Bobbi wrote to say, "You've mentioned several times that an author should ask a prospective agent some questions in order to get to know him (or her). I'm going to a conference in a couple months — what sort of questions should I ask?"

I've talked about his question a couple of times, Bobbi. Here are some thoughts to get you started…

-How long have you been doing this?

-How many contracts have you negotiated for authors?

-Who do you represent?

-What publishing houses have you worked with in the past year?

-Which editorial personnel have you done deals with?

-How many deals have you done in the past year? 

-What sort of authors and projects do you represent?

-What do you like to read? (Ask for titles!)

-Can you give me a book title you sold that you loved?

-Can you give me a book idea you sold that you loved?

-Do you offer editorial input to authors? 

-What would you say are your best skills?

-What's unique about your agency?

-What percentage do you earn on a book deal?

-Are there any hidden fees or charges? Any up-front costs?

-Do you charge back all your expenses?

-How do you handle legal or accounting issues?

-Have you ever worked in publishing or done any editing or writing?

-How do you approach career planning?

-Do you work by yourself?

-Are you full time?

-Are you a member of AAR?

-How long have you been in business? 

-How many people work at your agency?

-Will you be handling my work, or will someone else? 

That will get you started. Again, I think an author needs to consider what he or she needs from an agent before interviewing prospective agents. That way you've got some idea of whether or not this person would meet your needs, rather than simply asking yourself, "Do I like this guy?"

Marie Prys is the administrative presence behind our three agents. Books are one of her favorite things. Look for a monthly post from this former editor on what she will happily give up sleep for. 

I cannot give up reading great books—even when the days are bursting with schoolwork, overflowing laundry, potty-training, an author database in need of updating, and the to-do list that never ends. I’ll let Montesquieu explain why:

“The love of reading enables a man to exchange the wearisome hours of life, which come to every one, for hours of delight.”

My sentiments exactly! So at the end of the day, I read. Commune. Indulge. It might be a romance, mystery, spiritual read, biography, or even a cookbook. Late into the night, great books keep me up, bringing hours of delight. This month my favorite was a spiritual read: One Thousand Gifts (Zondervan, 2010) by Ann Voskamp.  

I’m not opening the door for theological debate; let’s just talk about the writing.  Some would call her style "wordy." I call it art. Her voice is powerful, and dare I say wrenching. Her words reach out and demand her audience to stop, to LISTEN. To respond.

At one point Ann grips the pain and suffering of this life. She voices what we all have felt at one time or another, a plea that she would not write the story this way! And then she says:

"I regret the words as soon as they leave me.They seem so un-Christian, so unaccepting—so No, God! I wish I could take them back, comb out their tangled  madness, dress them in their calm Sunday best. But there they are, released, and naked, raw and real, stripped of any theological cliché, my exposed, serrated howl to the throne room" (p.20).

I love the imagery. She takes these jumbled emotions and crafts word pictures so stark you can’t help but pause and imagine them just as she said! Voskamp's writing slays me and pushes me to turn just one more page, and one more, and one more…until it’s way past bedtime and I’ve done it again and indulged, for hours of delight.

Look for a post once a month about what books are currently keeping me up at night. How about you? What are you reading that brings hours of delight?

Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent.

First, I'd like to say I'm sorry for missing my post yesterday. I had some personal things come up and just didn't get around to it. So, we're going to take a slight detour this week, since I know there are a number of people who tune in specifically on Thursdays to hear about building author platform. And, well, we don't want them missing the next installment, now, do we?!

So for today, I'd like to share links to a batch of really helpful tutorial videos my author, the fabulous Jill Williamson, put together. They cover everything you need to know to format your manuscript for submission.

In these times of self-publishing, ebooks, bookstore closures, agents turning into publishers, and the crumbling of the traditional publishing model—who needs a publisher?

May I offer an indie publisher’s perspective on that question?

First: Ask yourself if you know the industry. Many writers seem to have no clue about the changes in the publishing market. You need to do your research, learn book marketing, and educate yourself. One day your publisher is going to ask you, “What is your marketing plan?”, and if you say, “I can email my friends and do a book signing…”, there is a good chance your book will fail. No matter what path you take to publish, you will be responsible to market your book. Not the publisher—you.

Second: Ask yourself if want a publisher. You may feel you don’t need a publisher these days, as you can do much on your own. But a publisher can do it faster and better, and brings expertise to the process… so do you want a publisher? (And when I say “publisher” I mean the indie publisher, the new model publisher, the partner publisher, or someone who is not stuck in the old way of doing business. I do not mean the Big 6 or old-school, dying on the vine publishers who seem to think eBooks and news of thinking are evil.)

The fact is, a good publisher can do a few things for you that you can’t do on your own. But that will cost you something. You will give up part of your royalty to cover their services. Think of a publisher as someone who knows 50 people that you need to meet in order to get your book into reader’s hands. All a publisher does is make the introductions:

·      A publisher can get your book into bookstores. To sell with Ingram you need 10 titles before they will even talk to you. You can go through a third party to get in, but it will cost you 10-15% of your sales. Why do you need to be with Ingram? Because they are the big dog in distribution. Most stores buy from them.

·      A publisher can sell special rights, foreign rights, movie rights, mass market rights, blah blah blah… Now to be fair, you could do this on your own, but the publisher knows who to talk to and who is buying. It is all about contacts. Remember when your dad said it is not what you know but who you know? It turns out, he was right.

·      A publisher can work to get you into a better deal through an agent. I know I am going to open a can of worms here, but the agent’s job is changing. They are almost not needed for a book deal with an indie publisher. Why would you give up 15% when you can talk directly to the publisher and hire someone to look over your contract? Most charge a one-time fee for things like that. I use Chip and other agents to sell subsidiary rights—they work and get paid based on the deals they bring in. This works out well for the agents, as they are free to use their contacts to make money without being tied up with the time it takes to sell a book to big OLD publishers.

·      A publisher can put out a better product. Some of the books going up on Amazon are awful. Covers that make your eyes bleed,  no editing, poor layout. With the changes in the industry, many cover artists and editors are leaving or getting fired. Most can be hired as freelancers or go to work with a small press. If you doubt what I am saying, look around Smashwords or Amazon.

·      A publisher can help you market. Notice I did not say, “they will market for you”? They know how to market, so they can hold your hand and show you the ropes. Most publishers market their line of books, not just one book or one author, so they have learned where to go and what to do.

·      A publisher can make the process easy. I can’t tell you how many writers I have worked with that are happy to have someone on their side who knows what to do. Selling books can be like a giant puzzle, but once the various pieces are put together, it gets easier with every try. Why invent the wheel all over again? Besides the industry is changing so fast that if you create a new design it can be outdated as soon as you are finished.

·      A publisher can make you more money. A small press or new publisher usually pays higher royalties than the big guys, (40-60% vs 12-25%). This means you make more money per sale and can make a living on fewer books with lower sales.

Who needs a publisher? If you’re an author trying to make some money writing books, the chances are YOU do.

Aaron Patterson is the publisher at StoneHouse Ink, which has sold more than a quarter of a million books in the past two years.

Twitter: @StoneHouseInk

Facebook: HERE

Blog: HERE

Website: HERE

StoneHouse University: HERE

NOTE: Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent.

We’re on week three of tackling the Platform Monster. Week one we talked about numbers as in how big an author platform should be, and week two we took the first step toward achieving those numbers by acknowledging that growing a platform should be like playing with dominos. You move forward, tile by tile, focusing on one thing at a time until the big payoff when everything falls into place and you have your platform.

So now let’s dig deeper. Each week, we’ll take a look at one of those platform components (Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Speaking) and I’ll give insight into how to do them right and reap the biggest reward.

This week, we’re talking about WRITING ARTICLES.

I chose this one to start us off, because aside from blogging, it comes more naturally to most writers than, say, YouTube vlogging and public speaking. It also is one of the easiest ways to ensure your name gets in front of lots and lots of people.

Here’s my thinking…you Tweet something or write a blog post or throw something up onto the Internet, and unless you happen to be talking about a trending or searchable topic, it only gets read by your immediate audience. But with articles (especially print articles), your words will be read by a majority of that publication’s readership. And 99.9% of those readers are people that you haven’t met before. So while pitching articles and columns may be a bit outdated, it’s one of the best ways to get your words in front of NEW readers.

So how do you see success with articles? Here’s what I recommend:

1.      Take a look at what you write and identify the topics you specialize in. If you’re a nonfiction writer, this is pretty easy. If you’re a fiction writer, it’ll take a bit more effort. Come up with a list of 5 or so interests that you feel are reflected in your writing. For example, Bernard Cornwell writes spectacular historical fiction geared toward men. When he was in the midst of writing and researching his King Arthur series, he could have identified the following groups of people who would be interested in his work: British history enthusiasts; King Arthur enthusiasts; mythology and folklore enthusiasts; myth, hero, Arthurian and possibly medieval reenactment groups; and of course, historical fiction enthusiasts.

2.      Once you’ve identified your groups of readers, track down publications that serve those readers. You want to dig up as many publications as possible and focus on print publications as well as e-publications (oftentimes referred to as e-zines). Popular blogs may also be considered.

3.      Write a handful of articles or essays for each interest group (some may cross over). If you’re like Bernard Cornwell, you may choose to write about the research that you’re doing. Or, if you’re Susanna Clarke, you may want to write about Magic in Adult Literature – Has Harry Potter Juvenalized the Subject? Whatever the topic, make sure it parallels your writing subject and interests your reader.

4.      Pitch your articles to the publications. Now the key here is to reuse articles so that you’re not always writing something new for every publication. The article you sell to Fitness Magazine can also be tweaked and then used in Self, Shape, and then Oxygen.

5.      When you get a few bites, pitch new ideas to those publications. The goal is to create a relationship with the publication in hopes that they’ll bring you on as a contributing writer or columnist. Also, by frequently appearing in the same publications, you’ll start to develop a readership.

6.      Keep track of how many people are seeing your words. Every print or e-publication has a readership number. For print, they refer to this as their circulation. You can find these numbers on their website or by emailing and asking. For e-publications, you’ll need to get their web stats. I like to rely on www.compete.com to give me insight into how many visitors a website will get per month (Tip: Only search the home page of the website. Don’t search your article’s individual URL).

7.      You should have some sort of website already, but at this point it’s time to add another outlet. Say, Twitter or Facebook. Think of it as placing that second domino right behind the first one.

8.      Come up with a byline that directs your fans to whatever social media outlet you chose in step 7.

If you look at the top of this blog post, you’ll see I have a handy little byline that directs you to follow me on Twitter and visit my Facebook page. And it’s worked. Since writing these posts, I’ve added three dozen or so followers. It’s not much, but imagine if I had been posting these words on multiple blogs and e-zines around the Internet. That group of three dozen could have been a few hundred. In just a matter of weeks.

And that’s it. Success in article-writing in 8 easy steps.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions and questions.

It's not everyday that a debut novel becomes a bestseller, which is perhaps why people are curious as to why and how Crossing Oceans made its way on to the CBA, ECPA, Amazon, and PW Religion lists. 

Anyone who regularly follows the bestseller lists for a few months will notice that while the book titles change, the authors rarely do. People like Ted Dekker, Francine Rivers, Karen Kingsbury, etc show up there over and over—making it difficult for a new name to squeeze in. (This is true in the CBA as well as the general market).

There is, of course, no single way to turn a book into a bestseller. If there were, everyone would be doing it with every book. I can’t speak for the rest of debut novelist’s who were lucky enough to break in, but this is how it went for me:

·      I had a champion.

Actually several. It started with a top-notch agent, Chip MacGregor, who championed the book and sold it to Tyndale House. Karen Watson, Associate Publisher there, read a partial manuscript and became passionate about it. She took a risk and gave an untried author a chance.

 This wouldn’t have happened though if the idea had been poorly executed. It took years to hone my skills. Over the course of ten years, I'd written several manuscripts that were ultimately rejected, read every how-to writing book I could get my hands on, and aligned with the toughest critique partners I could find. 

Lucky for me, the rest of the team at Tyndale House also got excited and additional resources were thrown at the book. One "higher-up" from Tyndale commented it was one of the best debuts he’d  ever read. That’s the kind of excitement that helps sell a book.

·      I had a great editor.

 I doubt I have to convince writers how important this is. Kathy Olson saw my vision for the story, suggested changes and heard me when I had questions or disagreed. We listened to each other, and there was compromise on both our ends.  She didn't change the essence of the story, or my voice, which I'm truly thankful for. What she did do is make a good story better.

·      They listened.

Right from the beginning stages, I worked with a team that wanted, and heard my input. They suggested changes they thought would improve the book. They also invited my feedback from everything from the cover design to the portion of endorsement we ended up using.

I was grateful when my (fan-stinking-tastic) marketer ran ideas past me about ad displays and which outlets they planned to advertise with. I offered insight, which could have been ignored, but wasn't. When I saw a PR tie in, I wrote to my publicist and we brainstormed and then acted. Sometimes she pitched an angle, sometimes I did, depending on who we thought would get the best results. There were no egos involved on either end, just a desire for the book to succeed.

·      Serendipity 

A major book chain buyer, (God bless her!), fell in love with Crossing Oceans and got the stores excited about it too. She ordered lots of copies, gave it placement at the front of the store. It was put on sale nationwide, which helped introduce it to readers. I couldn’t have planned that if I wanted to.

Another national chain made it their book club pick. This certainly wouldn’t have happened if Tyndale hadn’t pitched it to them or if it wasn’t a story that resonated, but I’m sure lots of other books were just as worthy. Like I said, serendipity.

Kindle offered it as a daily deal, dropping the price to $1.99 for the day. This also introduced me to many readers who wouldn’t have discovered me otherwise. Again, not my doing.

·      Word of mouth

Word of mouth normally only happens when enough people, the right people, (read The Tipping Point), read a book and become passionate about it. My publishing team took care to submit it to the "who’s who" of reviewers and outlets.

On my end, I worked to gather up early readers and to create buzz. I spent probably on average 2-4 hours a day on publicity. That’s a lot of time, but you only get one chance to debut. Many outlets are more curious about your first book than subsequent ones. It pays to pour everything you have into the first 

It also helped that Tyndale offered up Crossing Oceans as a freebie on Kindle and Nook. It stayed at number one free download on Amazon for most of that two weeks and then stayed in the top one hundred paid for weeks after. That’s a lot of potential for word of mouth.

I had a platform which I’d spent years building: www.novelrocket.com. With a strong base of supporters, it was easy to scare up folks who were happy to help me get the word out. (When you take time to help others, expecting nothing in return, you tend to get the boomerang effect. Hint. Hint.)

This isn’t a conclusive list, but it’s a good representation of how and why Crossing Oceans launched so well. A bestseller tends to happen when you have a well-written & sticky, (again—see The Tipping Point), book, a great team of champions, and an author willing to do their part.

It’s important to point out the obvious—some great books don’t sell so well despite all involved doing everything right. And some maybe not so great books sell very well despite little effort. 

I think God sometimes smiles on certain projects for reasons only He knows, and perhaps some books are meant to reach many, while others are meant to reach a select few—but that’s a topic for another post.

What I do know is that we could try our best to recreate this series of fortunate events I experienced with Crossing Oceans, but probably will fail miserably because most of the best breaks weren’t within our control.

What we can do is to write the best book we can, do as much to promote as we can, hope that our publishing team and readers "get" us, and say our prayers.

Gina Holmes is the author of CROSSING OCEANS, her debut novel that hit the bestseller lists and won numerous industry awards, and her latest, DRY AS RAIN, which has been getting very strong reviews. Both books were published by Tyndale publishers. 

Cherice wrote in to ask, "Can you explain how money is paid on a book publishing contract? I've got a contract in front of me, and I don't understand it."

Happy to, Charice. First, most authors are paid an advance against royalties when signing a book contract. There's a long tradition of publishers paying advances to authors, since it allows the author to survive while he or she is working on a book. This isn't free money — it's sort of a no-interest loan that will be earned back after your book releases. Let's say the contract calls for a total advance of $20,000. Typically you'd get one-third of this on signing, another third upon turning in the completed work, and the last third upon publication. (That said, there are a million ways to divide the advance. Some pay half on signing, some pay a percentage when the author completes the bio and marketing forms, etc.) So when your book releases, you're now in the red $20,000 to the publisher. You've been paid that amount, but you haven't earned anything back yet. 

Second, as your book sells you are credited with  money for each sale. That's your royalty money, and with each sale it slowly reduces that $20,000 debt. Most trade publishers in the general market (that would include Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, etc.) pay a standard royalty on hardcover books: 10% of the book's retail price on the first 5000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 5000 copies sold, and 15% thereafter. Royalties for most trade-paper books are 7.5% of the retail price, and mass market books pay a bit less than that. (Be aware: Most CBA publishers don't pay on the retail price of the book — they pay on the net price, which is the amount of money the publisher actually receives from the bookstore. And you negotiate royalties on each book. Though CBA royalties may seen higher, you'll have to do some math to determine which method will pay you more money.)

If your book is a $25 hardcover, you'd be making $2.50 for each of the first 5000 books sold. (Did you see how I got that figure? $25 x 10%.) What happens is that the publishing house keeps track of that figure, and applies that as a credit to your account. So if you sell one book, you no longer are in the red $20,000 — you're now in the red $19,997.50. After the first 5000 copies have sold, your earnings jump to $3.12; and after 10,000 copies have sold, you are earning $3.75 per book. With every book sold, they credit your account  the appropriate amount. Eventually you erase the $20,000 debt, and you begin making money that will be sent to you a couple times per year. Once you've passed the $20,000 mark (or whatever your advance was), it's said that your book has "earned out." Now you're in the best possible situation — a company is going to send you checks on a book you finished a year or two ago. There's no better feeling than getting a healthy royalty check and remembering that you're making on a project you're no longer working on.

Some publishers pay once a year, some twice a year, and some four times per year. Whether or not your book has earned out, you should be receiving a royalty statement from the publisher with each pay period, stating exactly how many copies of your book sold, what your earnings are, and either (A) the amount of money you are being paid or (B) the amount of money you're still in the red. And by the way, I've used the terms "debt" and "in the red," but an advance is really not a loan, in that you're not generally required to pay back an unearned advance. Does that make sense for the basic economics of getting paid? Feel free to ask me follow-up questions.