The National Speakers Association of Northern California January Meeting

Last Saturday NSA/NC kicked-off 2008 with a fantastically full day of panels and talks on writing and publishing for speakers. Over 80 members and guests attended, celebrating the huge NSA advantage over other writers – as speakers we bring an extroverts’ love of talking about our books or blogs into the public arena, in contrast typically introverted writers.

To be a writer is to practice the world’s loneliest (but not of course, oldest) profession. Yet once the book is complete the solitary figure in front of the keyboard needs to go out and sell themselves. The writer as whore? I don’t think so. Not according to the panel of experts who kicked off the morning. They pulled no punches, sharing the wonderful and awful truths about writing and publishing books.

The morning panel was moderated by literary agent Michael Larsen. Mike handles nonfiction and wrote How to Write a Book Proposal and How to Get a Literary Agent, and co-authored Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 Weapons for Selling Your Work.

On the panel were Steve Piersanti, offering the Publishing House perspective; Dan Poynter, CSP provided the self-publishing perspective; editor Alan Rinzler who has worked on books by Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson and Jerzy Kosinski in his 40 years of experience at Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Bantam Books, Grove Press, and the Rolling Stone Book Division of Straight Arrow Publishing; publicist Anita Halton discussed how to play the PR game. Alan was easily the coolest guy on the panel.

We heard something about the paradoxes involved in writing and publishing, where it’s always the worst of times and the best of times to engage:

The 16 Wonderful Truths About Writing Books (Michael Larsen)

1. Now is the best time ever to be a writer
2. As a writer, you are the most important person in publishing because you make it go
3. There are more ways to promote your books and profit from them in more places than ever
4. You have more models – books and authors – to help guide you with your writing and build your career as an author
5. Your have more ways to test-market your books than ever
6. Technology is the greatest tool for writers since the printing press
7. You have more subjects to write about than ever
8. Agents and editors must find new writers to make their living
9. If you come up with an idea for a series of novels or nonfiction books that you are passionate about writing and promoting – you can create a career out of it book by book
10. You will do a better job writing and promoting you next book than you did your previous one
11. You don’t have to quit your day job to write
12. Writing is a forgiving art – take whatever time you need to write your book
13. It’s easier to become a successful author than a successful actor, artist, dancer, composer or musician
14. Readers are the second most important people in publishing because they determine whether a book fails or succeeds
15. No matter how your books are published, you will be the most important factor in their success
16. You can spend your life browsing in bookstores since you have to keep to to date on what’s going on in your field
17. Nonfiction writers can sell their books with a proposal of a sample chapter
18. Nonfiction writers can be authors without writing a word by working with a ghostwriter as collaborator.

The 10 Awful Truth About Book Publishing (Steve Piersanti)

1. The number of new books being published in the U.S. has exploded to 291,922 new titles in 2006
2. Book sales are flat, despite the explosion of new books
3. Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast – 950,000 titles out of 1.2m sold fewer than 99 copies and the average book in America only sells 500 copies*
4. Bookstore sales peaked in 2004 and have been declining since
5. A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked by an average bookstore
6. It is getting harder and harder every year to sell books – new titles compete with the other 300,000 published annually and the 5m previously published that are still in print
7. Most books are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities
8. Most book marketing today is done by authors, not publishers
9. No other industry has so many new product introductions
10. The book-selling world is in a never-ending state of turmoil.

* Since a typical print-run on an analog press is 5,000 copies there’s huge environmental benefits in the move to on-demand digital commercial printing which currently accounts for only a small percentage of the total 53 trillion pages printed each year on the planet, but is predicted to grow significantly. The forests are breathing a sigh of relief!

Self-Publishing Rules!

My big take-away from the morning: self-publishing is the way to go! Why pay a publisher their percentage when you are the one who’ll do the promotion anyway? The downside is losing that 1% chance your book will be in the stores, if it is, congratulations! If it is not, congratulations! You are free to do the niche marketing, back-of-room sales and public awareness campaigns on-line and in person to market the heck out of your baby and keep all the profits minus the printing costs.

Two NSA members who’ve cracked the code

We heard from Allen Klein, CSP, the author of fifteen books, past-president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, and the world’s only Jollytologist on how to get published and stay published. Allen makes a difference in so many people’s lives with his uplifting books.

Dan Poynter, CSP wrapped up the day with an afternoon that countered the claim “never judge a book by its cover”. That’s exactly what Dan demonstrated books are judged, and sold, on. He specifically worked on the all-important task of choosing a title that passes “the glance test” for buyers.

My one regret about the meeting was that people did not talk more about the value of blogging. There are an increasing numbers of writers who blog and find it keeps the creative juices flowing. Some even use their blog as ‘morning pages’ for their book.

Writing begins where it ends – in solitude

It took me a full week to digest this material and make the time to write this blog posting. Procrastination can have its rewards. Today’s Weekend Financial Times has a series of reviews of five assorted books on the subject of writing and publishing which are an interesting coda to this subject:

• How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authorsedited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann
• The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writingby David Morley
• A Novel in a Year: A Novelist’s Guide to Being a Novelistby Louise Doughty
• Your Writing Coach: From Concept to Character, from Pitch to Publicationby Jurgen Wolff
• NW15: The Anthology of New Writingedited by Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee

One section of the review hit home:

…the general assumption has always been that writers are born, not made. Asked what made a poet of Wilfred Owen, many readers would claim that the sheer force of his terrible experiences somehow poured through his nervous system and on to the page as if he was a medium or a lightning conductor. Owen encouraged this Romantic view of creative genius. “The poetry”, he famously wrote, “is in the pity.” But the poetry is also in the poetry: for example, in the experiments with half-rhyme which he shared with more skilled contemporaries such as Edward Thomas and Robert Frost – experiments they worked on and practised like musicians playing scales.

The sheer hard work of writing, as of any art, is what gets talked about least. In the post-Warhol age of celebrity worship – a phenomenon which the current buzz about creativity is arguably part of – people tend to be more interested in whether writers talk to themselves when they’re inventing dialogue, as Jonathan Franzen does, or whether, as Neil LaBute claims, all he needs to get him going is a Sinatra album, than in being told that writing can be the most lonely and labour intensive of all art forms. Yet no work of art takes longer to produce than a novel.