Michael Chabon's keynote address was so freakin' good. Here are just a few things I jotted down:
"It may be that all morality rests on our ability to see the likeness in unlike things: I and thou."
"Ideas are the easiest and perhaps the least interesting parts of the job...Ideas are swarming, ubiquitous, chronic. Ideas are a plague....There are five novels in every newspaper, ten in every work of history, one in every unhappy family." Ideas are everywhere--the trick is sticking with them.
"I gave off the moral equivalent of that new car smell."
"the pile of well-typed crap"
Life is not a story, at least not a very good story. Life is just a bunch of middle.
"I got down to the work because the serious and diligent people around me were getting down to theirs."
"If your students are lucky enough to not know everything...."
"challenging each word to defend its presence in the sentence"
"No sentence was so fine that it could not be improved upon the ninth time through."
"I believe that writers ought regularly to read the dictionary" in order to discover the musculoskeletal system, the genome, of our language.
Novelists have two obligations:
1. Bringing the dish. "They bring the news, the gossipy gospel." The author is our friend, showing us the map of a life.
2. Keeping it entertaining. Sometimes using artifice, "all the thrilling sense of deliverance that only a great lie can." Pure autobiography is the last thing we want. When you're vanishing an elephant onstage, you don't tell about the half hour you spent reading up on mirror optics in a chophouse on Wabash Avenue, sitting on a donut cushion for your hemorrhoids.
Chabon did the talk in a Q&A style, asking his own questions and doing voices and impressions of question-askers one might find in an audience, which I thought was pretty genius. He said he'd been very disappointed when he learned we couldn't have a Q&A because the space (a large ballroom) wouldn't allow it. This disappointment again drove home, like almost every panel, the point that writing and reading are all about connecting with other people.
Here are some books Chabon mentioned as having influenced him:
Oakley Hall- Warlock
Jorge Luis Borges- Labyrinths
Edith Wharton- The Age of Innocence
Vladimir Nabokov- "I admire him for Lolita and Pale Fire, but I love him for Pnin."
Love in the Time of Cholera, 100 Years of Solitude
Moby-Dick
Portrait of a Lady
Next, I went to a panel called "It's Not Just About You: Solidifying Journalism's Role in Creative Writing Programs." The panelists were Patrick Walters, Jim Sheeler, Philip Gerard, John Calderazzo, and Rebecca Skloot. Here are my notes.
There's not necessarily any difference between journalism and creative writing. It's important for people who identify as either to learn about and embrace the other.
Reporting is simply defined as looking for facts, about your own life or others'. Reporting makes possible the effects we usually think of as literary--the meaningfulness. "Collect all the dots and connect them." Think of lives not as biographies but as stories. Research is not just looking at a photo; it's wondering what's not in the picture. The best pictures are a gift from the subject to the photographer, and it's the same way when you write about people. They're giving you a gift.
When you raise big problems and issues, you have to put them in context, try to turn it toward resolution. Writing about others forces you to observe and imagine what it's like to be someone who's not you. You take on a huge responsibility to be true to their story. The msot important thing you can say is "I don't know." Don't trust memory, no matter how sure it seems.
When Rebecca Skloot wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (for ten years!), she fact-checked absolutely everything. Even dialogue! When you show that you're trying to get everything right, people will give you a lot. They will help you.
Learn about research methods used by anthropologists and oral historians. Make the writers you read show how they know what they know.
Storytelling isn't going anywhere. People want to read stories, not strands of fact.
Here are some resources they mentioned:
Norman Sims, ed.- The Literary Journalists: the New Art of Personal Reportage
Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, ed.- Literary Journalism
Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, ed.- Telling True Stories
James B. Stewart- Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction
At http://www.newsu.org/courses, you can find tons of free tutorials, self-directed courses, webinars, broadcasts, and other resources designed by successful journalists to help you learn some of the skills. It's part of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Sounds legit.
In non-AWP news, I'm still waiting to hear about a few jobs that seem promising, and I have an interview on Tuesday to work as a typesetter! Typesetting is by far my favorite part of the publishing practicum. The woman I talked to on the phone said the interview will be more practical, not just talking. They'll actually give me some text and say, "Make a wedding invitation," or, "Make a business card." Very different from typesetting in a book interior, but using many of the same skills and techniques. The job is in a rural area about an hour away from where I am now, which means it would be a hassle in some ways. But my dad commutes about an hour each way, and it's worked for him for years. If I get the job, I'll just get me some books on CD or awesome podcasts (once I get a pod) and learn my way to work. And we never know whom else I'm going to hear from. There's no telling how God is going to work in my life in the next few weeks as we iron all of this out. I'll keep you posted!
Next up: To Publish or Self-Publish?
Friday, April 30, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
AWP 5: The Limit—or Light—of Spiritual Belief: Across Genres.
Hi all, thanks for being patient as I put off blogging in favor of other pursuits.
This panel included Emily Louise Zimbrick, Scott Cairns, Janet Peery, Nicole Mazzarella, Farideh Goldin, and Josh Allen.
When we encounter inconsistences in scripture and religion, we can ignore them, discard them as irrelevant, or acknowledge and study the complexities. If they're in God's word, maybe God wants us to consider these things, difficult questions, moral complexity. Real faith confronts the trouble and the troubling head-on. Bad literature, religious or not, avoids it. Dickinson wrote, "On subjects of which we know nothing, we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble."
Scott Cairns started by talking about the ressourcement movement, a French Catholic movement to recover patristic wisdom that had been excised from writings. He used the phrase "squandering tradition" to describe what the people were doing when they originally cut out parts of those religious writings. Cairns introduced (to me) the terms cataphatic, for a theology of attributes in which we say things about God as if he were a person and we knew him, and apophatic, the via negativa, the theology of unsaying and the way of unknowing, in which we think and speak of God in terms of what he is not. The two traditions usually balance each other out. For example, many people think of God as a king, but acknowledge that he is not king in the way we normally think of human kings. Cairns talked about Gregory of Nyssa (or someone else) meeting God in light, then in cloud, then in darkness. He said poetry is not a matter of waying what we think or want readers to think, or redacting experience, but an experience of trusting language and the words on the page. "If I only wrote what I know, I wouldn't have ever made tenure. So what I do is write in order to know."
Josh Allen talked about his fiction in which a husband notices his wife coming home later than usual from work and finds that she is stopping at a Mormon church to pray. He discussed the importance of multiple valid points of view and quoted John Garder, who, in On Moral Fiction, said "True art is too complex to reflect the party line." Allen quoted someone else who said, "We have to safely leave evangelism to the evangelist....Art transcends its boundaries by staying within them."
To an extent, all literature is about a spiritual journey.
Examine truth without examining dogma.
A happy ending, like any ending, has to be earned. The character has to make choices to resolve the story, not just feel despair and go up on the roof and have a transcendent experience. It must stem from choices the characters have made, not grace we don't understand. Offering readers only one emotional response means the piece will tend toward sentimentality.
Things they mentioned in the panel:
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
David Kurzon, ed., Modern Poems on the Bible
The Classic Midrash from Paulist Press
E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel talks about the difference between preaching and prophecy. Music critic and writer Greil Marcus, talking about Van Morrison on NPR, says that Van Morrison breaks through his own defenses and thus breaks through his listeners'.
Thanks for reading! The next post will be about the keynote address by Michael Chabon and, possibly in the same post, a panel on journalism and CNF. Good stuff.
In other news, I've just taught my last class, and had my last class as a student last week. It's a very weird feeling, like I'm losing part of who I am. Only part, though, and I can be a student of life whatever my career turns out to be.
I set the inside of my oven on fire the other night. I preheated the oven to make sweet potato fries, and the bottom of the oven had some butter-and-sugar residue from pecan rolls which had overflowed a little (or perhaps more than I thought). Funnily, I was more upset about not being able to bake the sweet potato fries than I was about the actual presence of a small fire in my house. Go figure. I've bought a new drip pan and am now about to install it and retry those fries. Nothing if not adventurous, this life.
This panel included Emily Louise Zimbrick, Scott Cairns, Janet Peery, Nicole Mazzarella, Farideh Goldin, and Josh Allen.
When we encounter inconsistences in scripture and religion, we can ignore them, discard them as irrelevant, or acknowledge and study the complexities. If they're in God's word, maybe God wants us to consider these things, difficult questions, moral complexity. Real faith confronts the trouble and the troubling head-on. Bad literature, religious or not, avoids it. Dickinson wrote, "On subjects of which we know nothing, we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble."
Scott Cairns started by talking about the ressourcement movement, a French Catholic movement to recover patristic wisdom that had been excised from writings. He used the phrase "squandering tradition" to describe what the people were doing when they originally cut out parts of those religious writings. Cairns introduced (to me) the terms cataphatic, for a theology of attributes in which we say things about God as if he were a person and we knew him, and apophatic, the via negativa, the theology of unsaying and the way of unknowing, in which we think and speak of God in terms of what he is not. The two traditions usually balance each other out. For example, many people think of God as a king, but acknowledge that he is not king in the way we normally think of human kings. Cairns talked about Gregory of Nyssa (or someone else) meeting God in light, then in cloud, then in darkness. He said poetry is not a matter of waying what we think or want readers to think, or redacting experience, but an experience of trusting language and the words on the page. "If I only wrote what I know, I wouldn't have ever made tenure. So what I do is write in order to know."
Josh Allen talked about his fiction in which a husband notices his wife coming home later than usual from work and finds that she is stopping at a Mormon church to pray. He discussed the importance of multiple valid points of view and quoted John Garder, who, in On Moral Fiction, said "True art is too complex to reflect the party line." Allen quoted someone else who said, "We have to safely leave evangelism to the evangelist....Art transcends its boundaries by staying within them."
To an extent, all literature is about a spiritual journey.
Examine truth without examining dogma.
A happy ending, like any ending, has to be earned. The character has to make choices to resolve the story, not just feel despair and go up on the roof and have a transcendent experience. It must stem from choices the characters have made, not grace we don't understand. Offering readers only one emotional response means the piece will tend toward sentimentality.
Things they mentioned in the panel:
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
David Kurzon, ed., Modern Poems on the Bible
The Classic Midrash from Paulist Press
E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel talks about the difference between preaching and prophecy. Music critic and writer Greil Marcus, talking about Van Morrison on NPR, says that Van Morrison breaks through his own defenses and thus breaks through his listeners'.
Thanks for reading! The next post will be about the keynote address by Michael Chabon and, possibly in the same post, a panel on journalism and CNF. Good stuff.
In other news, I've just taught my last class, and had my last class as a student last week. It's a very weird feeling, like I'm losing part of who I am. Only part, though, and I can be a student of life whatever my career turns out to be.
I set the inside of my oven on fire the other night. I preheated the oven to make sweet potato fries, and the bottom of the oven had some butter-and-sugar residue from pecan rolls which had overflowed a little (or perhaps more than I thought). Funnily, I was more upset about not being able to bake the sweet potato fries than I was about the actual presence of a small fire in my house. Go figure. I've bought a new drip pan and am now about to install it and retry those fries. Nothing if not adventurous, this life.
Monday, April 19, 2010
AWP 4: "What's Your Platform? What Agents & Editors Are Looking For in Writers
This panel was more Q&A than planned little speeches. I'll mimic the structure by introducing everyone and then diving into what they said.
Christina Katz- This panel is about how to be an empowered artist. We're all responsible for our careers, not just putting them in the hands of agents or publicists. Becoming visible, getting known.
Robin Mizell, literary agent.
Venn diagram--one group that has studied craft and is talented, one group that has studied how to promote and sell. The sweet spot where they intersect could be "larger and more dangerous." We can cross-pollinate. Jane Friedman says the challenge is writers who are very talented but don't have a mindset for the business.
David Sanders- Ohio University Press and Swallow Press.
Connection between how much of a presence a writer has in the world and how they succeed.
Jane Friedman, Publisher and Editorial Director of Writer's Digest.
Sage Cohen, founder of Sage Communications. Not sure she was actually at the panel--I rarely take notes on who said what--but her sites are cool, so here they are.
When creating your platform, think about what else you do besides writing. How are you going to become visible and rise above the crowd? Our job as writers is to stand out. It can be fun and exhilarating and creative. When you think your writing career is fun and exciting and interesting, it will become that way to others and draw people. Your platform is not your CV. It's an ongoing effort to connect with your readers and others who want to know about you and what you're doing. It takes years of work--it's never too soon to start. It's a journey, a lifelong process, part of your growth as a writer with a career.
Your platform includes:
1. The authority or credentials you bring to the table. It's a presence. Ezra Pound had the best platform of the 20th century.
2. Visibility. Antyhing that was available, Pound would exploit it, advertise his cause (not himself). This is your life. Get your friends to tell you the truth, not stroke your ego.
That was the opening remarks. Here begins the panel discussion proper.
Question 1: How can writers build a platform and gain visibility? It's not what you did, it's what you do and what you're going to do.
Answers:
Build!:
websites,
blogs,
e-zines,
e-classes,
real classes.
Write.
Get published,
give talks,
readings,
workshops,
keynotes,
panels.
Host or organize author visits and reading series.
Coaching, training. (These are all things Christina Katz does.)
Facebook,
Twitter,
LinkedIn,
YouTube.
HARO- Help A Reporter Out- requests for experts, you can answer and get media coverage. Vlogging.
del.icio.us or delicious.com, social bookmarking.
Embrace all the opportunities that exist to help writers become authors. You already have a network in the real world. Guest blogging opportunities, interviews, reviews. You should say yes to anything you're invited to until you're so overbooked that you can afford someone to say no for you.
Create an online presence. It makes you discoverable 24/7, even when you're asleep or unavailable.
Brian Solis has a graphic called The Conversation Prism that shows all of the possibilities for online connectivity, all the different sites. There's a version 2.0 but I'm linking to the older one because 2.0 made my computer not only say "error on site" but make an unprecedented beeping noise.
With all this online stuff, you don't have to be where everyone else is--don't join a site just because other authors are. You can choose what's comfortable for you and what makes sense in relation to your intended audience.
The BBC has a list of the top 100 websites, in a graphic showing proportional traffic. (Just rollover the blocks to see what they are.) You can't spread yourself among all the networks. Once you're inactive on a site, it's not effective. (my addition: probably less effective than not being on it in the first place.) You make a long to-do list and do just a little of it each day. Use what fits not just you but your audience. Where they work, live, where they go, use the tools they are using. Twitter is very effective for writers. People spend more time on Facebook than on Google! Your platform often builds with what and who you already know, where you already are. Reinforce the personal aspect of it. Extend the reach. Communicating and connecting are why we read and write. Being a big fish in a small pond is good. Oprah took away from us the idea of baby steps--we now think we can just write a really good book and then suddenly be famous. She made us think we can put all of our energy into the book and all we have to to is go on Oprah. But our career is 100% our responsibility, even if we land our dream deal with our dream publisher. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker all had really messed up relationships with their publishers--they were parent figures in a way, or saviors who were supposed to deliver them. We don't want that! We're going to deliver ourselves.
Question 2: What are the challenges in building platforms for writers?
Answers:
1.Time. The most important thing you have to do is write. But you can't write 50 hours a week unless you're Balzac. You're the expert! Be the expert! Let the world know what you know. If you're not writing nonfiction, write about the process, write about writing, learn what the tools are. That requires some time-budgeting to pay attention to what's happening and your contribution, to further your career. For a writer, your career is something that you don't put down.
2. Getting comfortable with technology and tools. Get comfortable with slow growth--don't ask someone to review your book the minute they friend you. It may feel at first like no one's paying attention. You have to move through the feeling of meaninglessness--give it time to develop, just like any other relationship, to grow before you ask for huge favors.
3. Overcoming the attitude that self-promotion is vulgar or an admission that you're not talented. Remain other-focused. Chris Brogan's book Trust Agents embraces being present in other communities and focused on them for a long time before you even mention your writing or projects. Comment on other people's sites. Attitude is the most important thing. A bad one is the biggest obstacle. Also, clarify who you are, what you do, why you matter, why you're relevant, from the standpoint of common ground with others, through their eyes.
4. Confusing platform development with socializing. Not zooming in on what you can offer.
5. Thinking too much about yourself and not enough about others.
6. Not having a plan. Hope is not a method. Being overconfident, thinking you have more of a platform than you do.
7. Burnout.
Find three role models who are not necessarily largely famous, but whose techniques have brought them success. Quality resources are key. Quiet time thinking about your platform will help. Libel, copyright infringement, privacy violations, and similar issues will get you automatic rejections from publishers.
Well, that's a sweet note to end on. Sorry these notes are quite scattered--I didn't realize blogger wouldn't let me cut and paste, so I couldn't re-order some of the info. Next up: Spirituality and Writing! Woo hoo! Quite a departure from the nitty-gritty practical panels of the first morning.
Does anyone know how to email or otherwise send a comment to the postsecret blog? I have some mind to speak.
Christina Katz- This panel is about how to be an empowered artist. We're all responsible for our careers, not just putting them in the hands of agents or publicists. Becoming visible, getting known.
Robin Mizell, literary agent.
Venn diagram--one group that has studied craft and is talented, one group that has studied how to promote and sell. The sweet spot where they intersect could be "larger and more dangerous." We can cross-pollinate. Jane Friedman says the challenge is writers who are very talented but don't have a mindset for the business.
David Sanders- Ohio University Press and Swallow Press.
Connection between how much of a presence a writer has in the world and how they succeed.
Jane Friedman, Publisher and Editorial Director of Writer's Digest.
Sage Cohen, founder of Sage Communications. Not sure she was actually at the panel--I rarely take notes on who said what--but her sites are cool, so here they are.
When creating your platform, think about what else you do besides writing. How are you going to become visible and rise above the crowd? Our job as writers is to stand out. It can be fun and exhilarating and creative. When you think your writing career is fun and exciting and interesting, it will become that way to others and draw people. Your platform is not your CV. It's an ongoing effort to connect with your readers and others who want to know about you and what you're doing. It takes years of work--it's never too soon to start. It's a journey, a lifelong process, part of your growth as a writer with a career.
Your platform includes:
1. The authority or credentials you bring to the table. It's a presence. Ezra Pound had the best platform of the 20th century.
2. Visibility. Antyhing that was available, Pound would exploit it, advertise his cause (not himself). This is your life. Get your friends to tell you the truth, not stroke your ego.
That was the opening remarks. Here begins the panel discussion proper.
Question 1: How can writers build a platform and gain visibility? It's not what you did, it's what you do and what you're going to do.
Answers:
Build!:
websites,
blogs,
e-zines,
e-classes,
real classes.
Write.
Get published,
give talks,
readings,
workshops,
keynotes,
panels.
Host or organize author visits and reading series.
Coaching, training. (These are all things Christina Katz does.)
Facebook,
Twitter,
LinkedIn,
YouTube.
HARO- Help A Reporter Out- requests for experts, you can answer and get media coverage. Vlogging.
del.icio.us or delicious.com, social bookmarking.
Embrace all the opportunities that exist to help writers become authors. You already have a network in the real world. Guest blogging opportunities, interviews, reviews. You should say yes to anything you're invited to until you're so overbooked that you can afford someone to say no for you.
Create an online presence. It makes you discoverable 24/7, even when you're asleep or unavailable.
Brian Solis has a graphic called The Conversation Prism that shows all of the possibilities for online connectivity, all the different sites. There's a version 2.0 but I'm linking to the older one because 2.0 made my computer not only say "error on site" but make an unprecedented beeping noise.
With all this online stuff, you don't have to be where everyone else is--don't join a site just because other authors are. You can choose what's comfortable for you and what makes sense in relation to your intended audience.
The BBC has a list of the top 100 websites, in a graphic showing proportional traffic. (Just rollover the blocks to see what they are.) You can't spread yourself among all the networks. Once you're inactive on a site, it's not effective. (my addition: probably less effective than not being on it in the first place.) You make a long to-do list and do just a little of it each day. Use what fits not just you but your audience. Where they work, live, where they go, use the tools they are using. Twitter is very effective for writers. People spend more time on Facebook than on Google! Your platform often builds with what and who you already know, where you already are. Reinforce the personal aspect of it. Extend the reach. Communicating and connecting are why we read and write. Being a big fish in a small pond is good. Oprah took away from us the idea of baby steps--we now think we can just write a really good book and then suddenly be famous. She made us think we can put all of our energy into the book and all we have to to is go on Oprah. But our career is 100% our responsibility, even if we land our dream deal with our dream publisher. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker all had really messed up relationships with their publishers--they were parent figures in a way, or saviors who were supposed to deliver them. We don't want that! We're going to deliver ourselves.
Question 2: What are the challenges in building platforms for writers?
Answers:
1.Time. The most important thing you have to do is write. But you can't write 50 hours a week unless you're Balzac. You're the expert! Be the expert! Let the world know what you know. If you're not writing nonfiction, write about the process, write about writing, learn what the tools are. That requires some time-budgeting to pay attention to what's happening and your contribution, to further your career. For a writer, your career is something that you don't put down.
2. Getting comfortable with technology and tools. Get comfortable with slow growth--don't ask someone to review your book the minute they friend you. It may feel at first like no one's paying attention. You have to move through the feeling of meaninglessness--give it time to develop, just like any other relationship, to grow before you ask for huge favors.
3. Overcoming the attitude that self-promotion is vulgar or an admission that you're not talented. Remain other-focused. Chris Brogan's book Trust Agents embraces being present in other communities and focused on them for a long time before you even mention your writing or projects. Comment on other people's sites. Attitude is the most important thing. A bad one is the biggest obstacle. Also, clarify who you are, what you do, why you matter, why you're relevant, from the standpoint of common ground with others, through their eyes.
4. Confusing platform development with socializing. Not zooming in on what you can offer.
5. Thinking too much about yourself and not enough about others.
6. Not having a plan. Hope is not a method. Being overconfident, thinking you have more of a platform than you do.
7. Burnout.
Find three role models who are not necessarily largely famous, but whose techniques have brought them success. Quality resources are key. Quiet time thinking about your platform will help. Libel, copyright infringement, privacy violations, and similar issues will get you automatic rejections from publishers.
Well, that's a sweet note to end on. Sorry these notes are quite scattered--I didn't realize blogger wouldn't let me cut and paste, so I couldn't re-order some of the info. Next up: Spirituality and Writing! Woo hoo! Quite a departure from the nitty-gritty practical panels of the first morning.
Does anyone know how to email or otherwise send a comment to the postsecret blog? I have some mind to speak.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
AWP 3: Squad 365 Continued
These notes are from the Q&A session following the Shameless Self-promotion panel.
Reading groups are often affiliated with local bookstores. Create a list of book club questions. There's a site, http://www.readinggroupchoices.com, where you can get your publisher to submit your book to it and then book clubs will see it.
Can you make your effort less time-consuming? Can you make it something that feeds your spirit? Find FUN ways to drive traffic to your blog, like Twitter.
Propose yourself as a writer/reader for reading series. Write to them nine months or so in advance of your publication date. Leave the crumbs through the forest--it might seem weird to take the initiative and invite yourself over, but they can't invite you if they don't know you.
My idea: have a petition for people to sign who want your book published.
Think of how you can be of service to your potential readers.
Pre-publication blog: countdown, contests, interactive stuff--make the publication a highly anticipated event. Don't post excerpts before selling the book because they may change a lot!
Make sure you editor/publicist knows some of the places that are personal to you where he should send press releases, places that wouldn't be on his normal list--your hometown paper, other places you've lived, places your family lives.
Before publication, don't tell too much of the story because then reporters and other media folks won't have anything new to tell. OR, the more you tell and share and offer, the more readers you'll get. Two schools of thought.
You learn from everything. At the very least, you learn what interests you, and a writer gets to use everything.
#1 way to get your book known: get in trouble.
Make promises you don't know if you can keep. Make mistakes. Be game all of the time. Have real conversations--people are more likely to read or buy it if they've spoken with you. Promotion is human connection, not entry into a great national machine called publicity. It is rendering service. When you render service, the ego's out of it and the fear's out of it. Big global plan. A little promotion each day (writing a fan letter counts!) Micromovements.
Sit down with a librarian to talk about how to promote your books to librarians. They might invite you back for a reading. Librarians will know about book clubs. Stores will send employees to readings with a portable credit card machine and books to sell. Mail copies with letters to your literary heroes. Or to your peers, equals. That's where collaboration might happen--collaborate with established artists in other media, and their platform can market you. Nonfiction and other writers have expertise. We are authorities about things. That's a platform too. Market with what you know, apart from the book as a product.
Here are some things they mentioned:
http://www.booksense.com
Drive by Daniel Pink
The Gift by Lewis Hyde
http://tribalauthor.com. They said the blog section of this site includes a post that helps you figure out Twitter.
http://www.4over4.com lets you print your own business cards, stationery, etc.
That's it for the Squad 365 panel, the first and perhaps best one I went to this year. Stay tuned for more AWP rehashing as I try to stretch the love out a little bit longer.
Reading groups are often affiliated with local bookstores. Create a list of book club questions. There's a site, http://www.readinggroupchoices.com, where you can get your publisher to submit your book to it and then book clubs will see it.
Can you make your effort less time-consuming? Can you make it something that feeds your spirit? Find FUN ways to drive traffic to your blog, like Twitter.
Propose yourself as a writer/reader for reading series. Write to them nine months or so in advance of your publication date. Leave the crumbs through the forest--it might seem weird to take the initiative and invite yourself over, but they can't invite you if they don't know you.
My idea: have a petition for people to sign who want your book published.
Think of how you can be of service to your potential readers.
Pre-publication blog: countdown, contests, interactive stuff--make the publication a highly anticipated event. Don't post excerpts before selling the book because they may change a lot!
Make sure you editor/publicist knows some of the places that are personal to you where he should send press releases, places that wouldn't be on his normal list--your hometown paper, other places you've lived, places your family lives.
Before publication, don't tell too much of the story because then reporters and other media folks won't have anything new to tell. OR, the more you tell and share and offer, the more readers you'll get. Two schools of thought.
You learn from everything. At the very least, you learn what interests you, and a writer gets to use everything.
#1 way to get your book known: get in trouble.
Make promises you don't know if you can keep. Make mistakes. Be game all of the time. Have real conversations--people are more likely to read or buy it if they've spoken with you. Promotion is human connection, not entry into a great national machine called publicity. It is rendering service. When you render service, the ego's out of it and the fear's out of it. Big global plan. A little promotion each day (writing a fan letter counts!) Micromovements.
Sit down with a librarian to talk about how to promote your books to librarians. They might invite you back for a reading. Librarians will know about book clubs. Stores will send employees to readings with a portable credit card machine and books to sell. Mail copies with letters to your literary heroes. Or to your peers, equals. That's where collaboration might happen--collaborate with established artists in other media, and their platform can market you. Nonfiction and other writers have expertise. We are authorities about things. That's a platform too. Market with what you know, apart from the book as a product.
Here are some things they mentioned:
http://www.booksense.com
Drive by Daniel Pink
The Gift by Lewis Hyde
http://tribalauthor.com. They said the blog section of this site includes a post that helps you figure out Twitter.
http://www.4over4.com lets you print your own business cards, stationery, etc.
That's it for the Squad 365 panel, the first and perhaps best one I went to this year. Stay tuned for more AWP rehashing as I try to stretch the love out a little bit longer.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
AWP 2
I'm going to do this in chronological order as closely as possible. So, the first panel I went to was about Shamelessly Promoting your Book. It was fun and really informative and practical. I'm just going to put my notes on here, incomplete sentences and inconsistencies and all.
Promotion is communal, fun, a lot of people involved. Twitter. "No sale yet but bravely planning for inevitable success." "Who's excited about what you can do on your own? Who feels beleaguered and confused?"
Jon Spayde- Living the Dream. book: How to Believe: portraits of Christian believers. Don't draw a foolish line between creation and commerce. "rapidly morphing and who-knows-what's-next publishing world" is more interesting and creative every day. Mini-connections instead of major outlets. Reaching out begins with idea and continues all the way to blog, blurb, podcast, reading, coffee house artist residency. Book morphs from static object into one stage of a complex process of communication. Communication and connection are the point. Better sales are a by-product.
Margaret Hasse- Premeditated Promotion. Freelance worker, consultant to nonprofits. Successful promotion requires a creative visionary thought-out tangible PLAN. Consult heart's desire and others.
1. Plan should have a context--statement--what you do as a writer and why. Mission--process, philosophy, passion, breadth, durability, challenge, distinction
2. picture of what will be different in community because of your writing.
3. PRODUCT--what you make and do that people might want to know about and make use of.
4. PEOPLE. Whom do you want to engage? Qualities of prospective readers who would like your book if only they knew about it.
5. PLACE. Where will you and readers find each other? How wide to cast net?
6. price. consider list price, advance. Charge for services like reading, etc., and think about what to volunteer your time toward. "Finance is a footnote to my story."
7. Promotion--how to reach and inform and inspire the people you've identified. Paid ads, profiles and interviews and reviews, website, email and direct mail, personal, trade shows, events
8. definite course of action--timetable, maybe budget. "You will hit some dead ends and turn to new adventures."
plan--from drawing on flat surface--also connected to Plant. Planting seeds.
Todd Boss. Get Committed. poet.
Poetry for popular audience. It should not be shameful for a writer to seek an audience--it's our privilege and duty, our contribution to the world. In other countries, poets are household names! It's perceived as belonging to all audiences, a public resource.
Let's commit to 2 assumptions:
1. The world is our audience.
2. It is our duty to give the world the poetry it craves.
How to act on it:
1. Commit to a public role. Become a poet laureate. Assert your leadership, assign yourself a role as a local public figure with a constituency.
2. Make a website. Make it yourself so that you can use it and update it easily, move with it nimbly. Use iWeb on a Mac.
3. Make audio. "Audience" comes from "audere--to hear." The world doesn't just crave poetry, it craves the sound. Without it, you're giving the world only half of the poetry it craves. When you sign a book contract, reserve electronic rights.
4. Encourage commissions. Offer on your site to write poems in praise or gratitude toward someone, from someone else. Create a new market based on emotional necessity, urgency, and deep artistic commitment.
5. Collaborate across media. Call for collaborators on your website. Think of yourself less as a writer and more as an artist. Chances are you're a filmmaker, librettist, and playwright too.
Commit to a poetry-craving public in as many ways as you can think of. It will make traditional promotion obsolete.
Marisha Chamberlain. The Good-Enough Book Tour.
Weariness and bitterness can seep through in readings, especially from the financially successful authors.
Touring may make you poorer--you will be paying your own travel expenses. Could be considered delusional.
Achieving profit goals makes people more tense and jittery, not less so.
Tour for reasons other than book sales. Not about me, not about my book, but about a few brave souls who celebrate literature. Sometimes bears no resemblance to the idea you have of a book tour. Your publisher might not send enough copies, or any!
It's not a do-or-die effort, it's good enough. To be all together and alive in the same room caring about literature.
That's the bulk of what Squad 365 said that morning. I have two more pages of notes from the Q and A portion, which I'll put in another post. I hope this is helpful for someone who's reading this. If nothing else, it's good for me to further digest it by typing it up. More to come; writers and non-writers alike, stay tuned!
Promotion is communal, fun, a lot of people involved. Twitter. "No sale yet but bravely planning for inevitable success." "Who's excited about what you can do on your own? Who feels beleaguered and confused?"
Jon Spayde- Living the Dream. book: How to Believe: portraits of Christian believers. Don't draw a foolish line between creation and commerce. "rapidly morphing and who-knows-what's-next publishing world" is more interesting and creative every day. Mini-connections instead of major outlets. Reaching out begins with idea and continues all the way to blog, blurb, podcast, reading, coffee house artist residency. Book morphs from static object into one stage of a complex process of communication. Communication and connection are the point. Better sales are a by-product.
Margaret Hasse- Premeditated Promotion. Freelance worker, consultant to nonprofits. Successful promotion requires a creative visionary thought-out tangible PLAN. Consult heart's desire and others.
1. Plan should have a context--statement--what you do as a writer and why. Mission--process, philosophy, passion, breadth, durability, challenge, distinction
2. picture of what will be different in community because of your writing.
3. PRODUCT--what you make and do that people might want to know about and make use of.
4. PEOPLE. Whom do you want to engage? Qualities of prospective readers who would like your book if only they knew about it.
5. PLACE. Where will you and readers find each other? How wide to cast net?
6. price. consider list price, advance. Charge for services like reading, etc., and think about what to volunteer your time toward. "Finance is a footnote to my story."
7. Promotion--how to reach and inform and inspire the people you've identified. Paid ads, profiles and interviews and reviews, website, email and direct mail, personal, trade shows, events
8. definite course of action--timetable, maybe budget. "You will hit some dead ends and turn to new adventures."
plan--from drawing on flat surface--also connected to Plant. Planting seeds.
Todd Boss. Get Committed. poet.
Poetry for popular audience. It should not be shameful for a writer to seek an audience--it's our privilege and duty, our contribution to the world. In other countries, poets are household names! It's perceived as belonging to all audiences, a public resource.
Let's commit to 2 assumptions:
1. The world is our audience.
2. It is our duty to give the world the poetry it craves.
How to act on it:
1. Commit to a public role. Become a poet laureate. Assert your leadership, assign yourself a role as a local public figure with a constituency.
2. Make a website. Make it yourself so that you can use it and update it easily, move with it nimbly. Use iWeb on a Mac.
3. Make audio. "Audience" comes from "audere--to hear." The world doesn't just crave poetry, it craves the sound. Without it, you're giving the world only half of the poetry it craves. When you sign a book contract, reserve electronic rights.
4. Encourage commissions. Offer on your site to write poems in praise or gratitude toward someone, from someone else. Create a new market based on emotional necessity, urgency, and deep artistic commitment.
5. Collaborate across media. Call for collaborators on your website. Think of yourself less as a writer and more as an artist. Chances are you're a filmmaker, librettist, and playwright too.
Commit to a poetry-craving public in as many ways as you can think of. It will make traditional promotion obsolete.
Marisha Chamberlain. The Good-Enough Book Tour.
Weariness and bitterness can seep through in readings, especially from the financially successful authors.
Touring may make you poorer--you will be paying your own travel expenses. Could be considered delusional.
Achieving profit goals makes people more tense and jittery, not less so.
Tour for reasons other than book sales. Not about me, not about my book, but about a few brave souls who celebrate literature. Sometimes bears no resemblance to the idea you have of a book tour. Your publisher might not send enough copies, or any!
It's not a do-or-die effort, it's good enough. To be all together and alive in the same room caring about literature.
That's the bulk of what Squad 365 said that morning. I have two more pages of notes from the Q and A portion, which I'll put in another post. I hope this is helpful for someone who's reading this. If nothing else, it's good for me to further digest it by typing it up. More to come; writers and non-writers alike, stay tuned!
Monday, April 12, 2010
AWP Denver!
Wow, I have so much to share. I had the most wonderful time in Colorado this weekend! The conference was amazing, more uplifting than the last two years, and shockingly educational. I picked up an armload of free journals and kept some of the best poems and pieces, which I might be sharing on here. I also thought I might post some of my notes from the best panels and, when possible, link to the folks who gave them. Is there anything wrong with putting a poem you love up on your blog, when it's been published in print? Maybe I'll try linking to them instead. I'll do these bit by bit, and that way I'll have material for quite a while. Non-writers, do stay tuned, because you never know what other awesomeness I'll come up with, and plenty of the conference material could apply to you in surprising ways.
The general overview is that I love writers and writing more than ever. Maybe I'm being preemptively nostalgic, knowing I'm about to leave the particular community of writers I'm part of and probably not be part of one at all for a while. Maybe I came into it at a sparkly-eyed time when I want to hug the world. Or maybe this conference was more full of joy and laughter than the 2008 and 2009 incarnations, not that those were dull or morose. But Michael Chabon did an amazing keynote address, which I hope I can get a copy of somehow, and George Saunders is much younger than I expected and peppy and does voices, which is perfect for settings like AWP where everyone is exhausted and prone to sleeping. Reading with him was Etgar Keret, who is new to me and whom I thought was Edgar Caret until just now. I'm definitely going to be reading him. One of his stories was about a beautiful woman who turns into a big fat hairy man at night, and her husband becomes friends with him. They go out on the town every night. He introduced it by saying something like, "My wife said, 'You write stories for all of your friends and family, but you've never written a story for me.' So I did, and I called it 'Fatso.'" Wow, did I have fun.
Outside the conference, I hit the Tattered Cover bookstore and yearned after almost everything there. I realized that it wasn't the books themselves I wanted so much as the time to read them. I also went to the Garden of the Gods and had a nice time exploring Manitou Springs, a very cute little town which, in the on-season, is probably overrun with tourists to the point of nausea. The Garden of the Gods is a series of rock formations that are indescribable. I get, a little bit, what people are talking about when they say Uluru/Ayers Rock in Australia has a primal pull. Felt it a little at the G of the G. Definitely recommend it if you're ever out that way.
Well, I plan to parcel out the AWP goodness for quite a while, so check back for more. Everything else is going great.
The general overview is that I love writers and writing more than ever. Maybe I'm being preemptively nostalgic, knowing I'm about to leave the particular community of writers I'm part of and probably not be part of one at all for a while. Maybe I came into it at a sparkly-eyed time when I want to hug the world. Or maybe this conference was more full of joy and laughter than the 2008 and 2009 incarnations, not that those were dull or morose. But Michael Chabon did an amazing keynote address, which I hope I can get a copy of somehow, and George Saunders is much younger than I expected and peppy and does voices, which is perfect for settings like AWP where everyone is exhausted and prone to sleeping. Reading with him was Etgar Keret, who is new to me and whom I thought was Edgar Caret until just now. I'm definitely going to be reading him. One of his stories was about a beautiful woman who turns into a big fat hairy man at night, and her husband becomes friends with him. They go out on the town every night. He introduced it by saying something like, "My wife said, 'You write stories for all of your friends and family, but you've never written a story for me.' So I did, and I called it 'Fatso.'" Wow, did I have fun.
Outside the conference, I hit the Tattered Cover bookstore and yearned after almost everything there. I realized that it wasn't the books themselves I wanted so much as the time to read them. I also went to the Garden of the Gods and had a nice time exploring Manitou Springs, a very cute little town which, in the on-season, is probably overrun with tourists to the point of nausea. The Garden of the Gods is a series of rock formations that are indescribable. I get, a little bit, what people are talking about when they say Uluru/Ayers Rock in Australia has a primal pull. Felt it a little at the G of the G. Definitely recommend it if you're ever out that way.
Well, I plan to parcel out the AWP goodness for quite a while, so check back for more. Everything else is going great.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Same thing with a tweak, I hope
What if I want it to open in a new window? I promise I'll go back to my regular style soon; I just want to get to the bottom of this. And I just noticed which picture comes up first on that link. It's a little unusual, so be forewarned if you choose to click on it.
Fun with Technology
Oh Happy Day
One of my friends said yesterday, "I know it's been a rough week for you, but how are you doing?"
I said, "Rough week?"
She'd seen on Facebook that I'd had a couple of job rejections mid-week. By Sunday, when we had this conversation, I genuinely didn't know what she was talking about. I was on such a high from church, and Easter, and the sunshine and general state of things, that I didn't think of it as a rough week at all. The gay couple in our church had their sons baptized on Easter, at the 11:00 traditional service, when everyone would have grandparents and grandkids and other easily shocked visitors. I'm so proud of my church for having it then. A baptism is special no matter what, a baptism on Easter even more so, and those kids are a couple of the best. I missed it because I didn't know about it and went to another service, but just the thought has had me feeling good.
As far as jobs go, I've pretty much passed worry and moved to another kind of impatience, a more excited and eager kind, like Christmas Eve. I don't think the next step is going to be bad, and I don't think it won't happen, but I'm still antsy for the big reveal. Holding out in some ways still, not applying to Books-A-Million because I enjoy having my soul intact, not aiming for editorial as in author-relations, getting excited about a couple of copy editing possibilities. There's so much available, really. The geographical radius is expanding, which feels funny but OK. Because I got a big tax return, and recently was reminded that I'll get a full paycheck for May, I can actually keep looking until mid-June, I think, before I'm fully desperate. And after school's done, I can devote almost all of my time to job hunting, which means I'll be better at it, which means I'll get one sooner. So I have no reason to be worried.
Easter this year feels like Thanksgiving! I have so much to be thankful for, and so much to smile about. I went for a bike ride yesterday and sang most of the way, "Oh Happy Day" and "Joy to the World" and snippets of other joyous songs. I also read most of the September 2009 The Sun (I'm that behind) and was surprised and educated and uplifted and cried because one of the pieces was so beautiful. A few weeks ago, I was crying a lot because I was scared and kind of angry and unsure of everything. Now, I'm crying a little less but crying because I'm happy and grateful and blessed and excited. And nothing external has changed--no job, no certainty. Not sure what happened, but I'm riding this wave as long as I can. Praise Jesus, and thank you thank you thank you.
I said, "Rough week?"
She'd seen on Facebook that I'd had a couple of job rejections mid-week. By Sunday, when we had this conversation, I genuinely didn't know what she was talking about. I was on such a high from church, and Easter, and the sunshine and general state of things, that I didn't think of it as a rough week at all. The gay couple in our church had their sons baptized on Easter, at the 11:00 traditional service, when everyone would have grandparents and grandkids and other easily shocked visitors. I'm so proud of my church for having it then. A baptism is special no matter what, a baptism on Easter even more so, and those kids are a couple of the best. I missed it because I didn't know about it and went to another service, but just the thought has had me feeling good.
As far as jobs go, I've pretty much passed worry and moved to another kind of impatience, a more excited and eager kind, like Christmas Eve. I don't think the next step is going to be bad, and I don't think it won't happen, but I'm still antsy for the big reveal. Holding out in some ways still, not applying to Books-A-Million because I enjoy having my soul intact, not aiming for editorial as in author-relations, getting excited about a couple of copy editing possibilities. There's so much available, really. The geographical radius is expanding, which feels funny but OK. Because I got a big tax return, and recently was reminded that I'll get a full paycheck for May, I can actually keep looking until mid-June, I think, before I'm fully desperate. And after school's done, I can devote almost all of my time to job hunting, which means I'll be better at it, which means I'll get one sooner. So I have no reason to be worried.
Easter this year feels like Thanksgiving! I have so much to be thankful for, and so much to smile about. I went for a bike ride yesterday and sang most of the way, "Oh Happy Day" and "Joy to the World" and snippets of other joyous songs. I also read most of the September 2009 The Sun (I'm that behind) and was surprised and educated and uplifted and cried because one of the pieces was so beautiful. A few weeks ago, I was crying a lot because I was scared and kind of angry and unsure of everything. Now, I'm crying a little less but crying because I'm happy and grateful and blessed and excited. And nothing external has changed--no job, no certainty. Not sure what happened, but I'm riding this wave as long as I can. Praise Jesus, and thank you thank you thank you.
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