Category: Writing

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: The Best Publishing, Writing, and Platform Links plus a Memorial Day Menu

by Maria

Read:

neil degrasse tyson quote

5 Smart Content Strategies from a Stellar Marketer of Ideas (Sonia Simone on Copyblogger): If you haven’t heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson, he will be your new favorite nerd. “He talks about the value in having a passion for all kinds of things, not just your specific area of study. (Tyson has pursued serious interests in wrestling, rowing, wine collecting, and ballroom dancing, so he practices what he preaches.)” In a world where we’re all honed in on acquiring ultimate knowledge in our fields, it’s such a relief to be encouraged to intellectually roam .

Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age (Maria Popova/On Being with Krista Tippett): I listened to this podcast on Tuesday, and it absolutely changed the trajectory of my whole week. I’ve always been an obsessive fan of Popova, but it’s particularly inspiring to hear her talk about the things few people talk about–meaning, fulfillment, intellectual curiosity–in a fresh, accessible way. Dream dinner party: Me, Maria Popova, Krista Tippett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and an XL pot of soup.

Osama Bin Laden’s Bookshelf Reflects His Fixation with the West (Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times): “His bookshelf is a weird hodgepodge. It’s hard to know how complete a list it is, and whether he requested certain books from aides, or if aides sent him works they thought he might like or that might influence his thinking.” A fascinating look at how the books we read shape our world view.

The 5 Simple Strategies That Grew Our Social Traffic by 350% (Madhav Bhandari on BufferSocial): Spoiler alert! The 5 strategies are: schedule the reposting of evergreen content, figure out your optimal timing, have great content to begin with, write headlines that draw people in, and include others in the conversation. But this is still worth a read, because each of those strategies needs to be unpacked before it can be implemented.

The Best Typography, Colors, and Templates Used in the Highest-Converting Social Media Images (James Johnson on BufferSocial): “Turns out, there’s tons of actionable, research-backed advice on how to create social media images that get shared—the ideal colors, fonts, text, and more, all leveraging what we know about design, psychology and the Internet to get more shares and engagement.”

10 Steps to Overcome Writer’s Block (Carly Watters): Step #2 is to “Forgive yourself a perfect draft: No one writes a clean first draft. It’s called a ‘Shitty First Draft‘ for a reason. Read some Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird is a must!) and learn that perfect doesn’t exist. Especially in art.” Writers, agents, and editors are always saying this because it’s one of the truest truths out there. But it’s so, so easy to forget. My favorite visual reminder: this free Anne Lamott art print to hang in your office and look at every time you’re battling perfectionism.

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