2. Use your name as your brand.
Did you know you can change your Twitter user name without losing your followers? So if you chose “@hotchica6” and now you have 3000 Twitter followers, it’s not too late to change it to “@HilaryHiggenbottom.” On your Facebook page, once you have 25 likes, you can choose a customized URL (and you can change that URL until you have 100 likes, at which time it’s locked in.) Go out there now and change all your IDs to Hilary Higgenbottom, or whatever your real name is, hotchica6.

3. Post your contact info.
It doesn’t have to be your personal e-mail address, but create SOME way for people to get in touch with you, and post that on your website. (Post it like this to avoid spammers: Hilary (at) Higgenbottom (dot) com.) There’s nothing more irritating than spending half an hour searching someone’s site in vain for a way to contact him. It’s not only frustrating, it makes the author appear aloof and unaccessible. Someone may want to ask you for an interview or compliment you on your latest article in the New York Times, and they may not want to do that in a public forum.

4. Get a professional photo taken of yourself.
You will post your picture everywhere—on your website, on your blog, and on the profiles of all your social media networks, and you don’t want that to be a blurry full-length photo of you and your dog. Wear something simple that isn’t black or white or patterned, put some make-up on, do your hair, and fork out $300 to have a professional photographer take your picture (make sure that includes the digital copies of the photos.) Better yet, have multiple pictures taken of yourself in a variety of settings (at your computer, doing a reading, etc.) Mary Robinette Kowal and Michael Hyatt do this well. Every time you refresh a page on their websites, their photo changes.

5. Interact with your audience.
Whether it’s through a blog, a professional Facebook page (where anyone can “like” you), or a Twitter account, make yourself accessible. Gone are the days of J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Readers not only want to know about you, they want to talk to you. And they want you to respond. You don’t have to spend all day on social media, but take a couple hours out of every week to connect with your audience. Your efforts will pay off in increased work (Editor Alan Rinzler credits his steady editing work to his blog) and book sales.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your online presence through blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I have a Social Media Madness class beginning this Thursday, Feb. 2 at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and there’s room for a couple more students. Also check out Lorraine Sanders’ one-day Journalism Basics for Bloggers as well as the full roster of winter classes.

And now what about you? What is one of your favorite social media tips?

He was dead.

I was so shocked to receive a birthday notification for a friend who had died seven months earlier that I expressed my frustration in a Facebook status update. I suggested that Facebook should have a way of notifying friends when someone dies, some kind of “tribute” function. (Of course, then there would be that chance that someone would post a tribute for someone who wasn’t dead, whom they wish were dead. That could be problematic.) It just seemed WRONG that I was receiving notifications to “Wish Chris Happy Birthday!”

I was surprised by the responses to my status update. One friend said, “I’m sorry abt ur friend…but I think finding out if our friends are alive is kind of up to us more than FB.” and another: “I think the bigger problem here is: how come you don’t know he is dead if he is a real friend …”

These comments left me feeling like, “If you really cared about your friend, you would know if he was alive or dead.” But Chris wasn’t a close friend. He was someone I went on a few dates with more than a decade ago, someone who convinced me that if I wanted to learn the craft of writing, I should become a reporter (I wanted to write for women’s magazines at the time). He was a journalist himself, and I took his advice and got a job as a newspaper reporter and stuck with that for the following three years. So he had a big impact on my life and my writing career. After I left LA and moved to the Bay Area, we talked or e-mailed a couple of times a year, then not at all for a while, until he joined Facebook. A few months after he friended me, I messaged him, mentioning how sad it was that the wife of someone we once knew in common had died of cancer. I had no idea that Chris himself had died—soon after he had joined Facebook. We knew just one person in common, and I was no longer in touch with her. (I am now; I found her on Facebook.)

A friend of mine said to me last week that she thought it was nice that some people use the Facebook profiles of friends who have died to write tributes to them. Maybe for people close to that person it is nice—like when my siblings and I thought it was nice to keep the recording of my mother’s voice on my dad’s voicemail for thirteen years after she died. Other people thought it was creepy. And I find it a little creepy (and so heartbreaking!) to visit Chris’s page and see that his relationship status is “engaged,” to see who is “current” employer is, to be reminded where he “lives” and when his birthday is. It’s as if he weren’t dead but frozen in time.

So what can you do about this? You can create an online will. You can either do it through a paid service like Legacy Locker, who, for $30/year will manage your online afterlife, or you can do it yourself—by entrusting someone close to you with the logins and passwords to your various accounts. If you choose the latter, make sure you store this will with your other will and living trust (You people with kids have a living trust, right?) and include in it information about all your online accounts: your website, your blog, your photo archive, your online backup service, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Also include instructions on how you want each account dealt with. Deleted? Made inactive? Or would you prefer that your friend/spouse/child/parent use your page to notify friends about your death and funeral arrangements? Or maintain a tribute page? Whatever you do, tell him/her to STOP THE BIRTHDAY NOTIFICATIONS.

You probably don’t think you’re going to die anytime soon, but neither did Chris. He died suddenly of a heart attack. So don’t delay. Draw up a plan for managing your online afterlife NOW. This article on Time.com explains what companies like Facebook and Google require to access a deceased loved one’s accounts, and here is
a list of online services to help you manage your online life after death.

What about you? Do you have a plan for your online afterlife? Do you plan to make one? Do you know people who have died who still have websites and blogs and Facebook pages intact?

As someone who just finished the last revision of my manuscript Monday night (Hurray! I’m taking the day off to go to the hot springs tomorrow, my favorite reward), this rang true for me. I sent an earlier draft of my memoir, Paris On Less Than $10,000 A Day, out two years ago to five agents. All five requested fulls, and all five had positive feedback but ultimately turned the book down (No wait, there was a sixth, the fabulous Nathan Bransford, from whom I received a form rejection, but who hasn’t received a form rejection from Nathan?) Rather than send it to more agents, I spent the next two years rewriting the book. I don’t regret that decision because I think the book has greatly improved, but now, as I prepare to send it out again, I have one goal: No matter how many rejections I get (assuming I get some) I’m not allowed to revise my book again, unless an agent specifically requests that I do so.

I’m confident that my book is well-written and marketable. I’ve read enough publishing blogs to know not to take rejection personally. It’s an impossibly tough market, the business is incredibly subjective (It’s all about finding the right agent, the who will fall in love with my story), etc. etc. I know all that. And yet …

I also know myself. A month from now, after having received three or four rejections, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll doubt my book and my writing in general. I’ll analyze rejection e-mails for clues as to what could be improved. I’ll kick myself for not having gotten my book out there sooner. I’ll wonder if having a bigger author platform would make a difference. I’ll tell myself that memoirs are a thing of the past (unless you’re a celebrity from the 80s), that modeling books are out, that the only chance I have of getting published is to sleep with Oprah’s hairdresser. I’ll wonder if my book is too serious. I’ll tell myself that if only chapters 1, 6, 9, and 18 were as funny as 2, 7, and 41, it would have sold by now. In other words, I’ll be plagued by self-doubt.

Back when I was rock climbing, I wanted to get my lead card at my local rock climbing gym. I’d heard from several people that no one passes the first time they take the lead test. Climbers often have to take it two or three times to get their cards because their lead has to be PERFECT—perfect clips, smooth, strong climbing on an overhanging 5.10B or 5.10C, and no stepping on or behind the rope. I passed on my first try. Not because I’m a great climber, but because I was so afraid to fail that I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced long after any sane person would have taken the test. I would not take the test until I was confident that I could do it flawlessly. Why? Because I’m plagued by perfectionism, the cousin of self-doubt.

Perfectionism can be a good thing. It can lead to great accomplishments. But it can be damaging, too. It can slow us down, it can prevent us from putting ourselves out there, from taking risks. And in order to get published, we need to be willing to put ourselves out there. We need to take risks—in our writing and in our lives.

What about you? Are you plagued by perfectionism and/or self-doubt? Do you find that men are more confident than women when submitting their writing for publication? How do you remain positive in the face of rejection?

I worked it back up to 55, and it held steady for a while. I had come up with a “system” to maximize my ROI without working too hard, and I was happy. Then the sky fell when Klout changed its algorithm on October 26. My score plummeted to 46 overnight. And then, through some bug, it bottomed out at 10 (then popped back up to 46 the following day.) I wasn’t alone. Thousands of Klout users were incensed that their scores had dropped 10 to 20 points in one day (most of those with high scores saw a drop while those with low scores benefited from an increase.) To soothe my bruised ego, @missuku sent me this great xtranormal video about the inanity of Klout. And in response to one commenter’s lament that he had spent months getting his Klout score into the 70s only to see it drop back into the 50s, TechCrunch published an article titled Nobody Gives a Damn About Your Klout Score.

Back in April, when I wrote this blog post about Klout, that was true. When I interviewed agents and editors in the publishing industry, none of them had ever heard of Klout. They definitely weren’t checking writers’ Klout scores before deciding whether to take them on.

But all that has changed. Since April, Klout has expanded to include not only Twitter, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare, WordPress.com, Blogger, and more (I can’t check their site for the complete list because I refuse to look at my Klout score), and now literary agents and social media gurus are telling us that the size of one’s Klout score DOES matter. In fact, in this blog post, literary agent Rachelle Gardner says you should include your Klout score IN YOUR BOOK PROPOSAL along with your number of Twitter followers and page views on your blog. Kristen Lamb, author of We Are Not Alone, a social media guide for writers, responded in a post titled The Dark Side of Metrics—Writer Friend or Ticket to Crazy Town?. For me, Klout was a ticket to crazy town.

When I first started using it, I watched other Tweeters to see what raised their Klout scores. I noticed that getting any kind of mention helped, so I @replied and retweeted people each night hoping they would @reply and retweet me back. It worked. But it felt like a waste of my extremely valuable time to spend half an hour (sometimes up to an hour) on the Internet each night writing tweets like, “Hey, how are you?” or “I loved that movie, too!” in order to raise my Klout score. There were some aspects I liked about it. I was connecting more with people and we all know social networking is about being social. I worked harder at writing tweets that would get retweeted. I tweeted more frequently and more regularly, instead of 10 times one day and none the next. I was happy with my progress. 55 was a good score, and 60 was on the horizon.

What frustrated me most about Klout’s new algorithm is that I couldn’t figure it out. I no longer knew what to do (get my Twitter followers, get more FB likes, get more retweets) to increase my score. Whereas before, my “True Reach” was a transparent number—my number of Twitter followers plus my Facebook likes, suddenly my True Reach was a mysterious 700 while a friend, who has a fourth my Twitter followers and no Facebook page, had a True Reach of 3000. And another friend, who doesn’t have a Twitter account or a blog or a Facebook page (only a personal Facebook profile), suddenly had a Klout score of 43—just three points behind mine. And she HATES social media. How was this possible? My husband found the answer in this article. According to Annie, and I think she’s right, what matters is the percentage of your followers who are actively engaged with you. In other words, you’re better off with 50 friends who retweet everything you say than 10,000 followers of which only 500 retweet everything you say. The algorithm is clearly flawed. And it’s not the only one.

I’ve been to Grader.com to score my website and my blog. My blog gets penalized for having infrequent posts that are long (the highest scores go to blogs with frequent, short posts) and for not having links to Twitter and Facebook. Uh, sorry Grader.com, but I have not one but TWO links each to both Twitter and Facebook on my blog. In other words, these scoring websites make mistakes. Big mistakes. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

So I’m taking a break. That’s not to say I’ll never check my Klout score again, but for the month of November, while all your Nanowrimo writers are cranking out 1666.66 words a day, I will be assessing my social media influence the old-fashioned way—by instinct. And until Klout reveals what exactly goes into its cockamamy (I always thought it was “cockamany” but Dictionary.com disagrees with me) algorithm, I won’t take my score too seriously. I’d rather spend my late-night hours playing games the old-fashioned way—sitting around my dining room table with friends, producing coffee and tobacco, and laying track between Palermo and Moskva.

What about you? Do you care about your Klout score? How was it affected by the algorithm change? Do you care? And have you found the secret to increasing your “new Klout” score?

So, of course, I wondered, “What IS enough to impress a publisher?” I e-mailed Andy to ask him, and this is what he said:

“It is going to take quite a bit to impress a publisher on how many hits you get on a blog. Probably 100,000 unique views a month is the ball park. But even that isn’t good enough. You are still going to have to convince the publisher that you have a good book in your head, and that it is not just recycled material from the blog that people can get for free. That said, regardless of the size of your blog, if you are trying to sell a book to a publisher, they really expect you to blog and to mine the social media. Even if you only get 100 hits a day (which is more than most people get).”

100,000 hits a month? I don’t know any writer/bloggers who get that many. Are we all wasting our time? I decided to ask Daniela Rapp, editor at St. Martin’s Press, what she thought. Here is what she said: “A hundred hits a day is indeed small potatoes, but I would argue that 100,000 is way more than we generally expect or see. Somewhere in the middle, I think. Twitter followers upwards of 10,000 are impressive. FB fans in the thousands.”

Hmm. Somewhere in the middle. So that means somewhere between 3000 (100/day) and 100,000 hits/month. So let’s say 30,000+. That’s at least a thousand hits a day (I’m talking page views, not unique visitors). I bet every blogger with 1000+ Google Friend Connect followers gets that. That’s achievable. But 10,000+ Twitter followers? Thousands of Facebook Fans? You have to be Nathan Bransford to make those numbers. So are we all wasting our time?

Roni Loren wrote a post last week titled Is Blogging Dead? And she drew her inspiration from a post by Wendy Lawton at Books & Such Literary Agency titled What’s Not Working? in which Wendy lists beginning a blog as one avenue writers should not pursue as a means to market their books. Her rationale is that the market is already so saturated, it will be nearly impossible for a new blogger to make waves in the blogosphere.

Yet there’s a difference between having a platform so tall that you can snag a book deal based on your reputation alone and having a really well written book with a little social media behind it to show agents and publishers that you’re out there making connections and that you’re book-marketing savvy. The key is to make sure the book-writing comes FIRST and the blog, Twitter, and Facebook second. I say this to remind myself more than anyone because there are weeks when I feel like I’m spending more time on social media than I am on my book, which is counterproductive. Because without a great book, what’s there to market?

I don’t think blogging is a waste of time. I think blogging poorly is a waste of time. The key is to find your niche and delve in. Don’t just write about writing. Write about what interests you, what makes you unique. If that’s rock painting and speaking Swahili, then that’s what you should blog about because people with those interests will find you and follow you and read your work. As someone who writes about writing, I don’t practice what I preach, but I think about it every day. I think about the things I would blog about if I were to expand the subject matter of this blog: parenting in Berkeley, my previous life as a fashion model, rock climbing, speaking French, Geocaching, Settlers of Catan. What about you? Do you blog about writing, or do you have a particular niche, something that makes you a little different from all the other writer/bloggers out there? What makes you unique?

Originally born in Sao Paulo, Brazil to Korean parents, Samuel Park moved to the United States at age fourteen. He went to high school in Southern California, in the South Bay Area, and then studied at Stanford University, where he graduated with B.A. (with honors) and M.A. degrees in English. He has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Southern California, and his scholarly writing has appeared in journals such as Black Camera, Theatre Journal, and Shakespeare Bulletin. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Columbia College Chicago. His debut novel THIS BURNS MY HEART has been called “mesmerizing” and “stunning,” and has been selected by booksellers as a Great Read Indie Next List Pick for July and an Amazon Best Book of the Month.

How Social Media Has (and Hasn’t) Helped My Writing Career


Social media, like much affecting publishing these days, is a relatively uncharted landscape—no one knows yet if it helps, or how it helps, though everyone feels it’s important. I’ve been told by more people than I can count that I should blog, tweet, and have a website, though it’s impossible to quantify how that translates into book sales. Here’s the rundown on what it’s been like for me, and my advice for other writers:

1. Twitter:
I think twitter is the best place for writers—published, aspiring, retired—to be. It’s fun, it’s quick, it’s casual. If there’s only one thing that you have time for, I’d say tweet. Twitter can lead to links to excellent articles and blog posts, and serve as a quick education into the business. Also, following other writers give you a very clear sense of who the players are. I’d recommend following @eleanorwrites and @alexanderchee, both very active and full of wisdom (and me, of course! @SamuelPark_). Of all social media, I waited the most to join twitter, but it turned out to be the most useful. It’s a fantastic way to connect to potential readers. Make friends with other writers, who are going to be your support system through this. On my release date, most of my congratulatory tweets came from other authors. I’ve made quite a few real life friends through twitter, first meeting them online and then translating that into real life lunch or dinner. Use your tweets to promote other writers and advance the conversation. Don’t worry—by promoting others, you’ll get back too. Twitter is like karma on speed dial.

2. Website:
It is absolutely key that you have a website. Your prospective agent will check it out, and so will potential editors. Once your book comes out, everyone uses your website as a ground zero, from journalists looking for information, to readers considering coming to your readings. Make sure it is constantly updated, and full of information, including listings for your events, contact email, even Q & As and Reading Guides, which will make it easier for journalists and bloggers to write about you. I recommend Word Press, and then linking it to a custom domain, so that it’s yourname.com, instead of the less aesthetically appealing yourname.wordpress or yourname.blogspot. Thesis can be an easy and cheap way to make it attractive. I haven’t tried Thesis personally yet, but a lot of writers use it, and create fantastic-looking sites on their own.

3. Blogging:
I recommend blogging, even though it is not as popular as it was a while back. Books are really hand-sold, either by booksellers or by you. Blogging allows you to reach potential readers and supporters one by one. If you’re able to maintain hundreds of followers—who really like you and value you—that’s an incredible platform to have. Name your blog after yourself—your name is your brand. Blog at least three times a week. I don’t recommend posting your own work—blog about writing, or about the biz. The downside of blogging is that it’s incredibly time-consuming; Twitter definitely has an advantage over blogging in that sense.

4. Facebook:
Facebook is most useful for writers who already have a fan base. Authors can translate those “likes” into sales for their next book when it comes out. It used to be that you had to wait for a review or an ad to hear about your favorite writer’s new book, but with Facebook, you learn months ahead from your news feed. This means established writers can get an early jump on pre-orders for their books.

5. Tumblr:
This is the social platform I’m least familiar with, though some people seem to be crazy about it. Tumblr appears to combine some of the best aspects of blogging and Facebook, and makes it very easy to share photos. I don’t see a whole lot of writers on Tumblr, though, so I think that makes it, along with Google+ at this point, entirely optional.

6. Flickr:
Useful for making high resolution photos of yourself available to media. You can download your photos, and then put the link up on your website.

An Overall Thought:
Bookselling is about handselling person by person. The more friends an author has on Facebook and followers on Twitter, the easier it is for her to do that. So how does social media help? It helps if you have lots of friends. They will buy your books and want to support you. They will become advocates and evangelists for your book. They will spread word of mouth and create buzz. In other words, social media helps insofar as it helps you to make and maintain friends. Nowadays, people want to buy books from writers they know!

What about you? What have you learned about the benefits of blogging/Twitter/Facebook since you began building your author platform? Do you use Tumblr, Flickr or Google+? What are your thoughts on those platforms?

Next, I want to share a discussion I had with Roni Loren last week on her blog. Roni’s post “How Fast Do You Have To Write To Build a Successful Literary Career” struck a nerve with me. She stated that although the standard expectation of writers for decades has been to write one book a year, today writers are expected to write faster. In order to create her backlist and quit her day job, she said, “I KNOW I have got to be able to write more than 1-2 books a year.” She mentioned that romance author Maya Banks writes 8-10 books a year and that proof that her quality hasn’t suffered is that she hit the New York Times bestseller list last year.

In May, I wrote a post about social media books in which I quoted a story told by Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a personal finance book I’m sure you’ve heard of. Kiyosaki told a reporter who had had trouble getting her novel published that she should take a marketing class. When the reporter appeared taken aback, Kiyosaki pointed out that the cover of his book read “bestselling author,” not “bestwriting author.” I used that anecdote to illustrate the importance of social media marketing. What I didn’t mention is that the best-writing part is equally as important. ONCE you’ve written your book as best you can, THEN you should worry about selling it and marketing it, but not at the expense of the quality of the writing. And just because a book hits a bestseller list, does not mean it is well written. It means that it has sold a lot of copies, for whatever reason. (Think of all the blockbuster movies that make gazillions of dollars but get terrible reviews.)

IF you are lucky enough to be one of those authors who can truly crank out two great books a year without letting the quality of your writing suffer, go for it. I am not one of those people. The first draft of my memoir was 520 pages, and I’ve spent the past four years revising it and editing it down. I’ve never heard that there is any expectation for writers to write more than a book a year. Most published authors I know spend 3-4 years on a book. (Samuel Park spent 3 years 9 mos on his). Roni’s rationale behind writing 2+ books per year is that she needs to create a backlist in order to make enough money from her writing to quit her day job.

The argument for a backlist is a good one. (The point being that if someone reads and likes one of your books, he can go out and buy the others.) It’s an argument to stop being so anal about your first book being a super-mega-bestseller and just GET IT OUT THERE because if people like your second book, they’ll go back and buy your first. That happened to Alice Siebold. After the runaway success of The Lovely Bones, people went out and bought her earlier memoir, Lucky, which hadn’t met great success when it was first published.

But why does a backlist have to be developed in six months? What’s wrong with publishing a book every two or three years? You’ll still create a backlist, just a little slower. Like slow blogging. If you blog once a week, you’ll still build a following, just a little slower. My argument that I’d rather see authors take time to write a really good book than to rush them to publication was countered with many comments by people arguing that more time writing does not necessarily equal a better book. Of course it doesn’t in all cases. But I bet if you piled all the books that took less than one year to write on the left side of a table and all the books that took more than one year to write on the right side, well, first the table would tip over. But I bet you’d see a greater number of high quality books—regardless of genre—on the right side. Now, there will be some great books on the left side. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days. There will be YA books and novellas that took little time because they are short. There will be books by experienced writers who have so much practice writing that they truly can crank out a good book in less than a year.

But I hope everyone doesn’t get into a two+ books a year frenzy. There are many ways to make a living as a writer. You can publish your books and earn money from your backlist, but you can also teach, edit, consult, speak, and publish shorter pieces like book reviews and magazine articles.

I think it’s wonderful that Roni is so motivated and that she has a clear goal for herself in mind. I think it’s wonderful that writers are mastering social media and how to market their work. But I think it’s even more wonderful when someone spends four years—or three years and nine months—on a book to create a truly wonderful book that will enlighten and entertain his or her readers.

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.

And I will be back tomorrow (Tuesday) with my regularly scheduled post!

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!