Category Archives: prewriting

Penguin Putnam Author’s Memoir Publishing Tips

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In this month’s New Writers installation, Tracy Slater offers memoir publishing tips. A fellow memoirist and nonfiction writer whom I met through SheWrites, her book The Good Shufu: A Wife in Search of a Life Between East and West is slated for release in 2014 by Penguin’s Putnam imprint.

The Good Shufu is a memoir about finding love, meaning, hope, and self in the least likely places, the places we always swore we’d never go. It’s about what we gain and lose, when we forfeit our plans, goals, and even sometimes homes for that age-old cliche, love.

Tracy’s work has also been published in CNNGo, Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008, Boston Magazine, the Boston Globe, and many Japanese publications. She earned her PhD in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and is the recipient of the PEN New England 2008 “Friend of Writers” award for her work with FourStories, a literary series in Boston, Osaka, and Tokyo that features appearances and readings from the world’s most acclaimed authors. Coming this month to the Boston area FourStories are Lauren Slater, Pagan Kennedy, and more.

Today’s takeaways:

  • insight into MediaBistro classes on queries/book proposals and writing memoirs
  • tips on how and why to get an agent
  • not getting duped in the contract
  • how unknown authors land grand book deals

 Click here to listen to Tracy’s podcast then see below for links to resources she recommends.

 

Visit Tracy's Blog

Visit Tracy’s Blog

Tracy concluded with these words:

“The second (piece of advice) is about the difference between crossing items off my writing ‘task’ list and making something as perfect as possible. In the past, I’d always felt like I was being efficient and successful and making progress if I met my quota of sending out a certain number of queries or finishing an article on one date and being able to move on the next.

“But what this book process has really taught me is that it’s much more important to spend time perfecting and then perfecting and then perfecting again one really important piece, and then finding the absolute perfect place to pitch it (not the most visible even but the one that most likely would want to publish your piece because it fits exactly with their readership or editorial goals) and then working over and over on the pitch until that is perfect. The ‘Motherlode’ piece I published was really short, one of the shortest I’ve ever published, but I worked incredibly hard, for about a month, on just those 800 words, and had lots of people read it and give me hard, honest feedback, and that’s I think how I made it into something worthwhile. So I guess I’d say that for me, I realized that progress should be measured in how close to perfect I can get something, and not in how many pitches I can send out in a week/month or even contacts I can make.”

Take a look at the piece that compelled the Penguin Putnam editor to request her book proposal. The soon-to-be author’s suggested resources listed in this podcast:

MediaBistro’s book proposal course

MB’s nonfiction book writing course

Publishers Marketplace

Nadine Gordimer‘s oeuvre

 

 

Learn more about Tracy through her blog.

Do you have any tips of offer on publishing memoirs?

Read about award-winning fiction writer Douglas Silver and glean some publishing tips from poetry chapbook-wielding Sandra Marchetti in previous posts of the New Writers column.

HS

Book Suggestion for Writers– Mentor: A Memoir

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Occasionally I suggest various media such as podcasts and web sites for travelers and writers, but rarely do I make book recommendations. It’s time to start.

This post is a hybrid review of Tom Grimes’ Mentor: A Memoir (Tin House Books, 2010, 242 pages). Grimes has written five novels, plays, and screenplays, and edited an anthology of Iowa Writers Workshop fiction. Mentor is the bildungsroman about his coming of age as a writer.

It starts with Grimes applying to writing schools and meeting his literary idol, Frank Conroy. Conroy accepts the 30-something, all-but-unpublished writer into the famous Iowa Writers Workshop (which seems to have lost a bit of its edge atop the US’s top-rated writing schools) Their relationship grows in parallel to Grimes publishing credentials. The mentor/mentee-ship morphs into one of friendship then takes on characteristics of that of a father/son relationship, and finally they achieve something akin to literary equality; meanwhile Grimes publishes a book, has plays staged, and gains recognition.

Read on to learn why I call it a hybrid.

Who should read it? Writers. It’s so literary writer-centric it’d be hard to conceive of anyone else liking it as much as we could.

Read it for content or writing? The former.

Flaws: Grimes sometimes goes off the rails by including too many threads, some of which seem like they’ll be major players in the first half but resolve themselves in just a few sentences toward the end.

He excerpts egregious amounts of copy from his screen/plays.

The narrative arc falls apart in the second half.

He loses his literary narrator’s voice and shifts to that of the teacher/department director (he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University).

The gain: Writers will love the snippets of writerly advice: “Worry to maintain the power of the voice” and learning the difference between action and dramatic action.

Grimes’ honest, tense scenes of the crossing the threshold from aching to be published to having the publishing world bid on his work to having the critics reject it should taper my fellow writers’ expectations of what publishing will be like.

The author’s lamentations on the writing process from pre-writing to revising will ring true to writers. In fact they’ll feel like tokens of commiseration.

Despite its literary flaws Mentor‘s topic and a couple of rather arresting scenes made me want to point the book out to every writer I knew. Check it out at  your local library like I did.

Wandering Justin, Your Blog Sucks

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Not really. WanderingJustin has one of the best blogs I’ve seen in architecture, travel, or writing. He’s so successful that companies send him stuff to try out and review during his travels and mountain biking jaunts. His rants have earned the ire from SkyHarbor. When I asked for a guest blog post on tips for blog improvement, he, true to his artistic orientation, went backwards. So here we have a rumination of what not to suck at. Cheers to contemplating your own blog’s improvement.

Screen shot 2013-04-05 at 2.49.22 PMBloggers all over the Internet love to tell people how great they are. And they often show it by giving you advice.

I want to put that practice into the spin cycle. Let me tell you what I’m absolute crap at — view each item as something you can work on … or as an invitation to help me get better.

Starting Conversations
My blog seems to be a repository of information. People search the Interwebz for something (“budgie smugglers” and “glow worm poop” are two surprisingly regular search terms for my site), they find it on my site, they move on. But they don’t comment much. I’ve tried asking questions, making them laugh, even having contests. The only time I get many comments is when I irritate someone. I’ll get all sorts of vitriol for saying NASA isn’t a waste of money, or even for saying that flat pedals on a mountain bike are for suckers. Other than that, comments are rare. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

Interacting with Other Bloggers
I know, it’s odd to say this in a guest post for a friend’s blog. But I just don’t find many blog buddies out there. I spend a good chunk of time looking for others like me. Most that I find just don’t engage me. When I do find someone, I’ll drop some comments on their sites or send a few tweets their way. For the most part, I can hear the crickets chirp. Which also reinforces the need to respond to the comments that I do get.

Making up my Mind
My blog is at the point where it gets attention. Every day, I get emails: People want to do guest posts, they want to exchange links, they want to advertise. What should I set as guidelines for guest posts? Should I even bother with link exchanges? What rates should I set for advertising, and how hard should I stick to my guns?

Self Promotion
Look, I don’t want to be That Guy. That Guy who never shuts up about his blog. Whose every Twitter post is about his latest blog post. I don’t want to be the blog equivalent of a local “friend rock” band whose only audience is friends and family. So I put my head down, write the best content I can and let it stand for itself. It’s worked well enough – but who knows what would happen if I were a relentless self-promotion machine?

My name is Justin, and I write the WanderingJustin.com blog. I want people to find some inspiration and ideas to create the kind of adventure that’s right for them. My own preferences? A few good hikes, a 10K race, and some sort of gross local delicacy at every destination. Oh, and microbrew!

 

Catch Justin’s other guest posts and find more of his cheeky commentary on Twitter.

 

HS