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Here’s a little trick I picked up somewhere along the way. I started using it when an author had to make a decision. Say she’s got two offers and doesn’t know which one to take. Or she’s presented with two different cover designs. Or she can’t decide how to start her first page.

Here’s what you do. Get a coin. Any coin will do. Assign Option A to one side, and Option B to the other side.

Flip the coin.

Now before you look at it, ask yourself. Are you secretly hoping it will be one or the other? That’s your answer.

I have rarely encountered a situation where the secret wish wasn’t there. If it isn’t, make a list of pros and cons for each. If that doesn’t work, take a walk and don’t think about it. Then think about it very suddenly. It will come to you. It may even come to you while you are asleep, but it will come.

It’s what’s on that page or screen that counts. Not your social media. That helps to sell the book once you have been published, but it can’t get you a contract. Not the fact that we met at a conference and really hit it off. Not the recommendations of prominent author friends. Not the fact that you pitched someone at a conference and they asked to see the manuscript. Not the accolades from all your friends, your mom, and your dog. Not the freelance editor you hired and not the writing class you took.

In the end, it comes down to the reader and what’s on that screen. They are alone together, just the two of them. You cannot stand there and advise the reader that the coming section is really good or that you know you need to work on Chapter Five.

Once you send something out, let it go. Now is the time to work on something else. Don’t fret (well, you will, but try to turn your attention elsewhere). Once it’s gone, it’s out of your control.

Don’t try to edit once it’s sent. Just let it speak for itself.

That’s really all you can do. The important thing is to keep going. You can’t fail if you don’t quit.

Once upon a time, long ago, multiple submissions were verboten. They were considered to be aggressive and rude. Each publisher felt that they were entitled to an exclusive look and that they could take all the time they wanted.

[Pause here for me to stop gagging}

Imagine that. It could easily take two years to sell a book, and publishers thought that was just fine. Agents did not.

So agents began to send out multiple submissions whether the publishers liked it or not. That way you could sell a book in a matter of days or maybe a few months. It was a hell of a lot faster and more expedient. Today it is the norm. Exclusive submissions can happen, usually by prior arrangement, but they are the exception to the rule.

When you do a multiple submission, you hope to get more than one offer. When you do, you have an auction. Here’s how it works.

As soon as I know that more than one is interested, I set a closing. Publishers must offer by that date and time. The time has to be exact, because offers usually come in at the last possible second. Once I can see what’s on the table, I move forward accordingly. There are different ways to do this. But the general idea is to tell everyone what the highest bid was and do another round. This can go on for a while. If the offers are very close together, you can declare “best bids”, in which everyone makes the best offer they can make. The goal is to flush out the highest bidder in a fair and reasonable manner. That sounds simple, but it often isn’t. That is why one of the first question an editor will ask is “What are the rules?” That is a time for me to explain exactly how it’s going to go. I may ask that each bid be a certain amount more than the last. Or I may eliminate the lowest bidder of each round. Or I may accept a pre-empt at any time. That’s when you get an offer so good that you decide to just accept it, shutting the others down. To complicate things even more, the house offering the most money isn’t necessarily the winner. The author may like another house better or have a better rapport with the editor. That doesn’t happen often, because the house with the most passion for the project usually offers the most money.

No matter how well you have it planned out, something can always go wrong. We have to expect the unexpected and stay focused. If a lot of bidders are involved, you never know what might happen. They ask what the rules are, and then they break them. But I have found that if I am fair and clear from the outset, it usually goes well.

When an author sells her first book, she really has no idea what she’s getting into. All she knows is that she had this goal and now her dream has come true.

That’s lovely and it lasts for a while. Until something else happens.

Like she realizes the publisher is going to do very little to support the book. Or she hates the proposed cover design. Or she calls with questions that don’t get answered.

This is where your agent comes in. Publishers count on agents to manage author expectations, and we do, but I wish publishers would chip in more to achieve this. The reason they don’t is because they don’t want to have to say to their author “No, we rarely do much for books at this level.” Or “This is what B&N said they wanted on the cover and they will order more books if we do it their way.” No author can know the business from the inside out when she’s just starting. And it can’t be learned all at once. That would be too overwhelming. So ask your agent questions. The only stupid question is the one that doesn’t get asked.

One time I had an author who came up with the idea that his book should be distributed so widely that the booksellers couldn’t possibly ignore it. He wanted it shipped everywhere to achieve high visibility. The more books out there, he reasoned, the more that will sell.

Except it doesn’t work that way. Not at all. Here’s how it does work:

The sales force goes out to sell the book to the trade. Naturally, they try to get as many orders as they can. Publishers often create incentives to achieve this. Then the publisher ships what was ordered. They can’t very well ship more than what was ordered. That would only annoy the booksellers and they would send the extra books right back. The book sells how it sells. What doesn’t sell is sent back to the publisher. If the book does very well, more are ordered.

My author didn’t know that going in. It seemed quite reasonable to him to demand flooding the market with HIS book. But what if everyone did that? There is only so much shelf space. Even online, there is only room for so much before people’s eyes glaze over. So they have to choose carefully and they support the books they think will have a chance.

This is just one tip of a multi-tiered iceberg. There is a lot to learn. Authors should make it their business to learn it, agents should be patient and teach, and publishers should be candid about why they did what they did.

The best trait a character can have is resourcefulness. A resourceful character initiates action instead of merely responding to it. A resourceful character gets things done.

Even if the character is a villain, we will admire that character if he is clever, and knows how to work the system. If you put your character at the bottom of a well, with no way out, what is he going to do? Sit there and hope to be rescued? That’s not interesting, and it’s not even a plot. A plot means he does something about it. He figures out something very clever that will help him on his own. Sure, if a child falls down a well, we will all be sweating it out, hoping the child gets out. But what if the child contributes to his own survival? It can be something small, as long as it’s resourceful.

The essence of a plot is that someone has a problem, and we get to watch them solve it. That can’t happen when the characters sit around waiting for something to happen.

I keep a gratitude journal, and have been doing that every single day for many years. Why do I do this? Because after you do it faithfully for a few months, you start to see everything in a more positive light. It’s a feel-good mechanism.

It’s easy enough to do. Get a blank book with lined paper and write down at least five things for which you are grateful on that day. Don’t repeat yourself. Every day has something different. It could be a large thing, like you sold your first book, or you made a bestseller list. Or it could be something tiny, like the bus pulled up just as you arrived at the bus stop, or you thought you were out of bananas and then you found one.

There should be at least five, but you can add many more if you like. Some days you barely have enough room for all the good things that happened. Other days, not so much.

How does this affect writers and publishers?

Because this is not an easy business. Writing is isolating, and it’s hard—much harder than you thought it would be. Because editors have to face a lot of demands and complaints. Because we all need to value and treasure each day, even bad days.

We once had an author who published her first book and it did very well. But she thought she was a complete and utter failure because it didn’t make the NY Times Bestseller List. I felt sorry for her. She had a lot of success, but she couldn’t take it in, not even a little.

So yes, take time every day to remind yourself that no matter what, this day will never come again, for better or for worse. When you look back and read what you wrote down years ago, you will remember so many good things. Even if it was a terrible year out of a country music song—my wife left me, my dog died, and my truck was stolen—you will remember that you had a wonderful divorce lawyer, you got a new puppy, and the insurance paid for a better truck.

THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER

Admit it. You’re jealous of someone. And you probably don’t know it, but someone is jealous of you.

It may be human nature to be jealous, but it’s a really, really, really bad way to live.
You have your path, and they have theirs. You both bring different backgrounds, styles, attitudes, energies, talent, and drive. There is no way that recipe can ever come out the same.

If you have a writer friend and that friend seems to be doing a lot better than you, let it go. The likelihood is probably that she is selling better than you and that’s why she gets more money. Authors sometimes think that publishing is a ladder of success that everyone can climb equally.

No, it’s not. Just because two authors started at the same time, have published the same number of books in the same genre, and may even have the same publisher does not mean they are entitled to equal recognition or treatment. Because one is almost certainly selling more books. That means it isn’t equal at all. And that easy, obvious, inconvenient little fact is the answer.

I have seen several cases of “joined at the hip” author friendships, where two authors become best friends and swear their friendship will last forever. In every single case, they ended up parting company, sometimes not very amicably. Why? Because one started doing a lot better than the other and that put a serious chink in their relationship. In every single case, the author who wasn’t doing as well never looked in the mirror and asked how he might be contributing to this imbalance. The answer is usually that the person doing well is simply writing better books. Or they are much more adroit and current with social media and keeping their platform strong. Or all of the above. That’s something no one wants to hear (I never promised rose-colored glasses in this blog), but it’s better to face the truth. The truth will set you free and you will be rid of the soul-eating jealousy. What can you do to write better books? What can you learn?

Or maybe you can’t. Maybe you are capable of writing A- books but not A+ books and maybe that’s okay. I know of at least one major bestselling author who always hangs out with the same two author friends. He is a household name. They are not—not even close. But they have all stayed friends, because they all recognize the reality. He has a magic spark that they don’t have and that’s just how it is. Jealousy doesn’t play a part, because they all accept the reality and this is how it was meant to be.

Have you ever seen the movie Amadeus? It’s about Mozart and his then-rival, Antonio Salieri. Salieri is the only one to recognize the depth of Mozart’s genius, but he can’t stand it. He doesn’t understand how Mozart, an otherwise unimpressive individual, could be so gifted, whereas he, Salieri, is good but not great. He is so jealous that he spends his entire life trying to destroy Mozart. Think of that. He is so eaten up by envy that he ruins his own life and Mozart’s instead of enjoying his own considerable success and being grateful that he got to witness a once-in-a-century genius. (Note: most of this is not historically true. It was a play and then a movie, but most of it never happened). It’s a story about jealousy, and I think it should be required watching for all authors.

How can you tell if a book is literary or commercial? Fiction tends to fall into either one of those camps. Sometimes the author thinks she wrote something literary, but publishers see it as commercial. So how can you tell?

Well, there are no hard and fast rules, but we know it when we see it. And so do you. If you are an author, you probably can’t be objective about your own work, but when you read something by someone else, you get a gut feeling of where it belongs.

It has to do with quality, yes. There is always a place for quality. Good writing certainly plays a part. But there is something more—an attitude, a piece of wisdom, a sense of wit—that makes it rise above. Let me give you an example. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is a quality book, and it’s also a very commercial book, even though it is considered a great work of literature. It’s commercial because it’s so easy to read and so entertaining. But it still has that spark, that extra something that moves it into a larger field. It is universal, it has depth, and the character is so real that people used to believe they saw him on the street.

I know a few pages in at the most if what I’m reading is literary or commercial. We love it when something hits that sweet spot in the middle—where it’s wildly readable, but also very high quality, and maybe it doesn’t matter in the end.

What does matter is how will it sell.

I have always found this to be true. When something drags on and on, it loses energy and momentum.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that any sale should be slapdash or hasty. But when everything aligns and everyone has reasonable expectations, things tend to fall into place. That means that the agent needs to know the market and what the book is likely to fetch, and the publisher needs to be aware of the potential the book really has. There are times when they need to look up from their P&L statements for a moment and just consider how much fuel this book has. That’s not a thing that can really be calculated, but they try. It’s just that sometimes they calculate themselves right out of a book they could have published successfully.

Life isn’t always going to be that easy to always deliver a quick sale, but sometimes it is. I love those times.

All negotiations are psychological. You can’t really get around it. The ideal is for everyone to walk away happy. They achieve this by exaggerating their expectations and then compromising.

If I’m expecting to get say $100,000 for a book and they offer $100,000, I should be happy, right? Wrong. The opening offer is always just that—the start of a journey. I know there is a very good chance they will go up, and they know it too. If I took that amount, I would walk away feeling like I could have gotten more if I had only bothered to ask. Conversely, if they offer $100,000 and I take it, they are going to walk away feeling disgruntled, figuring that I accepted it so quickly that they probably could have offered less.

Let’s walk through this.

A publisher calls with an offer. The offer is $75,000. Now, I know that this is an opening offer and there is more there. I suspect that their real number is $100,000.

From my end, I know that my real number is also $100,000. So do I come back asking for 100K? NO! If I want 100K, I have to ask for more. So I ask for $125,000. Now maybe they’ll come back with the 100K. They probably will. But I have to be prepared for anything. Let’s say they come back with $85,000. What would I do? I would sigh and express my disappointment. I would tell them that the author is going to be disappointed. They may go up again, or they may not. If they don’t, that gives me leverage to push for all kinds of other things—retaining audio and foreign rights, a refusal of joint accounting if there is more than one book, better royalties on various editions, bestseller or performance bonuses, and a host of other things. I would ask for all those things no matter what, but if I don’t get the money I wanted, they become stronger pieces of leverage.

That, in a nutshell, is how it works. But that is just the nutshell. There’s a lot more to it. I didn’t even mention competition, which changes the landscape considerably. I’ll write about that another time. This time, I’m just explaining the bare basics. I should always ask for more than I expect to get. They should always offer less than they expect to pay. That way we will meet in the middle and everyone walks away happy.

It may seem elaborate, but without that dance, we will never know for sure. A good negotiation is a win-win.