Archive for July, 2009

Check stock level and sales at Ingram

Call (615) 213-6803

Have your ISBN, and something to write with ready.
Make sure you enter the 13 digit version of your ISBN (starts with 978 or 979)

The system will repeat what you entered, hit “1″ if you entered it correctly.
Make sure this is correct or the information you get will be wrong!

At the next prompt, hit “3″ to get all the data available.

Posted in Distribution, Marketing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

I got an interview! Now what?

Your publicity strategy is beginning to pay off, and the interview requests are rolling in.

Before you take your message to the airwaves, here are some things to consider:

• Review the contents of your book, making note of the specific passages that support your messaging points.
• Your main message should be simple, short and memorable.  Be prepared to present both a 30-second and a 60-second version.
• Look over your list of suggested questions so you won’t be caught by surprise.
• Tailor your message to the specific audience.  For Christian markets, you need not traffic in “God Talk.”  Most in the audience are Christians, so you are “preaching to the choir.”  Those listening who aren’t Christians will appreciate hearing what you are saying without being beaten over the head.
• Whether the host is serious and hard-nosed or laid-back, take your cues from his or her tone.
• Match the personality of the people to whom you are talking. (The listeners’ personalities are probably similar.)  Studies show that sales increase if listenerscan relate to the person who is talking to them.
• If your interview will be conducted via phone, you will need to use a landline—no cell phones or cordless phones.  Choose a quiet room, and turn off call waiting (*70) before the interview.
• If the interview will occur on television, choose attire that is mid-tone or dark SOLID in color (i.e. purples, greens or blues). Pastels also work well on camera.

Some general things to avoid in any interview include:

• Do not constantly “sell” the message of your book or ministry. Make the interview interesting by providing usable or encouraging information about your ministry.
• Do not say “my ministry” or “my book,” but refer to the ministry name or book title. This helps the audience to remember who you are or what you have written.
• Do not cancel confirmed interviews unless it’s an emergency. Keep in mind that the station is graciously giving you time to promote your ministry and message, so you want to make the most of the given opportunity.

Think of each interview as a conversation.  The more interesting you are, the more interesting the subject becomes, the more interested the audience is in the book, and the more books you sell in the end.

Perhaps most importantly, be relaxed, be prepared, and BE YOURSELF!

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Posted in Engaging Culture, Interviews, Publicity | Comments Off

Covers Matter

[Meghan Dietsche] Goel [children’s book buyer for BookPeople in Austin, Tex.] understands why the publisher chose a real girl’s face. The 2007 Newbery Honor-winning The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt was “difficult to sell,” she said, because its jacket was simply a chalkboard. “We just could not sell it with that cover, even after it became a Newbery Honor,” she said. The paperback edition, by contrast, is faring better with a lively illustration of a boy behind a tipping-over desk, she noted. “Covers matter. No matter how much we’re behind the book, if the cover isn’t appealing it isn’t going to do well.”

From this fascinating article on the controversy over the cover of Liar by Justine Larbalestier.

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Getting Published Is Like a Horse Race…

Now that I have a few books under my belt people will ask me from time to time how they too can get published. That’s a hard question to answer because getting published is not very easy. One person from the industry told me once that getting published is like a horse race. Read the rest…

DeYoung, Restless, and Reformed posts a two-part series on getting serious about getting published, by Kevin Harney, author of Finding a Church You Can Love and Loving the Church You’ve Found, Seismic Shifts, and Leadership From the Inside Out.

Part 1

Part 2

Your thoughts?

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Posted in Publishing, Writing | Comments Off

Fabrication and the Truth

Telling lies for fun and profit . . .

The lie that tells the truth . . .

These are the titles of two well-known writing guides. They are riffing off an axiom of the writing enterprise, especially pertaining to fiction: that the lie told artfully is more true to life than the truth told blankly, frankly, superficially, “factually.”

Much has been made of how the subconscious works for writers and how they can tailor their efforts in ways that maximize the “downtime” input of that part of the mind. We learn to stuff a rough draft until it’s as full as we can make it, then put it away for a week or three so as to be fresh when we look at it again to trim and shape it. Same principle applies to editing a draft or reworking or rewriting it: Put it away and come back when the piece has fermented a while – or, that is, when we’ve fermented a while, after a period of time off (consciously) during which the mind has (unconsciously) continued to work on the material.

A lot of thinking may be available on how the subconscious functions as the source of fictional material and how to feed and exercise the imagination. Not that much on the subject has crossed my path. I’ve read and written enough to have a good idea how the process works, and once in a while I run across a writer whose experience and knowledge gives me more insight on it. Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block and Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream are fine examples.

The recent Alone With All That Could Happen by David Jauss (Cincinatti: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008) purports to be an unconventional reassessment of several aspects of writing, especially fiction writing. I stop short of a recommendation, because I’m not done reading the book; on the other hand, the first three of his seven essays are enormously helpful. I’ll follow up later on the question whether I’d suggest it as a resource and for whom.

Meanwhile, in the highest tradition of blogging, I’ll shamelessly borrow some sharp statements from Jauss’s first chapter, “Autobiographobia” (AU-to-bi-OG-ra-PHObia works for me; Chekhov coined the word). These statements, located on pages 5-12, themselves abundantly quote other writers. If you find what follows valuable to stimulate thought, reward reflection, or strengthen the flow of words, please let me know. For ease of digestion, I’m discarding both Jauss’s paragraphing and all ellipses. I prefer to lay out these excerpts as aphorisms, long or short, the way I mark or copy them and mull them over.

Perhaps the most repeated advice in the history of creative writing workshops is “Write what you know.” For writers who have a talent for negotiating between the demands of facts and the demands of the imagination, this may be valid advice. But for most of us, I believe, writing what we know can only result in nonfiction, whether thickly or thinly disguised.

This is why Graham Greene suggested that a good memory was incompatible with good fiction writing: “All good novelists have bad memories,” he said. As Robert Olen Butler explains, “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”

Grace Paley got it exactly right when she said, “You write from what you know but you write into what you don’t know.” You can’t avoid what you know – it’s who you are, after all – but if you’re trying to write into what you don’t know, you’ll discover things about yourself that you didn’t know. In short, you’ll discover your secret life, and so will your readers.

Here’s the paradox: Just as you reveal your secret life when you imagine others’, you reveal others’ secret lives when you reveal your own. As Donald Hall once remarked, literature “starts by being personal but the deeper we go inside the more we become everybody.” Everybody, c’est moi. And c’est vous.

Reading Chekhov and Shakespeare, and others like them, we inhabit their essential selves and dream their dreams along with them.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth.” Lionel Trilling seconds that opinion, saying “disguise is not concealment” but revelation, for “the more a writer takes pains with his work to remove it from the personal and subjective, the more – and not the less – he will express his true unconscious.”

Even if we know our secret selves (and that’s a big if), it’s almost impossible to draw our true faces for our readers merely by reporting what seems to be the “truth.” Instead, like Shakespeare, like Chekhov, we have to imagine we are someone else, we have to wear a mask; in short, we have to lie. For a lie is nothing more, nor less, than the means to make a secret public while still keeping it secret.

Writing about the secret life is not, then, a matter of revealing actual secrets but of distorting and altering them, consciously or unconsciously, so they tell a larger kind of truth. If you simply reveal a secret, at the very least, you will be false to the primary characteristic of the secret, which is that it is secret.

A secret that remains buried under the oppressive weight of silence increases in significance and value, the way carbon buried under the weight of the earth turns into a diamond. To reveal this “diamond” factually is to return it to carbon, but to reveal it in a way that conceals it – in other words, to tell a lie about it – allows the secret to retain the luster that silence has given it.

As this suggests, a lie is a form of silence, for it is a refusal to reveal the secret. But, as Wilde suggests, a lie tells the truth all the more fully and honestly by refusing to tell it. Or, as Emily Dickinson would put it, it tells the truth but tells it slant.

The secret cannot be kept and it must be kept. The only way to satisfy both demands, the only way the secret can cross over without being recognized, is to don the disguise of a lie.

Literature has its origin in secrets that the author feels compelled both to reveal and to conceal. In other words, secrets, and the secret life, generate literature.

Finally, one more that relates to the emotional power of strong fiction:

If Dickinson and Cavafy and writers like them had revealed their secret selves nakedly, we would not feel their inner lives so much as know them, and feeling is a deeper, more vital form of knowing.

I hope all fiction writers will find these thoughts as energizing as I do. It refreshes me to find such reflections expounded at length. They encourage me to let my imagination make up fiction that reveals a human truth and connects with the hidden truth in readers.

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Getting your self-published book on (local) store shelves

Josie Leavitt, owner of an independent bookstore and blogger for Publishers Weekly, posted some helpful tips on getting local independent bookstores to carry your book:

As the owner of an independent bookstore, I get approached at least twice a week by self-published authors asking me to sell their books. The world of self-published books has changed a great deal since we’ve been open.

I’ve amassed a list of what I’d like to see happen to make this growing area of bookselling as beneficial as possible for both parties. I’ve had some great success with self-published books. So if you’re an author, don’t despair, you can almost always get your book on the shelf. One thing I’ve changed is that now I’ll take one copy of any self-published book on consignment. This involves no risk on my part and it allows your book to spend some time on the shelf.  Just know that shelf space is at a premium. If after three months, the book hasn’t sold, it may wind up in the back room until there’s more room on the shelf.

One cardinal rule: if you want me to carry your book and you live locally, you should make an effort to shop at my store.

Do: Make your book look as professional as possible.
Don’t: Have a spiral wire binding (unless it’s a church cookbook), laminated pages or folders.

Do: Send an email with details about your book. I love emails; I can’t misplace them and I can quickly refer to it when I need to. And they give me an easy way to contact you.
Don’t: Come to the store unannounced and expect me to drop what I’m doing to review your book. There’s nothing that puts me off more than this. Respect my time and I’ll be much more disposed to look favorably on your book.

Do: Call to follow up on the email you sent.  This reminds to review the email if I’ve missed it.
Don’t: Be hurt if I don’t remember your book right away. We see lots of books. My lack of memory means nothing, other than I just don’t remember. It’s not a condemnation of your book.

Do: Try to leave a reader’s copy if you want me to carry a novel. I do try to read them and if I like the book, I’ll happily take several copies.
Don’t: Get mad at me for asking for a copy to read. I know it’s expensive to have extra books; if you can’t have a copy for me to read, then maybe an excerpt would be good. I can’t just have things on the shelf I know nothing about. So give me so info that can help me sell your book.

Do: Try to price your book within the market ranges. I know picture books can be expensive to print, but a $25 paperback picture book will be hard to sell.
Don’t: Not listen to your local bookseller’s advice. No one knows the market better than your local indie. Listen to their hesitations about carrying the book. See what you can do to modify the price. We had one self-published book that was really overpriced; we recommended a different printer and she got a much better price. As a consequence of the lower price we were really able to sell the book. I think by the time the print run ran out, we’d sold over 200.

Do: Think regionally.  You’re much more likely to get your book placed if it’s got something to do local region. We’ve had good results with a book about boxers in Vermont.
Don’t: Expect a Vermont bookstore to carry a book about California ponies….

Read the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

BelieversPress distribution customers: Booksellers can order your book from Ingram or STL Distribution on a returnable basis. They may prefer this to a consignment arrangement.

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