A Dan Piraro cartoon in Parade showed a medium sitting across a table from a customer with a netbook computer in front of her, and she’s saying: “We don’t use a crystal ball anymore. We just Google you.”
An editor interested in buying your book will Google you to get a sense of your presence online. Instead of a crystal ball, they’ll use a computer-generated profit-and-loss statement, along with feedback from colleagues, to help justify buying your book.
What wisdom about writing can I offer that will help you convince editors to say yes to your book? One or a series of books could be written about the wisdom you can gain from doing a job or practicing an art or skill. Some examples:
Biking
- Riding uphill is harder, downhill more dangerous.
- You have to know your bike, yourself, and the territory.
- You have to expect the unexpected at any second.
Photography
- You have to be the right distance from your subject.
- You have to balance color, foreground and background, tension and harmony, and the elements in a composition to create unity.
- Knowing how to use your camera will help increase your creativity.
Driving a Taxi
- You have to look at what’s around you but also in the distance both for traffic and for passengers.
- You will have slow and busy periods.
- You will have good and bad luck; you hope that they will balance each other.
Writing
- Reading is the doorway to writing.
- The best reason to write is that you must.
- You have to capture readers’ interest immediately and keep it as long as it takes them to finish your book.
- If you have a problem with your writing, focus on something else, and your subconscious usually provides the solution.
- Your proposal or manuscript is finished only when the people you share it with can’t figure out how to help you improve it.
- You need mentors to supplement your learning about writing, agents, promotion, technology, and publishing.
- The models for your books and career will light the way until you’re ready to find your unique path.
- You have to maximize the value of your book before you seek and agent or publisher by test-marketing it, building your platform and communities of fans, and developing a promotion plan.
- Promotion is more challenging than writing.
- The writing you do about your writing is as important as the writing itself (Katharine Sands).
- Publishers and literary agents are eager to find new writers as new writers are to be discovered.
- Your passion for writing and sharing your work will see you through the challenges of being an author.
- You will meet those challenges more easily if you’re clear about your short- and long-term personal and professional goals.
- You will succeed if you persevere, and the harder it is to achieve success, the more satisfying it will be.
- And as I mentioned in the previous post, luck has a lot to do with a book’s success.
I found one of my favorite pieces of wisdom on a cloth bag that Workman Publishing gave away one year at BEA: “The more you garden, the more you grow.” You can grow by acquiring wisdom from any endeavor and you can apply it to writing. The more conscientious you are, the more you’ll learn. May you have all the luck you want, and may the wisdom above speed you on your way.
Michael Larsen is a literary agent and consultant to nonfiction writers. He and his partner Elizabeth Pomada are co-directors of the San Francisco Writers Conference and the San Francisco Writing for Change Conference.
