Honesty and Trust: The Keys to a Great Editor/Author Relationship

I recently read the book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull. Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation, though his name is not as well known as his fellow founders John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. But Ed was there from the beginning, a precocious young man whose dream was to create the first fully digital animated film, a goal he accomplished several times over, revolutionizing the industry and raising the bar for animators everywhere along the way. 

I picked up the book for a few reasons. 1) I love Pixar and have always been fascinated by the inner-workings of innovative companies, especially ones involved in creative pursuits. 2) When the book project was originally being shopped to publishers a few years ago, I tried bidding on it. Before I did, I met with Ed Catmull, and that meeting remains the best pitch meeting I've ever had. Without any ego, Catmull regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories of the making of some of my favorite Pixar films, explaining the complicated, sometimes frustrating, and often heartbreaking decisions that go into making one of those truly great films. I was flabbergasted, and even though I didn't end up working on the book, I was eager to hear more about what Ed had to say.

The book is, at its core, a business book. It's not so much about unlocking the creative process or a primer on how to tap into your own creativity as it is a book on how to effectively manage creative people, especially at a large organization. Because that's what Ed does. He's not the guy coming up with story ideas or creating characters; he's the guy responsible for making sure the movie gets made well, on time, and on budget. 

A lot of what Ed discusses in the book has to do with the core values of a creative organization. I'm not going to go into detail on those here because 1) this is not a book report 2) you should read the book and 3) I've misplaced my copy at the moment and can't quote from it. However, as I was reflecting on the book and thinking about how I could apply Ed's wisdom to my own career, I realized that at the heart of his advice is a commitment to two related ideas: honesty and trust. 

Let's start with trust. Part of being creative means trying new things, and people are generally terrified of new things. When creative people work for a large organization and are managed by people whose goals are not simply to do the most creative or exciting thing but to do the most creative and exciting thing they can while still making money, things can get tense. It's therefore the job of the manager to trust their creative talent and give them a safe space for generating ideas, trying new things and, at times, failing. 

Creating a trusting environment involves communicating expectations clearly, offering feedback, and encouraging people to keep going. At the same time, in order to manage creatives, you need to practice the flip side of trust, which is honesty.

Trust cannot exist without honesty. In his book, Catmull talks at length about what he and his colleagues at Pixar call "The Brain Trust." This consists of a group of higher-ups who aren't working directly on a particular project, but who check in on the progress of a film at critical points in its development and offer candid, honest feedback about what's working and what isn't. Sometimes the conversations are difficult, and whole story lines or characters or even the entire narrative arc of the film need to be reworked. But the Brain Trust works because everyone understands that they have the same goal: to make a great animated film. No one is trying to gain favor with someone else. No one is trying to undermine someone else's ideas. No one is trying to sabotage the project. Everyone simply wants to make the best film possible. By offering honest feedback in a constructive and controlled way, Pixar engenders a culture of honesty and trust that pervades the entire creative process.

So, it's about giving ideas a chance to breath but not being afraid to question them if they're not working. 

It's clear how this concept would work at a large corporation and how important it would be to have a formalized structure in place to ensure that trust and honesty are sustained, but I was also thinking about how this works in the more intimate editor/author relationship.

I'd never really considered it before, but one could say that an editor is a creative manager. I don't manage large teams of people, and my authors don't work for me, but the relationship is not unlike the ones described at Pixar. There is a creative person, the author, and then there is the manager, the editor, who is in charge of helping the author hone their ideas and bring them into the world. And, yes, the pressure of deadlines and budgets are often looming in the background, sometimes more ominously than others.

There are two things I always do when editing a manuscript, especially during the early developmental stages when, generally, a manuscript still requires a lot of structural and conceptual work. The first thing I always do is present my feedback honestly. Of course, I try to do this as constructively as possible, but I have, at times, told an author point-blank that they need to start over, that the structure isn't working, that their thesis is confusing, that this draft simply isn't living up to their idea's potential. Of course, I also believe in encouraging authors, so I try to point out what is working in addition to what's not.

The second thing I do is to point out that any of the suggestions I make are just that: suggestions. Sometimes I might suggest a completely new outline for the book, or I may ask them to develop their argument about a particular subject more while playing down another. But the last thing I want is for an author to feel like they need to do exactly what I'm telling them to do. If they start rewriting in that mindset, they stop trusting their instincts and will quell their own creativity in an effort to do what they think I want them to do. Any suggestion is merely designed to get an author thinking about something differently. Maybe it ends up working, maybe it doesn't, but hopefully it helped them figure out what was best. By explaining that they don't need to take all of my suggestions at face value, I am telling them that I trust them to take this feedback to heart and understand where I'm coming from. They are still empowered in their role as author, in their role as the creative force behind the project.

A big part of promoting honesty and trust is only expressing opinions when you actually have a fully formed opinion. So often people want their voices to be heard, or they want to look like their contributing, so they speak up when they have very little to say. They criticize things they know nothing about, they nitpick, they try to assert control over things they shouldn't be controlling. I once, for instance, worked with an author who insisted on designing his own table of contents page rather than leave it to our professional in-house designer who had been designing book interiors for decades. Needless to say, that author did not inspire trust in anyone he worked with.

Understanding one's role is a big part of this as well. As an editor, my role is to help the author communicate their ideas. The operative phrase here is "their ideas." Not mine. For the first few years of my career, I edited conservative political books even though I am a pretty staunch liberal. I worked with authors whose views completely opposed my own. If I had edited these manuscripts so that they pleased me or so the arguments lined up with what I believed, I would not have been doing my job. It was difficult sometimes, but I did it, and I think my authors were grateful. I don't know if they ever guessed at my political affiliation, but I can guarantee it never came up in any editorial conversation I ever had.

Editing is a solitary process, so I can't speak to what other editors do, but I would bet that the best ones operate, consciously or not, based on this philosophy of trust and honesty. Our job is to help the author write the best book possible, and we do that by creating a dialogue, a partnership where we are free to communicate our ideas, try new things, experiment, brainstorm, and riff without judgement or fear of reprisal. The best editor/author relationships are the ones where this works both ways: where the editor not only trusts the author, but the author trusts the editor. This means they take the editor's suggestions to heart, even if they don't end up implementing every one, and that they trust the editor's instincts and expertise. When honesty and trust are reciprocated in the editor/author relationship, magic happens.

If you're an author looking for an editor (or an agent who will function as  your creative manager in the process leading up to selling your book), I encourage you to keep this idea in mind. Obviously, it's impossible to know if an honest relationship is possible until you really begin to work with someone, but there are ways to figure it out before you sign a contract. For instance, if you're meeting with editors prior to selling the book, ask them candid questions about the structure you propose. If they have concerns, make sure you understand them and their vision is in line with your own. If they love it and have no suggested changes, you should understand what they like about it so you can keep it in mind as you move forward. It's easy to get swept up by advance numbers (and I'm certainly not suggesting you ignore those) and the reputation of the publisher itself, but having a good working relationship with your editor is priceless because it will make you a better writer and also reassure you throughout the long, painful, emotionally draining process of writing a book. And if you're lucky,  you may end up finding an editor you can trust for the rest of your long, very successful career.

Happy writing!

How to Write a Book Proposal: Part II: Who Is This Book For?

Apologies to all of you who have been waiting with bated breath for this post as I know it’s taken me a while to write it. You can exhale now! Phew. I’ll pause for a moment to let your brain adjust to the new intake of oxygen. That’s better.

Now, onward. In my last post I told you how to write—or, really, how not to write—a comps section for your book proposal. I hope it was useful. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section and I’ll address them as best I can.

I started this How to Write a Book Proposal series by tackling the comps section because it really is so easy to screw it up—and bad ones are frighteningly common. In this post, I want to cover another tricky element of the book proposal—the Target Audience section, otherwise known as the Who Is This Book For section.

Like the comps section, the Who Is This Book For section is easy to grasp conceptually. It’s a relatively short section (usually no more than a page long) of any proposal in which the author is charged with describing the target audience for his or her book. It is a good, ahem, complement to the comps section because it, too, helps the editor understand the market for the book and helps us understand your vision for it. It’s obviously impossible to know how many copies will sell before the book goes on sale, but if you can make a case that the potential audience is large, the more likely it is that a publisher will be willing to shell out big bucks for the book. At the same time, if the potential audience is relatively small, the advance may not be as high or the publisher might determine that they could not sell enough copies of the book to make it worth their while to publish it. (If you don’t know what an advance is, I encourage you to do some research into the book acquisition and auction process before you continue. The goal of this series is not to teach you how to write a proposal from scratch but to address some of the common mistakes authors make; You should have a good knowledge of the entire process for any of what I’m about to share to be useful.)

Like the comps section, the Who Is This Book For section helps “position” your book. “Positioning” is short-hand for describing your book in a way that helps put it into a context within the larger market. An easy way to do this is to compare your book to others as a reference point. For example, when Knopf published Cheryl Strayed’s (excellent) memoir Wild, they (and others) repeatedly described it as “Eat, Pray, Love but on the Pacific Crest Trail.” This was great because people immediately understood that it was a memoir about a women who undergoes a personal transformation while traveling (like Eat, Pray, Love) but also made it sound different (unlike Eat, Pray, Love, which took place in three different countries, Wild took place on the West Coast). Any time you compare your book to something else, place it in a category, or describe your target reader, you are positioning your book.

Which brings us to the topic at hand: Who is your book for? The biggest mistake authors make—and the reason I thought it important to address this issue—is when they answer this question with “Everyone!” No. Stop it. How many books over the course of human history have been read by everyone? Zero.

Saying this is no different from listing only bestsellers in your comps section except it’s worse because it suggests you’re not only delusional but have no clue who your audience is. “But true artists don’t create for others!” you say. “They create for themselves, for the sake of their art.” Okay, you sound pretentious now, but I take your point. However, I’m not saying you should write in order to please a particular audience or compromise your book in order to make it more commercial. All I’m saying is that you need to understand who will want to buy your book and why. When you do this well, you signal to the publisher that you’ve given this book a lot of thought, that you’ve done your homework, read the work of similar authors, and are able to talk about your book in a way that will pique the interest of potential readers.

I imagine the reason most authors like to say theirs is a book for everyone is not, actually, because they believe it is but because they’re afraid of underselling themselves. You worry that by saying “mine is a book for mothers who like to knit” you’re really saying “no one except mothers who like to knit will be interested in this book.” But that’s not what you’re saying; you’re saying “I know that there are people out there who would like my book and I know who they are and where to find them.” You’re not selling yourself short; you’re being realistic and, in the process, helping your would-be publisher understand how to position your book. We like that.

Publishers often like to say that a book for everyone is a book for no one. Yes, there are books out there that have been read and loved by millions of people, but even these books have natural limits on their audience. And even those books started off with a specific audience and grew from there. One tremendously successful book of the past few years is Just Kids by Patti Smith. Patti Smith was a famous musician long before she wrote a book, so she had a built-in audience of people who were automatically interested in what she had to say. However, many people—I’d be willing to bet most people—who bought, read, and loved that book were not huge fans of Patti Smith’s music. I am one of those people. I read the book because other people read it and loved it and the story (her memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their lives in New York City in the 70s before they became famous) sounded interesting. I can’t speak to how that book was positioned or published since I didn’t work on it, but I’d be willing to bet the publisher started by targeting people who liked Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, books on 70s-era New York, and music from that era. It was only after the book gained popularity within that core fan base that it was able to spread to a more general audience.  

You see this a lot with genre-specific fiction like fantasy or YA—they become popular with a certain audience and then spill over into the general public. Maybe your book has the potential to reach a wide audience—and that’s great. But when writing your proposal, you need to think in terms of your target audience—the people who are most likely to enjoy your book—and let the publisher extrapolate from there.

As I’ve already said, the biggest mistake authors make is when they believe their book is for everyone. This becomes evident in the Who Is This Book For section when it is vague and unspecific and describes too many—sometimes polar opposite—target audiences. Sure, there is always potential for crossover and overlap, but books require an investment of time and money and there are millions of other books out there competing for a reader’s attention at any given time. You cannot count on a casual or accidental interest in order to sell your book.

To illustrate, let’s pretend we’re writing a proposal for a book about harmful ingredients in popular American foods. The author (that would be us) is a journalist who has conducted original interviews with current and former employees of some of the biggest food companies in America. We have found that many of these companies knowingly put harmful ingredients in their products in order to make their foods more addictive. They can get away with this because of powerful lobbyists who have campaigned for relaxed regulations in their sector.

This is news-breaking stuff that affects pretty much every American alive. Therefore, you might be tempted to say that your book is for “Americans ages 18-80 who consume commercially produced foods.”

Of course many Americans will be interested to know what goes into the foods they love, but not all of them will care. And even those who do care—those who may hear about your book as part of a news segment, for instance—might not care enough to shell out money to buy and read an entire book on the subject. Who are the people who will make that investment of time and money? Well, for starters, they are the people who have previously shelled out money for books about food and food production. They’re also people who are conscious about the food they buy—those who buy organic or locally produced food. Another potential target audience would be parents as people generally care more about the health of their children than they do their own. Maybe there’s some particular information in our book about additives in baby food. Yikes! With that in mind, here’s a better Who Is This Book For section for a book like this:

Readers of Michael Pollan and Michael Moss: The popularity of books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss shows that there is a large potential readership for books on American food production and an increasing interest in learning about commercially produced food [Note: you might say this is repetitive from the comps section, but, remember, you want to be careful about listing very popular books in the comps section. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was a runaway bestseller and therefore you might not want to list it as a comp, but you can list it here because its popularity indicates a potentially large audience for your book.]

Organic food advocates: Approximately 10 million people shop at Whole Foods and other organic grocery stores in America every month, and according to a recent Cornell University study, 10% of Americans say they try to buy organic when possible. In addition, 2 million Americans belong to a CSA (community-supported agriculture), up from 500,000 just a decade ago. The rise in this sort of conscious and sustainable food consumption indicates that Americans are increasingly aware of the benefit of eating whole, organic food as opposed to processed foods.

Parents: Many of the foods I discuss in my book are marketed directly to children in an effort to get them hooked on processed foods at an early age. No doubt parents who read this book will think twice before letting their kids consume these products once they read my book. I could see the book being popular with readers of parenting blogs.

A few things to note: first, the numbers in the second bullet are completely made up. I added them because the more specific you can be about the size of the potential audience, the better because it shows you’ve done your research. For the record, no publisher will think “Oh! 10 million people shop at Whole Foods and therefore we can expect to sell 10 million copies of the book!” The numbers are simply useful for context. You don’t want to laden your proposal with facts and figures, but a few carefully chosen data points can serve you well.

Perhaps I could have communicated all of the above in far fewer words than I’ve used here. But I wanted to take time on this subject because you’d really be surprised at how many people fail to describe their target audience. In sum: be specific and realize you can’t be all things to all people. If you know what your book is, and if your book is truly original and worth publishing, this should be an easy task. The right publisher will believe in your book and see its potential clearly. Trust in that and you’ll be fine.

Good luck!

How to Write a Book Proposal: Part I: Comps

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write over the coming weeks about how to write a book proposal. Given that I have worked for a major publishing house for the past seven years and that my job entails reading and vetting dozens of them on a weekly basis, I feel qualified to write this post, and, if you're an aspiring author, I hope you find it useful. If you're not an aspiring author, maybe you'll find it interesting. 

A quick disclaimer: the How to Write a Book Proposal series will not consist of step-by-step instructions on how to write a book proposal from start to finish. If you Google "how to write a book proposal," you will find dozens of websites with info on how to do just that. If you're looking for deeper information, check out one of the many books on the subject. 

Rather than giving you the soup-to-nuts skinny on writing a great proposal, I'm writing this series to talk about some of the things I, personally, pay attention to when reading a new submission. You know how some employers say that they throw out resumes with spelling errors on them because it indicates the job applicant lacks attention to detail? I don't do that (because we all make mistakes), but I do judge you harshly if your proposal does, or fails to do, certain things. I also laugh about you to my colleagues, but you will never know this because when I reject something (most often via your agent), I send a polite note saying I'm passing because "I don't feel this is a good fit for my list" or "I felt the subject was too narrow to attract a wide audience." These are, generally, my true reasons for passing on something, but they certainly don't let on that I spent a good 15 minutes reading portions of your proposal out loud to my assistant in order to entertain us both during a mid-afternoon energy slump.

Okay, to be fair, if your idea is fantastic or I love your writing style or you have a huge built-in audience who will trip over themselves to be first in line to buy your book, I would never pass on your project simply because the proposal did something that irked me. But, if you want to be safe, you will read what follows, take it to heart, and remember it when you get to writing. Okay, here we go.

In our first installment, we'll be discussing...

THE COMPS SECTION

Otherwise known as "Competition/Comparisons." In this section, you list books that are similar to your own. Generally, an author will list 4-5 similar books and include the publication information (title, author, year published, publisher, ISBN) and a paragraph explaining what that book is about and why it is a good comparison to yours. This is a section you should always include in your book proposal, for two very important reasons:

1. It makes the editor's job easier
2. If you do it correctly, it shows the editor you know your audience, understand the market, and have done your homework

First, let me explain #1. A good comps section makes my job easier because part of any editor's job is convincing her publisher (and, if she is able to acquire the book, her publicity, subrights and sales departments) that there are people out there who like to read books like this. If the editor can say, with a straight face, that this new book is similar to other successful books that have been published, it is easier to convince those around her that they should pay attention. I know every author likes to think that their book is different that it's special that there's no book quite like this one. If that's true, which it rarely is, it generally means no one wants to read it. If they did, someone would have written it already. There is a book on the market called The Idiot's Guide to Submarines. There is also a book called Crafting with Cat Hair, which I can't, for the life of me, determine is serious or ironic. So stop it. There is definitely a book like yours out there. 

Remember, publishers are businesses. Yes, they are often run by English majors who got into the business because they loved books (that is a stereotype, but it is often true), but we also have to feed ourselves. There is no real way to know if a book will sell or not sell, but one indicator that a book has a chance of selling is the fact that books like it have sold in the past. Do yourself and me a favor: include a good comps section.

Now, #2. What does it mean to do a comp section correctly? It means a few things.

• It includes books that are actually similar to yours
• It doesn't only include books that were major, category-busting bestsellers

The first item should be obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people cannot seem to do this basic thing. If you're writing a memoir about your mother's depression, you should not comp it to Angela's Ashes. Yes, they are both memoirs, but that is not the point. 

If, however, you're writing a book about growing up poor in Ireland...you still may not comp it to Angela's Ashes.

"Wait! But WHY?" you ask. "Because," I say, "Angela's Ashes was a publishing phenomenon that transformed high school teacher Frank McCourt into a literary sensation." Comping your book to it is not useful because of the second bullet above. 

As I mentioned earlier, part of the editor's job is to convince her publisher to let her acquire the book. One of the ways she does this is by positioning it within the marketplace to show that there is a potential audience out there for this very book. The second step in this process is figuring out how much to pay for the book. If you're writing a book proposal, you're likely familiar with the concept of an advance. For those who aren't, look it up, but for the sake of context, an advance is a sum of money a publisher pays an author in exchange for the rights to publish his or her book. An advance is determined by a number of things--most dramatically the number of other publishers interested in publishing the book who compete for the rights by offering higher advances than their competitors. But before a publisher offers an advance, they have to figure out how much they think the book is worth, which brings us back to comps.

Like I said, it's impossible to know exactly how much any book is worth before it is published. I have no idea how much Scribner paid for the rights to publish Angela's Ashes, but I'm sure it was a lot less than the book was actually worth considering how well it sold. On the other hand, there are countless books that receive high advances--sometimes millions of dollars--and don't end up being worth that much at all. It's a crapshoot.

The reason you should not comp your book to a huge bestseller is because it's like saying to the publisher "I think this book is like Angela's Ashes, which means I expect it to perform as well as Angela's Ashes, which means I expect a lot of money for it." This may not be your intention, but it communicates that you are either delusional or simply don't read that many books and therefore can't think of another comp except for the one that everyone already knows. 

It is much better to list 4-5 comps that have sold reasonably well and are genuinely similar to your book than to list a bunch of huge bestsellers. We go back to the first two reasons why a comp list is useful: it helps the editor and it shows you know your market.

If I have a book I want to buy and can point to a handful of books that have sold reasonably well--say between 30,000-50,000 copies--I am in good shape. That is a nice number of copies for a book to sell, so I can tell my publisher there are similar books that have sold well but they have not sold so well that they aren't useful in helping me determine how much I should spend on the advance. This number will allow me to justify spending a fair amount of money on the book, but not so much that my publisher will, say, "No way!"

So, what does a good comp section look like? I used to work on business books and got a lot of comp sections that listed books like The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, and Good to Great as comps. This was stupid for a number of reasons. For one, these books are nothing like one another except for the fact that they are often lumped together in the business section. It's like saying your novel is like The Kite Runner and The Client because they are both fiction. NO!

Also, all of these are huge bestsellers that defied the publisher's expectations in every imaginable way, so, for all the reasons I already mentioned, they are useless. 

Okay, so what should that misguided business author have done? Let's say Mr. Business Author is writing a book on running a small business. He should only include comps that are about that very thing. Some good comps he might mention are Small Giants by Bo Burlingham or The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz or Built to Sell by John Warrillow. [Full disclosure: all of those books are published by my old employer, and I worked with each of these authors at some point in my time there. I'm only calling these to attention because I know them well. There are dozens of other great books on entrepreneurship out there.] 

Mr. Business would also likely include The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, which is pretty much the go-to book on starting your own business, no matter what kind of business it is. It is a business classic and a huge bestseller, so it's not really useful for my purposes, but I wouldn't be annoyed if Mr. Business listed it because it is not so far removed from his book and shows that he (or at least his agent) understands the genre. An author is allowed to list one (maybe two) bestsellers if they are truly complementary and if he or she also lists others. Use your judgment. 

If you're writing that memoir of growing up poor in Ireland, and really can't stop yourself from mentioning Angela's Ashes, though, I still wouldn't recommend listing it in the comps section. Idea-driven non-fiction is very different from fiction or literary/narrative non-fiction, which is, generally, as much about the quality of the writing as it is about the subject. Comparing yourself to Frank McCourt is a bold move, and you will likely come off as cocky. The only acceptable place to mention this comparison is in, perhaps, the overview where you can say, "My goal is to pick up where Frank McCourt left off with Angela's Ashes. McCourt described life in Ireland in the 1930s, but in Dirty in Dublin,* I describe growing up on the outskirts of the Irish capital in the punk-fueled haze of the 1980s."

I would read that book.

I think this about covers everything I have to say about comps, except for this: read them. Before you set out to write a book, familiarize yourself with the other books out there. This will not only ensure  you have a good comps section, it will make your book better because you will know what a successful book looks like. Also, an author--especially a non-fiction one--is expected to be an expert on his or her chosen subject. A good comps section will illustrate that you actually know your audience and feel like you can write something they'd be interested in reading.

Next up, Part II: Who Is this Book For?

*Feel free to use the title Dirty in Dublin for your Irish memoir. You're welcome.