No, not the blog! I just got here and I’m staying.

I mean, moving-moving, like, you know,  in real life.

So, if things are a little quiet around here for a couple weeks, I apologize in advance.

There’s more really good stuff to come like how pro-bloggers have become the evil empire and are threatening to take over the known world…just kidding!

No, seriously, there were already a lot of interesting comments to my posts from last week and I welcome more while I’m packing and unpacking. I will be sure to respond first-thing when I am settled.

I’m looking forward to it! In the meantime, cheerio, and be back soon…

~From Vidiot

And now back to our originally scheduled programming…

I asked the readers of The Prosperous Writer e-zine some questions and here are some of their answers rounded up.

I originally thought I would handle these Q&As like guest posts but once I started seeing them roll in, I knew that they would be more thought-provoking as collections of ideas.

If you’ve been reading this blog since I returned from Digital Book World, you may have noticed that I’ve strayed pretty far from my usual topics of writer mamas, platform development, and how to prosper as a writer this past week. The past couple of weeks have been quite an adventure, and quite frankly they’ve taken me pretty far out of my own process. But I’ve gained a renewed passion for empowering writers to think for themselves and express the best of what they have to offer.

So, without further ado, here’s what some of the readers of The Prosperous Writer think in response to the question, “What does prosperity mean to you? (in the order they were received)…

From Carol Alexander:

According to Dictionary.com, the meaning of the word prosperity is “a successful, flourishing, or thriving condition.” When I apply that to different areas of my life, I come up with different outcomes. For instance, a prosperous gardener would spend the summer eating freely of fresh fruits and vegetables—from his own garden. In other words, his business would produce fruit. Therefore, as a writer, prosperity would mean that I am producing fruit. I am writing stories and submitting them for publication. It has nothing to do with whether the stories sell, whether anyone likes them or how much money I make.

However, if a gardener’s tomato plants turned brown, he would try to find out what was the cause and spray with the appropriate fungicide so that he got tomatoes in the end. Likewise, if a writer’s stories are not selling, a prosperous one will try to figure out why and work to remedy that situation.

From Lydia Sharp:

The word prosperity is defined as “a successful, flourishing, or thriving condition.” As a writer, I have not yet reached that goal in a financial sense (which is understandably the first thing all of us think of with regard to prosperity). However, over the course of the past year and a half, I feel I have reached a “thriving condition” in my personal writing routine and have successfully built a good foundation for my author platform.

From Julie Achterhoff:

Prosperity means a richness as a writer. It could mean making a lot of money because your writing does so well, but I think it has more to do with putting your heart and soul into your writing. I work hard at being prosperous as a writer.

From Dionne Obeso:

For me, prosperity means reaching the goals that I set for myself every day. Sometimes I might not make any money in a given day, but I know that if I am reaching my goals and working hard, the money will soon follow. It also has a lot to do with being able to accomplish everything I want to get done without sacrificing my time with my son or the basics of housekeeping.

What does prosperity mean to you? Get the Q&A and chime in, when you subscribe to The Prosperous Writer, which goes out weekly on Sundays. Just use the subscribe box in the upper-right-hand corner to subscribe.

Thanks to the folks who shared so far! I’ll share more soon.

Well, I wasn’t going to publish this because it feels fairly controversial. But then I read Mike Shatzkin’s post on Why are you for killing bookstores? And at the end he said:

The book business has always been one with very low financial barriers to entry. Ebook publishing makes getting into the game even cheaper. It is also going to bring increased competition to book publishers from content-creators outside publishing.

Pay attention to that last line. It’s future tense, right? But from what I’m seeing, it’s not in the future at all. Increased competition has already been happening and it’s been happening in spades since the New Year.

Fear of authors developing and owning their own platforms seemed to be a concern at Digital Book World and, at first, this fear struck me as paranoid and ungrounded. I have a few semi-developed thoughts for publishers on whom to partner with and whom to not partner with moving forward in this brave new world of publishing.

Publishers would be wise to choose their authors carefully because every contract signed represents a partnership. And the more we see a spike in folks whose clear intention is to use Internet publishing tools to get rich quickly to make the most of their peaking visibility, so the need also increases to talk about how much this has to do with leveraging the stamp of approval granted by traditional publishers.

Specifically, I suggest that publishers do not to partner with authors who would seemingly like to see them go out of business. The folks whose behavior concerns me most belong to certain crowds: the infopreneur crowd, the blogger crowd, and the pirate crowd. What these people have on their sides are:

• Speed
• Networks of people who have large networks of people
• And lots of jargon that they use to hypnotize people before they hard-sell them

Seems to me that there are a large number of people online, who have risen up in competition with traditional publishers…and ironically, some of them have recently become traditionally published authors.

I mentioned, who I am talking about, so I want to be clear who I’m NOT talking about:

I’m not talking about self-published authors, who are making a go of producing themselves. Those budding platform-building skills are going to come in handy once/when those authors become traditionally published. I absolutely don’t see self-published authors as a threat to traditional publishing. (Perhaps Harlequin is on to something with their new vanity press arm? Not really sure yet.)

I’m also not suggesting that because a traditional author self-publishes some of his or her own work, that he or she is a threat to traditional publishing. Far from it, I think this only expands the authors’ reach and connection with fans, which is good for future book sales of any type (assuming the author does a decent job self-publishing).

I believe that authors should retain rights to the majority of their body of work and only partner with publishers on a project-to-project basis. This keeps everybody on best behavior and prevents authors from becoming perpetual indentured servants to publishers.

I think multiple book contracts need to go away all together, so that authors can choose to partner with publishers for the right reasons–because they want to and it’s win-win–and not because they have been indentured by a multi-book contract. But this is really another topic…I digress.

Back on point, I’m also not talking about authors like Cory Doctorow. I think Cory partners with publishing professionals and the public in an open, guileless, transparent way—not at all similar to the ways that authors who I suspect would like to put publishers out of business. These are those who are using time limits, disappearing billboards, and escalating price points to divide and conquer.

Other signals of desperation include infomercial-like landing pages that scroll on and on for days, the constant hard sell in close proximity to the otherwise widely admired charismatic author, and the promise of six-figure secrets to those buy in–but only if you buy in now.

I think anybody who promised their spouse last year that they would be making six figures by now wants to save face. So off they go to chase down the next pot of gold at the end of the blog-your-brains-out rainbow. Have we had enough of these wild goose success blueprints yet?

Please. Say. Yes.

In the meantime, you can buy legitimately helpful tools in the form of books over at your local bookstore for ten to twenty bucks. Or even take them out at the library for free. But in this new marketplace such antiquated behaviors are not sexy anymore. Not to the cool kids anyway. No, no. They want the latest info-products, tele-classes, and other whatnots from whoever has recently been blessed…by your published authors.

And like Mike Shatzkin said, you don’t have to go to the bookstores for these, because, like e-books, you can’t buy them there. And when you buy them in lieu of purchasing books from traditional publishing, you aren’t just putting bookstores out of business. You are putting publishers out of business, too.

As you can probably tell, I’ve hit my limit. And I’ve lost faith in several people I formerly held in newly minted esteem. That’s pretty much over for me about as quickly as it started over the past, oh, twelve months. I don’t need your third-tribe-jargon-stuffed-cool-kids-better-buy-now-garbage-overload-hard-sell with a little insider wink to seal the sale.

I’ve never bought in and I sure don’t plan on starting now. And I’m one of the lucky ones because all I’ve lost is time spent peering into my Google Reader.

Pay attention, publishers. Watch out for authors who turn into hard-sellers. Bottom line: Some of your authors do not look to partner with you. They look elsewhere to partner, and they take your stamp of approval with them and leverage the heck out of it for their own benefit and the benefit of their cronies.

To me, these authors seem bent on taking your good name, leveraging it for their own purposes, becoming publishers themselves, and creating a brave new online world where only the swiftest and the best hard-sell copywriters survive.

That means you are out, publishers. Did they forget to send you that memo?

Wake up. Look around. Subscribe to your author’s e-mail newsletters.

Some of your authors are partnering with you…and some of your authors are seemingly not.

I guess I’m just wondering: Why ARE you partnering with them?

And how’s that working out?

Or am I the only one who is wondering?

These are the basic tools authors today need to be able to acquire and use to succeed in today’s marketplace. Please note: I am indicating that the author should foot the bill for these minor expenses, as the author should always maintain 100% ownership of his or her platform without interference or pressure from a publisher to do otherwise.

Firefox Browser: US users can download it here.

URLs for Author’s name, book’s name, tagline/topic: Forward the book’s name and the tagline/topic to the author’s name URL, which can be used as the home base site, saving the author time and money of managing too many sites. Author should purchase his own name URL for 5-10 years at a time. Publisher should never own author’s URLs. I recommend GoDaddy.com or BlueHost.com.

Wordpress.org blog: Widely considered the easiest and cheapest way to own, build, and manage your own website yourself. With minimal tech knowledge and hosting from your URL provider (like those I’ve just mentioned above), a person with modest DIY ambition can create, launch, and manage his or her own site at Wordpress.org. Others can hire the set up out but should still learn how to keep up and back up their sites on an ongoing basis. (Not to be confused with Wordpress.com, which is a good, free way for aspiring authors to practice blogging but allows no storefront capacities, not even Amazon recommendations.)

Thesis Theme: I use Thesis and I’ve been very happy with it thus far. I am also a Thesis Affiliate—I partner only with exceptionally good products for writers—so if you decide to give it a test-drive, please click on the Thesis badge.

Facebook Account: Authors need to have and use a Facebook account because Facebook is the non-social-networker’s social networking site. In other words, the folks on Facebook aren’t thinking about social networking. They are just hanging out. So, authors should hang out there too. Besides, it’s the best place to connect with fellow authors in my opinion. Fan page or no fan page, I don’t think is as important as just be there. Here’s my Facebook page. Why not friend me?

Twitter Account: Once you get the hang of it, Twitter is pretty fun. Of course, you don’t want to be there all day or you will become a person who speaks in sound bytes. I think we’re already subjected to enough of that to take Twitter in moderation. Twitter is kind of like wind surfing. It looks easy, then impossible, then you try it and you are sure that everyone doing it is crazy…but if you come often and stay briefly, you eventually get the hang of it. Feel free to “follow” me.

LinkedIn: I’m not as big a fan of LinkedIn at this point, but I haven’t written it off completely. What this means is that I swing by a lot less often. I see LI as more of a job hunter’s network but I think it can also be useful for networking your way to gigs, repeat or fresh. Until they make the interface more user-friendly, I won’t be able to afford to spend as much time there. Even so, “connect” with me once in a blue moon there. I like connecting with folks I know anywhere.

ShareThis Button: Love this tool, which has cut my social networking time in half! I put the ShareThis button in my Firefox browser so I can quickly share anything with my friends, followers, and connections. And voila! Whatever I notice and like is shared in a few clicks. Add ShareThis to your browser here.

“Outposts” (term comes from the book TRUST AGENTS by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith): Create account pages on all the mob sites that are open to public browsing (for example: Red Room, WeRead, GoodReads, FiledBy, Ning sites, etc.) Don’t be overly concerned with gated communities because they may not come up in Google or, if they do, will require a password, which will be a deal-breaker for most Internet browsers. Choose the sites that your audience will frequent and make sure you are there.

Constant Contact: I’ve been using Constant Contact for years to produce professional quality e-zines. Fortunately, for us, the service has gotten better over time (you probably won’t lose your content now). Also CC is offering some cool services like event management and polling that can make any content producer’s life easier. I’m an affiliate of CC, too, so feel free to use my link when/if you sign up.

Feedburner: Use Feedburner so your blog posts will get delivered directly to your readers’ e-mail inboxes. They will appreciate the service. Nuf said.

Google Reader: You can’t be a thought leader if you don’t participate in the most current conversations on your topic. No, you don’t need to relinquish sleep to keep up with the blogging Jones’ but you want to skim the posts you carefully curate and organize in your blog reader at least once a week. This will give you plenty of food for thought and likely have you gnashing your teeth on more than one occasion. (I repeat: Bloggers like to provoke. Consider yourself warned.) Remember, the choice of who to read and who to banish from your view is completely yours. Choose wisely. Choose Google.

Amazon: I don’t care how much badgering I receive: I use Amazon and I think every author should, if for no other reason than because some of your readers will use it. Even if they don’t use it to make a purchase, readers most certainly use it to share their opinions and influence book store shoppers. Authors are in the business of getting along with everyone, so I don’t think we should follow the badgering or the righteous lead. Where authors or booksellers shop for books is not going to be an accurate reflection of where readers shop for books, because readers shop for books everywhere. Authors need to get out of the business of telling readers how to buy and get back in the business of writing books worth buying. (Apparently I have strong feelings on this topic…I’ve been badgered about this for quite some time. Clearly it’s not doing me much good.) Authors can set up their author pages on Amazon, become a reviewer of relevant books, and retort back when people who clearly didn’t read their books post absurd critiques. Authors, I think you should proceed on Amazon as you see fit.

This ought to be a good short list to keep any author busy, as they get used to using these tools. Have fun!

~Photo by Emily Barney

I’m just back from Digital Book World and rather than offer a play by play on Twitter (I didn’t), a long blog post synopsis (I am sure others will do it), or a bunch of cheeky comments about how nobody in publishing knows anything (after all TOC is coming—oops, that was cheeky!), I’m going to offer up several constructive responses this week that I hope will unite publishers, editors, agents, authors, sales people, and book sellers and remind us that we’re all on the same team.

Whenever a publisher seeks, receives, underwrites, and curates a promising manuscript, the potential for a team is formed. That possible team is composed of the people I just mentioned. It would be terrific if the pod of people supporting the release of each book would actually form a team around and support each book, instead of just giving lip service to the prospect or going through the motions.

Every team needs a leader. For an A-list book, the leadership for steering that book team to success typically comes from inside the publishing house from the beginning and all the way through until the end of the publishing process. For books not on the A-list, authors are often left completely in the dark about the perception of their book from within the publishing house. And because of this void of communication, often no one steps up to lead the team, because the author is busy writing or fretting about a lack of attention to the book.

At this point, the A-list cat is out of the book-publishing bag, folks. Authors talk. We are all connected to each other. And we all know which publishers are team builders and which publishers are not. If you say that you give all authors/books the same consideration, when it’s common knowledge that this is not true, consider using the future tense and start doing it.

Let’s not kid ourselves, folks, authors pretty much know that not all books are created equal as far as publicity is concerned. (And if they don’t know, they can read these books and find out.) Therefore publishers, who don’t plan to invest in marketing and publicity for every book launch, need to “tap” authors to steer their own book-marketing ships.

What is desperately needed here is better communication, education, and just the tiniest bit of ongoing support. Nothing any editor or publisher shouldn’t be able to handle even with diminished editorial staffs. (And P.S., transparency and honesty in difficult publishing times is always appreciated more than you will ever know.)

The way to make this kind of non-A-list author support plan successful is to systematize the communication between the publishing house and the author as much as possible. Perhaps you think that systematized communication would disappoint or upset the author. If you think this, you have not been talking to authors who have been left completely in the dark about the fate of their books, who are crave any kind of communication from their publisher beyond deadline management.

Systematized communication looks something like this. Feel free to customize these suggestions to your own needs:

1. After signing: A letter from the CEO or President welcoming the author to the imprint, which describes why the publisher is proud of their long, successful history.  If the imprint is new or recently moved, describe to the author why this is good news to them.
2. Shortly thereafter: A letter from the acquisitions editor, also welcoming the author to the imprint, and then outlining what to expect from the editorial process with a copy of the imprint’s specific editorial guidelines.
3. An editorial phone conversation with the author about the book production schedule: And if you possibly can spare five minutes to answer the author’s questions or just make small talk, that would bring a level of human connection to the process, which is sorely needed. Update this conversation with an e-mail if/when it changes.
4. A fresh correspondence each time you hand your author off to someone new in the production chain: Another letter, this time of introduction from the new person welcoming the author again to the imprint and saying that the new person is excited to work with them and is interested in the best possible outcome for the book.
5. Paced phone outreach: Each new person in the production chain should be required to reach out to the author on at least one Friday afternoon during the book process to chat and answer questions for five/ten minutes at the appropriate junctures in the book production process. Fridays are a good, more relaxed day for these chats. Perhaps right before the employee leaves for the weekend, so there is a cut-off time. These conversations can lead to bonding between publishing insiders and authors, which can inspire authors to write better, network more, and market the book better because they feel connected to something bigger than themselves.
6. A minimum of one phone meeting with the in-house publicist, the author, the agent, and the editor. One meeting is better than none. Time it about six-three months prior to launch. It’s really up to the author and agent to get as much out of this meeting as possible. So authors and agents, be prepared and have your questions ready.
7. Publisher-endorsed book marketing techniques: Get your folks who are working with the A-list into a conference room or call and jot down all the book-marketing techniques that seem to be working from an in-house point of view. Add a caution to the author at the end of this list, which contains warnings about the types of “exposure opportunities” that can eat up the bulk of an authors book promotion time (see my post on the topic for examples) with scant, poor or negative results. Ask your authors what is working and stealing their time away from better quality marketing opportunities. Compile this info into a PDF and update it quarterly. (See agent Rita Rosenkranz’s free e-book as an example and feel free to send your authors over to download a copy or share it with them yourself.)

Wouldn’t these bare bones types of team-building strategies create more positive outcomes for the non-A-list author, than him or her sitting alone in his or her workroom, wondering what the heck is going on with his or her book?

An intern could certainly assist an editor with managing and streamlining this process. The systematized communications alone, even without the more personal support calls, could double your future book sales if an author feels included and valued by the imprint rather than captured, indentured, and then forgotten.

Now that authors are as connected as we are and are as connected to our own audiences as we are, and publishers are lowering advance sizes, the publishers who are the most sophisticated and successful team builders are going to ultimately attract the best writers and sell the most books.

Because success in today’s economy means leveraging all of you assets, including the publisher/author relationship. Authors likely know and are going to continue to know going forward which publishers team-build best (take my publisher, for one example).

What have I forgotten here?

Any authors who have been through the process care to chime in?

~ Photo by oooh.oooh

I let go of #platformchat on Twitter for good at the very end of 2009 after taking a couple of months hiatus. I’ve had some time to think about why I made that decision. Here’s the short version:

As a teacher, I’m really all about the doing, not the talking about doing. Therefore, #platformchat wasn’t accomplishing what I ‘d hoped it would accomplish as a teaching-learning context.

My focus in 2010 is all about creating more teaching-learning contexts that will move writers forward in grounded, fulfilling, prosperous ways.

While there was some teaching and learning going on in #platformchat, the context was not ideal for my intentions.

Additionally, Twitter as a context for a conversation about platform building was problematic and the process didn’t feel sustainable for me as a host. (I’ll spare you a detailed account of the many burps that happen on Twitter.)

Which is not to say that Meryl and I didn’t round up amazing guests who didn’t offer extremely insightful information. Because if you were there, you know we did round up great guests and they surely offered wonderful insights. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them all again for coming and sharing. You guys rocked!

The way I see it is that #platformchat on Twitter was an experiment—a fairly successful one—but one that ultimately failed to deliver the best of what I know I am capable of offering.

The way I see it. The “chat” about platform has only just begun…and it’s happening everywhere. If you participate in any chats about platform, and you think I should be there, feel free to give me a holler. I’ll do my best to show up or chime in.

~ Photo by nuanc

This post goes out to my advanced writing students who are challenged to keep moving their careers forward by pitching themselves again and again and again…

Let’s say, you’ve been published. Perhaps you’ve even been published quite a bit. Maybe you have up to twenty clips, when at one time you had none.

Hey, this is great! Congratulations.

And now, here comes the sophomore slump.

The sophomore slump is caused when writing for publication is no longer new. Gone is the challenge of figuring out all the how-tos required to get your words into print.

You’ve been there. Done that. Ho-hum. This is getting kind of…tedious.

For many writers, the end of being-a-beginner can mark the beginning of not-knowing-quite-what-to-do-next phase.

Fortunately, having been through the sophomore slump and having plenty of students facing the sophomore slump, I have two ideas for you:

Idea Number One: Continue with the success you’ve already established. I know, it’s hard. Because jumping through these hoops might now seem rote. That’s okay. If you don’t repeat the momentum you’ve established, you will lose your writing rhythm and with it your confidence. So, keep writing, keep submitting, and keep getting published, even if you are starting to feel that you should be beyond this stage by now. (P.S. Everyone feels this way. Typically, they are not past it but just bored.)

Of particular importance as you look for a bigger yield from past publications are what I call “warm leads.” Warm leads are the editors you’ve already worked with who like and print your work. Continue serving these editors. This is your bread and butter writing and can likely bring you a lot more money once you stop castigating yourself for not publishing somewhere else. Likely, nobody is judging you for where you publish anyway…except you.

Idea Number Two: Pitch the places you’d rather be. One of the pitfalls of the sophomore slump is not making enough time to reach out to the places, where you’d rather see your work published. But if you are not working in a focused way on where you’d rather be,  you are not going to get there.

Do your tougher pitches first. Then do the work that is the bread and butter after. If you have to balance this with a day job, figure out your highest energy times of day and do your new, more challenging work then. Then follow with the work that has become habitual. I realize that you don’t have that much time to squeeze writing in when you work full time, which is why you need to plan better than writers who have more time.

Here’s a few more tips:

When it’s time to stretch yourself as a writer, you’ll succeed faster if you don’t over-pack your schedule. Work in a focused manner on the next-most-coveted publication at a time. And then the next. Then the next. Etc.

Stretching is necessarily uncomfortable for most writers. Expect to be feel challenged and let the freshness of the challenge energize you instead of throwing you. (You were bored with all the stuff you already knew how to do, remember?) View a steady diet of do-able challenges as invigorating your writing, not throwing you off track.

Get a new rhythm. Steep challenges first. Then the same old, same old. Repeat.

Keep at it. Don’t stop the old work as you wait for acceptances at a higher level. That’s the freelancer kiss-of-death.

Pitch ten times as much as you think you need to and you will succeed. If you under-pitch, you’ll be likely to give up, grumbling about how “impossible” it is to move up the ranks.

But if you are an idea-bubbling, pitching machine, every editor I know will love working with you.

Remember: Less worrying, more querying. This is your ticket to success!

~ Photo by Alotta Ada

Your writing career isn’t just about landing one book deal and then scrambling like crazy so folks will hear about your book, and then scrambling to get a second book deal, and so on. No. There is a more strategic and steady way to lay the groundwork so you can avoid scrambling altogether.  ~ From Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform

Prepare to be amazed by how much you can do to market your book.

How little sleep you can do it on.

And to plumb the depths of your commitment to your writing career.

This accurately describes the situation of the newly published author.

You’ll launch your book with an awful lot of good intentions.

You’ll try to say, “Yes,” to as many people as you can.

But by this point, you will be running a sprint, not a marathon, so it’s easy to forget to take care of yourself.

Try not to forget your health. Or you’ll pay for it.

Do healthy things to counter-balance the surges of nervous energy that you will likely experience–a good review here, a bad review there–it’s all par for the author obstacle course.

Ground yourself in healthy habits that will keep you plugging along. The old-fashioned ones still work: good food, regular exercise, and lots of rest.

And, hey, go for it! You worked long and hard to get to this point.

But don’t kill yourself.

Don’t be so frenetic that you alienate others.

Don’t forget to thank everyone who helped you get where you are.

I talked about the importance of saying no and sticking to your plan last week.

Just remember who is steering the book-publicity ship.

You.

And yes, only a remarkable book will do.

I do not agree with anyone who thinks the quality of a book no longer matters. I think quality matters more than ever.

Word of mouth has never been so powerful in making or breaking book sales. So you’d better write a damn darn good book. Because you are not just flinging a book out there into the marketplace like a Frisbee and hoping that readers will jump up out of the crowd and grab it.

No.

You are going to be the public face of your book. The mouthpiece for your book. The representation of your book. And nobody wants to represent a poorly written book.

Am I right?

So you will be ready. You will write a really remarkable book. Because you spent all that time ramping up for it (see step one). Right?

And step three will go so more smoothly if you write a remarkable book.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Get Known (below). Come back tomorrow for step three.

Let’s get this part over with: The reality is, most books fail. What I mean by fail is not that they don’t sell thousands of copies, but that they don’t sell even one thousand copies. Agents and editors want authors to have a strong platform because authors with platforms sell books. The bigger the reach of an author’s platform, the more books they are likely to sell. It’s that simple. ~ From Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow An Author Platform (Writer’s Digest Books)