Beyond The Book Book _ch2

Beyond The Book “On Writing” Draft 1.1 June 21, 2006 * Chapter 2 • MS page 1

Chapter II. Making It Real Knocking on a publisher’s door – better yet, breaking it down – can take moxie. How can your MS become an ex libris? I once attended a panel discussion called “How to Make Six Figures as a Freelance Writer.” I thought, “Boy, that’s pretty good. I want to go there and get the formula.” Well, the formula was – and I’m only slightly paraphrasing – “have a really great idea and get very lucky.” It sounded right out of Steve Martin’s classic riff on “How to Make a Million Dollars and Never Pay Taxes.” That’s not a business plan that anybody would invest in. Over the course of our Beyond The Book conferences, however, I think we’ve been pulling together the elements of a real business plan – for both writers and publishers. Some might ask, can you really have a business plan for writing? James Carville, the political consultant, was asked about the secret to his success and he compared his work to a dog trainer’s: to be a success, he said, you have to think like the dog. And in the case of writing of any kind you have to think like the publisher and think like the reader – not necessarily like a writer. In this chapter, we hear from a publisher, an editor, and a writer – and all are readers. They all talk about taking an idea from the abstract or the manuscript through its first rite of passage – to the publisher. We also speak with an editor who helps us understand how to appeal to people outside our own Anglophonic community – in her case, to Spanish speakers. Paul Dry started his eponymous publishing firm in 1998 after many years of trading stock options on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. At first, Paul Dry Books published out-ofprint works that Mr. Dry had read and loved. Now, he publishes new writing, books from around the world in English translation, and reprints. His list ranges widely: poetry, fiction, essays, and books such as The Verb ‘To Bird’, a look at the world of birders, and So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. The list conforms to the mission of his small press: “To find books that we and our readers will love and that will become part of the conversation readers carry on with their friends and with themselves.”

Beyond The Book “On Writing” Draft 1.1 June 21, 2006 * Chapter 2 • MS page 2 Holly Stuart Hughes is editor of Photo District News, the monthly international business publication for professional photographers and a sibling publication to Editor & Publisher. PDN delivers information photographers need to survive in a competitive business – from marketing and business advice to legal issues, photographic techniques, new technologies, and more. Under Ms. Hughes’s guidance, PDN has won two prestigious Neal Awards for Outstanding Editorial Achievement, awarded by the American Business Press. A Yale graduate, Ms. Hughes worked for Partisan Review and Grolier before joining PDN in 1987. She wrote the introduction to Twentieth Century Photography, published in 1999 by Carlton Books. Adriana Lopez is the former editor of Críticas: An English Speaker’s Guide to the Latest Spanish Language Titles, published by Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. She has been the spokesperson for the Association of American Publishers initiative on Publishing Latino Voices for America. Also, Ms. Lopez has been a culture and arts editor at Soloella.com and the editor of Latin Scene and Latin Teen magazines. Her own works appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and many other publications, and through the Progressive Media Project she’s published op-eds on U.S. and Latin American subjects throughout the U.S.

Neil Steinberg is a thrice-weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times who writes about politics and social issues and whose work is noted for its sharp humor and biting satire. He’s also the author of several books, including Don’t Give Up the Ship: Finding My

Father While Lost at Sea; Complete and Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners-Up, Never-Weres and Total Flops; and If At All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks. Mr. Steinberg has also contributed feature stories to Salon, The Jewish World Review, Granta Magazine, and other leading publications.

Paul Dry: ‘We are hopeful readers in search of the book that will liberate us from the limited, quotidian life we have.’ We started a book club when we were in our mid to late thirties and we needed conversation. Reading the book was, first, a way to converse; then, for many of us, the conversation was an excuse to read the book. It got confusing: were we meeting to read or reading to meet? That confusion was fertile because it kept us going. We’re still meeting. Hearing other perspectives was the interesting thing for me. The books become more rounded and “fuller,” and the great book really holds up and exists in your imagination in a way that it wouldn’t have if you hadn’t talked about it with others. That multiple perspective

Beyond The Book “On Writing” Draft 1.1 June 21, 2006 * Chapter 2 • MS page 3 enables you to think about the book in a creative way; it gives the book so much more dimension. And that gave me the confidence that I could read a book and imagine how others would read it, and that I could find a book or a manuscript that would be interesting to other people, whose interests were different from mine but who could share an affection for a kind of writing.

A Reader First, Then a Publisher We recently published a very small book by Gabriel Zaid – fittingly small, since it’s called So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. I want to cite two or three sentences from it: The reading of books is growing arithmetically. The writing of books is growing exponentially. If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them. Later, the author goes on to say: Reading liberates the reader and transports him from his book to a reading of himself and all of life. It leads him to participate in conversations and, in some cases, to arrange them as so many active readers do, as parents, teachers, friends, writers, translators, critics, booksellers, librarians, promoters.” That’s the claim reading has on me. I became a publisher in 1999. We’re all many things, but one thing for sure is, we’re hopeful readers in search of the book that will liberate us from what we think of as the limited quotidian life we have. A Book to Root For, a Book to Read Really good writers always hear their writing in some way, and they’re good to the extent that they listen to their own writing. But they can’t do the job of publisher, or, if they can, while they’re doing that job they’re not an author. A publisher, it seems to me, has to exercise a combination of judgment and taste to select a manuscript that he or she wants to root for. The next phase – the rooting and enthusing – consists of shaping the book so you can present it to the world in as attractive fashion as possible and find the likely readers for that piece of writing. Discussion of a book’s “success” often implies that every book should have a huge readership, and if it doesn’t, it’s a failure. Zaid mentions The Labyrinth of Solitude by

Beyond The Book “On Writing” Draft 1.1 June 21, 2006 * Chapter 2 • MS page 4 Octavio Paz, for which Paz essentially won the Nobel Prize. In the first ten years of publication, that book sold a thousand copies. From a publishing point of view, it was clearly a failure. Yet it eventually became the central book in the opus of this Nobel Laureate. Now, not all books that sell only a thousand copies in ten years will bring a Nobel Prize, but it seems to me that success in publishing must be measured by this elusive gauge: did the author and publisher find the likely readers for the book? Not all books have millions of readers; some have rather small markets. But books can exist with small markets. You don’t need to find a million readers for a book to get published and find its likely readers. That’s different than a movie: movies need big markets. The High Cost of Reading The physical cost of making a little book isn’t very much, but there is also the time spent finding the book, the time spent reading it, re-reading it, thinking about it. Then editing it. Speaking with the author about the best way to package it. That’s typically called overhead, but you could call it opportunity cost. While you’re looking at one book, you’re not focused on another. Small presses exist precisely because it doesn’t cost a great deal of out-of-pocket cash to publish a book. But the daunting task is finding readers who’ll make the job worthwhile – both economically and emotionally, because nobody wants to send books into the world that aren’t read. If a book costs $15 and you’re a lawyer or doctor earning $250 to $500 an hour, then the purchase of the book is trivial but the five or ten hours spent to read it begins to look pretty expensive. A Problem for Large Presses, Too Big publishing firms are as daunted by their task, too. They have a lot more commitment. They’ve got a big payroll they have to meet every week. They’ve got to sell these books. The trick for any marketer is: how do you find your readers?

We’re all readers. We all swat away advice that people give us about reading this book, or that book, because we have an elaborate sifting system of what we’re going to read and whom we’re going to listen to. I have friends whom I ignore when they recommend a book; I don’t know why. Other friends might whisper at midnight, “Gee, you ought to take a look at this book,” and the next morning, I want to get a copy of it. Publishers have a problem finding readers, but as readers, we find it a problem finding the books we love. There are a lot of opportunities to reach people. We have to be energetic and not get discouraged when we don’t because, in fact, we’re busy. We walk right by things that, later, we wish we should have stopped to listen to. [From BTB Philadelphia, December 2003]

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Neil Steinberg: ‘Not quitting is the most useful skill that a writer can have.’ The good thing about agents is that they work with you – at least my agent does – and help you form your ideas. I like to hear from people and to have people guide me, because sometimes they’re right. At the paper, my big frustration is that no one edits my stuff, usually. Believe me, I wish I would have someone who would ask me, “Hey, have you thought about this or that?” But at a newspaper, it’s like, “It’s done, great, and that’s it.” I spent three years selling my first book. I always point that out because most people quit before then. Not quitting is the most useful skill that a writer can have. I wasted about a year and half with my first two agents. Finally, I’m literally sitting in the Billy Goat – sitting in a bar – telling this sad story to a Wall Street Journal reporter whom I’ve never met before in my life. And he says, “Well, why don’t you send it to my agent, David Black?” And I say, “You don’t even know what the book’s about.” He says, “I don’t care. He’ll figure it out.” Sowing the Seeds of Your Book So I sent him my little idea, my proposal, 15 pages of every fact I had all pushed together. The good thing about proposals is they’re like the seed that your book sprouts from. You throw everything cool into the proposal, then, as you do more things, the proposal just spreads out through the whole book. Anyway, a week or two passed, then the phone rings. This guy – a real clipped, New York sort – says, “All right, I want you to do this, do that, do this and do that. I want you to write a bio and move it here. I want you to change this, I want you to change that. I want you to change the title: I hate the bleeping title.” When he finally pauses for a breath, I say, “You haven’t even said you’re going to represent me yet.” And he says, “If I wasn’t going to represent you, would I tell you all this?” And I went, “OK.” Within two weeks, he had three publishers bidding on the book. He was a good agent. He was this energetic guy. People say, “Oh, agents take 15 percent, don’t they?” And I always reply, “Well, which would you rather have: 85 percent of something or 100 percent of nothing?” He has been really instrumental in my having a book publishing career, I think, because he got this book, got it out, got – and it just – I knew he was always sort of sitting there waiting. And I don’t know if I would have written five books in the past 10 years or so, but I knew I could.

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Opportunist, Knocking I’ve always been a very opportunistic writer. It’s very hard to send something over the transom to some magazine you’ve never been to, with people you’ve never met. But I found that any sort of connection you may have with them can be useful. I wrote for at least ten years for a magazine called Mature Outlook. It was a senior publication. Sears owned All-State Insurance and they gave Mature Outlook to every person over 55. It was an enormously wealthy magazine. One day I was reading my alumni news – little notes about my classmates and what they’re doing – and I see that Lib Brewster had just been named editor of Mature Outlook. I had never met her at school, but I just called her up and said, “Hey, Lib, hail to purple, hail to white, congratulations.” We got to talking, and she said, “I’ve got a story to do. I want a story on senior housing, on all the different kinds of senior housing available.” I thought, well, how deadly dull is that? But it paid all right. And so I wrote a story: here’s assisted living, and here’s this option and here’s that option. I turned that in. And every other assignment from her was “go to Jamaica and interview Arnold Palmer.” They all were these fun, celebrity interviews. But I came to see the first assignment as a test to see if could do it. Step Up With Stepping Stones I wrote the Castle Meadows Newsletter at Franklin Park, the Castle Channel, I think I called it. It was a steel company newsletter, but it was a job and I would do it. I’ve found a lot of people who are waiting for The New Yorker to call, that type of thing. They’re not willing to do the sort of stuff that (a) keeps you alive and (b) is a sort of stepping-stone. So when you go to the Oak Leaves or the local Pioneer paper, you can say, “Look, here’s my church newsletter.” Then you take the clips from the Oak Leaves and you go to the suburban Trib and you say, “Look here’s my thing for the Oak Leaves.” Then you take your suburban Trib clips and you keep stepping up until whatever nirvana awaits. I was a freelancer for the Sun-Times for at least three years before they hired me. And they paid $125 – maybe $150 – for an article. But I learned I could do five of them at a time. I got “on the paper” because the union “grieved” me: they complained that there was “some scab guy out there who’s turning in five articles a week. He’s not on the paper – you’ve got to hire him.” It’s hard to write, but if you develop the facility to do enough of those $125 articles, they start to add up. [From BTB Chicago, May 2004]

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Adriana Lopez: ‘A lot of U.S. Latino writers who write in English have had to convince their agents that there’s a market out there.’ The Latino population is making a huge cultural and economic impact on the U.S. The census numbers just shout out, “Wow, there’s this potential market for television, for film, for music, for books catering to Latino tastes.” Beforehand, it was always in-between, “How do we market to Latinos?” Some speak in English, some speak in Spanish, some are from Mexico, and some are from South America or the Caribbean. We had been an unidentifiable market – different dialects, different sabor, different flavor. But since the numbers and demographics of the 2000 Census came out, everything became clearer. It takes numbers to excite marketing departments and make them say, “This market is solid; it’s not just a nebulous thing.” The publishing industry really woke up in early 2000. Imprints, book clubs and bestseller lists were launched, and there was a real effort to really push Latino publishing in Spanish and English. If you look around, you can see the signs that the Latino market is growing and affecting everything from Levi’s commercials to the episode of Friends where Jennifer Anniston throws a little Spanish into the dialogue to English-language films with an allLatino cast and a Latino director. It’s first-time marketing. But what’s interesting is: in this era where media are so strong, where you can live your life reading only Spanish-language papers, or any language you wish to speak, the acculturation process is not happening anymore. I saw a quote that said, “Latinos acculturating to a dominant culture isn’t going to happen when there isn’t a dominant culture anymore.” This is why there’s so much potential for a glorified niche market, especially for Latinos in Spanish or in English. Reading for the Love of Language

Críticas reviews Spanish language materials and writes in English because most of the buyers from Borders or Barnes & Noble or distributors are non-Spanish speakers. But, if you look at the names of the reviewers, many do not have Latino names. It’s amazing that there are so many librarians and professors who are sticklers about reading fiction or nonfiction in its native language. These are people who enjoy language for the sake of enjoyment, reading Vargas Llosa or Garcia Marquéz in the original Spanish.1 The memoir of Gabriel Garcia Marquéz, the Colombian author, was released in Spanish first. Knopf published 50,000 copies of the Spanish language edition. It was a 600-page 1

BTB3 Transcript.doc, page 4; considerable change needed here to tighten and (I hope) make her meaning clearer.

Beyond The Book “On Writing” Draft 1.1 June 21, 2006 * Chapter 2 • MS page 8 book in Spanish and it sold out in the U.S. in three weeks. Perhaps the majority of buyers were Spanish-language-natives, but I think a lot of them were people who wanted to read Garcia Marquéz in his original language. Needed: Expert Advice en Español In nonfiction, we’ve noticed that a lot of Latinos who read in Spanish are attracted to books by U.S. experts, usually translated from English. A book by a diet guru that is popular in the mainstream will do very well translated into Spanish. The classic pregnancy book What to Expect When You’re Expecting did phenomenally in Spanish. When publishers create a lot of publicity behind a book written in English, there is an overlap with the Latino community. The book is automatically being filtered into their system as being worth reading in Spanish. A study in 2002 found that Latinos own 39.5 percent of U.S. minority-owned businesses. But there have not been many books readily available written by U.S. small business experts for the Spanish language community. There have been business books imported from Spain and Latin America, but doing business with a bank in Madrid or Bogotà is very different from dealing with Citibank. Tips about business savvy are different. Now we’re beginning to see publishing houses cater to Spanish language readers with business books, or with other topics such as medical advice. Global Rights in Spanish Writers cannot rely on their agents for everything; they have to wake them up to the possibilities, or they’ll just sit there. A lot of U.S. Latino writers who write in English have had to convince their agents that there’s a market out there, and they want to know about getting translated, or getting global rights. There are rights issues when you talk about the Spanish language market. Usually the best thing to do is to try to get your book sold overseas through the Frankfurt Book Fair. If your agent goes to Frankfurt and sells your book, it could get distribution throughout Europe in Spanish, German or French. Eventually that book, translated into Spanish, will probably then get imported to the U.S. in Spanish and sold at your local Barnes & Noble or independent bookstore. Pick up a copy of Críticas and look at the reviews. Your health book, for example, may have the potential to sell another couple of thousands of books in Spanish. Have your agent find out what the publishing house is, contact the editors at Frankfurt or via e-mail, and you could get yourself rights in a different language. The Universal Language? Not Always There is this idea of a “universal Spanish” and, for the most part, it works in nonfiction, or on Univisión and Telemundo. But when it comes to fiction, there have been big disputes. Criticas tries to give names to the translators, so authors can look at the magazine and at the genre, and actually find the translators through the publishing houses.

Beyond The Book “On Writing” Draft 1.1 June 21, 2006 * Chapter 2 • MS page 9 If you’re hiring a translator to target the Mexican American community, and your book is nuanced with Mexican dialect, make sure you try to find a translator who knows that dialect. Latinos, especially in the U.S., are used to conversing with Cubans and Salvadorans and Colombianos, and we all kind of get along, and can always figure dialects out in the context. So don’t get hung up on this idea. But do get advice, and have a conversation with your translator about dialects.2 [From BTB Los Angeles, April 2003]

Holly Stuart Hughes ‘Success depends upon breaking out of that niche.’ Photography books definitely represent a niche market. Publishers who take a risk on a book that is primarily photography feel pleased if they sell 5,000 copies. And photography books, depending on production values, can also be very, very costly. There’s a reason that some of the favorite coffee table books you want to buy this Christmas are about $75 or more. But there have been some interesting successes where photographers have looked beyond just trying to put their life’s work between covers for posterity. That’s a dream of every photographer – a great legacy – but those books tend to be for a specialized market of people who are interested in photography books. Success depends upon breaking out of that niche. Sometimes that means creating a gift book that maybe you’ve sacrificed a little on the production of your photographs or the print quality in order to make it sell for less than $30; it will be one of those “impulse buys” that you buy when you’re passing by the checkout counter at Barnes & Noble or Borders. Storytelling Through Photography But an important thing to consider is that photographers are all great storytellers. They’re all in the market of pitching great story ideas to magazines or newspapers with, say, a photo essay. They’re very good at coming up with

2

BTB3 Transcript.doc, pp.7-8; as before, change needed here to tighten and clarify.

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creative ideas, or looking back on their archive and finding a great story within the body of their work they’ve taken over many years. It’s interesting to ask, “Is there a base here? Is there a built-in audience, beyond just those people who want a beautiful art object?” Joyce Tenneson did a book called Wise Women. Her photos are portraits of senior citizens – of beautiful, older women – and she touched on a real need that we have in society to see elegant and respectful portraits of older citizens. Then there is Passing Gas and Other Towns Along the American Highway by Gary Gladstone. He’s an experienced travel and corporate photographer who, in the course of his travels, had passed many times through Intercourse, Penn., and other strangely named towns. One town in Kansas was called Gas and he realized, as he drove out of town, he had just “passed gas.” So, like many photographers, he spent his free time between assignments seeking these places out, or he’d work around his travel arrangements on assignment to use his little extra time get in some portraits of the people who lived in these towns. He thought that Passing Gas would be strictly a humor or a novelty book. But, in the end, he discovered that he loved these towns and the people he met were incredibly charming, and – lo and behold – his book really tapped into American nostalgia for small towns at a time when the book-buying public was really interested in that. He was very successful in getting publicity – he got a phenomenal amount of newspaper coverage and radio interviews – and the book had great sales. Less Risk, Better Chance for Publication The more that a photographer takes the risk out of the process for the publisher, the more likely you are to get that book published. That means not just showing up with an idea for a book, but really working with a designer that you trust to bring in a completed dummy, a sense of the length and the kind of production values you need – and to really show them what it would look like. You might work with a writer to create the text, or provide an introduction or a foreword. It’s up to the photographer to think about the book in the broadest possible way as a real project with many selling points – not just as a book, but as an exhibition, or connected to some kind of lecture series if it’s of an historical or educational nature. The limitations and frustrations of working on assignment are a common story for photographers. You’re coping with the needs of your clients and the demands for lastminute changes of a pesky art director, or photo editor. But sometimes photography can bring you to a great place, an interesting place and there’s more that you want to explore. [From BTB Philadelphia, December 2003]

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