As I’ve been talking about on my Twitter, yesterday afternoon I finally caught up on all queries as of February 1, 2015. Writers: if you submitted a query to me before that date and haven’t received a response, please re-send. It may have been lost in the cosmic Internet shuffle!
I’ve also been hearing back from many writers who are looking for a bit more guidance about how to build their platforms, so here’s a quick round-up of resources and articles you might find helpful:
As strange as it sounds, one of the things I love most about my job is analyzing stats. I love looking at the interplay of dozens of different analytics to determine the reach and level of audience engagement of a potential client. And when I sign an author/blogger/entrepreneur who I think is incredibly talented, I love to spend our first few months tweaking and optimizing their platform so that it can grow in the ways that will give them…to be totally wonky…the best ROI.
So what to prioritize? Here are the numbers I zero in on when I’m assessing a potential client’s platform:
My favorite article this week is a throwback post that recently resurfaced from Brain Pickings: How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently.
Dennett asks the question: “Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?”
This is an incredibly important topic–if we never learn to criticize or dissent effectively, so little can ever be accomplished. It’s an essential skill to learn as editors and agents, because so much of our work hinges on providing feedback to authors. And anyone who’s ever tried to edit someone else’s writing knows what a touchy thing it can be–writing is an extremely personal thing, and being told that your writing should be changed can sometimes feel like a personal attack. That’s why it’s the responsibility of critics/editors/agents/everyone to deliver feedback in a way that will make your subject receptive, rather than defensive.
Read:
This week’s “read” is more of a “look”–just as we’re on the conversation of book covers, Buzzfeed released a list of 32 of the Most Beautiful Book Covers of 2014. There are some really excellent covers on here, and though the list skews toward upmarket literary fiction (where there are less conventions to adhere to than genre fiction or nonfiction), it’s still a great example of what’s working in the market now. And while it’s tempting to just say “It’s pretty. I like it.” (I do this ALL the time, heh), it’s much more helpful to try to dissect why it works. Here are my favorites and why I think they are awesome:
Gold foil is very hot right now in the online world, but this is the first book cover I’ve seen tap into the trend. It’s a bit hard to tell from this image if they used full gold foil on the entire cover or just reserved it for the author’s name (since this is an expensive production add-on), but it looks incredible. It’s eye-catching enough to stand out on a bookstore table, but it also doesn’t pigeonhole the book into too narrow of a genre. I think the cover of the hardcover edition of the work (which you can see here) looked too science-fiction-y, but you can tell by the back cover copy that this book is meant to be genre-defying. And for that, you need an ungenred, ungendered cover!