1. Write a damn good book.

No matter how much marketing you do, your book will not sell if it’s not well written. Join a writer’s group, find a critique partner, enroll in an MFA program, attend writers’ conferences and retreats—do whatever you have to do to learn your craft and write, write, write.

2. Be prepared to work your arse off.

You think it’s difficult to keep up with Twitter and Facebook and blogging now? Self-pubbed authors are doing triple what most of us are doing. Here are a few blog posts about how much work goes into self-publishing (Thanks to Nathan Bransford for these links.)

First we have Cory Doctorow who, after traditionally publishing several books, decided to self-publish his collection of short stories. “I dramatically underestimated how much work this would be. It’s not impossible, and it’s not horrible work – it’s challenging, exciting stuff, but it’s incredibly time consuming and it can be tough (and expensive).”

Next we have Amanda Hocking on why she decided to go with a traditional publisher after her mega-success as a self-published author. In addition to wanting to spend less time marketing and more time writing, Hocking said in a recent blog post: “With St. Martin’s, I would be able to produce a better quality product that would be more accessible to readers, and I would have the support of a house behind me to help take of some of the strain I’ve been under so I can focus on writing more books.”

And finally, author and former literary agent Nathan Bransford on why he chose a traditional publisher despite his huge blog and Twitter followings: “My editor is amazing … I don’t have time to be a self-published author … Print is still where it’s at, especially for children’s books … I appreciate Penguin’s cachet … an advance … and … I believe in the traditional publishing process.”

Even John Locke, who sold one million e-books in five months, decided to go the traditional publishing route, but only for his print books.

There is even a hilarious video about the self-pubbed authors lament.

And yet there are people who firmly believe that self-publishing is the only way to go, like Mark Williams over at Mark Williams International, who blogs frequently about self-publishing. And maybe he’s right. Time will tell.

3. Know that although most successful self-published authors today are genre writers, memoirists and literary novelists may be the e-books stars of the future.

What do Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler, Amanda Hocking, John Locke, and H.P. Mallory all have in common besides being mega-successful self-published authors? They all write genre, which is to say fantasy, sci-fi, romance, thrillers, etc. However, as Nathan Bransford pointed out today, that doesn’t mean that memoir and literary fiction writers cannot self-publish, too. A few examples are C.Y. Gopinath’s The Book of Answers, Jim Hanas’s Why They Cried, and Dawn Tripp’s Game of Secrets. Like Bransford says, we should keep on eye on The Millions, HTMLGiant, and Bookslut for more.

4. Hire a freelance editor and book designer.

If you do decide to self-publish, you should hire a freelance editor (even if you have excellent editing skills yourself) and book designer, so that your book is as professional as it would be if it were published by one of the Big 6. It’s important that your prose be as well written and typo-free as possible if you want to stand a chance against the gazillions of other books out there. And people do judge books by their covers, even e-books. H.P. Mallory says in her e-book How I Sold 200,000 E-Books, “Customers absolutely judge books by their covers—my readers tell me all the time that they first took a chance on my books because they were attracted by the covers.” Mallory’s covers are FANTASTIC, but unless you have a lot of design and PhotoShop experience, you should hire a professional cover designer.

But while freelance editors are easy to find, where can you find a book cover designer that will deliver a quality cover at an affordable price? One possibility is to sign up for Mark’s List, a list Mark Coker at Smashwords has created to help authors find cover designers and formatters for their e-books. Coker himself hired a designer to design this book cover for just $45. If you need more cover designer suggestions, visit the Resources page of this blog or Google book cover designers. To sign up for Mark’s List, just send an e-mail to list@smashwords.com, and you’ll receive the list in an e-mail reply.

5. Decide whether you want to publish your book exclusively as an e-book or as print-on-demand.

The days of print-on-demand are waning. Today, most authors who self-publish do it exclusively through the e-book format because a) It’s cheaper and b) You’re not likely to get your self-published book distributed ito bookstores anyway. If you do want to offer a print version for Aunt Caroline and everyone else who still reads books the old-fashioned way, the best way to do that is through Amazon’s CreateSpace. Lulu is another big name in print-on-demand publishing, but CreateSpace seems to be dominating the sector. For a review of four of the top POD companies, read this review.

6. Do your research.

If you do decide to go the e-book route, first read this review of John Locke’s “How I Sold 1 Million Kindle E-Books in Five Months” ($4.99) and this article in the WSJ:. Then read Locke’s book.

Once you’re done with that, read HP Mallory’s “How I Sold 200,000 E-books: A Guide For The Self-Published Author” ($5.99). The more you know about self-publishing before you begin, the better.

7. Decide if you want to upload your e-book yourself to each of the e-book stores, or if you want to hire a company like Smashwords, an e-book distributor, to do it for you.

At the moment, Smashwords does not yet have a deal with Amazon. This means that Smashwords will upload your book to the Apple iBook, Kobo, nook, Sony, Diesel and other e-bookstores, but you’ll have to upload to Amazon yourself. The advantage of using Smashwords is that you only have to format your book twice—once for Smashwords and once for Amazon—instead of many times, which will save you a lot of time, especially when you need to make a correction or an update. To hire a formatter to help you prepare your manuscript for Smashwords and Amazon, you can see Mark’s list or visit the Resources page on this blog. Whatever you do, don’t do this.

8. Start marketing early.

You’re probably up to here reading about building your author brand, but that’s exactly what you need to do—and early. Don’t wait until your book is out. As Seth Godin has said: “The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.” Start blogging, create a Facebook Page, Tweet your butt off, and don’t forget to build that e-mail list.

9. Create a backlist.

The most successful self-published authors make a living by selling readers more than one book. Often they write series, pricing the first book in the series at $.99 in order to hook the reader with the subsequent books following at $2.99 each. (Why $2.99? Because, on Amazon, authors get 70% of the money from the sale of books priced $2.99 and above but 35% of books priced below $2.99). Whether you are writing a series or simply multiple books, you’ll make the most money by having a backlist. If you only have one book, H.P. Mallory’s suggestion is to “consider offering it for free for a limited amount of time. This is a great strategy for building buzz and obtaining reviews at the major retailers.”

10. Share the love.

Don’t become the woman in the video I linked to above. Don’t alienate your friends by over-self-promoting. Take time out of your busy schedule to share what you’ve learned, to promote the work of other writers, and, most of all, to buy and read other people’s books. Because if you aren’t buying other books, you certainly can’t expect people to buy yours.

And now what about you? Have you thought about self-publishing? Why or why not? Have you tried it? How did it work for you?

“It’s the remarkable-but-true story of a Hollywood producer who, in 1994, was driving to dinner with his wife. She mentioned something about her boss, and those turned out to be her last words. Without giving anything away, I’ll say the story involves horrific tragedy. A Rip Van Winkle-like hibernation. Impossible turns of fate. A killer at large. Miraculous medical oddness. Otherworldly powers. Time itself rearranged. You will tell it at campfires!”

The book is called Blindsight, and I waited with baited breath for its release. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up a bit—to the origin of this new trend of longform journalism.

It started when Byliner.com—a website that both publishes original works and points to works in other publications—released Jon Kraukauer’s exposé of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea titled Three Cups of Deceit on April 18 of this year. Available for free for a limited time, the story later became available as a Kindle Single for $2.99. (I read the free version, and it was fantastic, even for someone who hasn’t read Three Cups of Tea.)

Meanwhile, Longreads, founded back in 2009, had become a popular online journal for gathering longform stories—both fiction and nonfiction—from publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. To nominate a story to be a longread, tweet a link to it with the hashtag #longreads.

Then came the Atavist. In case you haven’t brushed up on your GRE words lately, an atavist is a throwback, in this case, to long-form journalism. Like on Byliner.com, the stories are nonfiction, but unlike on Byliner, they are multimedia. If you purchase the story through the Atavist app on your iPhone or iPad (which you can download for free from the app store), you get a whole lot more than a story. You get a storytelling experience from the future.

Example: Let’s say you start out reading Colin’s story in bed, but halfway through decide to go for a jog. No problem. Just touch the audio button and the story switches over to audio—read by Colin himself—at precisely where you left off. Want to know what the subject of Colin’s story looks like? Click on the photos. Want to watch clips from the cheesy movies the guy produced in the early 90s? Tap to see embedded videos. A timeline, written details about events … it’s all right there at the tap of a finger.

So is this the new trend in book publishing? Are shorter attention spans leading to shorter books? Colin thinks not: “I still have a book proposal I’m working on, and I still do magazine articles. But there’s a whole raft of ideas that don’t work as articles and don’t work as books, and usually you just throw them away because there is this in between space. I never would have done this as a book. I would have just told it to people at bars.

“Another thing that the Atavist allows is telling a certain kind of story, and here’s how it’s different from Byliner. The Atavist set out to take advantage of all the multimedia forms that are out there today. My piece is about a Hollywood producer. It’s about a brain that’s been dramatically altered. Those two things alone really invite some creative forms beyond just writing. We have video. We have some really interesting audio. You can read it just as text. It’s also an audio book. Basically it’s just really fun to read.”

To hear more from Chris Colin about the Atavist, tune in to Forum with Michael Krasney this morning at 10:30 a.m. on KQED radio, or catch it in the archives after the show.

* * *

Chris Colin is the award-winning author of What Really Happened to the Class of ‘93, which GQ magazine called “essential reading,” and the National Press Club selected for its 2004 author awards. He’s a frequent New York Times contributor and a contributing writer at AFAR magazine. He’s written about chimp filmmakers, Slovenian ethnic cleansing, George Bush’s pool boy, blind visual artists, solitary confinement, the Yelpification of the universe, mysterious scraps of paper and more for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Smithsonian, Mother Jones, the Atavist, Conde Nast Portfolio, VIA, McSweeney’s Quarterly and several anthologies. He wrote the long-running On the Job column for the SF Chronicle, was an early writer/editor at Salon.com and is the co-author of The Blue Pages. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Amy Standen, and works and teaches at the Writers’ Grotto, a writers’ collective.

MW: What are your predictions for the future of publishing?

EN: I’ve stopped caring about whether people want things as an e-book or as a printed book. A lot of people really want and enjoy their digital books and that’s a really attractive medium. My only concern is with the future of longform prose writing and how people want it and how we’re going to connect the reader to the book—whether they want it electronically or in print.

MW: What do you mean by “connect the reader to the book”?

EN: I’m talking about a filtering system whereby a publisher does a certain amount of pre-selection, so there’s a certain quality control; makes sure the book is its best possible version of itself; and does a good job of what we used to call marketing. Marketing is an activity that is meant to find the maximum number of readers for your book, so everybody who might be interested in your book will know about it.

The trick for a place like Graywolf is to combine a very old-fashioned approach to acquisitions and editing and tending to an author’s needs with a very newfangled, inventive approach to distribution and marketing. But the basic issues are still there—editorial, distribution, and marketing.

MW: When you say, “newfangled approach,” are you talking about social media?

EN: Social media is just one more thing that is heaped on publishers to do. It’s not a silver bullet. It’s useful and gratifying for authors to connect with their readers in a way that they haven’t been able to, but what makes this work mysterious is that I’ve seen authors who are highly engaged in social media, and I’m not sure it’s helped sell twenty more books. And there are authors who don’t do it whose books are highly successful. I call people who go from one conference to another talking about new media e-vangelists. But it’s not necessarily the answer to publishing’s problems.

MW: What can an author do to get the word out about his/her book?

EN: We have to find ways to get books to readers in whatever form they want, find ways to be in touch with our potential readers and have a two-way channel communication, and we have to encourage new review outlets, in whatever form they might crop up. The old media reviews still count for a lot for prestige, but they don’t necessarily sell books. So we have to get the word out about our books in a lot of different ways that may not even exist yet—whether it’s an interesting podcast show or a new review media online. Obviously the daily newspapers are disappearing. When I think about the review files in the first days of publishing, they were thick—the Kansas City Star, the Raleigh News & Observer, The Austin American-Statesmen—they all had pretty vibrant review sections that were not just reviewing blockbusters. A lot of places don’t even have review sections anymore.

MW: Do you encourage your authors to use social media?

EN: It’s not any one thing—it’s a density of coverage. Where you used to get that from twenty different newspaper and magazine reviews, now you may get it from five newspaper and magazine interviews, three interviews on a blog, the author’s own activity on a blog, etc. It’s just been dispersed. The sales numbers for a well-reviewed, voice-driven literary novel are not radically different for that kind of book than they were fifteen years ago, but you have to work a lot harder to get that number, and you’re reaching out to a lot of places that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. I think in the last five years, there are a lot more viable and authoritative online review media and web magazines.

MW: What are some of those online review media and web magazines?

EN: The web magazines are anything from The Rumpus to The Faster Times, Guernica, The Nervous Breakdown, and Triple Canopy. Some are online literary magazines and some are news magazines that put up literary content and do author interviews.

MW: What about bloggers like Maud Newton?

EN: She’s great. She has a ton of followers. I think bloggers will continue to be important, but what I think is interesting is what Tom Lutz is doing with the LA Review of Books. It hasn’t really been launched yet; their website is in a primitive state right now. And I haven’t even mentioned places like Slate and Salon, which feel more like old media companies.

MW: Do you recommend your authors do blog tours?

EN: Whether it was thirty years ago or today, you want your authors to do as much publicity as they can stomach. You should always do as much as you have energy for. But publishing has never been a cookie cutter industry.

MW: What about Stephen Elliott? What did he do for The Adderall Diaries (which EN edited for Graywolf in 2009) that worked?

EN: Stephen Elliott got a lot of attention for the way he did his book tour for The Adderall Diaries, but he is the last one to say everyone should do it that way. It may be right for him, but it may not be right for other authors.

MW: Can you explain what Stephen did?

EN: Steve wanted 400 galleys from us, and usually a publisher gives two. We all thought at Graywolf that Steve was a natural publicist, but we couldn’t give him 400, so we gave him 40. So he announced on The Rumpus that anyone who wanted a copy of his galley could have one with the condition that they had one week to read it and pass it on their own dime to the next person. So he got a ton of people reading it—he was doing a lot of interviews right before he published the book. It generated a lot of word of mouth, and that is the only thing that really sells books. The problem with that is that it’s not a science-created word of mouth. You have to have a good book. Publishing is not alchemical. In the literary world, you have to start with a book people like. There are a lot of books that are really good books but no one ever hears about for one reason or another, and they disappear without a trace. It’s one of the most frustrating things that happens to you as a publisher or an editor, and it’s devastating to the author, but it does happen. So having word of mouth is no guarantee, but you won’t have word of mouth without a good book. For every book you’re trying to figure out how to get people talking about the book. The challenge and award of publishing is figuring out new ways to do that that are different for every book. Stephen also got a huge amount of old-world professional reviews. Graywolf books get treated pretty well in the media. Book review editors are starting to believe more and more that we have books that are worth reviewing. And it was a good book. It was one of our lead titles for that list when we published it. We all worked really hard on it.

MW: Is it true that Stephen turned down a larger advance to work with you?

EN: It is.

MW: Why?

EN: I think it was a combination of my getting what Stephen was doing and his respecting books I had edited. One in particular was Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, and now he says Geoff Dyer owes him $10,000 because he took that much less (laughing).

MW: What are the advantages of being published by a small press vs. a larger press?

EN: A lot more personal attention from your editor to your publicist. You’re more likely to get a higher level of editorial engagement. You’re more likely to be involved in the entirety of the publication process. We let the authors have some input on the jacket design, we try to be transparent about our publicity plans, we’re just very involved very often. We won’t make them write their own catalog copy or jacket copy or get their own blurbs. I don’t think authors are necessarily the best at writing that. If you know how to advertise your book, you might as well self-publish. The other thing is that for certain kinds of books that might be more literary or darker or unconventional in some way, they can get lost on a larger list at one of the larger houses. They tend to stand out more on our list and we know what to do with them, how to handle them. Bigger houses tend to print the book rather than publish it. For certain books where we might be stretching to compete with a moderate advance at a larger house, it means a lot to us, and it might get published more aggressively by us.

MW: What’s the average advance for a Graywolf book?

EN: Our advances for fiction and nonfiction tend to range from $5000 to $20,000. A third of our list is poetry, a third fiction, and a third nonfiction. At big houses, advances go into the stratosphere, but I’d say for the kinds of books that we publish that might also be at home at literary imprints at big houses, they can be comparable. We often pay less, and we lose a lot of books not irregularly because they’re willing to pay more for them, but I used to lose books at FSG (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) to bigger houses all the time. There’s often someone willing to pay more than you for a book. That’s just part of being in the business.

MW: How do fiction, nonfiction and memoir advances compare?

EN: The fiction market has really collapsed over the last ten years, and the advances have fallen quite a bit. Memoir advances can get high, but they can feel novel-ly, so they tend to range. The thing about memoir is that the publicity can be easier, so we can get off-the-book page coverage, so you’re not relying just on reviews. There may be a feature article on your author. Stephen (Elliott) got a lot of press for how he was marketing The Adderall Diaries.

MW: Does an author need an agent?

EN: Generally you need an agent. A lot of publishers won’t look at unagented manuscripts because the volume is just too heavy. The vast majority of the books we publish are agented. The editor may have been the one to approach the writer, and I’m happy to connect writers to agents.

MW: Why does an author need an agent?

EN: Agents are about access, but also about reviewing contracts and taking care of subsidiary rights, whether that be film or foreign rights. There are a lot of moving pieces, and an agent can manage them.

MW: How has the editor’s role changed over the past fifteen years?

EN: Editors have to be much more cognizant of the marketing and publicity equation of books they are going to acquire. In the bigger companies, much more time is spent in meetings than it used to. Editing very rarely happens during the workday.

MW: What are editors doing during the workday?

EN: You could be doing anything from writing copy for books or going through proof corrections, writing notes to reviewers, which publicists do, but editors often do, too, chasing down leads, finding people to read foreign novels.

MW: You hear more and more that editors don’t edit the way they used to, that a book has to be really perfect before it’s sold.

EN: I know a lot of editors, and all of them seem to be editing. Either some people are lying or the editors I know are old-fashioned editors. But not all books get that attention, and sometimes you have a really bad match between editor and author. Having a bad editor can be like having a bad shrink. You can do real damage to your book by getting the wrong advice.

MW: Should a author hire a freelance editor?

EN: Freelance editors can be very expensive, and agents can be tremendously helpful. They might clarify whether you need one or want one. But given how difficult the market is right now, you want to give yourself the best possible chance you can to sell your book, so whatever you can do to increase your odds, you should. Some agents have a very good editorial brain and can do that detailed work for you. The truth of all of these things for an aspiring writer is that you need to make it the best possible book you can make it, and once you’ve done that, then you worry about the marketing part. If there are things you know are wrong with it, don’t send it out. You can’t send it out and say, “Well, I know this part is flat, but I’m going to fix it.” Fix it. It’s better to go slower. I like doing editorial work, but I have to be able to see what the book wants to be. That has to be clear to me.

MW: How difficult IS the market right now?

EN: It’s doing a little better than it was a few years ago. E-book sales are increasing in volume and are a not-insignificant source of income. Publishers can imagine a future for themselves now. But I think the bigger publishers are becoming a lot more conservative. Knopf, Viking, and FSG are all still publishing fantastic books, but they aren’t as willing to take as many chances.

MW: What do you think about self-publishing?

EN: Self-Publishing is great. It all depends on what your goals are. If you want a certain amount of public acknowledgment of your work, if you want your book reviewed by mainstream reviewers whether they are online or in print, then you still need a publisher. I’ve been on panels where people seemed almost angry, “Why shouldn’t I self-publish”? and I told them “Go for it. It’s no skin off my back.”

MW: Are you worried that publishers are going to disappear?

EN: A little. I’m not worried about writers or writing at all. I think there’s a lot of good work out there, and a lot of people still reading. But the question of whether people like me will have the kind of job I have in 10–15 years, I don’t know. It could be bad news for people like me, but I think writing is fine.

We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media by Kristen Lamb—This book is riddled with typos, and I completely disagree with her assessment that My Space is not dead and that you should spend time posting to it, but it’s a good book for anyone new to social media. For social media veterans, the beginning, which explains how to define your author brand and to outline your marketing goals, is wonderful.

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs by Brian Halligan and David Merrman Scott—This book expands beyond social media to include SEO (search engine optimization) which is important if you want clients to find you via search engine searches. I, for example, plan to use it to optimize my title tags and meta data so that when people do searches for “Berkeley editors,” “Bay Area editors,” “social media classes,” etc. my site pops up. It also discusses social media and blogs, and the more you read about those topics, the better. (Thank you Alta Peterson for turning me on to this book!)




Trust Agents by Chris Brogan—This book focuses more on the broader picture of social media and less on the nitty gritty technical details of how to set up a blog, how to Twitter, etc. It will help you think about how you can separate yourself out from others so that you’re using your time more efficiently. (Chris Brogan, if you don’t know him, is a social media guru who blogs. He’s great; I especially like his vlogs.)

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell—This was the first book I’ve read by Malcolm Gladwell, and WOW. What a book. It doesn’t relate directly to social media (I don’t think social media existed when the book came out in 2000), but it’s a wonderful book on business and marketing—both extremely well researched and entertaining. It will leave you wondering, “Now how can I apply all this to my author platform”? and I’m sure you’ll come up with some good ideas.








Crush It: Why NOW is The Time to Cash In On Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk—Another social media guru, Gary is the founder of WineLibrary.com and its very popular video podcast. Gary’s infectious personality will make you want to stay up until 3 a.m. commenting on other blogs “until your eyeballs bleed” as he puts it. I bought the vook—the video book which you can read online—because it includes video clips at the beginning of each chapter that are fun to watch, but I’m sure the book is great, too.

How about you? Have you read any of these? Do you have a favorite? Do you have any other marketing books to recommend for writers?

2. Buy a book from any bookstore
Buy at least one book per month, whether it be from an independent bookstore, a chain bookstore, a big box store, or an online e-bookstore. Every dime you invest in the publishing industry will make a difference.

3. Frequent your local library
Libraries have to buy books, too, and the more often those books are checked out, the more often they have to be replaced. So while I encourage you to buy at least one book a month, using your local library, too, will help keep publishing alive.

4. Give e-books a try
Whether you like it or not, e-books are the way of the future, so why not give them a try? I hear so many people say they can’t imagine reading a book on a screen, but you know what? I couldn’t either. And now I have an iPad and I love it. I love curling up in bed with the lights off and reading into the night like a kid under the covers with my flashlight. I love being able to read on a plane, on a train, and while I’m driving (kidding!) And if I had a smart phone, I’d be reading standing in line at the post office and at the supermarket, where I don’t carry my e-reader. You don’t have to give up buying paper books, and I hope you won’t. But give e-books a try, too. Test one out on your iPhone or borrow someone’s e-reader for an hour (or test out the color nook at your local a B&N). They’re pretty fun.

5. Read for 10 minutes every night
Author Sean Cummings started a Facebook Page encouraging everyone to read for ten minutes before bedtime. Then he designed a website called Save Publishingto match. Like the page, then get offline and read for ten minutes before you go to bed.

6. Give someone a book
The next time you need to buy a gift for someone, make it a book. If you’re not sure which book to buy, get a gift card from a bookstore (not an Amazon gift card; that could be used to buy diapers!)

7. Join Good Reads, Shelfari, Library Thing, or all three
Spread the word about the books you are reading. This will others ideas for good books to buy, and it will make them feel guilty that they’re not reading more books. Good! They should feel guilty! Put the peer pressure on.(You can post what you’re reading on Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In, too.)

8. Create a book list
Add a list to your website or blog of all the books you have read this year. Include comments if you have time, or rate each book. Like joining a social networking site for reading, this will a) Give others ideas of good books to read and b) Make them feel the need to read more books than you. That’s what we want. We want people to read.

9. Join a book club
If you can’t find a book club to join, start one. This will force you to read at least one book per month, to discuss it with other people, and hopefully to recommend it to others. By the way, here’s a pop trivia question for you: What book was Juliet’s book club discussing on Lost when Oceanic Flight 815 crashed? No fair googling it! Put your answer in comments.

10. Read to your kids
Rather than letting your kids watch TV, read to them. And when they are old enough to read for themselves, encourage them to read. Take them to the library; buy them books; set an example by reading in front of them. And if all else fails, require them to read for at least twenty minutes each night before they go to bed. We’ll breed a whole new generation of book lovers, and that will keep the publishing industry alive.

What ideas do you have for saving the publishing industry?

Nathan Bransford is the author of Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow, a middle grade novel about three kids who blast off into space, break the universe, and have to find their way back home, which will be published by Dial Books for Young Readers in May 2011. He was formerly a literary agent with Curtis Brown Ltd. from 2002 to 2010, but is now a publishing civilian working in the tech industry. He lives in San Francisco.

Laura Goode: I also think, Caroline, that there’s a middle grade that your question left unaddressed, between the traditional publishing model and self-publishing, and that’s small publishers. I’m writing a YA novel that’s coming out in July, and I’m publishing with Candlewick Press, which is a tiny tiny boutique literary press in Boston that does children’s YA stuff, so they’re not in New York. They gave me a really small advance–I don’t think they even give big advances, but my editor is a dear dear friend, and I’ve never at any point in the editorial process felt that she was pushing me in a direction I didn’t want to go. They altered the cover to please me. I think that too often the game becomes about the advance when in fact the advance is only the beginning point in the long game in writing and making money on books. So I think if you are willing to accept a small advance and eat shit for a while, you can follow the traditional publishing model and retain some control.

NB: I think that’s a great point. One of my former clients, Lisa Brockman, who wrote Rock, Paper, Tiger published by Soho, they sent her on tour, they did so much for her book, much more than what some of the major publishers are doing. It’s the personalized attention. When you go into a bookstore, they know Soho, they know the brand, they know what Soho means. So there’s definitely a place for small publishers who know what they are, who know their niche, and who do it really well. I think that publishers like that are definitely going to still be around because they can really offer an author something. They offer a brand, they offer individualized attention, and they offer things that you can’t do on your own. Major publishers, when they’re really working, do that, but too often things fall through the cracks, and you’re just getting funneled through the system without any individualized attention. So yes, that’s definitely worth remembering.

Constance Hale: Say you didn’t have your job at CNET, say you were just writing your books. How much time would you spend a day on social media?

Meghan Ward: We want to know how much time you do spend, too.

NB: I spend about half an hour to an hour per post, and I write five a week. And then it takes half an hour to an hour to read and respond to comments and forum posts. I don’t spend that much time on Twitter and Facebook.

Constance Hale: Okay, 85,000 followers, but you don’t spend very much time on Twitter.

Meghan Ward: But I think he got them from his blog—because his blog was so popular by the time …

Constance Hale: But you do post on Twitter. You have to feed something …

NB: But social media is about having a base somewhere. You use one thing as your base. My blog is my base. That’s where I devote the majority of my energy, and it’s where the majority of people are following me. On Twitter, I just do a couple of tweets a day, but that doesn’t take very long, it takes ten minutes. … I spend a lot of time reading blogs. … I probably spend a half hour to an hour reading blogs, so that’s up to an hour and a half to two hours (per day). … It doesn’t take that much time.

Constance Hale: That’s a lot of time.

NB: It is a lot of time, but it’s not something that’s going to get in the way of a day job plus writing. I don’t ever feel completely overwhelmed in a day.

Caroline Paul: Plus … even as an agent having a blog brought you more clients.

NB: Yes … a lot of my clients came through my blog. It was how I differentiated myself as an agent.

Meghan Ward: Do you plan to quit your day job some day?

NB: No, no, no. I can’t imagine doing that. I mean, if this blew up to something I couldn’t manage with a day job, but what are the odds? So no, I have no plans to quit my job.

What do you think of the future of blogs?

Rachel Levin: What do you think about the future of blogs in general?

NB: I don’t know. I asked that question on my blog a couple of months ago—have blogs peaked? I don’t think they have, but I think that they are going to continue to evolve. I don’t think that there’s going to be a situation where you can’t start a blog and have it become popular because all the popular blogs area already out there. If anything, if you start a new blogt hat is really really good and really taps into something that doesn’t already exist, it can become so big so quickly. But I think the bar is higher now because there are so many established blog. People already have a roster is they are into it. To crack someone’s attention is hard, but it can still really be done. I think they’ll continue to exist because it’s a format that can provide so much information, so much entertainment, and that can’t be easily reproduced in another form. I don’t know if they’ll get vastly more popular right now, but I can’t imagine them going away either.

Meghan Ward: Every writer is encouraged to start a blog. How is it possible for every single writer to gain an audience and for everyone to read all those blogs? It’s just not possible.

NB: I don’t agree that everyone should. I know that’s what authors are told, but authors are often encouraged to do everything. You have to blog, you have to tweet, you have to post to Facebook, you have to do Tumblr, you have to do this and that. But I don’t believe that. I think everyone is better off doing what they’re good at. If that’s blogging, awesome, do blogging. If it’s Twitter, do Twitter. If you don’t like social media, if you don’t like blogs and Facebook and Twitter then don’t do it. Do what you do like to do. If you’re a good speaker, go speak. If you’re very well connected, go socialize with those people. I think what’s unfortunate about it is that publishers don’t necessarily have the ability to impact a book’s chances in the way that they used to as shelf space disappears and as fewer bookstores. It’s become harder for publishers to really move the needle, so they’re really depending upon authors to do it themselves. So they’re just saying, “Go do it. Go do all of it and then come back and talk to us. But if you’re not enjoying it, it’s not going to work.

Caroline Paul: Do you have predictions about the publishing industry and where it’s going to be in five years?

NB: I don’t have any drastic predictions. I think that publishers are going to stick around. I don’t think that publishers going to disappear off the face of the earth. But I do think that more and more authors, as we move into the e-book era, are going to ask themselves, “Do I really need a publisher?” The reason that everyone has really needed a publisher up to this point is print distribution. If you wanted to reach readers, you absolutely had to have a publisher. But as that goes away, and as we get to 50 percent e-books, 75 percent e-books, close to 100 percent e-books five to ten years from now, you’re not going to need a publisher to reach an audience.

Constance Hale: So then who does the filtering?

NB: The readers do. I compare it to … there are a lot of restaurants out there. There are a lot of movies, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but we find ways of rating and filtering, and word of mouth and all the rest, and it will happen with books as well. I think it’s going to be a combination of critics and crowd sourcing. There will be gatekeepers. There will be people who influence a book’s success, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be publisher.

Constance Hale: Do you think it’s analogous? Restaurants? So who’s going to be the Yelps and the Zagats? Have those come up yet? Do we have those yet?

Po Bronson: Yeah, tons of those. But you can also just look at the way the publishing industry has worked. They buy a book, then you would always hear this story, “Around the house, everyone here is reading this and really liking it.” And you could say that is the publisher being a tastemaker, but actually that is just the publisher being a preliminary market, a pilot market. You could see the Amazon Vines program as another pilot market. You pay money to get your galleys in the system. They can’t force anybody to review it. People who are trusted reviewers in the system get your galleys and review it. And they’re a preliminary market. Some books go into that system and come out with three reviews. Some books go into that system and come out with hundreds and hundreds of reviews. And that’s a market telling you, giving you these signs. And the more publishers see what they do as, in my mind, as pilot markets to see what rises to the top, and not “We know best. We are the kingmakers,” and that they’re not and that they’re really just a pilot market, they would understand what they’re doing and find other ways to correctly do that.

Rachel Levin: So you think that publishing houses will be just free-floating editors … or no editors?

NB: Well, I think publishers will continue to serve the biggest books and the biggest authors because they provide a package of services that is really difficult for an author to do on their own. Distribution, production, editing, marketing, publicity, when they’re really on and when all of the pieces are working together, publishers can’t be beat when it comes to that collection of services, when it comes to making and producing and marketing a book. So I think the biggest bestsellers will still be with publishers. But for everyone else, I think it’s going to be interesting to see. Maybe it’s going to be a mixture of self-publishing and small presses. I don’t know.

Caroline Paul: I recently met an agent who decided that being an agent was a job that had an end date pretty soon, so she’s refashioned herself as an agent still, but for the new writer, which is, “I’m going to help you package your book. I’m going to guide you through this whole process, through the whole thing”—like a midwife of sorts. But then you can raise the baby.

Gerard Jones: For an upfront fee?

Caroline Paul: I think it’s an upfront fee. It might be a cut. There might be many models. But I thought that was very foresightful of her.

NB: So she’s more of a consultant than someone who is placing it with a publisher. I think we’ll see more and more of that.

Po Bronson: Regarding small publishers … the ones who had an identity and a brand in the marketplace, who basically specialized to some extent, did so much better than the ones who were just little big publishers, little Knopfs. … It’s interesting that we had Ethan Nosowsky in here from Graywolf [Press]. Back since the 80s, I was one of the people distributing their books and they were a baby Knopf or a baby Norton, and they do need to raise money. They’ve always needed to raise money to make it work, and they do a good job. They’re doing great with Geoff Dyer right now, but those kinds of small publishers have a really hard time in the marketplace. It’s when they really know a market and they can get you into some specialty areas and they have a track record with book sellers … You have to be careful when you’re talking about small publishers whether you’re talking about someone who has a name and a market of a certain type versus ones who are just generalists. I think the smaller publishers who are generalists are going to have the hardest time of all because they don’t have the big books to sustain them and yet they don’t have the capability to get into those little niche markets.

Rob Baedeker: When the barriers to publishing are so low because anybody can format their book for Kindle or get it out there in some electronic format, how do you rise above the noise level because it seems that that could be deafening?

NB: You need a first boost, and that’s where social media can play a big role in giving you that initial base of readers, whether that’s ten readers, a hundred, or a thousand. From there, if people like it, they will talk about it and it will go viral. I think everyone needs that boost, and the bigger the boost, the better the chance of it catching on. I think the idea of being just an author and just writing a book and putting it out there, if that ever existed, it definitely doesn’t exist now. It’s important to get that boost somehow. It doesn’t have to be social media; it doesn’t have to be online, but somehow giving that book a boost to give it a chance. But it is really hard to rise above the noise because there is a lot of noise out there. There are so many books coming out all the time and so many other distractions beyond books that it’s hard.

Sabrina Crawford: There are also so many blogs. I mean … if everybody’s keeping a blog, you can’t be reading every blog.

Po Bronson: Right, you make your film and no one will watch it, so you may write your book about your film, but then nobody’s paying attention to your books, so you blog, but no one reads your blog, so you tweet, but everybody’s tweeting, so how do you get above of all the other tweeters? … There’s something to be said for just being in the New York Times I suppose … not that I have an outlet there. I don’t.

Laura Goode: Are you having events in a couple of weeks?

NB: May 13 at Books Inc, Opera Plaza, I’m going to have a reading/launch party. Everyone asks how much is social media going to help, and I say, “I don’t know. I’ll tell you in a couple of weeks.”

Nathan Bransford is the author of Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow, a middle grade novel about three kids who blast off into space, break the universe, and have to find their way back home, which will be published by Dial Books for Young Readers in May. He was formerly a literary agent with Curtis Brown Ltd. from 2002 to 2010, but is now a publishing civilian working in the tech industry. He lives in San Francisco.

Meghan Ward: Can you tell us about your book?

NB: Jacob Wonderbar and the Cosmic Space Kapow is about three kids who blast off into space, break the universe, and have to find their way back home. It’s coming out in [two] weeks with Dial at Penguin. I never really thought of myself as a writer, but for a long time when I was working in publishing—I’m not one of those people who was working in publishing because I secretly wanted to be a writer—I actually wanted to be in publishing. And then I wrote one novel in my mid-20s that didn’t work out, and then I had the idea for this one, and I wrote it in about six months. There are going to be three so far and hopefully more, we’ll see. They’re going to come out about nine months apart. The first one is Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe and the third one is tentatively titled Jacob Wonderbar and the Interstellar Time Warp.

Laura Goode: Did you sell them as a package?

NB: It was a two-book deal, and then I just got a third.

Meghan Ward: How did you get interested in writing middle-grade novels?

NB: It was more driven by the idea that I had. I had an idea for a kid who was trapped on a planet of substitute teachers. It was sort of a middle grade idea, so I went with that.

Meghan Ward: Who are your literary inspirations?

NB: Roald Dahl, of course Douglas Adams. A lot of people describe [Jacob Wonderbar] as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for kids, which I’m flattered by. And the Calvin & Hobbes comics.

Caroline Paul: So your book is coming out in the normal publishing venues. But are you an advocate of looking into the new ways that things are going?

NB: I am. I think that the great thing about the new era is that people have choice. I wouldn’t consider myself an advocate for traditional publishing or an advocate for self-publishing except inasmuch as that it’s great that each individual author now has a choice about which route they want to pursue. I think it’s great that Barry Eisler is going to self-publishing and Amanda Hocking is going from self-publishing to traditional publishing. It’s because Barry is excited about this new era and thinks he can make more money by doing it that way, and Amanda Hocking wants to focus on her writing and wants to have a lot of the tasks she has been handling as a self-published author handled by a traditional publisher. So I think that the future is really bright for authors. I think it’s a very challenging time for agents and publishers and everyone who is dependent upon the traditional publishing industry, but I think everyone will be fine and everyone is going to survive, and it’ll just shake out with a spectrum of choice.

Po Bronson: Did someone already ask you, Nathan, who is your agent and did you want to go with the agency you worked with for ten years? (Over baby blowing raspberries) Or you felt you really couldn’t go with the agency you’d been at for so long?

NB: I did send out queries. I wanted to keep things separate, which I think a lot of people do when they work in the publishing industry. There are a lot of really great agents at Curtis Brown, and I would have loved to have had them as my agent, but I just thought that it could get messy if things were mixed with personal and business. So my agency is Catherine Drayton at Inkwell, and I’ve been thrilled working with her. It’s been great.

Constance Hale: I want to take you back to e-books for a second. For those of us who are under contract and working on a book—mine is a nonfiction book about language; it’s not narrative—I just wonder what you think we should be thinking about. As we’re working on a book, how should we be thinking about an enhanced book?

NB: I think it really depends. Right now the market for an enhanced e-book is growing, and there are new ventures that are looking into that, but right I think publishers—as far as I know, as of a few months ago—are primarily thinking of e-books as e-books in a text form. Now there’s talk of multimedia editions and books and all the rest and how they can either add to the value of the e-book or be a separate product. Whether they are considered a separate product and how much of the text they involve, these are all rights discussions to have with your agent to figure out who owns what and what permission for what. It’s all new and complicated. It’s something I was working a lot on in the last months when I was an agent.

But in terms of things to think about, I would think it’s exciting to think about how you can add value to the book by utilizing whatever media is available in the electronic form, so if there were videos you wanted to add to it or hyperlinks or things like that, you could envision an enhanced multimedia edition and from there it’s a matter of figuring out who would be the best person to produce that with—the publisher or a third party—and how to work out the rights depending on your agreement.

Gerard Jones: How are you planning to use social media to promote yourself as a writer? What is your next step?

NB: I am going to be doing some campaigns around the time the book comes out, but my goal is not to overdo it. Social media I really think of as building a connection between yourself and your readers and your followers. I think they’re not going to buy it just because I’m doing a blog giveaway that day. They’re going to buy it because they’ve been reading my blog they know what it’s about, they’ve heard about it. I’ll try to get the word out to reach people who haven’t heard about my blog or the book before, but at the end of the day, it’s about giving it that boost and from there it’s going to do what it does. People are either going to recommend it to more people or they’re not. At a certain point, it becomes out of your hands.

Meghan Ward: Your readership is mostly writers. Have you thought about expanding your blog to include more than just writers? To reach parents?

NB: I think for blogs it’s really important to have a focus and a core audience rather than trying to get too broad. That was always my built-in audience. I’ll occasionally expand out, but that’s what people expect when they come to my blog. And writers are readers, so I’m not too worried. And a lot of them are parents.

Helena Echlin: When you say you’re going to do campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, what does that mean exactly?

NB: I’m going to do a giveaway. I think I’m going to do a Kindle giveaway and create the contest in such a way that it will hopefully have a certain amount of virality, so give people an opportunity to get creative with it and also share the blog in their post in order to enter the contest and giveaway. I’m still working it out with Penguin to figure out exactly what it’s going to be.

Meghan Ward: Why did you leave Curtis Brown?

NB: I left because I’m really excited about social media. I started my blog as an extension of being an agent. It was something I did in my spare time in order to help build my career and differentiate myself. It’s something I really really enjoy a lot. I think it’s a really exciting, new world. This job that I have right now didn’t exist two years ago. Now I’m working for a company that I really like, trying to build my own presence to bring cohesiveness to the social media presence for a large company. I was really excited about it, and I was ready for a new opportunity.

Constance Hale: So you really love social media. I want to know what you really love about it. There is this weird phenomenon where a lot of social media is going from being amateur to being professionalized. … Is there a bifurcation going on in social media where there are people who are doing it professionally and getting paid by big companies to run the social media, and then there are those of us who are writers who are trying to keep up a social media presence to support and complement our …

NB: I think the space is maturing. You picture it as planets forming and acquiring gravity and mass. The blogs that are popular get more popular, and the ones that aren’t popular die off. I think it’s the next stage in the evolution. What I really like about it is building connections with people. What I always tell people is that social media is social. It’s about building a connection with people. It is becoming more professional. I’m a professional working at CNET. But my job is to make people feel a more personal connection with CNET. I’m appearing in people’s news feeds every day and bring a voice and a personality to a company to make it feel less like a company and more like someone you’re friends with.

Caroline Paul: If two different writers came up to you at the same time and one had never published a book before and one had one or two behind them, would you give the same advice? That’s actually happened to me … they ask me what should I do? And I’ve been telling people to go self-publish these days. I don’t see any financial benefit—unless it’s nonfiction—but fiction, there’s no financial benefit that I can see from the publishing industry. They don’t market your book, and you lose a lot of control. So I usually tell both of those people to start looking into self-publishing. Is that right or wrong?

NB: I think it really is up to each individual author, and I don’t know that I’d necessarily tie it to how many books they have written. First, is it a book that the publishers are going to want? If it is, then consider it; if it’s not, then don’t spend your time trying to query. But there are still a lot of advantages to publishers. They handle a lot of stuff that’s very very time-consuming to handle on your own. I couldn’t have done this (holds up book cover) on my own. They did a tremendous job finding the illustrator, putting the package together, the editing, and it’s going to be in bookstores. Right now, print is still 60-80% of the market. So if you’re hoping to maximize your readership, print is where it’s at—especially for children’s books, which have been a bit slower than other genres for e-books. However, if someone is very entrepreneurial minded, if control is really important to them—because I didn’t really have a say over the illustrator, and we argued over the title for months—if being able to experiment with pricing is important, then definitely self-publish. But either way it’s up to the author. Who am I? What do I want out of the publishing process, and what makes sense for my individual book?

Gerard Jones: Self-publishing does seem to have opened up the possibility of getting oddball stuff out there, but when I look at what actually seems to sell through online self-publishing, it seems very much dominated by just a few genres that have these pre-established online communities—fantasy, paranormal romance, romance, thriller, and then self-help and business books. Do you see much potential for the strange thing, the unusual thing, to find it’s way and try to get noticed?

NB: It’s an interesting question. I think you’re right that right now what does dominate are the genre books with built-in communities, but what I think those built-in communities are facilitating is word of mouth. It’s not necessarily that the genre people are reading more than people who are literary minded or who are looking for something different, it’s more that those communities are established and those people are talking to one other and recommending what they feel are the best ones. It’s probably going to take some more time for an oddball book or a book without that built-in base to trickle through that process. I don’t know whether that’s going to develop over time, or whether certain books are going to be more likely to go viral.

*To be continued tomorrow! Thank you, Nathan, for the opportunity to interview you!