Update on last week's William Morris Endeavor Agency event

I've been running around all week with no time to blog (mostly working on the article, and blog posts will come soon), but I had to stop and say what an amazing time we had on Thursday with Eric Lupfer as our guest. The praise has continued to pour in for his candid talk and his accessibility afterward, waiting patiently to speak with a line of faculty and guests. Thank you to everyone who came and made it such a full house, and thank you to Eric who was such a great sport.

Want to know what an editor thinks? Ask an editor.

Some authors spend a lot of energy trying to guess what editors want. They think about it, read books about it, ask their mentors, and ask one another. The people they tend not to ask, however, are the editors themselves, often out of a misplaced sense of propriety.

Here are some typical misconceptions:

* That you only get one chance to query an editor about your book. Not true! You asked a simple question, you didn't key someone's car or threaten their families. You can certainly ask again in the future, especially if you have significantly re-thought your project.

* That you are "out" at a press for future books if they turn down one of your pitches now. Again, nonsense! Most editors won't even remember who you are if it never got past the inquiry stage.

* That it is easier to publish at a lower-tier house than at a higher one. Actually, the opposite is sometimes true. There are exceptions, and prestige is a relative thing depending on your field and the standards for promotion at your institution, but many editors at higher-tier houses report frustration that they sometimes never even see certain projects because of erroneous author assumptions about how unapproachable those editors must be.

* That you have to hold your mouth exactly just so and submit one particular way versus another or they'll never look at it. In reality, any good editor is happy to consider a good pitch, however it arrives. Some of them don't even know what's on the publishing house website about the "rules" of submission. Most are fine with an e-mailed inquiry, and 85% of the editors I speak to want to use e-mail for everything... most don't want paper at all, although a minority still do. The ones who do will tell you after you inquire.

The bottom line is to let editors decide what editors want, and the only way to do that is to ask them. Learn to write amazingly effective, to-the-point inquiry letters that say succinctly what you're working on, how you think it fits with their stated list/press/vision, and why you're the perfect person to write this now. Then get those letters out there, to editors you admire and would like to work with. The less you second-guess editors and the more you give them the opportunity to think for themselves about your research and whether it will work for them, the better.

Oh-so-true illustration from that old internet classic, i can has cheezburger.

Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press

This is so useful for academic authors, and I hope to find more of these soon. Don't forget to check out Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press in an earlier post here. Booklab believes (okay, I believe, but I like speaking as Booklab -- so authoritative) that there is no substitute for knowing actual editors at actual presses. More about Lindsay Waters here.

Booklab Loves Sage Publishing Ltd.

Two titles that faculty have found useful in Booklab come from Sage Publishing, Ltd. Both Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks and Designing Research for Publication have been of enormous benefit to authors. Have a look at some of these exciting titles (exciting if you love research, writing and publishing, that is).

Just one note to the publisher if they happen to read this. Spend some moola to sexy up the book covers a bit! For example, we had no idea until we got deeply into Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks that Wendy Belcher is a faculty member at Princeton, or that she was a journal editor for eleven years. This important information should be on the book cover, along with blurbs from opinion makers among faculty, and more specific cover art. This is no slam to your artists (designing books is challenging, and I applaud the professionals who do it well, especially given time constraints and tight budgets), but such strong information can really sell a book title. Credentials count in this business, so let us see them!

Brilliant series from Duke University Press!

This series is a genius idea, and I'll post all of the installments if the press makes more. This is Duke University Press's Editorial Director, Ken Wissoker, explaining how it works at Duke:

Publishers in the news

The Washington Post has run an article about one of my professors from undergraduate school, and his elegant independent press. I didn't know that he occasionally typed on manual typewriters. My personal quirk is sometimes using an old IBM correcting Selectric II from the late 1970s, but an actual manual typewriter is even more startling.

In these days of print-on-demand publishing that creates good-looking books in small batches, running your own press doesn't seem like such a big deal, but he was doing this decades ago when a publisher still needed some sort of financial backing, or at least a significant trust fund (the latter being the genesis of many New York houses); it was and remains quite an accomplishment. You can visit the press here.

A book you must read if you love books

Oh, what a wonderful book this is. If you want to understand publishing history from an insider's point of view, then find and read the excellent The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors by Al Silverman. Here's a NYTimes book review. Milly Marmur suggested it, and as in all things, she was of course correct. Maybe I love it more because the first chapter is about my publisher for two books, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and FSG has gone through some very sad, even agonizing times this month, or maybe it makes me feel nostalgic for a publishing past I never had the privilege to know (also well-documented in At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf and Another Life: A Memoir of Other People by Michael Korda), but this is a don't-miss-it gem. Seriously, drop everything.

Georgetown University Press named one of the best places to work in publishing

Congratulations to our colleagues at Georgetown University Press. Their charming shop on Prospect Street was recently named the third best book publisher to work for by Book Business magazine. Although Booklab and Georgetown University Press are not officially connected, we consider them friends and colleagues, and I certainly agree that their director, Dr. Richard Brown, runs a terrific organization.

Acknowledgement and thanks to Rich Byrne as well

Richard Byrne, who was a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education before becoming the Editor of UMBC Magazine, the alumni publication of the University of Maryland Baltimore County (where I once joined a panel on publishing!), had also discussed writing an article about Booklab a couple of years ago. At the time we were too new... there wouldn't yet have been enough to say. I'm grateful to Rich for suggesting the piece, however, and then for introducing his Chronicle colleague Jennifer Howard to me/us after he moved on. She did such a brilliant job, yet of course I'm curious what his take would have been as well. You can read his blog here (it is also in the blogroll).

Am I holding out on you?

A while back I promised terrific new information from the university presses that I visited in New York: Columbia and NYU. Then I shared some of it, but didn't keep going. Why not? The answer is somewhat complicated, but it boils down to a lot of the information being traceable back to the individuals who shared it, even if I keep identities private. When I wrote and said "Can I blog about this?" the answer came back "In this instance, I'd rather you didn't." Normally people are fine when I blog about books using material they shared, but when a university press editor trusts you enough to offer candid industry information in private, it is understandable that she or he wouldn't want to later see it in a public forum when it would be easy enough for an insider to guess who said it.

I don't kid myself that this blog has more than its seven dedicated readers, but all seven of you are bigshots, and more than one of you could potentially know who I'm writing about. So I'm pondering how to reveal some tidbits. What I'll probably do is visit two more presses (Cambridge NYC and Norton) soon and then create some composite stories based on getting verification there for things I learned elsewhere. Once you have five people giving you a variation of the same odd phenomenon, then it's not gossip. It's news.

The bloodbath layoffs in publishing this week

Brave leaders figure out how to keep the team together when times get tough. They encourage everyone to think creatively about how to turn things around. They set an example of both thrift and foresight, and they act like heroes. They remember that publishing was never primarily about the money, and they resolve to get through temporary hard times with their integrity and organization intact.

They do not lay talented people off in December in a blistering economy to fend for themselves, precisely at a time when a lot of similar talent is hitting the streets looking for the same jobs.


NB: I speak, as always, for myself, not for any organization or other individual.

Great book for television writers

Okay, I'm no one to talk, given that I haven't had a television since 1988. Whole programs have come and gone, such as The West Wing or the various CSI shows, of which I never even saw one episode. So why am I blogging about a TV writing book? First because many of the authors who come to see me think that they might be good at writing for television or film, and many are probably correct. Second because I always want to applaud a how-to book that is actually well-written and the author of which is a genuine and successful practitioner, rather than someone who washed out in the field and now purports to teach it.

The TV Writer's Workbook: A Creative Approach to Television Scripts is written by Ellen Sandler, who worked for a long time on Everybody Loves Raymond as a writer and producer (she was nominated for an Emmy), and who has other programs to her credit. Her IMDB bio is here. She now teaches, which I roughly interpret as "rakes in fat consulting fees," which makes sense. Her book is warm and funny, but it gets down to business quickly, and by page 50 or so you really know what you're doing.

I read whatever how-to-write or how-to-publish books I can find, and 90% of them are unnecessary. The remaining 10% are quite good, and there is a top 1-2% that I consider essential. This appears to be one of those books (I welcome comment from people who actually work in television to tell me if this is accurate).

Are you still arguing with your publisher over paperbacks?

One of the many interesting discussions I had during visits to NYU Press and Columbia University Press this past week had to do with academic authors who want a paperback version printed at the same time as the hardcover version. They usually request this because university press hardcovers are notoriously expensive -- sometimes near or at $100 for a single copy. The academic authors rationalize this demand by saying they want their students to be able to afford the book.

However, the demand works against the author almost all of the time. First, most libraries will often acquire the least-expensive available version of the book, so many will buy the softcover if it is offered simultaneously with hardcover. Result? Not only does the press earn less money, but the author receives lower royalties and the book ages out on the shelves more quickly if it is used. Second, by blocking the publisher from earning more, the author chips away at the university press's already razor-thin profit margins. This has the net effect of making publishing more expensive overall, and (surprise) it increases the likelihood that hardcover prices will remain high. If academic authors really want to see hardcover prices decrease, one consistent way to do it is to work with the university press publisher to help them publish the book in an economically sustainable way.

There is a win-win solution that most publishers are willing to offer, but few authors know to request. If you really want your students to be able to buy the book economically, coordinate with your press to provide copies to you or to your university bookstore (if the bookstore will cooperate) that reflect the deeper author discount, which is sometimes as much as 40% or more. This can bring the price of the hardcover down close to where the paperback would have been priced anyway. Result? Your press makes its money on institutional sales, you get cheaper-priced copies for your students, and your students get a nice hardcover rather than a paperback.

Tidbits to come...

On Thursday and Friday, October 30 and 31, I visited two academic publishers in New York: NYU Press and Columbia University Press. It was an amazing trip, punctuated by a wonderful evening at Broadway Baby hearing Jan Constantine and Sue Elicks sing. Jan serves as General Counsel for the Author's Guild, but what many don't (yet) know about her is that she performs cabaret at various venues in New York, and that she and her singing partner are amazingly wonderful alone and together. I went with literary agent Milly Marmur, and we had so much fun.

You won't believe what I learned about publishing from visiting the two presses. I have visited university presses since early 2006, going to The University of Chicago Press, Northwestern University Press, The University of Arizona Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Oxford University Press in addition to these two most recent visits. But every trip is different, and the conversations vary as publishing evolves (and yes -- things can change just that fast). I came home with five remarkable trade secrets that I'll share here, one blog posting at a time, starting tomorrow when I'm better rested.

Book acquisitions are usually group decisions

So many authors come to me with the fantasy that one, sole editor will read their work (usually at a desk in a quiet office), make a decision, and act on that decision with a yes or a no. They're surprised when I say that in book acquisitions this almost never happens, and in article acquisitions it seldom does. First, the work is often glanced over or culled by assistants, even when the work is addressed to the editor (although most editors make a point of at least looking at everything that is addressed to them personally and some won't use assistants for this work). Second, few editors sit in a quiet room and read in a leisurely way at a desk. There is usually a lot going on, there are multiple manuscripts to review, and editors frequently take work home. Third, the vast majority of editorial acquisition decisions at a publishing house are made in a group environment. It's not that editors don't have power -- many of them have a lot of it -- but that publishers are group organisms where communication is vital, and where the opinion of colleagues is often highly respected. Most editors like to chat acquisitions over with colleagues, and at almost all houses some sort of conference is mandatory.

This month's Poets and Writers magazine (one of the oh-so-few writer's magazines I find truly energizing) has a helpful interview with Chuck Adams, the acquiring editor of Sara Gruen's bestselling novel Water For Elephants at Algonquin Books. The article is noteworthy because it is so authentically written (hard to define, but it sounds right for trade literary publishing, as so few articles in the writer magazines manage to do), and I noticed one good reason why -- the author is Jofie Ferrari-Adler, who is an editor at Grove/Atlantic; he used to be an editor at Viking. The series is called "Agents and Editors," and I recommend it highly. Here is the relevant part from the interview about how Water For Elephants was acquired.

"I started reading it and immediately just loved it. I gave a copy to Ina Stern, our associate publisher, on a Friday. We both came on on Monday and went, 'Oh my God! We have to have this book.' It was the first and, with the exception of one other book I've brought in, the only time that every editor here and the publisher said 'We have to have this book.' Usually there's one naysayer, and sometimes several, but in this case everyone agreed."

Notice how the editor loved it, but still immediately discussed it with the associate publisher, the team at the editorial meeting, and the publisher. This is not usually a mother-or-father-may-I kind of discussion when you are dealing with seasoned professionals, but rather a combination reality check and group coordination to see what others have planned as well. Books and their authors may come and go, but the editorial team has to work together far beyond the influence of one publishing experience. The acquisition has to fit with the editor, the house, the list (what the editor has published overall -- a kind of editorial identity), and the catalogues. It's not that things are matchy matchy, and many times they aren't. Editors break their own rules often, and houses often publish titles that represent departures for them. But discussions almost always preceded acquisitions, especially when money is involved, and your submission may have an interesting life of its own at various meetings or in e-mail forwarding within any given house.

Weedle tidbit

Ploughshares magazine at Emerson College has a new editor who used to be at a university press. Here's the blurb from their website: Ploughshares is proud to welcome our new Director / Editor-in-Chief, Ladette Randolph. Prior to her move to Emerson College, she was associate director and humanities editor at University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of a short story collection, This Is Not the Tropics (winner of a Nebraska Book Award), and the editor of two award-winning anthologies: A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers and The Big Empty: Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe grant, the Virginia Faulkner Award, and her work has been reprinted in Best New American Voices. Her novel, A Sandhills Ballad, is forthcoming this spring from University of New Mexico Press.

Ploughshares is certainly on the list of journals to write about in the occasional series.

The shown cover is from the Winter 1992-93 issue, where Georgetown poet David Gewanter published "Conduct of Our Lives."

The Book Babes have a new book!

Oh, I'm so intrigued by the Book Babes. These erstwhile Floridians are controversial, smart, and they've been writing about books long enough to have a lot to say. One little-known fact about your own Book Blogger is that besides being a Washingtonian passionately in love with Georgetown (both the university and the community in which I live), I'm also a Floridian. My family has lived on the Gulf Coast for decades, and I consider myself a citizen of that wonderful state where I have lived off and on, and where I visit at least six times a year to loll on the white sand beaches and sip the tasty margaritas. I have long admired the Book Babes and even once wrote a review of the book Lincoln and Whitman for The St. Petersburg Times before Book Babe Margo Hammond retired from her celebrated role as its book review editor.

Anyhoo, they have a forthcoming book-about-books with the unsurprisingly provocative title Between the Covers: The Book Babes' Guide to a Woman's Reading Pleasures.

Hey Book Babes! If you want to come to Book Fair at the National Press Club on November 18, we'd love to have you! We have an all-star lineup and you'd be perfect... drop me a note (I'm this year's chair), and we'll get you in.

The book journal, part seven: Knowing editors and agents as people

Getting involved in the book industry is one way to establish yourself as an author. Even if you have already published a book or several, I find that authors can sometimes be book industry loners when it is just as easy to make these vital connections. This linking can mean going to academic conferences and meeting successful editors in your scholarly field (I'll share my trademark pub meeting method later), or hosting university press editors at your campus for book talks. However you go about it, there's no substitute for befriending members of that group of superb professionals before you need them. Of course, friendships alone won't get you an academic book deal, but once you have a scholarly product worth selling, these esteemed colleagues can be pure gold when it comes to helping you take the next step.

This worked for me in an interesting way. This weekend I signed with an agent, and I wasn't even looking for one. She is actually my second agent -- my first was a wonderful man who represented me from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s when my writing was going a completely different direction. Back then I dreamed of mainstream media success (newspapers, radio, television), but when it began to happen I discovered that I missed the academy and traditional scholarship, so I completely switched direction (name change, all of it). The agent remains a good friend, but he manages a different type of literary career than the one I'm building now. We let each other go in the kindest way possible -- and I have since sent him other authors.

This new agent as of two days ago is an industry veteran just like the first, but she is more on the scholarly side of the aisle, and she represents a number of academics. By coincidence she is also very good friends with the previous agent. Usually scholarly books don't make money, which is why I didn't expect to find representation, but she has always kept a few of us on her list for (I guess) the prestige factor (something quite valuable in its own way).

The most interesting part of this, however, is that I didn't ask her to represent my book. I didn't even ask her to read it! We met through this business and bonded as colleagues and eventually friends. We enjoy one another's minds and spirits outside of work-related matters, but of course we also see eye-to-eye on most of those. When she asked to read the sample chapter and proposal of the book I've been blogging about here, I sent it to her thinking she'd have a glance and tell me what university press editors might want it. When she actually offered to represent it, as the Brits would say "I was gobsmacked." Add to that I was honored, pleased, shy about it, you name it.

Surprise connections like this one are what I also want for some of you as readers of this blog -- literary friendships that may grow into wonderful partnerships (I'm well aware that others of you have more industry connections than I could ever hope for... but I'm speaking to those of us who can be more reticent about such matters). So often book writing devolves to an exercise in jumping university press hoops for tenure or full professorship, or trying to satisfy trade editors in order to make money, but books can connect people in larger ways -- they can link authors, presses, agents, and editors, all of whom (we hope) love books and the creation of them. The best agent will care about your career, and that can only happen if she or he gets to know you dimensionally. The nervousness and sometimes neediness that so often accompanies agent submissions can be antithetical to a comfortable and easy collaboration.

I highly recommend it this way instead -- get to know many editors and agents as people, and develop your book at the same time. Then when you have something to share, you'll have a number of colleagues from whom to choose, and one of them might just step forward and say "Please, allow me . . ."

Editor and Publicist Cary Goldstein of TWELVE Comes to Booklab

On September 4 at 12:30, Director of Publicity and Acquiring Editor Cary Goldstein at Hachette's estimable imprint TWELVE will be our guest at a faculty roundtable to discuss how academic authors can become quoted experts in today's voracious news climate. How do serious works (history, investigative journalism, politics, etc.) rise to the top in the age of the internet and 24-hour news? From framing your nonfiction book proposal to anticipate this question, to the differences between the academic and commercial book markets when it comes to writing your work, Goldstein will analyze nonfiction from both of his unique perspectives: as an acquisitions editor, and as a senior-level publicity strategist. He'll also discuss TWELVE and what distinguishes its editorial and promotional approach from other houses. Faculty are welcome and lunch will be served. RSVPs are an absolute must, so please drop a note to booklab for confirmation and the exact location.

A recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Poetry Prize at New York University, Goldstein's poetry has been published in The Literary Review. His reviews and articles have appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time Out New York. Goldstein has handled publicity for all sixteen titles published by TWELVE, eight of which have been New York Times bestsellers, including Boomsday by Christopher Buckley, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Microtrends by Mark Penn, The Commission by Philip Shenon, and The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee.

Time for a writing and publishing tune-up?

Summer is a traditional season for academic authors to write, because of the relatively uninterrupted stretches of time that are supposedly available. What usually happens, however, is that summer school crops up (such a tempting extra paycheck, for engaging work), book research travel turns into a mini-ordeal (all that effort just to arrive at the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona and learn that the collection you want to examine has a restriction on it from the family, and nobody informed you of this before you spent $5,000 and traveled 3511 nautical miles -- 4040 of the regular kind -- to get there), and motivation often flies out the window because it's summer and summer is Just That Way. August slams up before you know it, and the book still isn't done.

If you find yourself needing a mental recharge to get going (after all, it's only July 27 -- there's still time!), you might try something I enjoyed: one of mediabistro.com's many publishing workshops, in-person in New York. It is ridiculously easy to get from Washington to New York these days; I prefer to stroll across the Key Bridge and hop the Vamoose Bus, but there are other cheap, comfortable choices such as the Bolt Bus and the Chinatown Bus. This ain't the scary old Greyhound -- today's sleek motorcoaches have internet, restrooms, and they're comfortable enough to snooze on. They cost about 1/5 as much as the train, and if you factor in travel time to and from Union Station, they take you to the same places almost as fast. Vamoose put me at Madison Square Garden, just five blocks from the seminar building over near Park Avenue and 31st.

I have taken several mediabistro classes in the past, but mostly in DC, and one online. Not to be a snob about it, but the New York ones are so much better. My course was taught by Joy Peskin, a senior editor at Penguin with a successful career. Networking with her alone was worth the tuition for a four-hour class (what's the value of meeting and chatting with an editor in person?), but when I saw the caliber of my fellow writers, I fell in love with the idea of visiting New York once in a while for an energy transfusion. There was another employee from Penguin in the group, plus a fashion designer with a sterling resume, an editor for a higher education publication, a renowned Sherlock Holmes expert, and so many more. Although mediabistro can seem to have a youngish and greenish online image, the age range was all over the place, and most of us were experienced writers in mid-career. Total out of pocket (bus fare, course fee, and what I spent on lunch, coffee, and crab dumplings for dinner): $175.

I enjoyed the four hours to New York and back reading manuscripts from Booklab authors and studying Italian, so travel time wasn't wasted, and it flew by. I left at 7 a.m. and was home before midnight, recharged, refreshed, and ready to face my own summer manuscripts again.