It's common wisdom, supposedly, that you should always look out for yourself—always watch your back, or always put yourself first, because no one else will do that for you.

This is the kind of wisdom I like to turn on its head; in fact, authors who always put themselves first can sabotage their efforts. Thus:


You are not No. 1.
The reader—your audience—is No. 1.

If you write a book primarily for fame, fortune, or glory (or even for art's sake, I must admit), you run the risk of forgetting the reader or audience who will make your book successful in the first place.  Here are ways I can tell the orientation of an author:

(a) Unpublished authors
A query letter or submission that focuses on the author at the expense of audience/market is a red flag. Look at your own query or submission materials: Do they focus on the story of why you wrote the book, or how you came to write the book, or how hard you've worked on it, or how much your family loves it? Time to revise.

(b) Published authors
Authors who focus too much on themselves often ask their editor or agent, "What have you done for me lately? What are you doing or spending on my book's behalf?" Successful authors, rather than waiting for others to serve them (and that might be a loooong wait!), are growing their community, and actively serving readers.

In the most general terms: Write for that ideal reader and consider how your book can benefit them—not how your book will benefit you.

In life philosophy terms, I think the following quote sums it up: "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." (Winston Churchill)
 
Related posts:
How to Avoid Sabotaging Your Writing Career (#1)

When Borders launched a new online store, I found their "Magic Shelf" feature (on the home page) annoying and silly. But I figured, hey, they're trying to innovate, and I should give it a chance and not have a knee-jerk reaction to change.

Then I read this manifesto on what online bookstore experiences could and ought to be like! (Thanks to a reference in ShelfAwareness this morning.)

It's the most brilliant thing I've read in a long time about online book shopping. A must-read. And now I don't feel guilty about saying Borders' new online store hasn't brought anything useful to the book-buying experience.

Whenever I give a workshop at a writers conference, I always leave time for questions at the end. At Mad Anthony, during my session on how to avoid sabotaging your writing career, a writer stood up during the Q&A and said that he didn't have a question but an observation: All of my key points were in fact lessons that apply to all occupations (or even all facets of life), not necessarily publishing itself.

How observant he was! And he found me out! At the end of the day, I'm delivering a fairly simplistic philosophy packaged as writing instruction. This week, I'll be discussing the various way writers sabotage their careers, and I think you'll see the broader lesson underlying each one.

SABOTAGE #1: ATTEMPTING TO GET PUBLISHED TOO SOON
There are two primary ways in which this happens:

• Submitting less than your best.
• Submitting your work without knowing the market (publisher, agent, and/or audience).

Submitting less than your best work is by far THE NO. 1 REASON that writers fail in their fiction submission attempts. With so many people trying their hand at novel writing these days, competition is fierce, and agents/editors can be choosy. Are you submitting your absolute best work? You aren’t doing yourself any favors by circulating work that’s only halfway there. Have patience and conscientiousness to submit your best.

Submitting your work to the wrong market (or not understanding your audience) is the No. 1 reason nonfiction work gets rejected. More than 90 percent of the people who query/pitch me do not convey a good understanding of who would buy their work, much less an understanding of the audience that my particular company serves! I want to sign the authors who understand the market better than I do—and why shouldn't I want that? All editors want authors who bring value to their line, rather than trying to bring authors up to speed on what the market needs.

Know if there’s an audience/market for your work and what it looks like.
Then exhaustively research the companies/agents you submit to.

This same rule applies to published writers—they are not an exception!

The greater life lesson here? Always put forth your best work, and always understand and appeal to the needs of others if you want to partner with them.

Many years ago, I ran across this passage in a now defunct blog (BookAngst):

… In my experience, unwanted-by-the-marketing-department books are, in fact, books that the editor himself was either insufficiently passionate about, or for which the editor failed, finally, to demonstrate—above all, to himself—that he had a vision for how to publish it effectively.

(If you'd like to read the full post, it's still archived here.)

There are few publishing-insider sentiments I agree with more than this—because it's proven absolutely true in my experience.

If I'm passionate about a project, everyone hears it, sees it, knows it—and everyone gets on board, even if doubts linger in the background. Passion is infectious. (Of course, if nobody trusted my judgment, that passion would cease to make a difference, but let's assume editors keep their jobs because their judgment continues to be trusted.)

I am guilty (sadly) of telling quite a few authors, as well as agents, that a project did not survive a pub board presentation due to lack of sales/marketing enthusiasm. While I'm not lying, I'm also not conveying the full truth: That if I were 100% sold on the project myself, I would pull all kinds of strings to make it happen. I've done it on rare occasions (sometimes to wild success, sometimes to wild failure), but I only do it when I have that passion or vision.

So now you know the truth. What if you're given this reason for rejection? What can you do about it?

1. Do YOU the author have a vision for how to publish the book effectively? Have you conveyed this vision convincingly? If you have, can the editor explain the weaknesses in it?
   
2. Is your concept truly compelling, something worth an editor getting passionate about? Remember, editors put their reputations on the line when acquiring your project. If it doesn't sell down the road, that's a mark against their judgment.
   

Writers have a difficult road ahead if they're unable to quickly explain or convey passion for a book or book idea (or if they don't have an agent who can do so on their behalf). To be convincing, you need a certain awareness, the most valuable awareness, perhaps: what makes your work exciting and attractive to people, whether readers, editors, agents.

With this post, I'm launching a series of musings on what I'd change about the book publishing industry if given a magic wand. The first thing?

No Roadblocks to Publishing in New Categories

This one is somewhat difficult to explain, but important to understand when it comes to a publisher's ability to innovate or try new things. First, it requires an overview of how books are sold to chain bookstores.

How Publishers Sell Books to Chain Bookstores

1. A publisher's sales staff (or its distributor) calls directly on buyers for Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc. These meetings happen regularly throughout the year.
2. Chain bookstore buyers are divided into categories. For example, there is one buyer for fiction at Barnes & Noble, Sessalee Hensley. She decides how many copies Barnes & Noble will buy of any particular fiction title. (To understand this fully, I highly recommend reading "This Buyer of Fiction Has Real Clout" in the Wall Street Journal.)
3. Publishers' salespeople meet with one buyer at a time (that is, salespeople don't have an audience with all the buyers at once).
4. To meet with a buyer, a publisher needs to be releasing a certain number of titles each season to merit the sit-down. This number is around 4-6 titles.
5. If this threshold is not met, then the publisher is forced to do a "drop off," where sales materials are dropped off in the buyer's mailbox. As you might imagine, this is a terrible way to sell a book; it often results in very low buys or passes (when a store decides not to stock a book at all). The situation becomes even more challenging when a publisher does not have an established relationship with a particular buyer or does not have a reputation in the category.

I hope you see where this is going.

If an editor wants to acquire a fabulous book in a category that the publisher isn't yet known for (or doesn't have a buyer relationship for), then the project has almost no chance of getting off the ground. The sales team is not interested in what becomes, in many cases, mission impossible.

The editor has two choices:

1. Build a new program around a category that has 4-6 titles per season associated with it.
   
2. Stick to the established categories.

Even if salespeople said "yes" to off-category projects, and took on the challenge, it wouldn't necessarily be doing the editor (or author) a favor. It could ultimately lead to an orphaned book that has poor placement in stores and little marketing/promotion support from the publisher.

This is a problem somewhat peculiar to my publishing house (F+W), since we're a special-interest company that doesn't really publish books for a general audience (unless you count our Adams division, but don't ask me to explain why some divisions of F+W can publish in any category and others can't). At large New York houses, they publish in nearly every category in the bookstore, so it becomes a non-issue.

In Spring 2009 (more than a year away!), Writer's Digest Books will release a new writing exercise book called Take Ten by Bonnie Neubauer. Because of the intensive design process for this book, our creative team has already started on it. Below are two favorite exercises from our designers Terri (who did the carrier pigeons) and Claudean (who did the robot family tree).

If you like these kinds of creative writing prompts, be sure to check out Bonnie's first book for us, The Write-Brain Workbook.