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( 3 / 491 )The Agenting Process Explained – Part 4 - Matchmaking
After the proposal has been edited and is ready for submission, agents begin what many consider the most important part of their work: coming up with a list of editors who could be interesting in buying the book. Matching editors and publishing houses with projects is an art. Many considerations must be factored in, such as:
· What kinds of books is a house buying?
· What have they bought in the past or do they want in the future?
· What’s on their list and what gaps do they have to fill?
· In what directions are they moving and what are their platform demands?
“When I get something that piques my interest, I think: What editors do I know that would feel as excited as I do about this project?” agent June Clark relates. “If a half dozen or so people come to mind, then I feel secure that it’s a project I want to take on, because the job of an agent is to know who’s buying what at publishing houses—it’s being a matchmaker.”
Most agents keep detailed records on everyone they’ve worked with in publishing. Some build databases that contain editors’ and publishers’ names, contact information, what they’ve bought and worked on, as well as their likes, dislikes, and publishing history. Other agents simply rely on their memories, knowledge, and experiences with editors and the industry.
Agents keep current by regularly reading industry publications like Publishers Lunch, Publishers Weekly and some of the many blogs that are now written on writing and publishing. Publishers Lunch reports recent book sales and states which editors and houses bought each book. Agents keep in contact by frequently meeting with editors and publishing people, usually over lunch. Agents also attend conferences and events with other agents, editors and publishing professionals. In New York, AAR, the agents’ association, hosts monthly programs, including one called Meet the Publisher. At these events, representatives from publishing companies bring some of their editors to tell the group about developments at their houses. AAR also puts on programs on subjects of interest to agents, such as copyright, contracts, and recent industry developments.
An excerpt from the National Bestseller Author 101: Bestelling Secrets from Top Agents by Rick Frishman and Robyn Freedman Spizman with Mark Steisel
www.author101.comhttp://www.author101.com
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( 2.9 / 78 )PUBLISHING TERMS YOU SHOULD KNOW -
(An excerpt from "Author 101: Bestselling Nonfiction" by Rick Frishman and Robyn Freedman Spizman)
Publishing industry personnel tend to speak in shorthand that they assume everyone understands, which is not always the case. When they talk about books and publishing, they can completely lose you. For example, publishing people constantly refer to "trade books", which can leave industry outsiders scratching their heads.
Unless you ask for clarification, important information about your proposal or book deal can sail completely over your head. Familiarize yourself with the following lingo so when you chat with agents or publishing personnel, you can understand what they're saying and be sure that you're both on the same page.
Common Publishing Terms:
Acquisition Editor
- An editor at a publishing company who has the responsibility to obtain and screen manuscripts that the house may wish to publish.
American Booksellers Association (ABA)
- The major industry association for U.S. booksellers. Its annual trade show, BookExpo, is where people in the industry display and learn about new publications and producers.
Boilerplate
- Standard contractual clauses or language. Generally, they are subject to negotiation and change.
Book Clubs
- Groups that sell and send designated books to their members at regular intervals and at reduced prices.
Copyediting
- Review of manuscripts for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax and meaning. Copyediting is a part of the publishing process that is usually done by professional editors at the publisher's expense.
Evaluation Fees
- The charges made by agents to read and critique writers' book proposals, manuscripts and other materials.
First Serialization
- The publication of selected portions of a book in periodicals prior to the book's publication.
Genre
- The general classification of a book such as business, parenting, writing, etc. The genre is usually indicated at the top of the back cover.
Hardcover
- Books bound in a stiff, protective cover that usually resists bending.
ISBN
- The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a ten-digit number that identifies each title and publisher. It's use for ordering and inventory purposes.
Jacket
- The removable covering placed on most hardbound books that contains promotional material on the book. Also called the dust jacket.
Lead Sentence/Paragraph
- The first sentence or paragraph in a piece of writing.
Overview
- The opening section of a book proposal that describes the book and its market. Also called the introduction, summary, synopsis and vision.
Packagers
- Those who bring the concept for book projects to publishers and then supervise the creation of the products that the publishers release. They frequently work with writers, designers and others to bring their projects together.
Returns
- Books that haven't sold and are returned to the publisher. It's standard practice in the book-publishing industry to allow retailers and wholesalers to return books that haven't sold.
Self-Published
- The term for a book that an author publishes him- or herself and not through a traditional publishing company. Typically, the authors handle, or hire other s to handle, all writing, editing, design, printing and distribution themselves.
Trade Books
- Books sold through traditional channels to bookstores and book clubs.
Vanity Publishing
- The process in which an author pays a company to publish his or her manuscript. Some vanity publishers also provide editing, design and distribution services.
http://www.amazon.com/Author-101-Bestse ... amp;sr=8-5
or go to http://www.author101.com to get all 4 books! and get your "Million Dollar Rolodex"
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( 2.9 / 82 )The Agenting Process Explained – Part 4 - Proposals
If a query piques an agent’s interest, he or she will usually ask the writer to submit a written proposal. They may also contact the writer to ask questions and find out more about the project, or even ask for the entire manuscript, if it’s already written. Frequently, the requirements for proposal submissions are posted on agents’ Web sites. Some have templates or provide their clients with examples that they want. Most just give general guidelines. If the agent’s site doesn’t provide sufficient information, you can easily find what you need in a number of books including: Author 101: Bestselling Book Proposals (Adams Media, 2005), How to Write a Book Proposal, by Michael Larsen (Writer’s Digest Books, 2004) and The Art of the Book Proposal: From Focused Idea to Finished Proposal, by Eric Maisel, Ph.D. (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004).
Agents tell us that they seldom receive proposals that don’t need help. But agents differ sharply regarding the help they provide. Some agents are editorially intensive; they do hands-on editing and work closely with writers to reshape their proposals until they get them just right. These agents believe that the quality of the proposal reflects upon them, so they work hard to submit only the best proposals to publishers. Other agents will make minor edits to a proposal or suggest structural changes that writers should make. However, they won’t do extensive editing or rewriting. If a proposal requires more than minor work, the most they will do is tell the writer what it needs.
Frequently, writers can’t make the necessary changes. Even the best writers need editors because it’s so difficult for them to objectively analyze their own work. So they need professional writers or editors to fix their proposals. In these situations, some agents will give writers names or recommendations to writing professionals, while others will not. In fact, many agents will not edit, rewrite, critique, or even tell writers why they rejected their proposals. A number of the agents we interviewed had editorial and publishing backgrounds and regretted that the demands on their time made it impossible for them to be more editorially involved.
An excerpt from the National Bestseller Author 101: Bestelling Secrets from Top Agents by Rick Frishman and Robyn Freedman Spizman with Mark Steisel
www.author101.com
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( 3 / 48 )"A Few Sales Tricks Can Launch a Book To Top of Online Lists"
The Wall Street Journal
THE NUMBERS GUY
By CARL BIALIK
March 23, 2007; Page B1
For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author.
New York public-relations firm Ruder Finn says it can propel unknown titles to the top of rankings on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble with a mass email called the Best-Seller Blast. Popular authors such as Mark Victor Hansen of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series recommend your book in messages to fans, and offer a deal: Buy the book today and you'll get downloadable "bonuses" supposedly valued at thousands of dollars -- such as recordings of motivational speeches and contact information for important people. Orchestrating even 1,000 book purchases in a single day can drive a title from obscurity to the top of the charts.
Rick Frishman, who oversees the campaigns for Ruder Finn's Planned Television Arts, also is a client. His 2004 book "Networking Magic" went from a sales rank of 896,000 on barnesandnoble.com the morning it was published to No. 1 at 4 p.m. He has a poster in his office showing the sales chart he briefly topped. "I'm a nobody, but I was somebody for a day," he says.
A decade after they were introduced, online book-sales rankings remain an object of obsession for authors. Because they're unrestrained by shelf space, the Web stores give millions of books a ranking. These are updated hourly and displayed on the book's sales page and on best-seller lists. This "democratic" potential is celebrated by compulsive watchers of the numbers. Cindy Ratzlaff, vice president of brand marketing for Rodale Books, has noticed that Amazon seems to refresh its numbers 35 minutes after every hour and she makes it a point to check the page soon after, every hour during the workday. "It's really pathetic and extremely addictive -- and we all do it," she says.
But if this is the democracy of bookselling, vote buying is an option. Ruder Finn's best-seller program is one of several online aimed at new authors; entrepreneurial sorts do it themselves. Suzanne Falter-Barns sent me the eight-page journal of her own personal Amazon Day, as she calls the time an email campaign sent her book to No. 8 on the list. ("Life is good, I think, as I watch the sun rise over Lake Champlain," she wrote of learning she was an online best-seller.)
Amazon says little about how it calculates its rankings, though scholars and publishers have attempted to reverse-engineer the system to determine how a sales ranking translates into actual sales. One major quirk: Used and new book sales are counted equally. So an author anxious about his sales ranking could put a few dozen of his books for sale for a penny apiece and ask a friend to buy them all.
This all adds up to numbers that are ubiquitous, closely watched -- and of dubious value. The targeted marketing campaigns contribute volatility to sales-ranking numbers that are inherently unstable. Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal, an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked 10,000 to as low as 50,000.
On Charteo.us, a free Web site that tracks the ebb and flow of Amazon rankings daily, dozens of the 1,500 books currently tracked rise or fall by 75% or more each day. Online sales can be throttled quickly by national media mentions. Author appearances on "Oprah," "Larry King Live" and "60 Minutes" accounted for some of the most dramatic increases measured by Charteo.us in the past couple of months, according to the publishers.
"We think of Amazon as the instant-gratification indicator for us," says Ms. Ratzlaff. Publishers also say they look to Amazon rankings as an indicator of future sales potential for authors -- along with rankings from Nielsen BookScan, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others that cut across retailers. Publishers can chart books' rankings on sites such as Charteo.us and TitleZ. The Planning Shop, a publisher that developed TitleZ to track its own books, plans to start charging for the service later this year.
Hence, sales pitches such as those from Mr. Frishman to new authors eager to become best-sellers, if only for an hour and only on a single site. "Everyone wants to call themselves a best-seller if they can," he says, even if it means doing so by luring would-be buyers with bonuses.
"It's a made-up number," Mr. Frishman concedes of the bonus value. There's little incentive for Amazon and Barnes & Noble to discourage these campaigns, because they drive sales. (Representatives for both sites declined to comment on how they calculate their numbers, and how others try to juice them.)
Critics of such programs say they muck up Amazon's recommendation system -- because some people buy the promoted books just for the bonuses, not for reasons of taste -- and encourage new authors to obsess over volatile numbers and pay for marketing tools to boost them.
Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com5
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