Tell me some
common problems that you see in the work of beginning writers.
ZUCKERBROT: In a
lot of cases, the story just sort of wanders off. You can say, "Well, there's
great dialogue. There's great this or that." But if there's no real story
anchoring it, who really cares, at the end of the day? You can have great
characters, you can have interesting ideas, but there needs to be some
narrative momentum, some narrative thrust.
LAZAR: I would say to start the story where the story starts. So
often, the story doesn't actually start until page five. Sometimes it doesn't
start until page fifty, but page five can be just as bad. As a reader, you just
don't get that far.
KLEINMAN: The big problem I see is that people don't spend enough
time with their books before they send them to agents. People are way too
focused on getting published and not focused enough on really working on their
craft.
BARER: You should revise it, and then you should put it away,
and then you should revise it again. If you're going to come back to me in
three months and say, "I have a better version that you should look at," then
you should not have sent it to me in the first place. It's amazing how many
people do that.
KLEINMAN: Or they say, "I knew there was something wrong and I was
hoping you wouldn't notice."
ZUCKERBROT: I get
those queries that say, "I just finished my novel...." And I think, "Well, now
you need to write it three more times."
BARER: Keep
working on it for another year. Show it to everybody but me.
Talk to me about your ideal client.
BARER: I think an ideal client is somebody who is obviously an
incredibly gifted writer who also understands that, these days, being a writer
is more than just writing a book. A writer who is willing to participate in the
publication. Brainstorming. Working with their publicist. Working with their
marketing department. Getting themselves out there. Using their connections.
It's hard because I think a lot of writers happen to be introverts who are shy
and kind of just want to be left alone to sit at their desks in solitude. I
think it's somewhat unfair that the business has changed so much and that we
now rely on them. But we do. And, truthfully, the writers who are the most
successful sometimes are the ones who are really willing to be a part of the
business aspect of it.
ZUCKERBROT: It's a business.
KLEINMAN: I
would go a step further, or several steps further. I think it's not just the
author who's really well connected—it's the author who's so well connected
that he's sleeping with a producer at ABC News or something.
ZUCKERBROT: You
have to get out there. Now is not the time to sit at home and catch up on Sopranos
reruns. If you have a high school reunion or anything where you can spread the
word about your book, get out there.
BARER: If you've written a book,
you should want people to buy it.
ZUCKERBROT: From reading Publishers
Weekly and Mediabistro and all the
newsletters we get, it seems to me that people are still looking for the magic
bullet. It's not Twittering. It's not videos for books. It's not whatever the
latest trend is. So a lot of that falls on the shoulders of the author.
KLEINMAN: I want
somebody who's well connected and whose subject matter appeals to a specific
audience.
BARER: And you
have to think about what that audience is and then say to yourself, "Okay, I've
written a memoir about my mentally ill son. Now I'm going to write an op-ed
piece about what happens when you're poor and a single mother and the state
fails you, and then I'm going to write a Modern Love column about how I met my
husband and how I should have seen the signs that he was also mentally ill but
I missed it and then I realized it when my son became mentally ill...."
LAZAR: This is a
real client?
BARER: Yeah!
KLEINMAN: This
is her life she's telling you about. Her
life.
BARER: My life. But yeah, this is a client, and she's doing all of
those things. She's saying, "I want to do outreach to the mental health community."
KLEINMAN: But
that's a memoir. The issue is novels.
BARER: But even
novels. Look at The Heretic's Daughter.
The author was like, "I'm going to reach out to genealogical websites. This is
a story about my ancestor and I'm going to reach out to all these places." And
her publicist and online people were amazing at helping her.
LAZAR: See,
that's the thing about these kinds of books. As much as an author can do,
you've also got to have Little, Brown paying a million dollars for the book and
having everybody focused on it.
BARER: Yes. That
is absolutely true.
LAZAR: An author
who really hustles can sell maybe five thousand copies on their own. But you
don't have a best-seller that everybody's talking about without having a
publisher who's really throwing down. And they start throwing down by paying
for it. Look at a lot of the books that work in a really big way.
BARER: You need
the in-house support. Whether they paid five thousand dollars or five hundred
thousand dollars, you need the whole company behind it.
ZUCKERBROT: It
starts with the editor.
BARER: It starts
with the editor. You need to have an editor who has passion, you need to have a
publisher who's behind the editor, you need to have a sales force that loves
the book, and you need a publicist who really decides to put their reputation
on the line for the book. Without that entire team support, it's incredibly
hard.
LAZAR: Can I
clarify something? I'm not saying a book needs a million dollars. When I say a million dollars, I'm pulling a number
out of the air, even though it's not so out of the ordinary these days. I've
never sold a book for a million dollars. [Author's Note: This
conversation took place two weeks before Lazar sold Anne Fortier's novel Juliet to Ballantine for seven figures.] But you hear about these books—Jeff—that sell for
a million dollars. [Whooping. Laughter.] And that's how you focus people. Unless you're an Algonquin and
you're smaller and more nimble and you can get the independent booksellers
behind a book. Did anybody read that long article about what they did for Water
for Elephants? They didn't pay a lot of
money for that book—actually, for them they paid a lot of money—but they made
a concerted effort that a larger house usually wouldn't make unless they paid
five hundred or a million.
BARER: It's not
so much the money, it's whether or not the house decides, "We are really
putting all our energy behind this book. When we go out to lunch with [New York
Times book critic] Dwight Garner or People magazine, we are going to talk about this book."
But that
usually only happens for a few people a season at a house.
LAZAR: Exactly.
It's a lottery.
So what are
the other people supposed to do?
LAZAR: They've
got to hustle.
Give me
specifics. Tell me what they're supposed to do.
BARER: In those
situations, I end up on the phone with that author brainstorming our asses off.
Using every connection I have. Calling the editor and asking who they know, who
their friends are. Calling the publicist and saying, "Please, we've got to come
up with something."
ZUCKERBROT: You
can do a bigmouth mailing on your own.
BARER: You send
an e-mail to every friend and family member in your address book and say, "Help
this book out."
KLEINMAN: At
Folio we have a marketing director, and this is what she does for a living. But
even then, there are certain titles for which there's nothing she can do.
There's just nowhere to get a toehold. As opposed to books where you can say,
"Okay. We have a clearly designated market for this novel, and we can clearly
go after x."
LAZAR: Is there
a book that she did that especially well for?
KLEINMAN: Yes.
She worked on this Civil War novel I sold, Widow of the South, when it came out in paperback. She went and got a
mailing list of five thousand Civil War groups and we sent them postcards and
e-mails. Who knew there were five thousand Civil War groups? The point is, if
you can figure out who the market is, you can go after them in a systematic way.
ZUCKERBROT: But
sometimes publishers do that.
KLEINMAN:
Publishers don't do that. Publishers
never do that.
ZUCKERBROT:
Okay, maybe not five thousand.
KLEINMAN:
They're way too busy. They're going to pay for the co-op and everything else,
but they're not going to do specific, grassroots marketing. They just can't.
But the main point is that you've got to get a grasp on the audience for a
book.
BARER: But that
can be hard for literary fiction. Sometimes you have a literary novel that
doesn't have a specific audience.
ZUCKERBROT:
That's where the independent bookstores are still so valuable, even though
there aren't as many.
BARER: But
here's the thing. I am the biggest lover of independents ever. I worked in an independent bookstore. Toby and the people at
my local independent bookstore, Three Lives, hand-sold Joshua Ferris's novel
like nobody's business. But at the end of the day, there's a limit to the
amount of stock that they are physically able to move. I think the ABA and
IndieBound are amazing, and they're looking for ways to build their presence
and be a powerful force, but I think it's still in development. They aren't
always able to move the same number of copies as a B&N Recommends pick.
Unfortunately. I think they should. I think more people should be giving them
business. Can I get up on a little bit of a pedestal for a minute? This is
something I say at every writers conference I attend. If you're a writer and
you want to be published, go out and buy a hardcover debut novel and
short-story collection tomorrow. And next month, do it again. Buy one every
freaking month. Because if you want to be published and you want people to buy
your books, and you are not out there supporting fiction and debut authors, you
are the biggest hypocrite in the world and I don't know who you think you are.
I mean, come on, people!
ZUCKERBROT: But
when you're talking about literary fiction—books that can't be boiled down to
a sentence, and where you can't target a specific group—how do books like that
find their audience? You're saying it's not independent bookstores anymore. Do
you think reviews still play a part?
BARER: I think
it's word-of-mouth. I think word-of-mouth does more than anything else.
ZUCKERBROT: But
where is that word-of-mouth happening now? The Internet?
BARER:
Everywhere. It has to be one of those books where everybody you know is talking
about it, you see it everywhere you go, it's being reviewed on every Web site.
ZUCKERBROT:
Exactly. And the publishers are asking, "How are we supposed to get that buzz
going when there's so much noise and everyone is buzzing?"
KLEINMAN: You
know what the answer is? The answer is the editor. I'm convinced that if you
have a choice between an editor who is a great editor—who really understands
fiction, how it works, how to shape it—versus an editor who is a cheerleader,
I will always, from now on and forever afterward, take the cheerleader. For a
long time I kept thinking, "It's so important to have an editor who can shape
the book." I was such a moron.
But let's
talk about what your authors are doing that's working. What are your authors
teaching you about selling books today?
ZUCKERBROT: I
have a client who everybody really likes. She's smart. She's thoughtful. She's
genuinely nice. Across the board, wherever she goes, everyone just wants to
support her. That's a huge part of it. You've got to be on your best behavior,
even if you're in a crappy mood. Always write thank-you notes. Help other
writers. I have another client who's like that too. So aside from being smart
and writing something really terrific, I think you have to have people rooting
for you.
BARER: I'm going
to say something that I think will be really unpopular. It always surprises me
when seemingly smart writers—I can't believe I'm saying this, it's probably
because I'm drunk—who are obviously really talented choose the worst subject
matter to write about. I want to say, "Look around you." I respect and
understand that some writers don't like to look at other books while they're
working on something. But think about who wants to read about this character.
If you have spent four hundred pages writing about a deeply unsympathetic
person, or an event that's already been written about ten times, or...I mean, the
unlikable character thing is really hard for me to understand. If I don't like
a character, why would I want to spend four hundred pages with them? Why would
you write a whole book about them? Am I wrong about that?
LAZAR: No, not
at all.
ZUCKERBROT: But
there are some authors who you tell that to—"This character isn't
likable"—and they think the character has redeeming qualities and is likable.
I have an officemate who has this wonderful nonfiction writer who was working
on his or her next book and picked some subject matter that was so obscure. The
agent said, "Who is the audience for this?" The writer explained that he or she
was really passionate about it. The agent said, "But who's supposed to read this? You may be passionate about it—"
BARER: But you
do want people to buy the book.
ZUCKERBROT:
Right. It's not that you have to write for
your audience. But you have to keep your audience in mind. That's a distinction
you have to make. Every once in a while I'll go to a writers conference and
meet someone who says, "I don't read contemporary fiction." I think, "Next." I
don't want to hear that you're mired in the classics. The classics are great.
They're an amazing foundation to have. But if you are not reading what is being
published today, and what is selling, who are you writing for?
KLEINMAN: It
just depends on what you want as a writer. If you want to write literary
fiction that's beautifully done but will be published by a university press and
won't get a big print run, then that's great. But don't come yelling at us
because we can't sell something that's not commercial enough. I just think it's
a different marketplace and a different kind of attitude.
I hear a lot of writers complain about
how hard it is to get an agent. What do you guys think about that?
BARER: Try
how hard it is to sell a book!
ZUCKERBROT: When
you see a great query letter, or a book that's really great, it stands out from
the pack. Everyone's all over it. Part of the problem is that most of the query
letters we see are sort of generic sounding. People say, "I've written a book"
but don't tell you anything about who they are. They don't list credentials.
They don't have to have credentials, but they should just say, "This is my
first novel." It's not easy, but just try to write a really smart and
thoughtful letter. I always think about the people in all these writing groups
who spend years working on something. Share your query letter with the people
in your writing group. Does your letter interest them?
BARER: I would also say that the first twenty pages count
more than anything. As an agent, you have a limited amount of time, and if
those twenty pages don't blow you away...
ZUCKERBROT: And you get these people who say, "I enclose the first
twenty pages, but it doesn't get good until page seventy." Wrong answer! I
think, "Ditch pages one through sixty-nine." I can't send this to an editor and
say, "Here's this really great novel, and it gets good on page seventy."
KLEINMAN: But on the other side of the coin, it feels like what
people don't want to hear—readers, editors, agents—is that the premise has
been done. Or that it's so bizarre that you can't figure out what to do with
it. I'll give you an example. I went to this Web site for writers that I spend
a lot of time on, and one writer had written a query letter about his book. The
character is this guy who is sitting and trying to do something, and this
client of his comes in, sits down, and blows her brains out in front of him.
That's how the book starts. It's sort of interesting, but there's also this
huge yuck factor. You're reading it and thinking, "Okay, I can't imagine
calling up an editor and saying, ‘So, I have this really yucky book....'" This
author is having a real problem selling the book. No agent wants to even look
at it. So what's he doing wrong? According to everybody else, it's all about
writing a great letter. And that's what he keeps doing: He's going back again
and again and again to work on the letter and make the letter great. Dude, the
problem is—
BARER: You have to think about the story.
KLEINMAN:
Exactly.
BARER: Every once in a while I
think you can transcend that. You'll have an author like Elizabeth McCracken
who writes a memoir that sounds so devastating and yet she's so gifted and it's
so well done.
KLEINMAN: But that's not even the
same universe as what we're talking about. We're talking about first novelists.
BARER: That's right. You're right.
ZUCKERBROT: The
thing is, I don't think there are any hard-and-fast rules. There are
guidelines.
KLEINMAN: Do you
think The Lovely Bones would have been published if it had been
her first book?
ZUCKERBROT: I
don't know what it looked like unedited, so it's hard to say. I only read the edited
version. But I read it in bound galleys and I was hooked from the first
sentence. I couldn't put it down.
KLEINMAN: Well, I so could put it down that I actually threw it out the window. I didn't even
want it in the house with me.
BARER: I was
a very bad judge of that book. I really liked it, but I thought, "This will be
really hard to break out because it's so upsetting."
KLEINMAN: "I've
got this great book about a dead nine-year-old girl."
BARER: It's so hard to say that to a woman. And
let's just put it on the record right now that women buy fiction and men do
not. Step up to the fucking plate, men out there, and start buying some fiction—I
mean literary fiction—because otherwise we're all just going to keep that in
mind when you're trying to get published. Show yourselves! Apparently, for some
reason, they aren't. I don't know why. You have these incredibly talented young
male writers like Ben Kunkel and Nat Rich who are publishing books, and where
are the young men who should be buying them?
KLEINMAN:
Totally playing video games, and I don't blame them.