The Author's Journey

27 January, 2010

In my last post I talked about how my smallish publisher uses reps (not employees) to sell books to the chains. With independents, the relationship is more direct. The good news is, there are ways to have a direct impact on the sales process, and once you get an advocate, they will “hand sell” your book to their customers, and most likely tell their friends at other stores. The bad news is, the process is labor-intensive, since you have to pitch each bookseller individually. 

M. says that without any doubt her best sales weapon is the ability to offer the author for a signing. She drew a vivid picture of what it’s like.

“Are you familiar with the term ‘slush pile?’” she asks.

“Sure,” I respond. “It’s the stack of unsolicited manuscripts on the desk of an acquisitions editor.”

“Right, but the term is also used for the waste-high stack of ARCs that most independent buyers have in their office.” The problem is to get them to pay attention to your book, buried as it is in the middle of the stack, which grows every day. The way to do this is to offer an author signing.

Successful signings are usually the only thing that gives M. any leverage with other booksellers. If she can say, “I sent Mike to Tattered Cover and he sold out,” she can get me in elsewhere, and get a decent order in the bargain.

My whole concept of developing specific metro markets and building a spread sheet of convincing sales numbers won’t work. But there are a couple things I can do.

The first is to develop what’s called in marketing a “dimensional direct mail piece.” It need to be something that is hard to ignore. Once, to help a company sell software for controlling travel expenses, I created a game board (with invaluable contributions from co-creative director Marcia Gregory), complete with dice and little tokens. You competed by rolling the dice and moving from square to square like in Monopoly, except the object of this game was to waste as much money as possible on a business trip. The squares said things like, “Rent a Lexus instead of a Ford, waste $250 dollars,” and so on. We got three responses on the first day, worth about $1.5 million in potential business for our client.

Will something like this help M “get their attention?” I hope so.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a couple of weeks.

December 18, 2009

I drive over to Marin County for a late afternoon drink with my agent, Kimberley Cameron. We sit outside in unseasonably warm December weather. When the waitress approaches, Kimberley enquires if there’s a French Chablis, and the answer is yes. California Chablis can be quite sweet, but the French variety is more like a medium Chardonnay. They come from the same grape. She also orders some bread and pate. “Only the chicken, not the other, please.”

Kimberley is dealing with a slew of personal and business problems. On the business side, an employee of six years whom Kimberley set up in New York at substantial expense has jumped ship along with several clients, including one who just got a six figure advance. It’s a real blow, but she soldiers on, giving me her undivided attention and offering one suggestion after another as I go through my plans.

When I mention a bookseller I want to hit on, she says “We had lunch today. We hugged. No problem.” She is also close with a woman at RedRoom, an important web site for me.

And she has good news. She had lunch a few days ago in Los Angeles with two film agents. There’s no telling whether they’ll take on Fortuna – it depends on whether or not they “get” it – but it’s a start, and worth a celebratory clink of wine glasses. My opinion is, if you don’t celebrate the small victories, you’ll rarely get to celebrate.

She has run out of ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies) and I agree to get her four more. So now I’m off to the post office to send those, as well as gifts to the publisher and editor-and-chief of Oceanview. One of the aspects of selling books is constantly competing for the attention of the people who can help you.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a couple of weeks.

The Final Cover

July 20, 2009

The final proof of the cover arrived in my inbox this morning. Or, I think it’s the final. Any hidden agendas about the color, the finish (glossy vs. matt), the type or anything else would have appeared by now.

I am very pleased. The art director fixed the type, which was my main concern. He added a new wrinkle – some art directors just can’t stop fiddling – but it made things a little better, and definitely not worse. If I still had an ad agency I would hire this guy in a minute.

Getting the cover almost seemed like a reward for sending off the final copy edits, although the two processes aren’t connected.

I dislike dealing with copy editors so much – even when it’s for my own good – that I put off dealing with the last sixty pages for at least three weeks. The manuscript just sat there on a table. But finally I faced it, and indeed there were unpleasant problems to deal with.

I had gotten some of the dates wrong.

Every section of Fortuna has a time and date, and five of them were obviously wrong. Worse, it wasn’t obvious how to fix them. I had to carefully read each section, the section before it, and the section after it. (It’s been so long that I don’t really remember when all the events happen.)

Beyond that, the process was about accepting or rejecting capitalizations, italizations, commas and the like. The copy editor’s comments were in red ink, and I either left them or wrote “NO” with a thick blue fiber-tipped pen. The manuscript had two or three “NO’s” on almost every page. I should have enjoyed this power, I supposed, having had my work edited in ways I didn’t like for years. But in fact, I felt bad.

For some reason, the editor-in-chief wants everything to happen on paper, not “on the computer,” as she expresses it, so I had to send the only copy in the world to her via snail mail. I should probably have made a photo copy, but I didn’t want to spend the money. So I just shipped it overnight, which is the safest way. The cost: $67.00.

I am going to end up losing money on this book.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

December 12, 2008

It’s a gray day in early December and the spirit of Christmas is in the air. Long-time friends Christopher and Gayle are coming over from San Francisco tonight for dinner in a restaurant by the water with dark oak paneling and a real fireplace. It’s an expensive place, a real treat.

Around three o’clock the phone rings in my office, a sort of cottage located behind the main house, and I answer in my business voice.

“Hi. This is Mike Stevens.”

“Mike, it’s Kimberley. I have a deal for you.”

I don’t quite know what to say. Finally, I simply tell her to say yes.

We talk about it. It is not a good deal. The advance is miniscule.  Kimberley’s share might not even pay for our lunches to date. But it’s a deal. I have sold a novel. The dream of every English major has come true for me.

Strange to say, I am not elated. In my heart of hearts, I had already given up hope. And this has happened before, the process of giving up hope the thing and then getting it. There is something about letting go that attracts success to me. Or so I surmise. Who knows?

I spend the rest of the afternoon making calls to friends. By five o’clock, the sky is almost dark.

At the restaurant, I wait until we’re well into our second round of drinks. Then, reacting to something in the conversation, I remark that there are some things that can happen only once in a lifetime. I pause  “… like selling your first novel.”

Suddenly, everyone at the table is cheering and yelling so loudly that the whole restaurant turns to look at us.

I have sold my first novel.

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

January 17, 2008

November 9, 2007

A brief digression. When you make your living as a creative director, you get used to clients wrecking your work. The depth of their misguidedness has never failed to astonish me. Again and again, I’ve seen companies act against their own best interest, insisting on headlines, graphics and strategies that could never work, and in the process, rejecting ads that would surely have won awards.

The frustration younger writers and art directors experience is intense. One writer I hired (and who is now an extremely successful freelancer) summed up the universal perspective in creative departments. He had been on the job – his first agency job – for about six months when Halloween came around. He showed up at work that day wearing a hat in the form of a giant, rolled-up condom that he had found at a shop in San Francisco’s Castro District.

I was a little confused. “What’s your costume?” I asked.

“That’s easy,” he responded. “I’m a client.”

However, when you get paid $150 an hour to fight a daily battle against fear, stupidity and self-centered egotism, it’s not too bad, and sometimes you win. Also, when you bill by the hour, the more haggling over the words (“How about ‘challenges’ instead of  ‘problems?’”), the more money you make. Still and all, there’s a residue of anger that no amount of Christian love, zen, or time itself can wash away.

Now, back to Kimberley’s second round of changes. I’m not getting paid anything to write Fortuna. And I have no intention of letting her assume the role of a client. Furthermore, we have made – I don’t know what else to call it but a “gentleman’s agreement,” pardon my sexism – that there would be one round of changes, excluding the ending. I am not going to set a precedent that she can change the rules in the middle of the game if she feels like it.

I sit down at my computer and type out an e-mail that ends. “I really do want you to represent me … but if you don’t want to, I’ll understand.” That’s it. We do it my way, or it’s divorce.

Kimberley writes back, “Seems like a chat is in order.”

We are to talk by telephone at two in the afternoon, and I count the minutes. When the phone rings, Kimberley is her usual breezy self. “Seems like you’re just done with the manuscript,” she says, as though she were talking about a problem with a FedEx delivery. “That’s fine. But you will fix the typo’s we caught?”

“Of course.”

A few pleasantries, and that’s it. Putting down the phone, I realize that Kimberley is into brinksmanship. It’s just how she operates. And when she’s negotiating on my behalf, this will be a good thing.

to be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

May 1, 2006

My birthday is only a few days off and today, I luck out with a present I could hardly imagine. Business Week has a cover story – a cover story! – about Second Life, an online role playing game or MMORPGs that consists entirely of user-created content. 

When I initially showed the first page of Fortuna to friends, they all loved it, but several voiced the same concern: People won’t know what an avatar is. I would argue that readers could get the meaning from context, that the use of the word was part of the book’s exoticism… but in fact, I have been concerned about this.

Part of my mission, after all, is to sell the book. And the last thing I want to do is create a stumbling block for the acquisition editors. I  learned long ago that when you’re pitching a creative concept, every detail has to be perfect. In business meetings, there are always a couple of people who will focus on any possible negative, however trivial. Maybe the word “avatar” needs an asterisk. Maybe I need a little paragraph prior to the opening scene where I explain the phenomenon of MMORPGs.

I do not want to re-write the first sentence. I’m in love with it.

And now, I’m convinced I won’t have to. It’s all there – in Business Week! How non-obscure can you get?

In the second paragraph, I read, “Anshe Chung [the woman on the cover] is an avatar, or onscreeen graphic character. (My italics.) The third paragraph explains, “Second Life participants pay ‘Linden dollars,’ the game’s currency, to rent or buy virtual homesteads…. But players can convert that play money into U.S. dollars… using their credit card at online currency exchanges.” And further on, “Chung’s firm now has virtual land and currency holdings worth about $250,000 in real U.S. greenbacks.”

The real gold is in the sixth paragraph. “All told, at least 10 million people pay $15 and up a month to play these games, and maybe 20 million more log in once in a while.” That’s – count ‘em – 30 million potential readers!

Take that, ye acquisitions editors of little faith. I immediately send the online link to Kimberley, even though she hasn’t seen the book yet. Call it pre-selling.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael