that’s something.”

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These are just three examples from the December 17, 2009 post at Mashable: The Social Media Guide. One thing to note on all these examples is the volume of hits per month (average). In order to get noticed by potential agents and pubs your blog will have to be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of hits per month. This is a lot of traffic! So, one of the success factors for getting your blog-to-book involves really savvy social network marketing strategizing on your part and really, really, really good SEO (search engine optimization). I'm going to do a more detailed post later down the line about steps bloggers need to take to leverage this process of book-to-blog for maximum results. I'm working with a friend on turning her terrific blog into a book, as we "speak," so I'll have some real-world experience with this in short order.

In the meantime, my take on this is pretty simple. Worry about print in ten years, not now. Right now, everything is on the table. Books are not going anywhere, but they are going to move into the background and lose their primacy as first-and-only choice for readers. As e-books evolve and become more viral, their print versions will become the aftermarket, rather than the other way around. But, right now print books are selling very well (not fiction!—nonfiction). Leveraging this fact is only smart if a blogger has a marketable idea that will translate to a printed page.

It's not enough to just write your clever blog. You have to market it, make it as viral as H1N1, and build your base into millions of hits. This means using every social media trick in the book—pun intended. Blog-to-book—one more window opens for writers, and it's a good thing.

Twitter-Lit: Pushes to Become Real Lit!

Would you pay 30$ for a hardcover book of tweets from your favorite Twitter-lit author? (See my earlier posts on Twitter-lit.)

Apparently, there are a lot of people who are interested in doing just that. In fact, an enterprising web-strategy agency called Definitely Something has started a project called TweetBookz, designed to help twits (excuse me ... I mean tweeters) to self-publish their Twitter-lit and then sell their labors in the form of an actual book.

In an interview with Mediabistro's Galleycat, Definitely Something's Rob Goldstone gave a little background about their effort:

"Most of our work is spent on sites like Twitter, on behalf of our clients, and one day we started joking around with the idea that it would be cool to see all our writing in a more permanent form ... So far the reactions have been very positive, with early book orders and lots of blogs picking up on the story. We hope its just the beginning and are ready for the holiday shopping boom."
(Mediabistro 2009, Galleycat Interview with Rob Goldstone)

Regarding who might want to do this, Goldstone commented:

"Others may create books of the tweets they consider their funniest or most inspiration. Some may go to the extreme and pick only tweets about the basics of life such as what they ate or what they did that day. We'd also love to see companies active on Twitter ordering their own TweetBookz as gifts for their employees or customers."
(Mediabistro 2009, Galleycat Interview with Rob Goldstone)

So, what does it all mean? This is not just an enterprising company leveraging some flavor-of-the-month web service. This effort may end up just an "expensive mistake," but it might also be the first of a trend that grows. Self-publishing on the web is ubiquitous and growing exponentially every month. As a publishing luminary said, "The publishing problem has been solved." Meaning, if you want to publish, you are no longer at sufferance to the traditional publishing companies. Literally anyone can cheaply and effectively publish their work, and find an audience.

Obviously, quality control is an issue, and herein lies a major role played by publishers—they filter the flotsam and jetsam. But, now you can hire the same QA services from a subsidy publisher, or third-party editors (another area growing leaps and bounds). The changing role of publishers is a whole, complex post in and of itself, and maybe one day, when I feel like typing a lot, I'll do that post, but for now the point is that Tweetbookz is another example of how it is all changing. Creative people are leveraging technology to increase opportunities for writers—and that's enough to make us all sit up and take notice.

Will it be a flash in the pan? Who knows and who cares. I'm all for anything that gets people writing, expressing themselves and finding their voices, even if it means doing so in 140-character tweets.