#AmWriting

Hey #AmWriters! Jess here. I recorded a bunch of videos to answer all of your questions about creating video for book marketing but in the end, I figured an entire episode needed to happen in order to really get into the topic. 

I started creating daily videos based on the content in The Addiction Inoculation because I wanted to the information out there, and if it sold some books or rustled up some speaking invitations, great. At the time I’m writing these show notes, I’m 63 videos deep, and yes, it’s a massive time suck. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of patience through plenty of mistakes but the experience has been a net gain for me overall in terms of education and exposure. 

I hope this flattens the learning curve for you, and please report back in the #AmWriting Facebook group if you have anything to add or advice to offer! 

Links 

The #AmWriting Facebook Group

Jess on Instagram

Jess on TikTok

Jess on Twitter

Listeners, the team at Author Accelerator knows that all kinds of people can make good book coaches. It’s not necessarily people who have had massive success as writers themselves. It’s not necessarily people who have secured agents, book deals, degrees, or awards.

It’s people who really could spend all day talking about books, who get excited by the idea of lifting up other writers, and who are ready to back up their passion for writing with skills, training, and hard work.

If that might be you, join the Author Accelerator team for two days of exploration on November 30 and December 1, 2022, to find out if 2023 will be the year you launch a book coaching business or level up the one you already have. Head to bookcoaches.com/dreamjob to learn more.

Pain by Elsie Robinson

Imagine discovering that one of the highest paid, most well known journalists in the world, whose voice dominated the Hearst media empire for more than 30 years, who wrote something like 9,000 published articles…

has basically disappeared from living memory.

That’s the story of Julia Scheer and Allison Gilbert’s biography: Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman. The story of this podcast is how Allison came to enlist Julia and finish the project, which came from the discovery of one of Robinson’s poems (and please note this was not a woman who was best known for her poems) in her mother’s papers thirty years ago.

We talk about Elsie—whose writing secrets and mantras sound like things you could hear any day on the podcast—as well as the process of defining the project, finding a co-writer and shifting your own work, and even your own bio, in order to become the writer of a new kind of book.

Links 

First, our new mantra: It is the Parked Profile, not the Divine Spark, which is the secret of success. (i.e.: Keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.)

Elsie’s Writing Manifesto and Top 5 Quotes on Writing.

A novelization of another famous women of the era: The Personal Librarian 

Fab reviews of Listen, World:

Wall Street Journal

New York Times

Washington Post

Allison’s colleague and co-author, Julia Scheeres

Allison’s website

#AmReading

Allison: Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

The Successful Woman, Dr. Joyce Brothers

KJ: Out of the Clear Blue Sky, Kristan Higgins

Also mentioned—The Crappy Friends Podcast

Listeners, the team at Author Accelerator knows that all kinds of people can make good book coaches. It’s not necessarily people who have had massive success as writers themselves. It’s not necessarily people who have secured agents, book deals, degrees, or awards.

It’s people who really could spend all day talking about books, who get excited by the idea of lifting up other writers, and who are ready to back up their passion for writing with skills, training, and hard work.

If that might be you, join the Author Accelerator team for two days of exploration on November 30 and December 1, 2022, to find out if 2023 will be the year you launch a book coaching business or level up the one you already have. Head to bookcoaches.com/dreamjob to learn more.

Ever feel like some things are just outside your ken? I’m that way with literary magazines. And I’ve never found the right retreat or residency, or applied for a grant, and I know sometimes it’s just that I don’t think I belong in that world.

But worlds don’t usually just reach out and drag you in. That’s a fave theme of ours around here—you can’t be published unless you write something, etc. If you want to be part of a literary world you have to find it and start looking around for a door. 

This podcast is ALL about finding doors. And knocking, and however you want to extend the metaphor—and it was great. As I’ve said before, you can tell a practical podcast by the number of links that end up in there, and there are a ton of useful links below. 

And let me add to all of it my favorite old school book on a similar topic, Making A Literary Life from Carolyn See. I hope this talk with Patrice inspires you to get OUT THERE.

About our guest: Patrice Gopo is an award-winning essayist and the author of books for adults and children. Her essay collection, All the Colors We Will See, was Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her debut picture book, All the Places We Call Home, was inspired by one of the essays in her collection. She’s the child of Jamaican immigrants, but she was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska—which gives her a pretty unique perspective on everything from racial identity formation and immigration to weather and life in the great outdoors. She’s had essays in a ton of publications, including Catapult, Charlotte Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and AFAR Magazine, and her essay “That Autumn” received a notable mention in the Best American Essays 2020—which is HUGE. She’s also the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award—and I’m telling you all these details because literary magazines, grants and residencies are exactly what we’re planning to talk about.

Links from the Pod

Literary Mama

Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith

Publisher’s Weekly Lit Mag Database

Funds for Writers database

Clifford Garstang

Poets & Writers: Literary Magazines

Lit Mag News!

Creative NonFiction Classes (Patrice mentioned teacher Lisa Olen Harris) 

North Carolina Arts Council

Patricia Gopo’s Grant Application Tips

PatriceGopo.com Writing Resources

St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency

National Endowment for the Arts

Sustainable Arts Foundation

#AmReading

Patrice: Nothing Special, Desiree Cooper

When Stars Are Scattered, Omar Mohamed and Victoria Jamieson

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Felicia Rose Chavez

KJ: A Rather Haunted Life (Ruth Franklin's biography of Shirley Jackson)


Writers, I’ve got exciting news from Author Accelerator. Applications for Author Accelerator's new 2-year scholarship program for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color opens this month! The Author Accelerator team developed this scholarship as a way to amplify diverse voices and perspectives that are under-recognized in the publishing world.

The newly launched Author Accelerator Book Coach Certification Scholarship provides one year of professional mentorship and feedback for up to three students of color as they complete the Book Coach Certification program and one subsequent year of career coaching and mentorship as they launch their business.  If you’re Interested in Applying, the scholarship window opens November 15th and will close January 15, 2023. The program will kick off in March 2023.  To learn more, visit bookcoaches.com/equity.

Many of you have heard me (this is obviously KJ) whine about my revision in process. Well, I’m here to report that it’s done, and successfully. Below is a full description of the process, and in the episode you’ll hear me talking about it with Jennie Nash. I detail everything except the Peeps that fueled me, and I decided it was wrong to leave them out. 

So, in addition to a lot of butt-in-chair time and a surprising number of hours spend really just staring the at screen, I should own that I also ate a lot of Halloween peeps and most of a bag of fun-sized $100,000 bars. And I would have eaten the whole bag but someone else beat me too it, and they owe me big.

Here it is in writing, THE LONG VERSION: How to do a substantial novel revision in 30 days

The Overview

I had a long, rambling, completed draft of a book with a solid plot and decent thematic/internal story. The magic system was unclear and the romance undeveloped, and I had too many side-characters and too many scenes that weren’t doing more than one job. Because it’s a seasonal book, I couldn’t take my time with a revision without getting pushed another full year out. So we were shooting for publication in less than a year—and we needed to leave some time, tbh, for me to get this wrong and have to fix it again. Thus: 30 days to a revision that involved nearly a full rewrite, even though the characters, story and in particular the plot excitement of the ending would stay the same.

What the hell did I sell?

At the time, I thought I sold a solid, almost-ready 102K draft.  Looking back, I see I sold an idea (Grown-up Gilmore Girls meets Practical Magic with a stolen set of family Tarot cards with powers and a mission of their own) and a rambling, creaky proof-of-concept draft with a solid plot at its core and characters my editor liked and wanted to spend time with.

What this was: Same basic plot, both inside and out. I’ve done revisions that required altering a major plot point or removing characters. This did not.

Same characters.

Same themes, but narrowed and clarified.

A few thoughts on that—the draft I sold was, in my mind, intentionally “edit-able”. There comes a point in a draft when editing it is hard. When what you have is both very polished and tightly wound, the editor may be able to see what’s wrong, but pulling it out will be more painful for the writer, because you’ve locked down all the story elements to intertwine and all the language, etc. This wasn’t that—when I yanked out scenes, they were at least flabby or tangential. I didn’t have to feel too bad about it. And the story wasn’t quite locked in as well. So none of this was unexpected. I know this editor likes to edit and is really good at it.

That said, it WAS a … third or fourth draft or fifth, I can’t remember. I’d done a lot of work on it. When I let go of it I thought it was pretty darn good. When I got it back I was like, OMG I can’t BELIEVE I gave this to anyone, it’s so long and there are scenes that don’t go anywhere and it takes forever to get to the point. And in many ways I had done too much writing work on a story that wasn’t ready to be written (although some of that is necessary for me to find the story).

So a) I thought this was a lot better than it was and b) even after you sell a book, sometimes there is substantial work still to be done and that is fine, it doesn’t mean you’re terrible and the story is crap and the editor is staring at it and thinking, I cannot believe I bought this horrible piece of junk. (Or so I kept telling myself, over and over and over.) And c) apparently what you go out with can be (and will be) far, far from perfect. Even if you think it is.

All that said, some editors don’t edit. I was talking with another writer at a party recently, a NYT best-seller who broke out on her seventh novel, and has written 2 more since, told me that she doesn’t get edited any more. That may be because of her skill and experience (and if so, I am so not there and can go back to feeling terrible about this draft) but I’ve heard the same from newer novelists. And debut novelists, although that situation is a little different, as our debuts are usually the product of a longer period of work and often working with paid editors or readers.

I knew this editor and knew what to expect. If I was submitting to an unknown editor, I would submit something that—to me—was ready to go. Which, I should say, does not mean that it won’t get the same big editorial treatment, so it’s important to be ready for that and accept it. It also doesn’t mean it wouldn’t need it.

The goal for this go-round.

Major notes from my editor: it’s too long, and it drags. The magic system is unclear. The motivations of several major secondary characters who move the plot are unclear. The love story is an afterthought. There’s too much of one secondary character and not enough of 2 others. Too much internal monologue, too many conversations in parts that should be action. The deep backstory (i.e where the magic comes from) should be super-clear to me but mostly unseen by the reader.

Minor notes: Some scenes don’t work hard enough. Magic should be more magical. The stakes are high, but make it more clear what they are. More descriptions of the cute town and shop.

My editor suggested a fresh structure of the first half of the book that moved it more quickly, which was very helpful. There are two inciting incidents, and we moved things so one of them happens very very quickly (the return of the magic) and the other later, after the first had more time to develop (the magic goes badly).

I had two calls with my editor, the first before she wrote her (10 page!) editorial letter and the second after I’d read it. I didn’t do any revision in between—I re-wrote the flap copy and worked on their author questionnaire (and if you’ve never done one of those, they’re quite long). We also wrote the tagline. Both of those—the flap copy and the tagline—were really helpful in reminding me what it was I was doing here, especially the tagline, which ended up on a post-it on my desktop: Flair is done with magic. But magic isn’t done with her.

I needed to cut at least 10K words, make the magic, the plot and the motivations of the characters around it clear, bring the romance forward and take out a lot of action (and a few tertiary characters and events) that were obscuring the main story.

An aside: I think we’re either writers who stuff too much into the story (and write long) or writers who get right to the point (and write short). Whichever you are, outlining a favorite book in your genre or one that really did whatever your goal is (page-turner, thought-provoking, slow burn) successfully for you can really help. How many additional characters and plotlines were there? Which did you remember at the end of the book? How many did you really love, or really contributed to the book’s success with you? Did they move the plot and the inner story or just one or the other?

I did this during my revision and found it really helpful. Again. For me, outlining—or at least thinking about specific elements—of books I hope to be like on some level is always a good move.

The numbers

Original: 102K/330 pp 36 chapters

Revision: 83K/298 pp 30 chapters

30 days/189.5 hours of butt-in-chair. This does not count anxiety dreams, walks to think through problems or time spent staring at other people and nodding while thinking about book.

Longest day: 11 hours (I had 2 11 hour days and 5 10 hour days)

What did that look like? 7-8 hours before dinner, with a substantial dinner stop that often included a walk or short bike ride, then back at it until 11 pm or so. I’m a natural night owl, so that’s not that hard for me.

Shortest: 1.5 (I traveled 3x during the 30 days, so I knew in advance that there would be several days when I did very little.)

 The shortest “real” day—as in, I didn’t drive for 8 hours or spend a full day in family activity—was 6 hours. I’d consider that a normal day, and if I hadn’t been in a rush I would say that’s about ideal.

Average: 6.3

The mechanics

I made one big decision first thing: I decided not to work in the draft, even though it had (relatively few) line notes from my editor. Instead, I decided to return to Scrivener.

The big advantage to Scrivener is the ability to move from chapter to chapter easily—as in, when you realize you’re quoting something said in an earlier chapter, it’s in the outline off to the side and easy to pop up and see, or if you realize you’ve forgotten something, ditto. That’s really tough in 300 pp in Word, or even if you pull out each chapter and work on them separately in Word. And the risk of choosing an old version is high for me.  This worked really well, and I would do it again on any revision where I didn’t need to be following line notes in Word. The ease of moving around a doc in Scrivener cannot be beat.

I also decided not to pull out each chapter, put it in Scrivener and plan to revise it. Here’s why—there was a LOT in this draft that wasn’t going to make it into the final. At a minimum I needed to cut 10K/15pp. But truly, so much needed re-writing as much as revising—or maybe I should say, there was a lot of new material that needed to fit in. It would be easier to take what I needed from the old draft and add it to new stuff than to cut things, especially things I liked. Most of the scenes I needed had been written, but interspersed with scenes I did not. It was MUCH easier not to even look at those scenes again unless, say, I began writing a conversation and thought –they’ve done this before. Then I’d go dig it out.  

Instead, I tackled it bit by bit, taking out the part I planned to work on and creating a Scrivener folder for it. I divided my book into about 6 sections—broadly, the beginning, the beginning of the middle, the midpoint scenes, the beginning of the end, the big action at the end and then the end. I planned for it all to end up in Scrivener and to compile it out from there.

I often did the editing in Word by pulling out, say, three chapters that needed to become 2, dumping them into a fresh word doc (that way I got my editor’s comments, too), giving it a name and working in there by also opening a dumping ground word doc next to (on desktop) or behind (laptop) it. I’d pull out a huge chunk, put it in the dumping ground and then go snatch lines or paragraphs as needed. This also gave me confidence, because the original always remained whole. I could always go back and get something if I needed it.

Those Word docs looked like this:



I drafted new material in Scrivener. Once or twice, I duplicated a chapter so that I could try something and see if it worked but easily go back to a previous version, which Scrivener also makes easy. I did some smaller chapter revisions in Scrivener too, although often I did them in Word and then pasted the result into Scrivener.

I created multiple outlines (about which more in the next section), and often—especially as I got closer to the end—included target word counts, and I really paid attention to those. I have a tendency to repeat things, especially in dialogue, and keeping an awareness of where I was in the scene/chapter in terms of middle and approaching end helped me move things faster.

Why are my fingers not moving?


[Wait - there's more! Continue reading at our Substack here]

Sometimes your first book is a gateway. For me—KJ—it was Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos, a book I wrote in 2006 with Susan Straub. Susan was the expert and I was a rising writer with a lesser expertise riding on her coattails. We pitched the book before I had many bylines at all—but adding the words “is the author of the forthcoming book…” to my pitches opened a lot of doors. The book itself was shorter and much differently formatted than standard non-fiction.

Many writers get started this way, with gift books, guides and other non-fiction books that follow existing formats or fit into existing series. (The fiction version would be work-for-hire chapter books or books within a fandom—and we’d love to talk about that if you have guest ideas.) 

Maria Teresa Hart is a writer and editor who works most often in food and travel, with a series of impressive bylines that range from the New York Times and The Atlantic to VICE and Business Insider, but she came on the pod to talk about the experience of writing a book for a publishing house within an existing series. Her book, Doll, is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. We talk about how that happened, what it was like and how an experience like this can become an doorway into larger opportunities in publishing. 

LINKS

Maria Teresa Hart’s book, DOLL, is a pop-culture feminist critique of doll history and culture, from Raggedy Ann to Barbie to android sex dolls. Find it HERE.

Readers of Jane Friedman’s The Hot Sheet (if you’re not a subscriber, I recommend it, find it HERE) can read an interesting piece about work-for-hire in fiction fandoms in the 9/28/22 issue.

High Heel, Summer Brennan

Object Lessons Series

objectsobjectsobjects.com

Object lessons essay series in The Atlantic 

Maria Teresa’s essay on Bidets

33 1/3 series

33 1/3 WEBSITE

Barbie movie

AmReading

Maria Teresa: The Witches of Willow Cove, Josh Roberts

How to Be Eaten, Maria Adelmann

KJ: The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix

Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck

https://www.mariateresahart.com, Twitter: /maritehart, IG: @mariathart

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

Also…. you know we here at #AmWriting tend to think working with a book coach or developmental editor is the gold standard for getting help with your project. But that’s not always in the cards—and even if it is, doing as much as you can before bringing in help is often a smart approach. (Although throwing small amounts of $$ at things for years until you’ve spent as much as you would have if you’d just gone all in is not…. so if that resonates with you go find a book coach already!)

The women of Pages & Platforms have created a course they call Story Path after years of going through this process on their own, and helping many clients fix their stories and finish their books. They saw how many people struggled with getting from a zero draft to a professional, working draft and made Story Path to help other writers get to “the end” faster. 

Here’s what you’ll get in the course:

The developmental editors of Pages & Platforms provide 20 multimedia lessons, worksheets, exercises and quizzes to help you apply your knowledge to your work-in-progress, monthly live group coaching calls and 12 months of access to the course materials.

Here’s some feedback from a real student when she first started (she’s now querying her completed novel!):

“Already ‘Story Path’ has proven invaluable, and we’re barely halfway through the course! It’s given me (an aspiring novelist stalled on bringing my rough draft in for a landing) the tools, frameworks, and inspiration needed to confidently tackle both my ending and effective revision of a complete ‘professional draft.’ Hawley, Ramirez, and Campbell probably saved me from tons of angst and flailing around. I highly recommend this course!”

—Carolyn Cowen, novelist 

This one is NOT FREE. But putting your $$ where your mouth is can be very very motivating. So if it sounds like it’s for you, get all the details and register HERE. We’re an affiliate, so we do make a little something if you decide to sign up —but please know that we only team up with people and businesses we trust!

I (KJ here) adore Nanowrimo. Tell me it’s impossible to write a whole novel in a month, especially a month with Thanksgiving in it, and I will set out to prove you wrong. My first novel, The Chicken Sisters started as a NaNo project, as did Playing the Witch Card (which is probably coming out in Fall 2023).

I… cannot NaNo this year (yes it’s a verb), because my next set of revisions, with an accompanying deadline, will be heading my way in the last week of October. But Jess can and will! 

So I offered Jess my favorite advice on a successful NaNoWritMo—the KJ version, at least. Here’s how I approached last year’s NaNoWriMo, and it worked pretty well in the end:

My first novel clocks in at around 107K, my current WIP draft is at 99K. I favor long, convoluted sentences. I like to express things in sets of three—reasons the character is reacting as she is, emotions that are bombarding her, the ways her body responds— or even five: lists, smells, tastes, memories, expressions and as I have just demonstrated, I tend to use a lot of punctuation while I’m doing it.

I do this from the very beginning. If I’m writing a scene, I write a whole scene. The people move, they eat, they smell and taste and feel, they think about their backstory: the whole shebang. Historically, that’s meant two things. First, when November 30 rolls around, I’ll have 50,000 words—but I’ll only have a draft of about half of my story.

Second, I’ll have put in a lot of time writing those long sentences and and elaborate scenes. The terrible truth about my first drafts is that the writing tends to be pretty good. The dialogue flows, the action moves, there’s humor and pathos and feeling in the way the characters interact with one another.

It’s the story that usually sucks.

Getting to The End, not The Middle

I suspect that to some extent it will always be this way for me. I plot, then I write, then I discover that the plot doesn’t create room to bring the character to the place where she needs to be and I have to go back and do it all over again. But I also suspect I could do that initial finding my way to a character arc and plot that weave together in a way that satisfies the whole a lot more efficiently if I just wrote fewer words.

Make a Plan

To do that, I need a plan that forces me out of my usual loquacious style, and here it is: I divide my 30 days and 50,000 words into a beginning (6 days, 10K) , a middle (18 days, 30K) and an end (6 days and 10K again). World-building and character riffing are fine as long as I stick to the schedule. 

Write Some, Pre-write Some or Just Say What Happens

Next, I pay attention to time and word count. If I’m lingering and I need to move along, I throw down some plans and some prewriting. Conversation about the Halloween event here. Town history TK.  Some prescient line that recurs at end.

So that’s my weird NaNoWriMo plan: write fewer words, but get more of the whole picture on the page, with the goal of finding my way to “the end” instead of “the middle”. I know (and you know) that it won’t really be the end. There will be much, much work ahead—but I’ll have a draft. It will be a terrible draft, as it should be, but it will help me do the work I find hardest: not writing the scenes but finding the story. If I’m lucky I’ll be putting flesh on the bones; if I’m not, I’ll be rebuilding a scaffolding, not taking down a whole house.

And here, from the archives, is a NaNoWriMo Prep list I created a few years back. 


Kj's Nanowrimo Prep Checklist
219KB ∙ PDF FileDownload
Download
Here’s a fun calendar Sarina found:


Nanowrimo 2022 Calendar 50k Purple
107KB ∙ PDF FileDownload
Download
And a link to How to Do the Blueprint for a Book Challenge.

A few useful past episodes:

#NaWhateverWriMo, Episode 181

#SupporterMini 1: #Prewriting

#AmWriting

Jess: A Little Too Late, Sarina Bowen

Mad Honey, Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

All Good People Here, Ashley Flowers *for loving the audio version

KJ: 

We All Want Impossible Things, and What Can I Say?, Catherine Newman 

Reluctant Immortals, Gwendolyn Kiste

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

Also…. you know we here at #AmWriting tend to think working with a book coach or developmental editor is the gold standard for getting help with your project. But that’s not always in the cards—and even if it is, doing as much as you can on your own is always a smart approach. 

The developmental editors of Pages & Platforms, Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez, want to share their top tips for editing your own work in a FREE webinar Monday 10/31/22.

YOU WILL LEARN:

Learn more HERE. We’re an affiliate, so we do make a little something if you decide to sign up for additional services. But this is FREE. And please know that we only team up with people and businesses we trust!

Listeners, we’re sharing this interview again because if you’re not already subscribed to Theodora’s substack, you should be. We sent you a taste of it this morning on top of this episode. We adored talking to TT, as we like to call her around here—but now that she’s revved up her Substack, every single time we’re texting back and forth about its brilliance. “Butter” has joined our official #AmWriting lexicon.

So, enjoy a favorite that you might have missed when it originally rolled out over the holidays last year. 

Notes on the Pod: Who doesn’t want a craft book that’s fun to read and will help you plan your fiction (or memoir), write that fiction, revise that fiction and then sell that fiction? This week we talked to Theodora Taylor, author of more than 50 novels and one brilliant book about writing that made Sarina and I (KJ) go SQUEEEE and then text back and forth frantically for a couple of hours. It’s all about the “Universal Fantasies” that give our story-loving brains the things we need when we read—and how to spot those in your own writing to help you tell people what you’re all about, use them in drafting and revising and just generally make sure they’re everywhere in everything you write—literary, commercial, genre, short stories, novellas—everything.

We read Harry Potter for Hogwarts fun and the hero’s journey—but we also are in it for the universal fantasies of “crushed underdog proves self to loathsome family” and “ordinary person turns out to be special” and “loyal friends can be better than family” and so on—and the thing about those elements is that they appear everywhere. You could find a book in any genre that scratches those itches, and those feelings are a big part of what we’re reading for. As Theodora says, they’re what makes your book taste good.

They’re the butter.

7 Figure Fiction: How to Use Universal Fantasy to Sell Your Books to Anyone

Facebook group: 7 Figure Fiction

https://theodorataylor.com

https://7figurefiction.com

#AmReading

Theodora: Beastars Manga by Paru Itagaki

KJ: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova

Sarina: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

Listeners, you KNOW we got granular with this one because there are just plain so many links! 

Terena Elizabeth Bell has been writing all her life. Her first short story was published in a literary magazine when she was in college—almost thirty years ago, and she’s published many since and won multiple awards. She’s also written for more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Playboy, MysteryTribune, and Santa Monica Review. Platform-o-rama, right?

But she could NOT find a publisher for her debut novel or debut short story collection. As she puts it: It wasn't for want of trying. Her novel was turned down by 64 agents.

That novel, RECURSION, and Terena’s short story collection, Tell Me What You See were both purchased within two weeks once Terena decided to turn to the small presses associated with the lit mags she’d been a part of for so long.

We talk about the glories AND problems with small presses, how to be sure you’re talking to a small press and not the kind of hybrid publisher we often warn you about (there are legit hybrids, but be careful out there, many take advantage of writers who don’t understand what they offer), finding the right small presses and literary magazines and what it’s like to be a more literary and experimental writer. It’s a great episode with a lot of information we haven’t covered before. 

BONUS: Read Previous guest Joni B. Cole’s When Is It Smart to Submit Your Work to a University Press? (You’d Be Surprised!)

Big Literary journals Duotrope, The Submission Grinder

Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference

SMOL Fair Readings

NYT article on how Billie Eilish’s platform didn’t sell her book

CamCat Books

Justine Bateman’s book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, which her platform also didn’t sell.

The 10 National Book Award Finalists for 2022 include 4 books of short stories.

Beacon Press: an American left-wing non-profit book publisher.

Soho Press: a New York City-based publisher founded by Juris Jurjevics and Laura Hruska in 1986 and currently headed by Bronwen Hruska. It specializes in literary fiction and international crime series.

Best Short Stories of 2022

Malarkey Books

Authors Guild Model Contract 

Brooklyn Book Festival

FSG—Farrar Straus Giroux does/does not take unagented submissions

Submittable

The controversy surrounding Roxane Gay’s PANK

ThrillerFest

Find Terena at www.terenabell.com or on Twitter @TerenaBell

#AmReading

Terena: Edith Wharton’s A Glimpse of the Moon, A Son at the Front , and The Custom of the Country

Night Rider, All the Kings Men, both by Robert Penn Warren

KJ: The Letters of Shirley Jackson, as well as the four book omnibus that has Sundial in it (and Alexis Hall’s Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble and Glitterland)

If you’ve listened to any of us for any time at all you know we love Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. People often attribute to KJ a piece of advice she learned from Laura: People are a good use of time. We think of Laura every time we start to call ourselves “too busy” and then remember that much of what fills our time is a choice, and if we want to do it, we’ll find a way to get it done. 

One glorious result—we’re all much better at saying “yes” to the things that are important to us and “no” to the things that would get in their way.

Because we always benefit from a re-read of Laura’s books, we’re bringing this earlier interview out and sharing it again. 

Laura also has a new book out: Tranquility by Tuesday:  9 ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. The idea is genius: upgrade your Tuesday, upgrade your life. The nine rules here really do offer big impact from small change. We can’t recommend it highly enough!

Also on the horizon: If being a book coach –and you know we love book coaches here--sounds like a dream,  but you have no idea how you will run your business or get clients, our friend and sponsor Jennie Nash is hosting an event this month for you. 

In Find Your Zone of Genius as a Book Coach, Jennie will share the top reasons people resist starting a new endeavor, and how to fight through those negative thoughts. She’ll also show you  how to brainstorm your way to a zone of genius to your book coaching business. 

This is a live working session that will not be recorded - because Jennie wants to workshop with YOU on your idea. It’s happening October 27th, 2022 at 1PM Pacific, 4PM Eastern. Head here for more info!

Alexis Hall describes himself as a genrequeer writer of kissing books. You may know him as the author of Boyfriend Material and Rosalyn Palmer Takes the Cake, both of which we’ve talked about here. But like recent guest Emily Henry and so many others, those successes were far from his first rodeo. Head to his website, quicunquevult.com, to see the evidence. (Why is it called that? You’ll have to listen to find out.) Alexis has written, and still writes, everything from paranormal and fantasy to billionaire romance to rom-com, with the recent addition of genre mystery and historical fiction.

We talk tropes, dialogue and leaning into the the thing you do best then revising for the rest. (And we did it all with a kitten climbing around on my desk, adding to both the joy and the challenge.) 

Sarina and I (this is, as usual, KJ) have long hoped to talk to Alexis because he is so prolific and also so willing to take chances. When we finally did, what we heard was someone who doesn’t see himself the way we see him—successful, talented, charming and able to convey all of that on the page. That shouldn’t be a surprise, because he often writes characters with that same block—they’re successful and delightful but see themselves as flawed in some way. That may be almost too generic to be considered advice (after all, we’re often told to write a “misbelief” into our characters)—but I found it striking, because along with the many other emotional journeys Alexis writes, he writes this one often and well: that of a self-perceived fuck-up accepting that they’ve transcended that earlier self and become someone capable and worthy of love. 

I’m calling that out here because as we talked to Alexis, we talked about his brand being clever banter and an uber-confident writer’s voice—but I think that emotional journey is part of his brand as well. So this episode left me thinking about how brand is more than the way a book or a writer looks and sounds. It’s also the way the book feels. And when you think about it that way—that the emotional arc and feel are part of the brand as well—I think it may help silence any voice in your head complaining that things are repetitive, or that you’ve “ done that before” or that something has been done by others.

We tell our own stories and the stories that we hold most closely, in fiction, in non-fiction, in whatever we’re working on. Indirectly, directly. Again and again. I hope this episode helps you think about what your story is and how you’re telling it.

LINKS! 

Alexis’s books in general are all here.

But you can pre-order Paris Daillencourt Is about to Crumble on Amazon here and Bookshop.org here.

Follow Alexis on Goodreads, Twitter and Instagram.

#AmReading

Alexis: ARC of Kate Clayborn’s Georgie, All Along

Sarina: Dark Matter, Blake Crouch

KJ: Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

And— this is KJ with a question. Do you own In Her Boots yet? Have you read it yourself, or given it to a friend who’d love a fun story about figuring out who you are as opposed to who you think everyone wants you to be—that also delivers a literary hoax, farm life and an ex who can’t seem to find the exit? If you don’t have it on the shelf yet, now’s the time!