What’s it like for a writer to work at the elbow of legendary filmmaker George Lucas?

For the answer, I turned to my son Jonathan, an executive editor at LucasBooks.

He’s worked closely with the boss and other staff for the past seven years to write and produce dozens of titles related to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, including beautiful coffee table books on the art and technique, the history and making of each film, novelizations and other books.

LucasBooks is riding high at the moment with five books on the New York Times bestseller lists in hardcover fiction, children and young adult – each based on the new animated film and upcoming TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The meticulously timed rollout of the books to coincide with the film’s release practically guarantees an avalanche of sales for LucasBooks, the publishing imprint of Lucas Licensing, a Lucasfilm company.

For Jonathan, a lifelong cinema fan, writing books like The Making of Star Wars – The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film, The Art of Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith, The Making of Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith, and The Complete Making of Indiana Jones is a perfect fit.

I reached Jonathan at home, and we talked about his work at LucasBooks.

What are you working on now?

George and I just finished a huge project called Frames that has 1,416 full page high-resolution color stills from all the Star Wars films in six leather-bound 11×22 inch volumes, one per film, packaged in a beautiful wooden box.

It’s the ultimate collector’s edition, with only 1,138 printed in a limited edition for $4,000 each.

What’s it like working with George Lucas?

He drops his guard once he gets to know you, tells jokes all the time, and is very nice, very relaxed.

We sat for hours at Skywalker Ranch together with Mike Blanchard from postproduction, working on Frames, going through every film shot by shot.

It was meticulous hard work, but fascinating to hear his stories and memories about how each film was made.

What’s the process of writing about the making of a Lucas film?

It depends on the film. For Revenge of the Sith, I traveled with George and the crew as they shot in Australia, England, and the visual effects in California.

I was able to observe the interactions between George and the actors, how they worked together, and then I also interviewed several of the actors.

At first I kept a distance but gradually I wound up sitting at George’s elbow as he directed the actors and later for the animatics – the addition of visual effects and computer animation during postproduction.

What can you tell us about the book ‘The Making of Star Wars – The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film’?

Since the film was made in 1977, writing this book was a really big research job. There were boxes of draft scripts, special effects sketches, character notes and photographs to go through and I was lucky to discover a cache of old interviews with the actors and crew made during the shoot.

How do you decide what to include and what to leave out?

I try to get more than I need to start with and then just tell the story. As the narrative takes on a life of its own, it’s easier to see what I really need and what can be deleted.

Like Fred Astaire said: “Get it ‘til it’s perfect, then cut two minutes.”

What’s it like editing other writers for LucasBooks?

Well I’m lucky to work with several Lucasfilm staff who write with expertise and sophistication. But I also work with free-lance novelizers – writers who have to learn the ropes of creating new stories for Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

I edit all of our writers very carefully though I’ve asked a couple to read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language.

Orwell’s advice is to choose words that are simple and direct, and do not use prepackaged sentences.

How’s the book business from your perspective?

Never better. We have a large core market of loyal fans. Adults who grew up with Star Wars buy the big non-fiction books and younger kids, mostly boys, go for the novelizations. We also do occasional “princess” books for girls.

We package the books according to our own high standards and are having no trouble persuading our book publishers and distributors – including Random House, Scholastic, Dorling Kindersley, Chronicle Books, Palace Press, and Abrams, to give us more pages, larger formats, better printing, and higher prices. We, like a lot of the entertainment business, seem to be depression-proof.

Knock on wood.

Business is booming at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. Eleven new major book deals nailed down and that was while Sandy was vacationing in Europe.

So look out, now that she’s back!

Widely considered the most powerful agent on the West Coast, Dijkstra has been called “tough” and “abrasive” with a keen nose for new talent.

A passionate fighter for her authors

I’ve been on the other side of the table from Sandy during some tough negotiations and I can tell you she’s a passionate fighter for her authors. She knows the ins and outs of every contract. She perseveres, she’s relentless, and she walks away with top dollar for her clients.

One thing is certain: when I get a submission from Sandy Dijkstra, I sit up and pay attention.

The agency, based in Del Mar, California, represents more than 250 authors. Its deep bench of blockbuster best-selling authors includes:

• Amy Tan Joy Luck Club, Saving Fish from Drowning
• Lisa See Peony in Love, On Gold Mountain
• Joel Greenblatt The Little Book that Beats the Market
• Chalmers Johnson Blowback, Nemesis
  
• Susan Faludi Backlash
• Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Mistress of Spices
• Irv Yalom Staring at the Sun
• Maxine Hong Kingston Woman Warrior
• Stephen Prothero Religious Literacy
  
  

What Sandy thinks about publishing today

What can we learn about the state of the book business from a top literary agent? I reached Sandy by phone at her offices in the beach town of Del Mar, just north of San Diego.

How’s business?

Absolutely terrific. I just got back from a two month vacation in Europe and found that the three wonderful young agents who work for me had sold eleven major projects while I was gone. Eleven new contracts.

‘I should go away more often,’ I told them.

These were deals for new authors just starting out, for older established authors, for five and six figure advances, some with two or three titles in the contract, fabulous projects at major commercial publishers. So my people are happy, optimistic about selling more books, passionate about what they do. And that’s the future for us!

There’s quite a bit of doom and gloom in the book business this year, as publishers report declining unit sales and profits. How has this affected your operation as an agent?

Well after 25 years in the business, I know that plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change the more they are the same.

I’ve seen this cycle before. We don’t really know what’s going to happen and personally I don’t believe this doom or gloom is going to last. I can see the bigger picture. The truth is that we’re in an economic recession, real estate is suffering, the price of gas is awful, there’s less discretionary income around.

But what do we really know about the future? Well, we know that baby boomers need larger type books, that’s for sure. We know younger people still love to read but are buying fewer books.

So what we have to do is understand, to meet and grow with these young people, and figure out how to sell them ideas and information they want.

What do you tell your authors about marketing their books?

I tell our authors that they can’t stop working on their book after the first act, after finishing the manuscript and signing the contract. I say they have to go on to the second act or there won’t be any third.

We want our authors to know that they themselves are the first and best advocate for selling the book, and we their agents are the second.

We can try to persuade the publisher to pay attention to the book and do all the conventional things they’ve been doing for years in the national broadcast and print media. But we know that they have a narrow window of concentration. It’s hard to get their attention. A few weeks after publication, they’re on to the next season, the next list of books. So we tell authors to have limited expectations of their publishers.

It’s really up to us – the author and the agent – to keep the book visible, to continue and expand the marketing, to hire a publicist when appropriate, especially to invest in web-based internet marketing.

How important is web marketing?

I agree with my colleague Steve Kasdin (former marketing executive with Harcourt Brace, now marketing Amazon’s Kindle to book publishers) that authors and agents have a tremendous opportunity now to control marketing direct to readers by going on the internet, building interactive web sites, and blogging.

Some publishers, like Penguin and Random House, support author web sites and blogs, but it’s still up to the author and agent to keep pushing on this, with the help of professional tech design and web-marketing specialists for hire.

I’ve been recommending Fauzia-Burke Associates, for example, and there are many others.

What are you most excited about now and for the future?

You’re going to be hearing a lot about the San Francisco Opera’s World Premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter on September 13th. Amy Tan wrote the libretto based on her novel. Stewart Wallace has written a score with western and Chinese music. It’s going to be fabulous.

I’m also excited by what Irv Yalom is doing now. You know he’s been a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford Medical School for decades, writing nonfiction and novels, books for professionals and for lay readers, big New York Times bestsellers like Love’s Executioner, international bestsellers like When Nietzsche Wept, and The Gift of Therapy.

All of his books are having new editions all over the world. His new book about overcoming the terror of death called Staring at the Sun is a bestseller in Germany, France, Greece, Brazil, Israel, Norway, and Sweden, When Nietzsche Wept has been made into a movie that’s soon to be released, he’s starting in on a new novel.

What an inspiration!

Many successful books are written by ghost writers, co-authors, and other, often uncredited, collaborators.

If I sign up an author who’s a highly regarded expert in the field but not a professional writer, I bring in a ghost who’s a pro at getting under someone else’s skin and producing a seamless work in the author’s voice.

It’s the way a lot of books get published

Here’s an example: For our parenting list at Jossey-Bass, I wanted to do a book on the emotional problems of undergraduate college students.

At the time, there were serious headline-making problems on college campuses: increased suicide, stress and anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, sexual harassment and worse.

Finding the best brand

We knew the best brand for a book like this would be Harvard College, which had been having big problems on campus. So we got in touch with Dr. Richard Kadison, an esteemed psychiatrist who was also Director of Harvard’s Mental Health Services.

Dr. Kadison turned out to be a terrific guy – passionate, deeply worried, mission driven and eager to help produce a book that could make a difference and help parents and undergraduates recognize their problems and handle the symptoms before it was too late.

A busy man and not a writer

The problem was, however, that Dr. Kadison was a busy man and not really a writer. So I brought one of our established co-writers, Theresa DiGeronimo and put together a contract.

We three talked through each chapter. Theresa would send me a draft, which I’d edit, and then request revisions. This was our process, back and forth. The book, College of the Overwhelmed was ultimately a success in cloth and in paperback. Theresa has written eight books for us like this on various subjects over the past fourteen years.

On another occasion, one of our best-selling marriage and relationship authors decided to write a new version of his basic book for an emerging market of military families.

Since he was too busy with research, workshops, and trainings to take off any time, we hired an excellent ghost author who captured his voice and content in a narrative that has sold very well ever since, more than earning out the substantial advance we paid both of them for the job.

Other co-author and ghost arrangements occur when an agent or author offers the publisher a proposal where a celebrity or non-writing expert with a good idea or a great platform has a book worth publishing.

Does it matter to the reader?

Ghost writing, co-authoring, and other forms of ad hoc collaboration are common and time-honored traditions in publishing. Does it matter to the reader who actually wrote the book if the ideas are inspiring, useful and the text well-written?

Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on this.

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Illustration courtesy of Sue Beatrice

Taos, NM ~ This special place in the high desert has for generations drawn writers and artists, who come for the spiritual power of the endless skies, blazing sunlight, and thundering cloudscapes over the vast expanse of open plains and dark jagged mountains.

D.H. Lawrence and Willa Cather, playwright Thornton Wilder, poet Robinson Jeffers, painter Georgia O’Keefe, and photographer Ansel Adams are among those who arrived here at turning points in their careers and felt the Taos region exert a profound influence on their work.

The separate reality of Taos Pueblo

The undeniable pull of northern New Mexico as a literary destination is often attributed to the presence of the Taos Pueblo, an ancient village where the Red Willow Tribe has lived continuously for more than a thousand years. Members of the tribe who live at the pueblo today have no electricity and for water rely on the river that runs through it.

Taos Pueblo is a stunning sight. When you see the rich brown adobe dwellings stacked five stories high in sharp relief against the brilliant blue sky, you realize that you’re at the source of the famed southwest culture and architecture seen throughout the region and beyond. The thickened walls, organic, rounded edges and the vigas – heavy log rafters that hold up the roofs — are familiar and timeless.

You can feel how the enduring presence and integrity of these people has inspired writers and their readers to believe there’s a separate reality beneath their stoic and serene style of life, layers within layers of mystic truth and knowledge that only the Indians know – and they’re not telling.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, literary muse

Anyone on a literary quest to Taos soon learns about Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy heiress from the East who arrived in 1917 with fistfuls of dollars and a burning desire to become the muse of the high desert.

Luhan tried to fulfill her fabulous visions by building a counterculture paradise that would offer a communal alternative to what she perceived as a failed materialistic Western culture. She married a local Pueblo Indian, Tony Luhan, and valiantly herded famous artistic cats to her home, with mixed results.

D.H. Lawrence, for example, accepted her invitation in 1922 to visit the place she described as “the dawn of the world” as he was coincidentally traveling the globe, looking for a site to establish his own utopian community.

Things fall apart

Lawrence agreed at first with Luhan’s claim that the indigenous culture of the American Southwest should “shift American consciousness towards organic expression.”

But after a few months, relationships turned sour, as Luhan pressured Lawrence to write the ultimate book about Taos that would revolutionize the world.

Instead, the cranky and mercurial Lawrence painted over the open glass windows of her second story bathroom with watercolors “perhaps to avoid having to see Luhan naked,” according to Lynn Cline in her book on the early Taos and Santa Fe writers’ colonies, Literary Pilgrims. You can still see his artwork decorating the windows in Luhan’s private quarters at what is now a B&B called the Mabel Dodge Luhan House.

You too can sleep here

We jumped at the opportunity to spend a weekend there in the Robinson Jeffers room with its traditional mud walls and high wooden ceiling built of log vigas. Through the windows one night we watched a spectacular midnight moonrise worthy of Ansel Adams’ famous 8×10 Land Camera.

On a stormy afternoon we curled up reading in the B&B’s atmospheric library filled with Luhan’s personal photographs and precious artifacts, basically unchanged since she presided over her literary salons of luminaries whose works became associated with the region.

A writer under every stone

Writers and visual artists continue to come to Taos, drawn to the stark beauty and bold forces of nature here.

“The stars are different,” Georgia O’Keefe said. “The air is different here, the wind is different.”

…………………….
Look here for more literary destinations

Q : I have so much material for my memoir. How do I sort out what to include and what to leave out?

A : This is the key problem a writer faces when constructing a non-fiction memoir. Here are six specific steps to consider when making your decisions:

1. First, skip to the end

Every memoir should be a journey of change and transformation. So before filling in the details of a chapter-by-chapter outline, I recommend that you think first about the ending.

Once you know the climax, where you wind up, you’ll know better what the story is and where to begin. Start by asking yourself:

• Why am I writing this precisely now?
• What’s the point I’m trying to make?
• Where am I going with this story?

2. Next, identify the biggest change in your life

Since memoirs are all about challenges, changes, turning points and reaching some new level, plateau, or climactic moment in your life, what’s the dramatic turbulence that’s inspired this memoir? Some possibilities include:

• Coming of age
• Escaping or emigrating from one country to another
• Achieving independence
• Finding love
• Overcoming poverty, illness, anger, abuse

3. Consider what happened before your birth

What about your parents, grandparents, ancestors and other significant influences from the past? How did they influence who you are? Think about your conscious and unconscious attitudes, fears, and values.

4. Outline a prologue, act one, act two, and act three

It’s the narrative arc again, as I discussed recently here. The basic point of the outline is to create a coherent linear structure for the events of your life.

You can reorganize the outline so it starts with a bang at some significant turning point, then flashes back to the very beginning. This is optional, however, and not a formulaic requirement.

5. Go through the outline and delete at least half of it

Avoid the kitchen sink school of writing. Include only those events and characters which directly relate and provide meaning to the point you want to make: how you grew, developed, changed.

6. Now you’re ready to start writing

Selling this memoir, of course, depends on the literary quality of the writing and excellence of the story. The only exception to that requirement is for famous celebrities of whom everyone has already heard.

But for the rest of us – we have to be smarter, more selective, more organized, and most of all know how and why we got from infancy to the wonderful and inspiring denouement of now.

B ook publishers expect authors to take charge of their own online marketing. That means writers need to create their own clever websites and build active blogs and hopefully they’re also out there whirling on the social networks.

Cold hard reality

The cold hard reality is that many authors haven’t the foggiest idea how to do those things, and what’s more, some may be completely disinterested. They’d rather be writing their next opus than blogging and twittering online. Remember Book Launch 2.0?

To make matters worse, it seems that many publishers offer little in the way of technical support or resources to help authors develop their web presence. Writers are left to their own devices to find web and blog designers — not to mention reliable help to maintain the site — producing mixed results and sometimes making costly mistakes along the way.

This conundrum needs to be resolved. Everyone knows that the web represents tremendous new opportunities for authors to go directly to their readers on line. It’s where people live today, making it possible for writers to connect and interact with potential readers all over the globe.

How’s this for a new concept ?

We ought to support our writers with web-savvy designer geeks on staff. Every author should expect and receive assistance to build a state-of-the-art blog, with tech support and training as needed to get it up and keep it running.

In these times, we should integrate this into the publishing process as an essential component of the marketing plan for every title. Not only would authors get much needed help, publishers would also be assured of consistent quality in design and content. We don’t expect authors to go out and get their own book jackets designed and printed, do we?

Technology has reached the point where this doesn’t need to be overly complicated or expensive. WordPress, one popular open-source blogging platform, is available for free, with a mind-boggling array of “theme” templates and plugins to create easy-to-manage interactive blogs each with a unique look and feel.

What’s the alternative?

Otherwise, we’re likely to continue in our present chaotic state. In my own experience, only a handful of my trade non-fiction writers have websites, with more ramping up as best they can.

Some have been very successful. One of my authors had a great experience with his website, using it in recruiting more than 2000 readers to fill out a survey, the results of which provided important data and terrific stories for his next book.

Others have been frustrated. “I hate my website,” one author confessed. “It’s a big ugly mess and needs to be redesigned entirely.” This writer has worked very hard to produce book-related podcasts and videos and has built a large, complex site, but wonders sometimes if all the effort is worth it. “I’m exhausted.”

Publishers need to step up. There’s never been a better time for authors to take control of their marketing and reach their readers directly. Every publisher who wants to stay in business knows and should strenuously support this essential reality.

“Reading and writing go on, in new forms, forever!”

That’s the rallying cry at Stanford this week, where book and magazine publishers from around the globe have gathered for the 33rd annual Professional Publishing Course.

It’s my 12th year on the faculty, and I’m witnessing a new level of excitement, stimulating ideas, and heartwarming determination.

A very smart bunch of editors, sales, marketing, design, and financial people here are producing a wealth of great resources and ideas for a brave new world of publishing, including new ideas in new formats, from traditional T (for timber) books, to E books, twitter books, mobile books on your cell phone, and other incredible new concepts.

I’m posting on the run between sessions, but I wanted to report that people here are buoyantly and genuinely optimistic about their ability to create new ways to produce a variety of media products in different formats, and determined to stay alive, even flourish financially in the years to come.

E ditors pray for the perfect book title: a tight high-concept combination of words that crystallizes the content and intention of the work. A title so scintillating and irresistible that millions of readers want to run out and buy this book immediately.

Eureka! It happens.

Think of Chicken Soup for the Soul, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, or Gone with the Wind, or Jaws. These book titles resonated and were ultimately absorbed into the fabric of American culture.

Back to the drawing board

But more often than not, the title we publishers see on a new proposal or manuscript is uninspired or confusing, so it’s back to the drawing board for the author, editor, and often quite a large group of interested parties weighing in, including marketing and publicity pundits, sales people, even key account buyers from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Sometimes a stroke of creative genius can turn a ho-hum title into one that sings. The great editor Maxwell Perkins changed “Under the Red White and Blue” to The Great Gatsby. Thomas Pynchon’s “Mindless Pleasures” became Gravity’s Rainbow.

Last minute drama for Catch 22

Unforeseen circumstances can force a high-drama title change at the last minute.

Joseph Heller’s brilliant Catch 22 was initially called “Catch 18” until Leon Uris unexpectedly beat him to the punch with Mila 18. I happened to be there at the time, in 1962, a new editorial assistant to the legendary Bob Gottlieb, Heller’s editor at Simon & Schuster. It was my first exposure to the behind the scenes anxious back-and-forth that frequently occurs over nailing down the perfect book title.

I’ve since suffered over many books, struggling to transform a mundane working title into something memorable. A manuscript originally titled “A History of Indian Tribes in North America” became Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. “Harlem Memories” became Manchild in the Promised Land.

In some cases you get the perfect title before the book itself is even written. My wife, Cheryl Rinzler, came up with the title Raising Baby Green that defined both the content and the market, inspiring the book we commissioned by Dr. Alan Greene (what a coincidence), which recently won the Nautilus Award for Best Parenting Book of 2008.

Sometimes, agonizing compromises

On other occasions, I’ve experienced an agonizing process of painful compromises with too many cooks and ambiguous results. I wound up sort of liking the title for Irv Yalom’s latest book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. But I still wish we had called it “Wild Dogs Barking in the Cellar” a terrific image suggested by Irv’s agent Sandy Dijkstra that no one could quite understand but sounded perfect to me. Oh well.

I’ve also come up with some real corkers. A perfectly fine and decent book we published about how men and women regress to the “fight or flight” primitive survival instinct of the brain stem amygdala, inspired me to fight for the title Reptiles in Love: Ending Destructive Fights and Evolving Toward More Loving Relationships by Don Ferguson PhD.

To compound the difficulties created by this mouthful, we put a gorgeous but terrifying illustration of an evil looking lizard biting the head of a flamingly colorful snake on the front of the book. Wow. I’m told that buyers hid it in a plain brown paper bag before leaving the bookstore.

Suggestions for authors

• Less is better. Try to keep down the number of words to a precise and evocative few.
• More can also be better. If it’s impossible to be brief, try something deliberately long like Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. That worked.
• Don’t rely on the subtitle to explain what the book is really about, as we did with Reptiles in Love. It’s the title itself that people see first when scanning a catalog or bookstore shelf.
• Avoid clichés and hyperbole like “Best”…”Most”…”Radical New”…
• Research the title on Amazon or Google. You can’t copyright a title; therefore you’ll often notice there’s more than one book with the same one. Avoid taking a title that’s been used too many times or already belongs to a famous book.
• Try out your title on a variety of people, including people with different tastes, people who are not family and friends, who are educated about the subject or not, who are cool and uncool – be curious and open to the market.
• Put a “promise” in the title of how-to books, like Launching Our Black Children for Success, or Helping Children Cope with Divorce.
• Welcome controversy, like Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great.
• Ignore all of the above. Who could have predicted that Eats, Shoots & Leaves would become a huge best seller about why commas make a difference?

Titling, as with so much else in the book business, is an art, not a science.

I’ll be posting occasionally about the individual components of a published book, each of which requires care and attention. We’ll look at the special issues and strategic publishing decisions relating to elements such as the cover art, the foreword, the flap copy, the author photo and others.

You can find these posts in the blog category Parts of a Book. Please weigh in with any questions.

Q:My writers group thinks I need to strengthen the narrative arc in my novel. How can I do that?

A:The “narrative arc” is a fancy way of saying that every story needs to have a beginning, middle, and end. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, you need an act one, act two, act three, right?

Take for example a coming-of-age novel or memoir. The 13-year-old hero starts out an innocent lad, poised on the brink of challenges, opportunities and choices.

But in many proposals and draft manuscripts I see, the poor boy is in much the same place by page 476. Not enough has happened to him.

A successful narrative arc requires action

If there had been the necessary narrative arc, our hero would have been tested and endured a series of adventures, symbolic actions and meaningful experiences that would have left him more mature at the climactic epiphany. Like Aeneas or Ulysses or Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye or Harry Potter.

In a successful narrative arc, the hero or heroine is confronted with dangerous threats, seductive choices, major decisions, necessary feats of physical bravery, or emotionally powerful assaults from family or social pressure.

Editor & writer go scene-by-scene to find the holes

When I’m working with a writer who needs to strengthen the narrative arc, we go through the story scene by scene and find the holes, the moments in time when something needs to happen to get the central figure to the next level.

We brainstorm specific scenes to insert that target the character’s weakness or dramatize the symbolic threats from rivals, challenges from mentors, dangerous social stressors within the political or cultural context of the situation, opportunities to succeed or fail.

A good story needs to:

• start with a bang
• quickly accelerate to a level of action
• have moments of drama and suspense that keep rising in intensity
• sustain a high pitch
• level off
• gradually come down to earth in an emotionally satisfying closure and denouement

Constructing such a narrative arc is not easy but it is mandatory. If you’re having a problem, I suggest first writing a rough chapter outline to chart out the geometric rise and fall of your arc.

Ask the Editor is a new feature that welcomes your questions about writing and book publishing. Please post them in your comments.

Take a look at the 2nd piece in this series, Ask the editor: 6 steps to writing a memoir, which also touches on issues related to the narrative arc in a work of non-fiction.

I’m among the publishing veterans who admired and benefited from the creativity and courage of Clay Felker, who died this week at the age of 82.

This celebrated and deeply influential editor made a big difference at the start of my own career when he assigned his young star reporter Tom Wolfe to write what turned out to be a landmark profile of Claude Brown, the unknown author of the about-to-be published Manchild in the Promised Land.

In 1965, Claude was a 28 year-old former gang leader who’d been sent to reform school, where he wrote Manchild. I was his 26 year-old editor at Macmillan.

After working on the book nonstop for six months, I took a deep breath and sent an advance copy to Norman Mailer. He passed it along to his friend and editor Clay Felker.

Clay quickly assigned Wolfe to do one of his on-the-spot action pieces for New York Magazine, then still the Sunday Supplement of the old New York Herald Tribune.

So Tom Wolfe, in his signature white dandy suit, Claude and I took the subway to Harlem, cut through some dark alleys together with a photographer and growing bunch of neighborhood kids, and climbed through the crumbling back yards of Claude’s old neighborhood. Claude showed Tom the places he sold drugs and where he was gunned down: first-time-ever material in those days.

Felker created trends and celebrities overnight

Claude and Tom got along splendidly from the start and Wolfe went home to write a terrific article that caused a sensation and launched Manchild as a huge phenomenon: front page reviews, New York Times best seller, a career-making book for Claude. Manchild still sells 20,000 copies a year, now 43 years later.

Felker had rare prescience. He was able to sniff out and promulgate the most interesting personalities, the political and cultural start-ups, creating trends and celebrities overnight. He recognized the importance and value of what he saw rapidly changing around him in the early sixties, but was also deeply cynical, skeptical, and eager to skewer and overthrow all facile ideology, old or new.

Can you introduce me to Clay Felker?

When I went to work for Rolling Stone in 1969, one of the first things its young editor Jann Wenner wanted to know was, “Can you introduce me to Clay Felker?”

Clay was the editor he admired and emulated the most. I took him over to Clay’s East Side duplex and Felker was gracious but aloof, treating us like the two eager puppies we were. Tom Wolfe was there, too, so Jann met him also for the first time, and from then on Wolfe became a regular contributor to Rolling Stone.

Courageous and curious, sometimes abrasive

Felker’s obituaries allude to his tough-minded, cocky, sometimes abrasive attitude, and I certainly found that to be true from my brief contacts with him. But he had courage and curiosity, and writers who worked with him were grateful for his support in giving them freedom and inspiration to do their best and bravest work.

Which is what a good editor should do.

Writers sometimes suffer bouts of major paralysis. They want to write, are desperate to get down something great, but it’s just not coming easily, in fact not at all.

No one had a worse case of writer’s block than Hunter S. Thompson. After the presidential election of November, 1972, his contractual deadline for Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail with Straight Arrow, the book division of Rolling stone, had come and gone with no manuscript delivery.

As Hunter’s editor, it was my job to get the finished book to the printer on time so we could beat Teddy White’s The Making of the President to market with our own Rolling Stone, Straight Arrow Books, Gonzo version of the epic election.

So after tracking Hunter from Woody Creek to San Francisco, I finally loaded up my car with a large Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder and headed out to the Seal Rock Inn where the Prince of Gonzo was hunkered down.

We turned on the tape and talked — for 48 hours

He wasn’t exactly glad to see me but was impressed with the Nagra, so we turned it on and started talking. We edited his dispatches to Rolling Stone for the prior eight months, and recorded new material, pacing with a hand held mike trailing a long wire, the reels going around so slowly as they did. I asked him questions. He responded. Every few hours, members of the Straight Arrow Staff came out and hustled away the tapes for transcription. This went on for more than 48 hours.

Transcripts began to appear. We edited them standing up, still taping, interviewing, arguing, lunging around the room, tripping over each other. Here’s a photo of us going at it.

We edited the transcripts by hand. Taped and transcribed again. We finally patched the final manuscript together and met our deadline with the printer. We made it to the stores before Theodore White and The New York Times called Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail one of the “notable” books of the year. It’s still in print today, 35 years later.

We handled Hunter’s writer’s block the same way when producing The Great Shark Hunt and The Curse of Lono. By then the hyperbolic Gonzo mythology was in place, Doonesbury ran every day in the comic strips, and the reality was becoming no different than the legend.

Could this work for you?

It’s hard to write. It’s unrealistic to expect that it should just flow out in a beautiful finality. Writing is rewriting. Every serious writer knows that.

But if you have a friendly interviewer, transcriber, editor and tough-love fellow traveler, then talking into a voice recorder may be a way for you to work through a bout of writer’s block too.

Look here for Part One of this series: Guts Ball: Editing Hunter Thompson

It’s the #1 question aspiring authors ask me: How do I get your attention? Here’s how – with a compelling, convincing book proposal that knocks my socks off.

For those who’ve heard that a query letter should always precede a proposal, my view is you should skip the query entirely and instead send in the complete package. More on that here.

So let’s move on to the five essential elements that I want to see in any book proposal.

1. A great hook

The hook grabs the reader. In no more than a few opening sentences, this overview of the book must command our attention and convince us that your work is so good we don’t want to put it down. A good hook is like a one-two punch, stunning us with both your concept and your platform.

The concept should tell us what’s original and “must read” about your main idea. If you’re an expert in your field and have a new twist or discovery on the topic, that’s terrific. If you’re writing fiction, your story has to zing in two sentences of plot summary.

The platform should indicate how much success you’ve had in marketing yourself in person or in the media. Candor and honesty will be greatly appreciated. If you have no real platform yet, which is often the case, indicate that you understand its importance and are building one through speaking events, cultivating media, writing for web sites, and social networking. You’ll have a chance to provide more detail in #4, below.

2. A polished chapter outline

Whether you’re writing nonfiction or fiction, all agents and editors will appreciate a comprehensive two or three page chapter outline consisting of one or two succinct paragraphs on what is in each chapter, with no more than 10-12 chapters. Remember this outline is a tool to show the focus and structure or the work in progress and isn’t carved in stone. No hype please, just tell us what’s in the book.

3. The first 20 pages of the book

It’s crucial that the opening of a book impress the reader, reviewer, sales rep, book buyer, agent, editor, and publicist. Everyone wants to see if you can write and if you can draw your readers into the story. We can also tell what level of editorial development might be necessary. So please don’t send us a chunk that starts with page 21.

4. Your author platform

The platform is so important these days, you should include it both in the hook and again, in an expanded vitae. Tell us who you are with modesty and humor, but be sure to include your education, relevant jobs, publications small or large, any broadcast or print media appearances whatsoever, potential endorsements from credible authorities or celebrities in the field, and professional affiliations, speaking events or workshops or trainings you might lead. For fiction, including conferences and workshops you’ve attended wouldn’t hurt, but only if they required competitive application.

One of the best things you can tell me about your platform is that you’re hiring a publicist. Editors and publishers love to hear that an author is committed to supporting a book’s publication by signing on with a professional publicist. This can be expensive, but it’s well worth it. Virtually all of my successful authors have their own publicists, and many are starting to retain web marketing specialists as well.

5. Your DVD performance reel

It’s great if you can offer a video of yourself on Oprah or the Today show, but few of us have those, so send a video from a local interview or speaking at a meeting or conference. If you have nothing at all in hand, make one of your own. Sit down in your living room, have someone turn on a spotlight, and speak into the camera full face. What we want to see is an author who can articulate a message, while remaining relaxed, personable, and authentic. I’ve seen an unknown author’s homemade video persuade a team of editors, publishers, sales directors, and publicists at a proposal meeting to take on a book, simply because everyone realized that this author would be a real asset in our marketing efforts.

That’s my two cents. Hope it helps.

L ike many authors, Guy Kawasaki has struggled with his publishers to get the cover designs he wants for his books. But unlike anyone else before him, he decided to take matters into his own hands and hold an online contest to recruit and select the best possible jacket for his book The Art of the Start.

The response was phenomenal, with hundreds of submissions from graphic artists and design firms all over the country.

Of course it helped to be Guy Kawasaki, whose name and website come up near the top of a Google search for the just the word “guy”. That’s out of 672,000,000, folks.

This Guy is famous for being a pioneer and entrepreneur in tech promotions, start-ups, and publishing for many years. He was an early evangelist for the Macintosh to software and hardware developers, and later an Apple Fellow, whose tour of duty was to maintain and rejuvenate the Macintosh Cult. He’s now a Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm.

He’s written eight books, including Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and most recently The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, a book that Guy says “reflects my experience as an evangelist, entrepreneur, investment banker, and venture capitalist.” The book has sold 68,000*, and continues to sell more than 200 copies a week, four years after it was published.

We can all take a lesson from his success at engaging the community in creating a better book with a built-in market, whether it’s through a contest like this, open source participation as the book is being written, or other special outreach techniques as befits your unique creation.

“Anyone can give this a shot and create some buzz around their book”

-Guy Kawasaki

I spoke to Guy a few days ago to ask about his experience with the online jacket design contest:

Why did you take this route, rather than go through usual process of working with the publisher’s art director?

My publisher showed me six designs they had commissioned and I didn’t much like any of them, so I decided to run my own cover design contest with friends from iStockphoto and was lucky to get hundreds of submissions, finally boiling it down to three finalists.

Who were the judges?

Me, myself, and I.

How did your publisher feel about letting you run the show?

They were OK with it, especially when they saw the three finalists. They even upped the prize from the original $1000 Canon digital camera to a big fee for the winning designer, Adam Tucker, at their usual rate, which they had not agreed to at first.

Do you recommend this approach for other authors?

Sure. Not every author has the name recognition on the internet that I do, or would necessarily attract as many contestants on the same level. But why not? Anyone can give it a shot and create some buzz around their book.

What were the benefits for you?

It inspired a whole lot of entries and a lot of publicity for the book in the community. We had so many good covers that we not only used the winner on the front but included 85 other versions on the inside cover of the book, which was a first. So everyone is real happy about it, and it will be coming out next in paperback.

* Book sales figures are from Neilsen BookScan, which collects retail sales data for the book industry.

Update on Adam Tucker, winner of Guy’s cover contest. We thought his career as a book jacket designer might have taken off, given the visibility of his winning cover, but it took a little sleuthing to find him and here’s why: “I’m still working as a freelancer, but I’m also a part-time seminary student these days,” he wrote, responding eventually to a Facebook message. “So, I have my clients I generally work for, and the occasional new one due to word-of-mouth. All that to say, I don’t even have a website :-)”

The sad demise of Cody’s Books, the iconic independent bookstore in Berkeley that closed this week, is a loss for readers, authors, booksellers and publishers everywhere. The reasons for this unfortunate event are many and complex – Amazon, over-expansion, fiscal mismanagement, the negative impact of digital publishing, the usual suspects – but I’ll leave that discussion to others.

My reaction is personal

Fred Cody was a friend of mine. I loved him and I loved the bookstore he and his wonderful wife Pat had started in 1956. The Telegraph Avenue location that I first visited in 1967 was a big rambling light-filled space that smelled like fresh new books and old butts ground into the unfinished floorboards. It was always crowded with browsing readers of all ages from the diverse Berkeley community, and the broad walkway in front of the store reflected Fred’s generous spirit and idealism, with long-haired street people camped daily selling flowers and political posters.

Fred was a tall man with great craggy bones and crevices in his handsome face, resembling a happier version of Abe Lincoln. He described himself and his store in the early days as an anachronism even then, decades before the advent of the internet and all that has followed.

“I am a bookseller – the owner and operator of a personal bookstore. We are, I’m afraid, members of a fast-vanishing tribe. I agree with those who say that the small personal bookstore is a somewhat picturesque carryover from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Yet there are still people who are so badly adjusted to reality that they insist on either writing books or selling them.”

-Fred Cody

Fred Cody’s benign presence pervaded the store space at all times. He pioneered the in-store author reading and brought in such literary luminaries as C.P. Snow and Tom Robbins. Everyone knew Fred and Fred knew everyone. He became an inspiration and guiding spirit when we started Straight Arrow the books division of Rolling Stone in 1969. He told me we should “publish books that are not only informative and enlightening, but weapons in this struggle for social change”. Corny, huh? But he meant it, and so did we.

Later, during my stint as the editor of the Berkeley Monthly, Fred wrote our book column and recommended many young writers to me for our short story selections, including naturalist David Rains Wallace and an unpublished young woman named Alice Walker, his personal favorite. He had a finely tuned taste for literary excellence and innovation.

Why Cody’s failed

I spoke today to Bruce Harris, a master book sales guy who sold to Cody’s and other independent booksellers for 48 years, first as a rep for Crown, eventually as President for Sales at Random House and Publisher/COO of Workman, and he put it this way:

“To survive as an independent book seller these days, you have to be either independently wealthy and in it for love not money, or have a special niche. Now an independent store needs a distinct identity, like mysteries, computer books, children’s books, gardening, something… But even the big chains are in jeopardy now, trying to keep up with the Amazon juggernaut.”

I asked Bruce why Cody’s failed: “Well, I always thought Andy Ross [who bought the store from Fred Cody in 1977] was a smart guy but he could be stubborn, opinionated and inflexible. The neighborhood on Telegraph Avenue became a really big problem for him. People didn’t want to deal with the social problems on the street, and stopped going. Then he moved to Fourth Street neighborhood where he couldn’t afford the rent. Then to San Francisco where he had no connection, no base. It was a series of unfortunate events.”

What a pity. But such a bright side. I was always grateful to Cody’s as a place where over the years I led a total of 27 writer’s workshops — the perfect atmosphere for so many folks wanting to be better writers and get published.

What Fred would say today

I’m sure Fred would smile at the sad news today and say something like “Keep fighting the good fight. Don’t give up. There are still plenty of good writers, good books and readers around, and there always will be.”

And he’d be right.

Chappaquiddick, MA ~ I’m writing today from this remote sandy outpost off Martha’s Vineyard, the most famous literary island in the US.

The Vineyard is one of those enchanted places in the world closely associated with writers and publishing. Think of Paris with Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway drinking absinthe at the Deux Magots. San Francisco has the legacy of City Lights Bookstore, Kerouac, Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti, and the beat generation. East Hampton has been for decades the place where you see editors and authors playing softball and making deals on the beach in August.

In Martha’s Vineyard, residents and summer visitors have been writing about the island’s history, culture, beautiful ponds and shoreline, incredible wildlife, and highly diverse residents for more than 200 years.

Do you like to poke around bookstores when you travel? So do I. I’ve been wandering through antique shows, garage sales, and book shops, discovering obscure out-of-print and self-published titles on the famous and infamous events and personalities of the island.

The best book I came across about the true flavor and personality of the island was a two-volume oral history called Vineyard Voices: Words, Faces and Voices of Island People, a large beautifully produced set, which includes interviews and photographs of a broad variety of local denizens. I found both editions at an antique sale at the West Tisbury Grange for about $120 each, but you can find them for less online.

Many other titles are available, from mysteries to children’s books. One entertaining example for adults is Holly Nadler’s recent Vineyard Confidential, a compilation of Martha’s Vineyard gossip. For example, I read that Nathaniel Hawthorne, here during the summer of 1836 procuring horses for his uncle’s stage company, had a star-crossed love affair with a half-Indian young woman who bore his child and became his inspiration for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.

Other notable literary folks are celebrated in Nadler’s book, including Jackie Kennedy, who spent 16 summers here, during the period she was also working as an editor at Doubleday. Jackie met and signed up island resident Dorothy West, a writer who was a charter member of the black literary royalty of the Harlem Renaissance.

Dorothy West had summered at Oak Bluffs on the Vineyard since childhood in 1908, published a semi-autobiographical novel The Living is Easy in 1948 and wrote a column in the venerable local paper The Vineyard Gazette. Jackie O. loved the column and insisted that Ms. West let her publish a long languishing second novel, which was set in the Vineyard in the 1950’s. The Wedding was ultimately released in 1995 with the dedication “To the memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners.”

Nadler skewers Lillian Hellman, author of the Broadway hit play The Little Foxes and the bestselling book Pentimento, who was known as “the meanest woman on Martha’s Vineyard” during the period she lived there with Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest).

One of Hellman’s regular adversaries on the island was William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner, and a Vineyard seasonal resident for fifty summers. Styron, who also wrote regularly for the Gazette, claimed at Hellman’s funeral that they fought all the time. Not about literature or politics, but whether a Smithfield ham should be served hot or cold.

Styron called the rambling Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven, “the best in the world.” The well-stocked general-interest bookstore also features a section devoted to books by local authors, from self-published cookbooks and bird guides to major histories, memoirs, novels, narrative non-fiction, and is the community center for new and veteran writers who are both year-around residents and summer visitors.

Beyond the scandal and celebrities on Martha’s Vineyard is a powerful respect and dedication to art and literature. You can sense it around you – writers writing. Back in the lush green forests. Along the trails, dunes, and marshes. This is a special place – hard to get to, isolated and magical. The perfect spot to ruminate and enjoy the solitude, read a dozen books or best yet, find your muse and write one yourself.

Next literary destination: San Miguel de Allende, in the central highlands of Mexico. Check my calendar for dates in August when I’ll be heading there with Tom Robbins for a series of events to celebrate his work.

News update: A devastating fire on July 4th badly damaged the beloved Bunch of Grapes bookstore described in this post. The fire originated next door in a restaurant, Cafe Moxie, which burned to the ground. The townspeople, who had gathered for the traditional Independence Day street fair, watched in disbelief as firefighters battled the flames. Fortunately no one was injured in the blaze, and the bookstore’s owner has vowed to rebuild.

M ost agents and publishers recommend a brilliant and scintillating letter that pitches and pleads for the right to send a full proposal and sample of the manuscript itself, but frankly I don’t encourage it.

Break this rule!

The only thing writing a query letter demonstrates is how well you can write a query letter, and they’re so easy to just delete or toss without answering.

Send the full proposal

Even if it’s against conventional advice or rules, I recommend sending a full proposal and at least 20 pages of the book itself so the recipient can really understand your idea and see how well you can write. All it takes is an email attachment.

Most agents or editors will take a peek and if you can hook them at the get-go, they’ll stay for more. How many query letters actually get any response at all?

Confidence and aggression are good qualities in a writer

Send the whole thing, I say. What have you got to lose?

Next up: The book proposal: what publishers want

A developmental editor can help a writer find ways to add greater depth and stronger identity to characters in a story.

One approach combines two characters into one more complex and diverse individual, or instead, may split apart one character into two separate individuals, each representing a different aspect of the relationships in the story.

I worked on a novel recently with a young author who was writing about a single first person narrator with an older sibling. When tragedy in the form of a parent’s death struck the family, there were conflicting and oppositional responses from the two brothers, both somewhat glib and superficial. I recommended combining the two individuals, which gave the one remaining first-person narrator a broader range of options, behaviors, and feelings. That helped quite a bit in providing a single character the reader could find appealing, and easier to care about.

In the same novel, I recommended that one cloying but lovable girlfriend of the first person narrator be divided into two young women, one unfortunately annoying and ultimately rejected in favor of another who was more appealing in the long run. In this case, each half of the original was developed with more complexity and detail, so the choice between them was more nuanced and emotionally satisfying to the hero and, of course, the reader.

Two into one, or one into two. It’s a technique I’ve used in appropriate situations. You may want to try it yourself.

Writers I work with occasionally forget about dialogue entirely, summarizing the action in a stilted “told to” style, while others write quote after quote, in a voice that sounds all the same, often coincidentally like the author’s own.

I have a few tips for all such folks:

• Read out loud and listen carefully. Could you tell when one person was talking, then another? This is crucial for differentiating your characters.
• Listen to people around you to gather up and utilize the many unique accents and habits of speech we hear every day.
• Punctuate the dialogue with action. “He stood up painfully while she poured the tea without spilling a drop…There was an explosion just outside the window, shattering glass across the room…”
• Punctuate the dialogue with visual description. “She could just make out the blur of eucalyptus trees through the windshield as the car sped past…Six identical houses formed a barrier of hideous green between us…”
• Read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, or The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, or anything else by these two authors. They knew how to write great dialogue.

I was interviewed last week for yet another book about the early days of Rolling Stone Magazine.

This marks the latest of nearly a dozen long interviews over the years as a primary source for writers on the founding and initial development of what was then a startup with grandiose ambitions, including two major histories of the birth and near self-destruction of the magazine, four biographies of our most famous writer, Hunter S. Thompson, and another three sessions in my living room with film crews, lights, cameras, screens, and microphones for a rash of film documentaries after Hunter died.

This time the work-in-progress was the official, authorized biography of Rolling Stone’s founder, owner, and still-publisher, Jann Wenner.

As I spoke with the author, my old friend Paul Scanlon, the managing editor of Rolling Stone in the early seventies who went on to work for GQ Magazine and was now back writing this authorized version of events that happened forty years ago, I realized how difficult it was for him to get an accurate view of what really happened at those editorial full submersion parties around my swimming pool in Berkeley and the all night confrontations among us young staffers with huge egos and competitive hidden agendas about who would control what we put in the paper.

I knew that every other former employee Paul interviewed had a biased point of view, that some of the key players were either dead or refused to speak with Paul, and that none of us could honestly say that “this is how it was” without implying between the lines that “the others won’t be telling you the truth…just take it from me.”

“Keep tongue firmly in cheek when relying on living players with their own agendas”

One of Hunter’s early biographers, Peter Whitmere, used my files and quotes as a primary source, so these were featured prominently in his book, When The Going Gets Weird : The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson : A Very Unauthorized Biography . Another author, E. Jean Carroll, didn’t talk to me at all, so her version, Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson didn’t include my input about his creative struggles as a writer.

So I knew the importance of this interview with Paul, particularly since he was writing the “authorized” biography that would be controlled ultimately by Jann himself, with whom I had many contentious disagreements about who did or said what first and should get the credit or blame.

Such is the nature of writing a biography of any person or institution. What the readers will learn is mightily skewed by who gets access and the nature of their particular bias.

Take a look at two contemporary views of John Adams’ role in American history. No longer available for interviews, Adams’ monumental correspondence with his wife Abigail and with his former enemy, and later respected friend Thomas Jefferson, was preserved for more than two hundred years and provided certain biographers tremendous resources and access to his inner mind. That may be why David McCullough’s best-selling biography John Adams put Adams at the heroic center of our country’s revolutionary years. On the other hand, The American Sphinx , Joseph J. Ellis’ biography of Thomas Jefferson, was based on different letters and other primary papers, and therefore gives quite a different view of Adams’ role and relationships during the founding years of this country.

“History is written by the winners,” said Napoleon or was it Winston Churchill, we’re not sure. But we do know that Churchill won a Nobel Prize for Literature for his own six-volume history of World War II with himself in the central heroic role, while at the same time, Charles DeGaulle was writing his own version of the same war, and this time, what do you know, it was he in the central heroic role.

When we see a newspaper, magazine article or book written about something we’ve actually experienced, it’s obvious how inaccurate or distorted it can be. “Why can’t everyone see things our way,” we may ask. Well it’s tough for any writer, especially of an authorized biography, to sort through the players with obvious bias, not to mention figuring out what those in hiding might have said.

To the biographer or historical writer, I say use good basic journalistic standards and verify whatever new information emerges from an interview with at least one other primary source. Qualify all assertions if uncertain or ambivalent about their origins. And keep tongue firmly in cheek when relying on living players with their own agendas, including me.

As an acquiring editor, one of the first things I look for in an author’s proposal is the “platform”, that is, the writer’s reputation and public visibility – and the ability, willingness, and experience to promote themselves in the marketplace.

What we publishers all hope for when opening a proposal from a literary agent is not just a great idea for a book and a promising ability to write, but an aspiring author’s track record in book sales, appearances on radio and television, respect in the professional community for teaching, research, and scholarship, as well as financial success in the field and anything else that has put the author’s name in public and produced a long list of entries on Google.

The bigger the platform, the higher the book advance.

These days building a platform is crucial not only for selling a book, but in building a professional career as an academic, entrepreneur, scientist, public speaker, trainer, workshop leader, or corporate spokesperson.

One of the smartest and most successful at this is parenting expert Michele Borba, who has built a network of affiliations with the roster of companies whose logos appear at left. Michele has published six books with me, all still in print, that combined have sold more than 200,000 copies. All have sold continuously, with a long shelf and back-list life in the US and Canada.

Her books have also served as calling cards, drawing invitations to speak before parents and educators, and have attracted major corporations such as Johnson & Johnson and Learning Curve West who seek her wisdom in consulting on children’s products and issues.

Michele has become the premier parenting guru on the Today Show, appearing regularly on a broad variety of topics. She blogs at Dr. Michele Borba’s Parenting Secrets at NBC’s iVillage and is a contributor on many other websites.

The corporate logos pictured here indicate only a portion of Michele’s long list of credits — but remember that this platform has taken more than ten years to build. We spoke recently about her experience building an author platform, and she passed along these great suggestions.

Michele Borba’s Top Ten Tips for Building a Successful Author Platform

1. Hire your own publicist to help you get all those planks lined up. Before you sell your book or once you have a copy in print, either self-published or with a commercial publisher, hire a top level PR person to learn from. Then, next time you can do it yourself. It can be expensive but it’s worth it and you’ll acquire some essential techniques for the rest of your career. I started with the wonderful Dottie DeHart at DeHart & Company and the first thing she taught me was:

2. Make your own media kit that includes:

• A one-page press release that bullets your best hooks for the book’s content.
• Two 750-word articles that can be reprinted free of charge based on key elements of the book itself.
• Ten questions with answers included, that can be used as an interview in any print media or as a suggestion for a new interview.
• A jpeg of the book cover.
• A jpeg of your photo.
• A dvd “reel” of media clips. If you have major national media, great. But I didn’t at first, so Dottie started me out on some very small local cable media at first, but it was me on camera looking good, and you can do this too.

3. Focus on breaking news. Remember the media wants content that connects to other hot stories happening right NOW. They’re more interested in that connection for the viewers and readers, than in selling your book for you. So if you see something breaking in the national or print national news about, for example, obese kids being at risk for diabetes or heart disease (all true), get in touch with a producer, and suggest that you are an expert with a book either in the works or already published on this precise subject.

4. Create a great website. This can start small but always keep growing, changing, and evolving around what you’re doing, who you are, specific events on your schedule, photos of your books, new endorsements, press and video clips. Get a good designer to help set it up and be sure it’s always fresh and up to date. There’s nothing worse than a website that hasn’t been revised for weeks or months. Sure this can cost money, but think of it like graduate school: a worthwhile investment in your future career and financial security.

5. Get endorsements. No family or friends, please, unless they’re famous enough so everyone recognizes their name or have a very credible brand affiliation like an ivy league school or high position in a related institute or corporation.

6. Develop a speech. Make it related to national news, be sure it reflects your expertise and ties in with your book, and vary it in length and content depending on the size of the audience and duration of the event, from a 15 minute talk at the PTA to an all-day or weekend training with management and executives of an educational institution or business. Start small but be prepared to expand when you succeed and are in demand at a higher level.

7. Learn to blog. Don’t pitch or sell your book when you comment on someone else’s blog. Instead, just join the community, make a contribution, and oh by the way, mention something from your book on the subject under discussion.

8. Learn to make audio and videos. Pod casts and videos that can be posted on YouTube or sent around the internet are becoming one of the best ways to sell yourself and your books.

9. Use Amazon to the fullest. The online retailer provides authors with familiar ways to post a book with a product description and opportunity to order, and is introducing new ways to promote books, such as posting author videos and special gift offers for shoppers.

10. Never walk by a bookstore without going in and shaking hands with the staff. If they know you they may recommend your book. A personal contact, a friendly face, has been shown to increase local sales, store by store, chains or independent or specialty shops.

So choose what feels most comfortable and feasible from the list above and have some fun with it. You’ll usually never know exactly what works or doesn’t specifically, so it’s good to try as many approaches as possible.