Your First Book Reading

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

You’ve been asked to do a reading. Start your thinking with these realities:

  • Some writers would rather paint walls than read their work out loud to an audience.  Some authors are so enamored with their own words that they tend to forget an audience exists.
  • Some adults love to close their eyes and sink into the sound of another person reading out loud.
  • Some adults close their eyes while another adult reads out loud because the whole experience is a bit uncomfortable.

Even the most polished reader performer needs to think carefully about the opportunity and ask a few questions:

  • Who will be in the audience?
  • What is the occasion?
  • What are the facilities like?
  • How many minutes have been designated?
  • Are there any special requests?

The occasion, audience, and setting really define the structure of a reading. Asking questions helps build a relationship with your host. A bookstore owner might like you to sit on a chair on a platform, to stand without a stand for your book, to use a microphone or not use a microphone, to keep the presentation to twenty minutes or to use a half hour followed by an open discussion. You’ll feel more comfortable and do better if you’re not surprised by the requirements of the store’s space.

An invitation can be ambiguous. For example, I was invited to present to a group of retired school teachers. The program committee debated whether their group would be more interested in the writing and publishing process with a short reading or would the speculative genre be a topic that intrigued the luncheon group with time for questions? Their final decision was delightful—as a group of teachers they had spent years reading to others and wanted to be entertained by a half hour reading with a short question and answer period.

Once you know the facts, you can better prepare your materials. Doing a reading is a great opportunity to market your book. It is an even better opportunity to market yourself as a writer. Adults who might squirm while you read will engage if you talk about your writing—why you wrote this book, what you learned while writing it, humorous stories about your characters or your family’s response to the story. They want to hear more about you and why they should consider spending the time and money to read your book.

This is about entertainment.  People could be doing other activities if they weren’t in a chair facing you. If you have a half hour, divide the time into talking and reading. Maybe you spend time setting up the book. You could talk about the main characters and a few quirky details about each then follow that up with reading an excerpt to support what you shared. You might talk about your experience biking to work in the city then read an interesting or humorous segment.  If you have the right audience, you might read a tender-hearted segment that touches their emotions.  Just remember: balance talking and reading.

Practice, both your comments and your book segment:

  • Be sure you have control of your timing. The audience is trusting you will respect their time and keep them engaged.  A reading that ends five minutes early is far better than extending ten minutes long.  If they want an encore, be prepared.
  • Control your voice. Mix up your volume and tempo. Listeners should be able to tell there are two characters speaking in a segment. Read out to the audience, not to your book.  Tape your practices and have a good friend give you constructive feedback. No mumbling, droning or yelling allowed. Think about listening to drive time radio or play by play commentators or a newscast. An audience needs your verbal clues to know how to respond to the material. You can be dramatic when you read. Surprise your readers.
  • Relax your body and look at the friendly people who have gathered. Small groups allow for individual eye contact and interesting two way conversations. Be personable. Just as in public speaking, keep your hands out of your pockets and avoid any annoying habits like pushing that one strand of hair behind your ear over and over.
  • While many writers prefer to read from manuscripts because they can increase font size and insert prompts or pauses, others have strong feelings that you lose a valuable marketing opportunity by not holding the actual book. If you use a printed manuscript, you might insert it in a binder and paste a copy of the book cover on the side facing the audience. You could also bring along a book holder and stand one on the podium or table.

Enjoy the discussion time. There are few better ways to collect readers’ reactions than to hear from them.  In fact, enjoy the entire opportunity. Take a bow. You’re a writer that people want to meet. If you want a different perspective, read the Toastmasters International advice on book reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self-Publishing Business Bonanza

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Most writers know someone who has done well financially by self-publishing. Maybe you have a friend who has mastered the Kindle business model and racked up thousands of sales after giving their book away free for a few days. Or you may have purchased a limited edition flashy tabletop book directly from a photojournalist. Once you’ve completed your novel, will you try to become a traditional published writer or jump into the self-published numbers? The Minnesota Book Publishers Roundtable invited a panel of experts to their meeting this week to explore how self-publishing is impacting business. Cevin Bryerman, VP and Publisher of Publishers Weekly, Tom Kerber, Chief Publishing Executive of Beaver’s Pond and Jenny Martin, librarian for Duncanville ISD, each represented parts of the books and readers continuum.

Self-publishing has become a new revenue line for many businesses within the publishing industry. While it costs nothing to publish on Amazon’s Kindle platform, most self-published writers do spend money in the process. Not everyone is comfortable using Kindle’s content loading program. Many need someone to design a cover. More should have their book copy edited. And there are places where reviews can be purchased. Finally, if the author wants printed copies, those must be purchased.

If a printed book is the goal, there are publishers like Beaver Pond Press which calls itself the first and only “mentoring press.” BPP defines themselves as a hybrid publishing model closing the gap between self-publishing and royalty publishing. BPP won’t print just anything. They take time to review a manuscript and draft a plan for making the work ready for press. Of course the writer pays for all the services—story editing, line editing, design, proof reading, cover design and such. Their products are handsome and costly. Kerber said most of their customers don’t expect to recover costs or make money. Their writers are deeply committed to having a high quality book to sell to a public as small as family or an audience as large as they can personally create. In Minnesota, Beaver Pond Press has helped a number of authors earn awards.

Promotion is a difficult challenge for every writer, but for the self-published a number of critical routes are blocked. Many publications won’t review self-published books, publicists prefer to work with publishers, large bookstores won’t stock books not available through a distributor, and public libraries usually won’t include these titles in their collection. According to Martin, most public libraries follow American Library Association protocol in building their collections which typically relies on reviews in publications such as Kirkus Review, ALA Booklist, Library Journal, the New York Times and Publishers Weekly or direct information from publishers. It makes perfect sense that librarians rely on these resources, unless you are self-published or even published by a small publisher.

Kirkus Review and Publishers Weekly have responded to the flood of self-published works by offering writers the opportunity to pay for a review in separate versions of their publications. For $150 to $425, they guarantee a professional review. These reviews are written to the same critical level used in their primary publication and could be great or awful. In the search for new talent, agents and publishing houses do read these indie versions as well as keeping an eye on Kindle self-published books with strong performance and high review scores.

The music recording world went through digital revolution and nothing has been the same. Big talent makes money, not from recording, but from appearances and tours and selling branded stuff. Indie bands produce music in someone’s spare bedroom and post their creations online. The market has split into slivers of genre to satisfy an international audience.

Hard to know where publishing will settle. While the market opens there are businesses hungry to tap into writers’ desire to publish. What is right for you centers on your definition of success. Some writers are big names in the Kindle world with no recognition outside electronic readers. Theyhave probably achieved their definition of success and smile each month when a royalty pay hits the bank. With plenty of Kindle forums and opportunities or exposure, writers can build a nice professional world in the ebook setting.

Self-published titles sell less than 100 books which says there are many reasons why writers make this decision. Maybe one hundred copies of a book about pioneer women in architecture for a select professional society fulfills one writer’s goal. Or hundreds of books stored in the basement for selling at antique conventions and from the back of the room at special events satisfies another writer.

Your definition of success influences what is appropriate to invest to transform your manuscript into a book. Not every e-book formats nicely into a printed edition which might push you toward a book designer. Covers help sell books so if that is your goal, a graphic artist’s time might be a good investment. If your breakthrough novel is 300,000 words and you hope to attract an agent or traditional publisher to bring your baby from the e-book world into bookstores, hire a story editor then a copy editor or a content consultant. You can spend a thousand dollars carefully and help position your work. You can spend thousands to have your book printed. You can invest more than the price of a new car to have boxes of beautiful hardcover books produced. There are vendors ready to provide whatever services you want to buy. If you want to market that book, do be sure to hold funds in reserve. There are folks willing to provide services to help you with that side of the business as well which is a whole different subject.

The bottom line is knowing what you want to achieve as a writer then purchasing services if that is appropriate. You could spend thousands for a cover design or a few hundred. Editing could cost you thousands or hundreds. Google Adwords is clogged with companies wanting to help self-published writers, but a stronger resource might be a local book publishers association or literary organization.

The publishing ocean is plenty big for lots of players. Just know how far you want to wade into the waters and come to the beach with the right equipment. Even a day at the beach should have some pre-planning.

Submission Seduction

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For about five years my goal as a rookie writer was to build a short story collection, one hundred fifty pages long, to submit to The Loft’s Mentor competition. A copy of my first submission is stored in the back of a drawer of short stories, all unread by anybody outside early writing group members or the Mentor program judges. I don’t feel exactly like I need to extend a late apology to the judges, but honestly, I haven’t found one story in that first collection worth revising.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is one of those books that should be read by writers ready to take their craft to a new level. While there is a certain amount of kismet in being published, there is also a whole lot of hard work, drive and insecurity. Writing about the joy and insecurity of publishing, Lamott suggests writers tape a line from Cool Running, a movie about the first Jamaican bobsled team, above their desk: “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”

Once you have been published, the game is on. You want your name to be on other book spines or on the cover of a journal. Maybe Lamott or Margaret Atwood or Stephen King don’t feel the need to prove themselves worthy one more time. I do know writers who have won national awards, who have ten books to their names, who are asked to speak at big events, who still collect rejection letters from agents or publishers. They sound a whole lot like I feel.

None of this stops writers from submitting. Contests, magazines, agents all have the chance to embrace our work or say no thank you. Maybe your hero drinks beer and the screening person has a bad hangover. Maybe the magazine published too many stories like yours about young kids dealing with their parents’ sexuality. You’ll never know. Your work is brilliant and needs to find the right person who appreciates what you’ve accomplished. None of this is personal. If you’ve done a good scouting job to identify an agent or publisher or editor who welcomes writing like your best effort, the rest is often chance.

To be a published writer you have to submit your best pieces somewhere. There are hundreds of magazines that want your work if they knew about it. You might get paid or you might have an afterglow that carries you through a current revision project. Visit a site like Duotrope to help match your work with the market or print out a list of the top fifty literary magazines and begin researching where you fit as a writer.

One lesson learned last year is to think ahead about future hopes for your work. The afterglow can dim if you give your favorite story or poem to a small online journal then discover it has become ineligible for most other publications. First publication rights can only be used once and even small journals want to be your work’s first exposure to readers. But if you’re building credentials, every publication is a diamond bullet point. So open your browser and build a plan for entering the game. Submission can be very seductive.

Women Without Makeup

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At a certain age many women won’t leave their home without a partial social mask called makeup. Maybe tinted moisturizer and lip shimmer. Maybe the whole deal with shadow and mascara and real lipstick. Even in the grocery store or out walking the dog, that minor skim of cover marks a woman as someone who cares about herself. And we won’t even mention appearing in public without filling those pierced ear openings. Decades in the professional workforce stamp expectations that are hard to erase.

So sitting around each morning with my beautiful book club women sans makeup produced a gentle intimacy like sisters at home together. Pale or blotchy, dry or oily, we were comfortable in our skin with each other. There were wonderful topics to discuss while lounging in bright morning sunshine and slurping at the first cup of coffee or second cup or third before anyone grabbed their concealer or powder. I’ve become sensitive to grooming of neighbor women who stop by to visit and feel honored by those who arrive with hair brushed and a clean, natural face.

When I started writing this, I thought it was a small thing, this vulnerability of being comfortable with others without wearing makeup. But even using the word ‘vulnerability’ implies some risk taking in showing a natural face, social messages that are defied about how women should look. I’ll let others take those on. If you enjoy the tubes and pots and powders, I understand. But don’t ever feel like you have to pass me by if you’re just looking like yourself without the polish.

A Writer’s Worth

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How much is a creative writer worth?

The facts are harsh. Writers are like job seekers paying a potential employer to review a job application. We’re a class of professionals who will work eighty hours in a month merely for recognition. Writers produce the content that drives a market dominated by a handful of large magazines, huge publishing houses, a very few e-marketers and an entertainment industry. But the cold reality is that content on the whole is the least valued part of the whole business. Many of us might envy farmers who get paid seven cents of the three dollars paid for a loaf of bread, not because it is a fair amount, but because a whole lot more people buy bread than books or magazines.

When the Justice Department filed suit against Apple and a number of major publishing houses, few asked how the action would impact writers. With royalties based on some percentage of retail or electronic pricing, there is a logical assumption that writers benefit from higher prices electronically. Typical royalty agreements pay a majority of writers 8 – 12% of net for mass market paperback books and 10% list price for electronic books. So assuming a 10% royalty, if one of my titles sells 500 copies paperback at $15 retail ($8.24 net) and 500 electronic copies with a $7.99 list price, my royalty payment would be approximately $800.

If that number is exciting, it’s important to know that the average U.S. traditionally published titles sells about 250 copies. Assuming all the copies sold are paperback, calculate the royalty, then return to the question: How much is a creative writer worth? It’s hard for a new writer to crack the best seller list and make the rock star bucks of writers like James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer or Stephen King. Not one of the top selling writers in 2010 wrote contemporary fiction. All are genre writers. Year after year the list remains relatively intact, dominated by what the American public likes to read: mystery, horror, romance and sci fi writers. It isn’t royalties that earn these writers millions of dollars, but the combination of royalties plus selling rights to production houses and speakers’ fees and such.

Jumping into electronic self-publishing is appealing. One friend recently sold thousands of a genre work and is earning nice return with minimal monetary investment. Reality knocks with the experience of two others who have sold less than one hundred e-books between them. Drawing readers to a self-published e-book can poses the same challenges as attracting readers to a new blog. Competitors number in the hundreds of thousands.

Maybe selling short stories will supplement the rent check. Unfortunately, the majority of literary publications pay in copies or recognition only. Scales at those that pay writers range from one cent per word to five cents per word. So a 5,000 word story might earn a writer a publication credit in their accomplishments, or a few copies of the magazine, or $50 to $250. Some say literary magazines have become part of academic inner circle where college writing teachers fight for tenure and promotion by grabbing space in each other’s publications. By the way, many literary magazines charge reading fees of three to fifteen dollars per submission. The fees help magazines pay the staff necessary to plow through the flood of electronic submissions received monthly during open reading times.

Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and many other books, has been quoted as saying: “I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.”

Revision Time

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Harvesting Ashwood: Minnesota 2037 will be delivered in one month. Before sitting back to admire the cover and enjoy the glow, my attention has shifted to revising the final book of the Ashwood trilogy. With a new website launching soon, promotion activities for June through August still in development and a calendar of short story submission deadlines, this demands total concentration. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible.

Writers all develop their own techniques for revising large bodies of work. The first serious revision of the third Ashwood book was completed in January. Since that time I have read the manuscript, collected a list of new material that should be woven into the story, and drawn charts of the various dramatic arcs in the subplots. I’ve let the story settle in my mind and spent time writing background material to explore characters’ motivation or expectation at various points in the book. Beside a huge binder that contains the manuscript, there is another binder with sections on new material, background information, fixes that must be made, and plot lines.

I’ve decided to use a storyboard approach to revisions for this book. Each chapter is summarized with character or significant plot developments highlighted. Next to each chapter summary are details about new material that could be included and notes about how this change would impact later chapters. Writing a thriller is more like cooking a dish where key ingredients have to be added in sequence or accepting the risk that dinner could be a mess. In contrast, writing contemporary literature may be more like blending seasonings and broth to create the most pleasing dish. Hopefully my storyboard approach will develop into a good recipe for the third Ashwood book.

Traveling Book Club

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Every writer must be a reader. I won’t back down from that statement. A writer who does not read is like a person applying for a driving license who has never sat behind the steering wheel. I have my book club to thank for exposing me to literature that would not have crossed my radar and keeping me reading when projects or writing could have devoured all free time.

This month we’re reading The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, an American writer with a shelf of science fiction including significant speculative fiction work. Bless their collected souls, the book club members want to be supportive of my speculative fiction work. Dick is fascinated by many of the same social and political issues readers will identify in my books. He passed away in the 1980s which shows that a dominating government, limited resources, and loss of freedoms are not concerns unique to any one generation.

Discussion without an arbitrary cut off related to everyone’s work schedule the next day will be interesting. I suspect we’ll talk about a whole lot more than books. There is a world of problems and challenges to chew through—families, work, politics, music, books. We’ll probably visit The Peninsula Bookman for a wander through new and used books. I’m guessing we’ll also visit the Bayside Tavern for good bar food and a bit of rowdiness. I know we’ll spend time walking along the shores of Lake Michigan even if it rains. The lake calls to our two Michigan and one Wisconsin native as a homecoming of sorts.

So be prepared Fish Creek. The book club is coming to town.

To Blog, Or Not

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This morning another favorite literary agency blog announced its end. “And so we say good-bye” by Jessica of Bookends Literary Agency gently closes the window that provided a peek behind the curtains that protect whatever happens in the world of agents. Jessica says she feels the power of the blog has faded in a world of Twitter and Facebook.

Insane as you might think this is, I agree with Jessica. Blogs are kind of like the New York Times of miscellaneous information when news crawls across the bottom of a screen fulfill some readers’ need for all the facts. Blogs are a guilty pleasure—reading about a topic of interest for a full minute instead of answering emails or opening Facebook or something equally as immediate. The Bookends blog had a rotation of writers and posted new materials almost daily. Wow, that’s like producing a new brochure about your business every week.

While I agree with Jessica, the reality is new writers are encouraged to blog, to build an online presence, and relationship with readers. When Nathan Brandsford moved from agent to social media consultant and published writer, he backed away from daily blogging because of new demands on his time. Maintaining an authentic blog presence is a responsibility that can’t be approached lightly. Nathan is back and writing to a different reader—a person who likes YA literature and reading instead of Jessica’s audience—individuals in earlier stages of their own literary careers.

During AWP 2012 blogging was all the buzz. Poets presented blogs that featured party pictures and new works, bookstores talked about blogs connecting them to their customers, publishers emphasized that writers had to have presence to attract an audience.

While presenters at AWP 2012 didn’t present solid statistic about the value of blogs, others in the marketing world have been doing research. Social Media Examiners claims there’s a strong correlation between how frequently a blog posts and the amount of traffic generated. They claim businesses that post daily will generate 5 times more traffic than those that post weekly or less. They have interesting diagrams to support their findings.

For writers that suggests blogging could be useful not only in attracting an agent or small press, but also supportive of continued marketing of published works. It would be wonderful to have harder data, but when has there ever been hard statistics about successful marketing for writers to follow? More people are buying books and there are so many more book titles to buy. In a market that continues to fragment building an audience requires more than one strategy.

Beyond marketing data, a blog does provide a writer with the opportunity to invite readers to peek behind the curtains of a fictional world. I am not Sally Dodge or Anne Hartford. This is Cynthia Kraack figuring out the world of writing.

 

Book Trailers

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Door County sunsetIf you claim to be in the arts and ignore the force of social media you can only stand to lose some possibility with that decision. Unlike an ad in your local newspaper or a poster pinned up behind the indie bookseller’s computer, online news about music and movies and books might be viewed by someone who lives on the other side of your town, your country, or the world.

Everyone is hurrying to blog or twitter, but this week I’ve been focusing on YouTube while creating the first in a series of book trailers in advance of the release of Harvesting Ashwood: Minnesota 2037. All the word work of writing must be captured in images and music. After proofing galleys and working on press materials, the trailer is a welcome opportunity to spend hours looking at pictures and videos while listening to many kinds of music. Between flipping through personal photos, free online sources, and places like iStockPhoto, days can slip away. Even knowing my own work, this visual process has revealed ways to think about the people and stories in Harvesting Ashwood. A former writing coach encouraged casting a book with actors as a way to develop realistic characters, but this is a deeper process than choosing Tom Selleck instead of Sam Shepard as a grandfatherly figure.

Of course the trailer is one part of a bigger marketing campaign assigned the task of attracting viewers in the crazy world of YouTube. Thirty to forty-five seconds with images changing frequently is not a lot of time to summarize 90,000 words. Since 20% of viewers click away in the first ten seconds and another 13% are gone by twenty seconds, the book trailer is not the place for a talking head (unless you have connection to someone like Stephen Colbert or Bono).

With Windows Live Movie Maker, it is possible to build and pull apart multiple projects. The final result will not in any way resemble the incredible “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trailers, but my budget is less than what that production company probably spent on masking tape. My intention is to capture the attention of a few hundred people over the next eight weeks. What I figured out about Harvesting Ashwood while working on the series is a gift that will carry into the final book in the trilogy.

Watch for the first trailer the week of April 9. Think about building a trailer for your next creative project. It’s a good way to think out of the box about your own work.

Blog Book Reviews

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A publicist with a national small press based in Minneapolis stunned the Minnesota Book Publishers’ Roundtable audience a few months ago when she mentioned sending hundreds of advance reader copies out for one book. The number she cited was equal to about half of a first run for a book published by a small, regional press. Beyond traditional media, she had sent copies to special interest publications and writers and a whole lot of literary bloggers.

Blog Rank slices and dices the top 50 book blogs in a variety of ways. If you don’t find one you like in their listings, you can visit Technorati where they tally over 16,500 book-related blogs. If those two sources don’t give you enough to consider, ask a few readers in your community what blogs they visit when looking for help in picking their next book purchase or library loan. Finding the best blogs to follow or query for a review is a bit like searching for a dozen blue gumballs in a bin filled with thousands of small, round candies.

Erin Underwood, a fellow graduate of the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program, writes Underwords, a literary blog. When contacted about the possibility of doing a book review, she deferred because so many requests come her way and the reality is that she has a business world job as well. At any time, she has review or book release commitments out six months. Her experience is similar to a number of the Blog Rank writers who temporarily, or permanently, have closed their blogs to book review requests.

With Bowkers reporting that well over 1,000,000 book titles were published in 2010, the majority self-published or in a micro-niche, it isn’t a surprise that bloggers are inundated. In some ways finding the right book to read can be as challenging as identifying one person on the ground when flying over North Dakota on a Delta jet.

The average number of books sold per title is about 200 units—usually to family and friends or individuals interested in a specific, niche topic. The trick as a regular writer, versus the block buster megastars, is building a broader audience. With very connection point in the retail channel struggling with fewer resources to sort through more content, a writer has to use multiple tactics. Occasionally a quiet guy like Paul Harding will hit it big with a first book like Tinkers, but most of us will work hard for our bit of media and blog coverage, key readings, and invitations to book-related festivals. It’s all worth the effort when you realize that your book has been bought by people in faraway states or other countries. People you don’t know.