Just a suggestion, you might want to include ANY contact info or be easily google-able.
I don’t care if written the next fricken’ bible if I can’t contact you, then I’m going to assume someone made up an identity.
Get it together people.
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Lolita is one of the best-selling novels of all time, with over 50 million copies sold since its debut in 1955. When Nabokov was shopping the title around though, he had a hard time finding anyone willing to publish it because so many publishers were worried about getting tried for obscenity as soon as they touched it.
One rejection letter even went so far as to inform the author, “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation… I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” Ahem.”
While this list is interesting, I think that it’s important to note that most books (unless you’re James freakin’ Patterson) do not get published by the first publisher they send their manuscript too. That’s part of being an author, you have to find the right house with the right culture that appreciates what you’re writing.
This is especially true for Lolita which seems like the work of an insane man even after you read it. Lolita is one of the dangerous books which takes on the perspective of a protagonist who is in no way shape or form a morally correct man. Here is a person who prays on young girls and somehow Nabakov is such a masterful writer that one almost begins to feel sympathy for the Humphrey. It is this which makes it such an amazing book (in addition to it’s unique portrait of America and the landscapes and cultures that surround it) and also such a hard manuscript to publish.
But then again, Anne Frank’s Diary was not published in the first go and who can really understand that?
“The Perseus Books Group has created a distribution and marketing service that will allow authors to self-publish their own e-books, the company said on Sunday.
The new service will give authors an alternative to other self-publishing services and a favorable revenue split that is unusual in the industry: 70 percent to the author and 30 percent to the distributor. Traditional publishers normally provide authors a royalty of about 25 percent for e-books.”
This is a statement I’ve said many a time in the last month or so. Part of my job at Berrett-Koehler is to respond (generally by calling or emailing) to unsolicited proposals. I would say that probably 99.99% of the proposals that are sent in unsolicted do not make it further than that.
This is for various reasons:
-A lot of the proposals are business/management books, this means that unless they have a ton of speaking engagements and generally have a strong platform, it really doesn’t matter how good their proposal is (which sucks because a few times I have really liked their idea but, oh well). The market is way too flooded for a book to sell without the author being somewhat prominent or known.
-Wrong topic. BK only publishes a few genres and if it falls outside that, automatic rejection. This annoys me a little bit, because it indicates the person never really bothered to look up the company and just sent out a mass proposal
-They are flat out crazy. This range widely in topic but some of the topics covered have been: the bible as a sexual guide, why the earth and mars are threatened explained through anagrams of Issac Asimov’s character names, and a story of multiple personalites with lots and lots of drawings by the author.
On a certain level this can sometimes be the most interesting part of my job, or at least the most surprising.
So I’ve been interning at Berrett-Koehler for around a month now, and my crazy schedule is still crazy but somehow managable. I’ve been working at trader joe’s in larkspur and it’s interesting to see manager’s manage, to be blithe, especially in the face of all the business books I’ve dealt with in their various forms.
It’s hard to sum up what I’ve learned in the past month but perhaps the easiest idea to put my finger on is that I now have some of idea of what is not a book. This is especially true for business books. Learning what could be a book or how to organize and edit a book is something I am still learning but also recognize as something that will always be a least a little but ephemeral.
Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors and this video is just awesome. A deconstruction of how the typical story-line goes.
Andrew Kolb has illustrated the David Bowie song, “Space Oddity” (also known as “Ground Control to Major Tom”) into a children’s picture book. First off, being a fan of Bowie I thought this was brilliant and well-drawn. I’m surprised this hasn’t been done before, given how easily the song translates into a storybook. What also surprised me is that the illustrator is offering the book for free in a PDF form on his website.
I think as a promotional tool for potential authors this can work two ways. Ideally, it will promote the book before it has even gotten published or put into a hard copy and people will, once reading and seeing it, want to have a copy for themselves. There are a few examples of this but perhaps the best known is the book “Go to Fucking Sleep” which was written by practically unknown author. Once a PDF had leaked, and an audio version (recorded by Samuel L. Jackson) had been recorded, pre-sales for the book skyrocketed. I think that this is the ideal case, the one-in-one hundred happenstance.
I think that in order for this sort thing to work, one has to be very lucky and have a great marketing base to work from already set in place. However, it one gets lucky and it goes “viral” then, well, it doesn’t really matter, you will do well no matter what kind of marketing base you have, as long as you have the intelligence to sell the crap out of it.
The problem with offering content, any content, for free is that people than assume that is should be free. It sets up a mentality that people’s creative work will and should not be compensated. I think that offering free e-books is a great marketing tool, as long as their are limits set up.
That being said, I think this book in particular will benefit greatly from being free. For one thing, the illustrator does not even have a publisher yet and this is a great way to sell the book to potential buyers.
Whenever I enter into a new experience I always find myself slightly dazed, my head full of (already half-forgotten) names, tasks, to-do lists, and mostly remembered directions to the kitchen. My first real day (not including my training day with the wonderful Chloe Park), was on an author day with Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller.
Honestly, I could not have asked for a better first day. First off I learned that I probably never want to do another all day meeting, but by doing so I got to see each of the elements of BK at work. To preface, I just finished the NYU Summer Publishing Institute, a six week crash course on the world of publishing.
So getting to see all the different departments interact with authors was like studying some foreign country for years and years and suddenly finding yourself in the midst of it. Having come from the distinctly east-coast world of publishing it was interesting to see how a smaller, independent publisher worked on a day-to-day level.
During that day-long meeting I learned a lot from the authors themselves. It is easy to see why both Blanchard and Miller have found such success in the book and business world. Miller especially struck me as someone who knows how to distill an idea to it’s simplest and easiest to understand form. He called himself a, “chicken salesmen”, simplifying his real job (VP of Training and Development for Chick-Fil-A) to what, essentially, he really does. In Blanchard, I saw someone who knew how to engage an audience, and in basic terms, tell a really damn good story.
That first day alone taught me a lot about Berrett-Koehler and how publishing works on a real world level. Although not every day will be as exciting, just being able to review manuscripts and read proposals is something new and engaging for me.
