Curb Appeal: Staging your Literary Work

What is curb appeal?

According to the real-estate business, curb appeal is what potential buyers see first when they drive up to your property that’s for sale. It “embraces everything between your front door and the street” (per the MyHomeIdeas site).

That site goes on to note: “It doesn’t take much to make dramatic style improvements.” Tips include adding flower boxes or a nicer mailbox, trimming the shrubs, etc.

“With a little faith in your vision, and a few tips from the pros,” they say, “you can transform a dowdy exterior to an inviting, welcoming entranceway.”

Well . . . same for your manuscript.

Like staging a house for sale, to prepare your work to pitch to others, think more about the buyer’s interests. What will draw them in off the street and get them in the door?

Yes, you’re terribly fond of that wildflower patch in the yard, or the abstract painting in the foyer, but will it turn off a group of potential buyers before they get far inside? Will they really love your herb garden . . . or see it as a nightmare to maintain? That family photo means so much to you . . . but take it down . . . if you want to let buyers enter and imagine themselves in the home as their own.

We’re talking metaphorically, about your writing.

What are common techniques to “stage” your work for curb appeal?

1. For god’s sake, clean up the place. Fix the most visible problems!

2. Consider: what is the likely audience? And what do they want in a reading experience?

3. How do I attract the quick look online, the drive-by eyeballing of the place, the noncommittal “check-it-out” tour?

4. Are you able to stage it yourself? Or would you benefit from the help of a professional?
Literary agents, book doctors, and editorial consultants – like me – do a lot of “staging”; we think about how your work will appeal to readers (other than you!) and how to put its best foot forward.

To stage your manuscript, here are a few quick ideas.

1. Does the tentative title appeal to your audience?
Have you tested it vs. other possible titles with a small group? Seriously, the best title isn’t the one you like, but the one that attracts others who don’t know anything about what’s inside the work. I often go to a bookstore for this; bookstore staff, if they have a minute, often have great insight into which title might appeal more than another.

2. Have you written a compelling, brief – but confident and impressive – bio of you as author?

3. Do you have any evidence of testimonials or feedback from typical users/readers, any indication of interest from others?
Or evidence of comparable sales of nearby, truly similar properties?

4. How compelling is the first page or two, really?
Would you buy the book, or invest more time to examine it, based on the first paragraphs?

5. If nonfiction, is the table of contents clear and revealing of what’s inside?
Maybe it’s just me, but I shy away from cute chapter titles; I think it shows a lack of understanding of how a book sells and what a reader wants in a table of contents . . . not to be amused by your cleverness . . . they want to know what the book’s about and be able to find things in it!

6. Personally, I am a fan of the good epigraph quote.
These are placed at the front of the book. The epigraph to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is from the Bible. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

A clever epigraph, maybe an intriguing, pertinent quote from a literary giant of the past, is like that trim and colorful flowerbox . . . it doesn’t turn anyone off, but attracts those who enjoy those things.

7. A preface, by a famous person, is generally a good thing.
People know they can skip it, that it’s not essential to the work and was written afterward by someone else. It will impress some, and be quickly skipped by others.

8. A prologue by the author, on the other hand, is not always as good an idea as it seems (especially for fiction).
If it’s there, it should be brief, and very intriguing. If it’s too long, it’s hard to skip, but slows things down from the start instead of plunging the reader into the work. To me, it just raises the question of why you feel the reader needs to know some background before starting the real story.

9. A great pitch paragraph is always appreciated by everyone.
Can you sum up your book in 3-4 paragraphs? Or your story or article in a line or two? A good pitch identifies the neighborhood (genre) of the work, and the style, and mentions a couple of great features that everyone is sure to love. Is it a bungalow or a ranch-style or a brownstone? And how many bathrooms?

Buyers don’t want to hear: “it’s hard to describe” or “it’s a unique combo Tudor/bungalow/ranch.” Most buyers will say “Yikes!” and look elsewhere.

So . . . pretend for a moment that you’re starting to consider buying a house. What do you scan for? When you’re ready to check out a specific property, what do you want to see as you approach?

A nice description of the property? A good neighborhood? A successful broker showing it? A well-kept front yard? A few points of appeal as you enter? A welcoming feel? Nothing to turn you off before you get too far? A sense that the place might fit you?

Now, think of your manuscript as that property.

What the literary curb appeal?

Yes, eventually, it’s a matter of the quality of your writing. But if you don’t get them to look at the place, you aren’t going to sell it.

Top Ten Books for Writers (recommended book #1)

I’ve decided to review my library of hundreds of books of writing advice and put together a list of a small number of top recommendations for your library. I’ll review my favorites and compile a list of the essential works (IMHO) for writers (to be kept on a permanent page of my blog).

I’ll tell why I think a particular book makes the top list.
Here’s the first (in no particular order) likely candidate:

The First Five Pages
A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
by Noah Lukeman (1999, paperback 2005)

To order from Amazon.com, click here.

Focus: Fiction, but with application for nonfiction projects
Audience: Emerging writers

Why I’m recommending this: it delivers lucid, crucial knowledge about writing well. But most of all, it drives home the industry imperative: you must make a (nearly) perfect impression in the first several pages. It’s how the industry works. And as a practical principle, it holds water. If the first 5 pages don’t impress, why would the rest? If you doubt this, pick a favorite book from your bookshelf and read the first 5 pages. Are you impressed?

Let’s face it, many books pitch well. A great several-paragraph pitch to an agent can be written for most projects. A bigger test comes in the first reading at the agency (or publisher). This will be done by a very busy person, one who has an incredible quantity of other works at their fingertips to consider.

So the real value of this work on craft is in combining the issues of craft (found elsewhere) with that filter of always keeping in mind the realities of the business: you need to impress the influential people in the middle (agents, editors) . . . and you need to always remember that all readers are busy, easily distracted, unwilling to part with their hard-earned money and precious time, and that there is a ton of competition easily available. Impress (and do it from the beginning), or readers will turn elsewhere.

Furthermore, learning to please and impress and tempt in the first 5 pages is a skill that can be repeated, once you know how, throughout the book.

In a 2000 interview with Catherine Tudor at Prairie Den, Lukeman summarized the rationale:

. . . [W]riters should worry about their craft before plot. I can’t tell you how many queries I receive where writers emphasize what great stories they have; that may be so, but nevertheless, if the craft isn’t there, if the execution isn’t up to par, it doesn’t matter. It’s like someone who has a great idea for a song, but doesn’t know how to play the piano.

Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction, explaining why 99% of unsolicited manuscripts end up tossed the reject pile:

When most professional literary agents and book editors hear the title of this book, they grab my arm, look me in the eyes and say, Thank you. I can see their pent-up frustration at wanting to say so many things to so many writers and simply not having the time. I’ve come to understand this frustration over the last few years as I’ve read thousands of manuscripts, all unbelievably with the exact same type of mistakes. From Texas to Oklahoma to California to England to Turkey to Japan, writers are doing the exact same things wrong.

While evaluating more than ten thousand manuscripts in the last few years alone, I was able to group these mistakes into categories; eventually, I was able to set forth a definite criteria, an agenda for rejecting manuscripts. This is the core of The First Five Pages: my criteria revealed to you.

Thus, despite its title, this book is not just about the first five pages of your manuscript. . . . It assumes that if you find one line of extraneous dialogue on page 1, you will likewise find one line of extraneous dialogue on each page to come.  . . . This book will teach you the step-by-step criteria so that you, too, might develop that acute ear and make instant evaluations. . . .

For the rest of this excerpt, click here:

Author Credentials: Noah Lukeman runs Lukeman Literary Management Ltd, a New York–based literary agency, founded in 1996. His clients include winners and finalists of the Pulitzer Prize, American Book Award, National Book Award, Edgar Award, Pacific Rim Prize, and multiple New York Times bestsellers.

Author Platform: 4 Things It Does to Lift You Up

An author platform. To pitch a nonfiction book, you need one . . . because literary agents want you to have one . . . because publishers want you to have one. . . .

But what are author platforms and what do they do?

Let’s tackle the second part of that: what do they do? Think of passing by a room in a hotel convention center with an open door. You peek in and see a speaker up on a platform, ready to speak to a big crowd of people, seated and ready to listen. What’s your impression of that person and their influence? A person on a platform, speaking to an assembled crowd, has many advantages in getting heard compared to a similar person, perhaps with just as much knowledge, sitting in a chair in the hotel lobby.

The person sitting in the lobby can get their message out to a single person who happens to sit down beside them. The person on the platform will quickly get the message out to many more people. And if it’s a good idea, that message might then spread exponentially, much more quickly.

So a platform for a speaker is a tangible, existing, powerful tool. Well, a literary platform for writers does just what a physical platform does. Here’s what it gives you:

1. Visibility. A platform lets you be seen and heard by the people farthest in the back. With a P.A. system, you can be heard in a large auditorium; if outside, across a large public space. With a platform’s amplification, you say what you have to say once . . . and many hear it.

2. Community Experience. A platform lifts you up so many can hear your message all at the same time. This creates a community experience. Think of the buzz in the room after a great speech. People can discuss what they heard with others, verbalizing the core themes, comparing what others valued in the talk. This makes everyone more able and motivated to share the ideas with others not at the speech. This is the heart of buzz . . . knowing that what’s exciting to you is exciting to others. You believe that others want to share what they think about the matter, and you begin to look for more opportunities to talk about it.

3. Aura. Let’s face it, just being seen on a platform probably means some influential people have wanted to promote what you have to say. You’ll instinctively be more impressed by a person welcomed onto a platform, introduced as an official speaker, than a person met at a party or standing on their own little soapbox in a corner of a park or sitting alone in a hotel lobby.

4. Experience. A person who has been on a platform again and again, speaking to crowds, has gotten a big benefit from that experience. They’ve learned how to better craft and deliver a compelling message, how much preparation is needed to engage and sway a crowd . . . and how simple and clear the best-heard messages are. Speaking from a platform to many requires different skills than a good storyteller sitting at a dinner table, telling tales to a small circle of friends or family to pass the time. A large crowd gathers for a talk expecting to hear someone with the skills to deliver a valuable message in a way that it is understood, is convincing, and includes take-aways, the memorable bits that an audience carries away and holds in their minds.

For a writer, “platform” is often more than major speaking venues. It can be a popular blog (Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki have huge virtual platforms) or a large mailing list of your own or a column in a major magazine or a high post in an influential professional organization.

The need for a platform for a nonfiction book, of course, reflects that publishers buy these works based on a pre-book proposal, long before a full manuscript exists. And on any given topic, any 20-page proposal may look not so much different from the next. The difference is often the author: how much they bring to the table in the way of a proven sphere of influence, with previous succcess in marketing themselves and their ideas — to real networks that will want to hear the newest ideas that person has on his or her topic of expertise.

Sit in the publisher’s chair, and think how you would choose between fairly similar book proposals. If one person has been successful in developing their own big platform, they would seem a better bet as an author to help sell books than an untested speaker. And at it’s core, publishing (from the point of view of publishers) is all about making good bets.

So, the easier you make it for them to bet on you (the better you can help your agent convince an editor to help convince an acquisitions committee), the more likely you are to get that nonfiction book contract.

Let’s All Play the Genre Game (Pitching)

Not sure which genre your novel is? In your mind, hey, it’s a hydrid! Maybe a science fiction/fantasy, or a romance/thriller/time-traveling mystery. Maybe you think that’s a good thing.

But if it’s more than one thing, in terms of genre, that’s a problem.

Specifically, a marketing problem.

Why? Genre is basically a label. It assigns a book to a category. New writers might think this is intrinsically a bad thing, one that somehow limits or restricts them.

But pause and think why a label might be helpful for a customer browsing in a book store. It’s a finding aid. They go to a section where the shelves are filled with the kind of books they like to read or are looking for.

For a fiction reader, a genre label means even more than just a spot on a shelf. Calling a book a Romance or Mystery or Fantasy or Thriller is an assurance to the customer of some sort of basic, familiar, time-tested form for the story.

Very few readers want to hear: “It’s hard to categorize.” Yikes! They want to know it’s within a category they like.

This problem flows all the way down the chain. Booksellers won’t know where to shelve it. Publishers won’t know what to call it or which category buyer to pitch it to. Agents won’t know what to call it in a brief conversation with an editor. And that’s a problem – for you.

Sure, they could figure it out for you. But that’s not their job. They instead will turn to other books that are more solidly centered in a known, popular genre. By and large, they prefer to work with writers who know the right labels to use in summarizing their book in a brief, succinct pitch.

Within any category, there’s lot of variety. So it doesn’t limit literature; it’s just a label, not a definition.

I encourage writers not to quibble. Don’t say “it’s hard to categorize” or “it’s sort of [this] with a bit of [that].” Bite the bullet, show your confidence and experience, and pick the main category it’s mostly in – the one that will put it in the bookstore section you want the book to be shelved in. If it’s a fantasy that involves some sort of mystery, it’s probably still a fantasy. Call it that. Then, in the description, you can mention there’s a mystery involved in the plotline.

If, as a beginning writer, you’re mixing genres so much that you can’t pick one – or you’re intentionally mixing genres – it may reflect a serious underlying problem of not knowing why genres are so popular and satisfying to readers.

Yes, you can mix genres; no one says you can’t. But it will be harder to find an audience. The fallacy for beginning writers is to imagine that mixing two genres will double your audience.

The hard truth: The real audience for a mixed genre work isn’t the sum of all readers in both genres . . . it’s the (much smaller) subset of those readers that like both. (I.e., if you draw two overlapping circles, it’s not the total area of both circles, but only the small section where they overlap.)

For ideas on how to label your work, visit this Wikipedia discussion of types of genre fiction.

Or AgentQuery.com has this description of fiction genres, from Chick Lit to Commercial Fiction to Literary Fiction to the main genres of Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller/Suspense, and such.

Also, here’s a good article by Anna Genoese on genre.

So, what if you pick the wrong label? If it’s done with confidence, and it’s generally in the right ballpark, an agent or editor will correct the label if they feel it is helpful for marketing. But it’s better to show confidence and pick one, then let the story speak for itself.

If in doubt, rely on this rule of thumb: go to a major bookstore, and pick the category with the books that are similar to yours.

If it’s not in any of the so-called “genre fiction” categories (mystery, fantasy, etc.), the safe choice is General Fiction. But what if the person you’re pitching to prefers the term Literary Fiction, for instance. How to tell? Check their website. If an agent says they represent Literary Fiction or Women’s Fiction, for instance, those are good choices for labels – if they fit your story.

Are there books that cross genres? Sure. Take one like The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger. “A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion . . .” starts the publisher’s (Harcourt) description.

It continues “this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger’s cinematic storytelling that makes the novel’s unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

“An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler’s Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.”

For marketing categories (in its catalog), Harcourt picked: Fiction – General, and Fiction – Romance/Time Travel

Note: no mention of science fiction (the classic time-travel genre). Instead, Harcourt went with General Fiction. With a hint of Romance, but probably not to be shelved there.

The New Writer’s Handbook 2007

The New Writer

What people are saying about The New Writer’s Handbook 2007:
(To order from Amazon.com, click here.)

“. . . from the preface by Erica Jong to the closing piece by Mary Pipher, it surprises and satisfies.”
– Library Journal (Starred Review)

“. . . a holistic approach in reaching out to new writers, nurturing their careers on both the creative and business side. . . . real-world, how-to advice, as well as inspiration and encouragement for when the going gets tough.
– Amy Brozio-Andrews, in Absolute Write Newsletter

“Expertly compiled . . . a compendium of 60 practical, insightful, informed and informative articles. . . . A critically important and strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library reference collections. . . .”
– Midwest Book Review

The World’s Greatest Pitch

A query letter for a novel must be short. Ideally, just one page. It’s what you send as a first contact to a literary agent (sometimes directly to an editor), often as an email. You hope they will open it, scan it, be intrigued very quickly (and impressed by your writing on that one page), and utter the magic words: “Send me more.”

To succeed, you must sum up your opus in just a paltry few sentences. Perhaps as few as three. Maybe a few more if they’re good and short and compelling. (Compelling not to you but to the busy agent or editor, sitting with a huge pile of other queries and not much time.)

Yes, I know you’ve slaved over your wonderfully complex novel and want to tell, oh, so much more! More about the characters. More about the plot. More about why you wrote this story. And maybe all about the other novels in the trilogy you’ve planned.

Don’t.

It’s a test. It’s a gate you must pass through. An agent or editor (in almost all cases) wants to see you have written the kind of work that can be summed up in a short, pithy, come-on paragraph – exactly like the ones you see on the back of paperback editions, or in a short description somewhere like the Book of the Month Club’s catalog.

So, at a recent writer’s conference (Wisconsin Regional Writers Assn.), I advised: hey, sign up for the Book of the Month Club! and read their short descriptions of books. That’s how you want your pitch to read.

For instance, here’s a BOMC paragraph introducing John Grisham’s new novel, Playing for Pizza:

After three interceptions in 11 minutes that cost his Cleveland Browns football team the playoffs, third-string quarterback Rick Dockery’s football career is over. Or is it? There is one team who still wants him. The only catch is the team is the Parma Panthers from Parma, Italy. Rick isn’t too keen on the idea but with nowhere else to go he takes the offer and is introduced into a whole different world full of strange rules, great food, and exotic women.

That’s a great pitch. It does exactly what it needs to do. First: Set-up (sets the cool scene that kicks off the book and pulls you right in). Second: Complication (an interesting monkey-wrench is thrown into the situation, something that scrambles everything). Third: Teaser (a sense of how everything changes . . . ending with an intriguing, open-ended come-on that suggests you are really, really going to like this book!).

This pitch for Grisham’s book concludes by promising a good read: a story full of things “strange, great, exotic.” It doesn’t go on and on. Instead, it leaves you wanting to know more.

Here’s another example, in a more serious literary tone, also from BOMC’s current offerings:

The Worst Thing I’ve Done, by Ursula Hegi:

Annie, Jake, and Mason have a tangled bond since childhood, one that is fraught with jealousy, competitiveness, and dormant attractions. When Annie’s father and pregnant mother die in a car wreck on the same night that she and Mason get married, the three friends decide together to raise Annie’s infant sister, Opal, who has survived the crash. But as they do, the festering feelings between them leave Annie wanting out of her marriage — something that leads all three of them to cross a precarious line with a decision that will have catastrophic consequences.

You get the idea.
Set-up. Complication. Teaser.

For more advice on pitches and queries, I recommend Katharine Sands’ wonderful book: Making the Perfect Pitch. Then work on your perfect pitch: short and sweet, well written and punchy, open-ended.