Oh Dear

Wendy Wolf, editorial director of nonfiction for Viking Penguin, once rejected a book proposal because when she met the author he wasn't wearing socks.
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PUBLISH YOUR BOOK

There are 70 people in this room. No surprise, as Rosita Boland just reminded me. Doesn't everyone think they have a book in them?

Book agent Tina Bennett, book editor Wendy Wolf and author and history prof Jane Kamensky are talking about their collaboration on publishing a single boook of Kamenksy's--the story of a large building that burned down in the early 1800s.

Kamensky just compared trade publishing, from an academic's point of view, to a man who is "in trade" in a Jane Austen novel.

When a colleague heard she was writing that kind of book, Kamensky said, she was told, "Oh, Jane, I don't envy you having to answer to The Market."

Jane Austen metaphors are proliferating here.

"This is like a marriage. The trust has to be tremendous. We're handling your money for you...we're handling your reputation," moderator Christine Larson just said, of the author/agent relationship.

Some tips from Tina Bennett:

-Don't use cute stationery with kittens on it. It goes in the trash.
-Respect people's time. Don't say, I'm going to New York, can we just have coffee and talk about some ideas? "I think it's incumbent on the writer to present some ideas in writing and not just toss ideas around."
-You have to be able to write a really good letter. One or two pages. Bennett doesn't believe in the two-line pitch.
-Be professional above all, You're a serious person, you know what you're doing, you have an idea that will be interesting beyond themselves and their family.
-Many people have bumped into stories that are deeply moving, that are authentically moving, but they won't make a good book proposal. That existential experience you had, that trauma....it ain't a book. The person who had cancer and reorganized their life, that's really important for you.
-Don't use an e-mail spam services. They get instantly deleted.
-Don't use the sensational formulaic material, opening with a sentence "so and so was bleeding on the couch."
-Use the personal approach--"I admired so and so books and noticed you were in the acknowledgments section," or, "I am modeling my book on such and such book you edited."



Kamensky said she started the project of getting her book published by doing a lot of publishing research and meeting with three agents, the last of whom was Bennett.

Tina Bennett--one of the New York literary agents--praised Kamensky's professionalism and smarts, but emphasized that a lot of getting on an agent's list is about personal compatibility. She and Kamensky just clicked. Kamensky said that Bennett was the right agent because she wed intellectual street cred with market strategy.

Once she had found an agent, Kamensky said that Bennett advised her that she couldn't write a book proposal that was just, here's my name and here's my idea, like a former National Book Award winner she knew had done.

"It behooved me as a beginning trad writer to write a proposal that was long enough" that "you could see the voice of the author, the logic and momentum of the story, and the texture of evidence that the story was based upon," Kamensky said.

The book proposal "didn't need to be a 100 pages," but it ended up being 45.

The next step was to try to sell the book to editor Wendy Wolf, who praised Bennett's approach.

The three qualities any agent should have: "Intimdating, intelligent and understanding," Wolf said.

It's important to remember that a book must be sold multiple times: from the author to the agent, from the agent to the editor...from the editor to the editorial board, from the editorial board to the sales department, from the sales department to the bookseller, from the bookseller to the consumer.

Again, Wolf emphasized the personal relationship between author and editor. "I don't care where you live," she said, "get your butt on a plane to New York and meet your editor."

An editor will want to know a lot of things--not only about your book, but about you.

"I want to know everyone you've known in your own life...How are we going to get your book reviewed? How are we going to get you on the radio?" How, even, are we going to get your book picked up by your mother's book club? she said.

"I am the huckster in the marketplace," Wolf said. " You have to look at your book as a commodity as much as a bundle of ideas."

"Who is your audience? The answer is not: the readers of the New Yorker. It can't stop there."

A book editor needs to know all those things before signing on, Wolf said.

MORE TIPS.

Wendy Wolf
-I EXPECT people to know something about me. DO YOUR HOMEWORK, it's not hard. Any first line to Tina or me, either "Jane Kamensky told me to write you," or "I admired X."
-She once turned a book down because the author who approached her was NOT WEARING SOCKS and she found that disrespectful.
-An author FORGOT to tell her new agent that she had had an agent before, and she asked Wolf: what do I do? Wolf responded; GROVEL. GROVEL and APOLOGIZE and maybe you can repair the damage.





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Dennis Palumbo on Psychotherapy for Writers

Here, far too early in the morning, Dennis Palumbo is bringing a gentle sense of humor and a touch of Goethe to one big question hovering over the conference.

As a participant asked him, how do you go from being a newspaper reporter where you’re told what to do, to a freelance reporter where you have to manage yourself and basically be an entrepreneur?

“This is a huge change for people psychologically,” Palumbo said.

“When you’re an employee it’s almost like being a child in the family,” he said, adding, “Whether or not you do it well is kind of like what grade you will get.”



Having a boss is a psychological boost, Palumbo said. It means you have someone who believes that the work you do is good—and good enough to pay for. You also have someone backing up the need for your story.

“The thing that’s so scary about being an entrepreneur, being your own advocate in the career marketplace” is you have bring your own sense of entitlement to your work, Palumbo said.

The great German poet Goethe described writers as those who must believe that the world cannot survive without what they write, Palumbo said.

“Most of us don’t feel that way, but …you have to feel that way,” Palumbo said.

“As a writer, you are taking focus, and for a lot of people, that’s very difficult,” he said. “That’s why a lot of writers are comfortable when they’re working in a staff position. They have roles, they have positions, and they’re clearly defined.”




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One Liners

"Treat your editor, if nothing else, as a canary in a coal mine."

-New Yorker Editor Amy Davidson


Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
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Jennifer Crandall's onBeing: the next Talk Stories?

For a while now, I've been wondering: why isn't there a video equivalent of the New Yorker's legendary Talk Stories? Short. Witty. Sharp. An original voice coyly avoiding the first person. You can buy whole volumes of them by Lillian Ross or Jamaica Kincaid.

Talk Stories are a distinctive brand. I thought shortform narrative video should have an equivalent: three minutes, top quality, and smart.

Enter WaPo's Jennifer Crandall.




It took her a while to find her journalistic place, she told a session audience today. Crandall likes to meet people. She'll chat up seven-year-olds at parties. She visits a bike shop and runs into a refugee from Hurricane Katrina. "Week by week," she says, she wants to "chart the human landscape."

What Crandall started to do was invite some of the people she meets to an all-white studio. She turns on a camera and has a two-hour conversation with them. Then she distills that two hours into a three-minute video clip. One ordinary person, in crystal-clear video, talking against a white background. The seven-year-old kid. A guy who admits he's trying not to be a racist even though he was raised that way. A cute former sorority girl who loves her job harvesting tissue from dead bodies. (I won't give away her many punch lines: look in the archive for Jacquelyn Einsel.)

Crandall's editing is crisp and punchy. She edits out all of the questions she asks: what was a conversation becomes a monologue, but one that's clearly been shaped by Crandall's point of view. That raised some journalistic hackles at an earlier session: was it fair, another reporter asked Crandall, to present her subjects with all of the back-and--forth context removed? Wasn't that misleading? Crandall replied that it was clear to the viewer that the clips had been heavily edited and mixed around, so the viewers wouldn't be misled.

Crandall's project, onBeing, is obviously very different from the New Yorker's Talk Stories. It may be more closely akin to another narrative all-star, Ira Glass' This American Life. But Crandall's onBeing pieces are short and smart and they have that distinctive feeling of something that's already a classic. They're charming and funny, and people at the sessions today seemed to respond to them very intuitively.

I'm surprised I didn't hear about onBeing before this weekend's conference. It seems like something that should be spread around.

Yeah, I'll link to onBeing a fourth time. Just try one.


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Audio Tip: Get Your Readers Lost

You know that TV show Lost? It has a crazy plot. The narrative is all over the place. Nobody knows what's going on. And that's exactly why people love it.

Amy O'Leary's big point for writing audio: forget the nut graf.

Our brains are primed to decode complicated narrative, she says. People like having that kind of work to do. Just look at Lost.

You can backfill later. Throw out your best quote, O'Leary says, and win your listeners in the first 15 seconds.

The point of an audio piece is to convey character and emotion, O'Leary says. Those are its strengths. Text is better for conveying the nitty-gritty of the issue: the facts, the analysis, the fine points. Audio's not so hot in this area. You want the full story, you need print. But audio can get people to care about the story--it provides the atmospherics.
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Q&A with Melissa Tavaras

Callie Crossley and I sat down with conference attendee Melissa Tavaras. Melissa works in Miami at NBC Telemundo as an assignment desk editor and field producer. She is also a writer for the South Florida New Service and a student at Florida International University.

Working in both print and television, she is becoming adept at multi-platforming

“Unfortunately, since people are downsizing there is room for people like me,” said Melissa, who focuses on international affairs and politics. “I am building work that I want to do. I consider the work that I do now, as really my work.”

Ernie: How are you enjoying the conference?
Melissa: It is fantastic. I have met so many people. I’ve learned things about honing my skills. Not only writing, but visual as well.

Ernie: Why did you come?
Melissa: I am a young journalist and I want to meet as many people as possible. It is a networking tool.

Ernie: What have you enjoyed the most?
Melissa: The one on documentaries was good, because I am a producer. Visually, I relate to it.

Ernie: Do you want to do documentaries?
Melissa: I would like to, I have an idea.

Ernie: What is it about?
Melissa: I am not telling you!

Ernie: What are you going to implement immediately when you get back to work?
Melissa: When I speak to people I tend to focus so much on them that I leave out details, like background and smells. So I am going to start implementing all of my senses. I am going to start doing that immediately.
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