Writing, Self-Publishing, Book Marketing

Publishing a book is a long and complicated process, and it seems everyone has advice along the way.  There are articles and instructions on writing, editing, publishing, marketing – a complete confusion of advice and how-to’s to get you through.  But before any of that, before the first word appears on the page, there is a very critical step that stymies many writers:

Getting an idea.

This very elementary necessity has put some of the best authors into a complete panic.  The great American journalist and author Gene Fowler decided “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead”.  But personally, I think there might be some other (maybe less painful) ways to get ideas.

1. Write down an idea as soon as you get it.  I have a good friend who composes music, and he is constantly being teased for the random scraps of napkins, envelopes or illegible bits of paper that fall out of his pockets whenever he reaches for his keys.  When an idea strikes him, he just grabs whatever’s handy and jots it down.  But he is a very successful composer and taught me a valuable lesson.  A “mental note” just doesn’t sustain a good idea (or even a bad one!).  Write it down in the moment and you at least have something to work with later.
2. Don’t throw old ideas away.  Some ideas are garbage, there’s no avoiding that.  But some bad ideas are really great ones, just at the wrong time or approached from the wrong direction.  Scott Adams, who writes the Dilbert cartoons, understood this principle well: “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep”.  If it doesn’t sound good now, or you’re busy with other things, hang onto it.  Some other time when you hit a dry spell you will have a well to pull from, and things can look completely different after a little time.
3. Make time to try.  Gene Fowler’s approach may sound painful, but it does work for a lot of writers (maybe without the bleeding).  I have used this technique myself, and although I hate to admit it, it did work.  Set aside a certain amount of time with no distractions (for me, that included unplugging my internet cable), open up your word processor, and force yourself to stay there until the time is up.  You may not believe it until you try it, but the human mind will come up with all kinds of interesting ideas simply to escape boredom and desperation.
4. Surround yourself with interesting people and situations.  The poet Raymond Carter believed “There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about”.  Although this is very true, if all you did that day was wash the dishes and walk the dog you might find it difficult to find your inspiration.  Go to places that fascinate or stimulate you – museums, coffee shops, forests, homeless shelters – the world is an incredibly interesting place, but we have to get out into it. 
5. For lack of a good idea, try a bad one.  This piece of wisdom was an accidental discovery in my life, a little miracle like penicillin or sticky notes (well, maybe littler).  I was given an assignment with a topic that was just horrible.  It was the last possible thing I, or any of my readers, would have found interesting.  I tried every way I could think of to get out of it, but nothing worked.  I started working with that topic, and it led me to something else, which led me to a very interesting person, which led me to a fantastic idea that turned into a fascinating article.  It could have gone differently, of course;  I’ve had other bad ideas that no amount of reworking could make into decent ones.  But if nothing else presents itself, at least you’re working, and you might just get lucky!

A great idea is the wind in the sails of a writer, that force that propels us through the fear of failure or embarrassment and the tedious hours of reworking, proofing and editing (and this sentence was the idea that started this whole blog).  Although none of the techniques I’ve mentioned are miracle workers or magic spells, maybe at the very least they inspired you to close your browser and go back to your blank page.  Even Nobel Prize winner Andre Gile admitted “I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts”.

- Beth Ludema

(Originally published in The New York Times, print and electronic.) 

By FELICIA R. LEE

Published: October 27, 2009

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days. In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”

The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after their first issue.

“Everyone is reading short-form text,” said Mr. Hunter, the editor in chief. “Literature has not made that jump.”

Mr. Lindenbaum, the fiction editor, added, “The short form could work increasingly well in a hectic age.”

Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, an organization that aids independent literary publications, said using new media to deliver content was not an original strategy but that Electric Magazine had a distinctively comprehensive approach.

“A lot of our members have done some of these things, but I am not certain that they have done all of them,” Mr. Lependorf said of Electric Literature’s marketing strategy.

The anthology may have been first with an iPhone application, as its founders claim, he said, because it is a new technology. Of the 350 active council members (and hundreds of others that publish irregularly or in tiny numbers), he said, “less than a handful” are on Kindle.

Electric Literature is coming along at a time when all sectors of the publishing world face challenges because of a weak economy, Mr. Lependorf said. Writers complain that they drown in the great middle between the mega-sellers like Dan Brown and the avant-garde work produced in small quantities.

Mr. Cunningham said he allowed Electric Literature to use an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “Olympia,” in the debut issue “as a vote of confidence” for Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum, who were his students in the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.

“I’d been waiting for someone to do something more interesting on the Internet with fiction,” said Mr. Cunningham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Electric Literature’s YouTube videos “maintain the integrity of the written word and extend its range,” he added.

For the first issue, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum had animated videos created for all the stories after asking the writers (Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Shepard, T Cooper, Lydia Millet and Diana Wagman) to select a single sentence for the animator to interpret.

Mr. Shepard’s video has received 9,000 hits, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum said, and a video based on Mr. Whitehead’s story about a comedian, in the second issue, has about 600 hits and is picking up traffic.

As for Mr. Moody, he said he came up with the idea of Twitter fiction after he fell in love with the new form. “It’s like trying to write in haiku continuously,” he said in an e-mail message.

“I like that E.L. seems as though it will try just about anything, and I think it’s important for literature that it’s always pushing the envelope, colliding with other forms, trying to find new envelopes for its message, and generally renewing itself,” Mr. Moody’s message continued. He called it a method that was partly pioneered by magazines like McSweeny’s and Ninth Letter.

Stephen O’Connor, whose story “Love” is in the second Electric Literature issue, said, “They approached me after a story came out in The New Yorker.” At about 12,000 words, he added, “Love” is a bit long for a conventional literary magazine.

“I’m hoping it will be a younger audience, all those kids like my students at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence who are always on Facebook and iPhone,” Mr. O’Connor said.

Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum said they were having a lot of fun (there’s a party for the second issue on Wednesday night at an East Village hotspot) but are working long hours and putting in their own money for Electric Literature. Mr. Lindenbaum teaches literature at Brooklyn College, and Mr. Hunter does freelance writing and editing for an organization at the United Nations.

A start-up fund in the mid-five figures came from private investors, they said, and about 25 people consistently donate their time to the magazine as advance readers and editors, as well as video artists and animators who make the YouTube videos.

To publish the paper version, they use print-on-demand; the e-book, Kindle, iPhone and audio versions eliminate printing bills.

“Instead of paying a printer $5,000, we pay five writers per issue $1,000,” Mr. Hunter said.

Their biggest challenge is to get enough subscribers so the venture is self-sustaining. The cost of a subscription is $24 for the electronic version and $48 for paper. So far, they have 800 subscribers and 1,600 in single-copy sales, as well as 1,300 friends on Facebook and an estimated readership of 4,000 and growing.

“We have an optimistic message at a time of pessimism,” Mr. Hunter said. “As writers, we got tired of the doom and gloom. The future is not something you acquiesce to, it’s something you create.”

One thing Electric Literature seems good at is getting people to read serious literature, making it less like homework. As Sara Nelson, the books director of O, the Oprah Magazine, and former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said, “Anything that takes the starch out — go for it.”