Category: Blogging

The 4 Stages of Publishing a Book–New Series!

by Maria

How to publish a book

It’s one of the first questions I get on introductory phone calls with aspiring authors: What does the publishing process entail? So this month I’m running a 4-part series on how the publishing process works and how you can navigate each stage of the journey with zero bewilderment and maximum fun. Consider this your required reading if you’re thinking about birthing a book, but you need to know how to do it without losing your marbles.

It’s no coincidence that everyone in the publishing industry compares publishing a book to birthing a baby—they’re both deeply personal experiences, fraught with questions, doubts, and ultimately, huge rewards. But both experiences are worthwhile because they bring more meaning to our lives, either by growing our immediate family or by growing our extended family: the people out there in the world who you feel called to help. Publishing a book is one of the best ways to get your message and your mission out into the world and to use it as a way to help your readers, rather than as a way to just help yourself.

Over the next 4 Tuesday mornings, I’ll walk you through the 4 key stages of publishing a book, covering everything from how to get in the door, to how to introduce your new book baby to the world.  Here’s what we’ll cover [updated with links]:

As a heads up, this series will be discussing only the way things work in the traditional publishing world. If you’re looking for a comprehensive look at how the self-publishing process works, I highly recommend Jane Friedman’s wonderful article found here. And while much of the series emphasizes why a platform matters, I’m a big believer that platform will only become increasingly important for fiction writers, too. (It’s already a must for nonfiction authors.)

If you’d like to have the posts come directly to you so you don’t miss them, you can sign up to have them delivered to you. Just enter your email address in the scrollbox on the right, or shoot me an email, and I’ll get you set up!

 

Read, Eat, Drink: How to Hit the New York Times Bestseller List and a Recipe for Orecchiette with Sausage and Spinach

by Maria

Read:

How to get published

How Bestseller Lists Work (Tim Ferriss): Ever wondered what it takes to hit the New York Times bestseller list? Well, the truth is that it’s mostly luck, timing, and making sure you’re on the Times’s radar. I’ve seen lots of books with extremely high sales not hit the list, and I’ve also seen plenty of books with moderate sales hit the list, simply because they launched on a slow week. The takeaway? Hitting the NYT list isn’t as much about sheer volume of sales as it is about playing your cards right, while the Amazon lists are a more accurate representation of a book’s popularity.

How to Gain a Massive Following on Instagram: 10 Proven Tactics To Grow Followers and Engagement (Courtney Seiter for BufferSocial): As I’ve written about here, Instagram is an interesting platform because it engenders engagement, and it isn’t over-crowded (yet). It’s also a place with high conversion from fans to sales, so it’s been the hot new thing in the publishing world lately. Is it better for visually driven nonfiction than for fiction? I think so. I’m still of the belief (more on that here) that Twitter is the best social media home for fiction writers.

I Quit My Job Today (And So Can You!) (Sarah Knight on Medium): Ooo, juicy! Don’t we all love a I-quit-my-job-and-went-after-my-dream story? Chasing a passion over a paycheck is practically the American Dream of the millenial generation. Read Sarah Knight’s story of how she quit her Senior Editor job at Simon & Schuster to go freelance, and check her website out here if you’re an author looking for a top-notch editor.

Will Book Publishers Ever Start Fact-Checking? They’re Already Starting (Boris Kachka for Vulture): “It’s every editor’s nightmare,” says an editor. “You live in fear that someone’s gonna get by you. It’s like working for the TSA. You don’t want to be the guy who let the terrorist in.” Being the editor or agent behind a book that’s found out to be fraudulent truly is what our nightmares are made of, but there are so few systems in place for vetting authors and books. Happy to see that some imprints and private companies are finally filling this gap.

The Clues to a Great Story (Andrew Stanton in a TED talk): This is a Watch, not a Read, but it’s a worthwhile one. Stanton is the writing genius behind smash hits like Toy Story and Wall-E, and if anyone knows how to spin a good story, it’s the minds at Pixar. In his words: “Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We’re born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.”

Eat & Drink:

Orecchiette with Sausage and Spinach

When I was in college, I studied abroad in Verona, Italy. If you do an Italian vacation right, you should expect to gain a few pounds. If you live there for nearly four months, you can expect to buy a whole new wardrobe. This happened. And naturally, I blame a cookbook.

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Why You Need the 80/20 Rule if You Want to Grow Your Platform

by Maria
the 80 20 rule 

We are creatures of habit, and we can so easily be caught up in our routines and systems. This is especially true for bloggers, who control their own schedules and have to face a whole slew of new challenges as they grow: how to build traffic, how to monetize, how to avoid burnout, how to resist the urge to give up. And as I wrote about a few weeks ago, one of the biggest mistakes bloggers can make is to spend too much time simply churning out content. If you’re just operating in survival mode five days a week, it becomes impossible to tackle the big-picture growth initiatives.

Which is why the most successful bloggers I’ve seen—the ones that built blogs with millions of pages views in just a couple of years—are the ones that understand the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is this: you should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time finding ways to share it. Here’s why it works:

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Read, Eat, Drink: How ClickHole Became the Best Thing on the Internet & a Rhubarb Gin Cocktail Recipe

by Maria

Read:

How to get published

60+ Fantastic Email Newsletters to Read and Share (Courtney Seiter for Buffer): I love email newsletters because they’re such an effortless and fun way to learn new things. And this list is especially awesome, since it spans so many topics: general news, tech, marketing, design, photography, sports, food and beverage, general interesting-ness, and self-improvement (i.e. a lot of the topics I represent as an agent)! I really do not want to confess how many of these I signed up for. Let’s just say it was more than 2 and less than 20.

How ClickHole Became the Best Thing on the Internet (Dan Kois for Slate): “But the Atlantic reports that [The Onion] plans more independent site launches in the ClickHole mode, and according to Quantcast, the online traffic-measuring tool, ClickHole’s traffic has mostly held steady between 10 million and 15 million page views per month. Like many websites, ClickHole’s had game-changing mammoth viral hits; in November about 7 million people read what I believe to be ClickHole’s masterpiece, “’90s Kids Rejoice! The Spider Eggs They Used to Fill Beanie Babies Are Finally Hatching,” in part because at least a few social-Web visitors worried the threat was real. And as ClickHole has grown,  the site’s moved away from being a simple BuzzFeed parody; instead it’s become richer, weirder, a darker reflection of our own dark times.” Did any one else burst out laughing at the thought of spider eggs hatching in Beanie Babies? Way, way too good.

The Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started with Video Content (Matt Aunger for Buffer): Video is a fabulous tool for connecting more deeply with your readers, because it creates an intimate, face-to-face, three-dimensional experience. (Why do you think Food Network stars, John Green, and other TV, YouTube, and movie stars manage to sell so many books?) Here’s the delightfully short guide to layering video into your existing platform without driving yourself nuts.

How to Repurpose Your Book or Blog Content for Profit and Promotion (Nina Amir on JaneFriedman.com): “As an author who has just produced or may be in the process of producing amazing amounts of content, you have a great advantage: You can turn all that content into money-making products. These ‘information products’ can provide you additional income and a business that revolves around your book. This strategy also works for long-time bloggers who are often sitting on as much information as a book would contain.”

Eat & Drink:

Over to Jarrett, for this gloriously delicious drink:

Rhubarb and gin cocktail recipe

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