The Business of Best-Sellers

Is this summer the time to pen your best-selling book? A lawyer, editor, scientist and other career women tell how they found time to write – and how they got published.

By Kathryn Whitbourne

Along with owning a beach house and winning the lottery, writing a best-seller ranks right up there as one of our chief fantasies. Especially this time of year, while reading a beach book during a summer vacation, who among us hasn’t thought, “I could do that?”

Although the chances of making it big are small (less than 1 percent of all books published make a best-seller list, according to PublishersWeekly), each year thousands of people sit down to write books with dreams of making it big or just making an impact.

The most realistic of these literary contenders may admit they’re writing for “pleasure” only, while secretly hoping for a wider audience and the prestige of critical success, crowded book signings and a segment on Charlie Rose. It’s a dream, after all. And guess what? Despite the odds, it can happen – even to professional women with brimming lives and careers.

Pamela Samuels-Young, an attorney for Toyota Motor Sales and the author of two books, including In Firm Pursuit (Kimani Press, 2007), clocked 60 to 70 hours a week at the office while working on her books in her spare time. “If you’d told me I could’ve found time to write a book, I would’ve said no,” she says. “But I did. I wrote from 4 to 7 in the morning. I wrote on airplanes and in hotels.”

Today Kathy Reichs is the full-time author of 11 mystery best-sellers, including Devil Bones, to be published in August. But before she hit the big time, she was a full-time forensic anthropologist – and mother to three kids. “I would get up at 6 a.m. and write until 9,” she says. “I always say to [aspiring] writers, ‘You have to find the time.’ It can be terribly hard, but if you’re serious, you’ll find it.”

Sue Miller spent 10 years at a job in daycare before she could afford to write for a living. “I was a single parent, and it was convenient for me,” says the best-selling author of The Senator’s Wife (Knopf, 2008), among others. “I learned a lot about family life from seeing parents interact with their kids. And all the time I was writing.”

Was writing hard work for these professional women? No question. But like any other passion women juggle with the responsibilities of career and family, it’s the dream that keeps the work alive – and makes the sacrifices worth it. “I didn’t know anyone who made a living as a writer,” says Miller, who began submitting her work for publication at age 35. “But when my son turned 11, I looked at my life and thought, ‘You really need to try it.'”

Art Imitates Life

So you’ve decided to live your dream and write, and you’re committed to making the time, even with a busy schedule. Then you come face to face with that blank page. What do you write about?


Miller couldn’t draw on firsthand experience for The Senator’s Wife, about a philandering politician and his long-suffering wife, so she spent a lot of time on research to get her characters and settings right. It’s a good thing, since the book premieres at a time when infidelity in public office seems downright commonplace. Inauthentic writing would fall flat to readers well-acquainted with the stories of governors Eliot Spitzer, James McGreevey and David Patterson – and their wives. “I did think about Hillary Clinton, but I put it in a different time,” she says of her book’s 1960s setting. “I thought about how people’s lives were so much more private compared to now.”
 

Whether you plan to write about a ruined marriage (despite your own happiness) or the court of Catherine the Great, the first step is doing your homework. For other writers who draw from personal experience, the necessary authenticity comes much more naturally. Either way, having a unique and genuine voice makes all the difference.
   

Kate Medina, an associate publisher at Random House who has worked with top writers including Alice Walker and Amy Bloom, says the wheat separates from the chaff in her business mostly because of the writer’s voice. “I can tell in a couple of pages if a strong, true, natural writer’s voice is there,” she says. “After that, I look at things like the plot and the setting. Those can be fixed, but if the voice is not there, usually there’s not much that we can do.”
   

Reichs always liked to write and wanted to bring forensics to a wider audience. Her dual careers as both writer and forensic consultant give her books a realism that resonates with readers and critics alike. “I’m still in the lab,” she says. “The greatest praise I get is from doctors and scientists telling me I got the facts right.”
   

For Jeannette Walls, the story she had to tell was about as personal as it could be: growing up with her eccentric, nomadic family. “My family was so weird,” says Walls, who worked as a celebrity reporter at MSNBC when she wrote her best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle (Scribner, 2005). “But the emotions – like complicated relationships with parents or feeling left out as a kid – are universal.” Once, as she rode in a New York taxi on her way to a glamorous event, she saw her homeless mother on the street rooting through garbage. Walls sank down in her seat, praying that her mother wouldn’t spot her, and the story started writing itself.
   

“The best reason to write is that you have to tell the story,” she says. “If it’s honest and powerful enough, then it’ll be read.”

Making the Deal

Walls found out quickly that writing is hard work. She wrote her “bad” first draft of The Glass Castle in six weeks. “Originally I tried to fictionalize it,” she explains. “But I have no imagination. The real people kept invading.” It took her five years to revise it.

Whether it takes you months or years, once you finally have your book done, how will you know if it will sell? After all, savvy career women aren’t accustomed to working long hours and making sacrifices without receiving a payoff in the end.

Unfortunately, there is no golden formula. Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins, says she can tell instinctively when a book is good, but not necessarily if it will sell big. “It’s hard to define,” she says, “but I remember when we got The Professor and the Madman, which was about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. There was a mixed reaction to it, but I thought it would be big because it had sex and adventure in it. We sold almost a million copies.”

Still, in addition to the time and talents required, writers can make a concerted effort to improve their chances of publication and brisk sales. It can even be as simple as who you know. Reichs, for example, gave a few of her early chapters to her daughter’s friend, who was a junior editor at Scribner. “I’m sure she was thinking she would do this just to be nice to her friend’s mother,” Reichs says. “But, in fact, I got an offer in a couple of weeks.”

Miller took baby steps toward her big break by getting published first in small literary magazines, which led to an agent and some writing grants. Samuels-Young, who started writing when she got fed up with the lack of African-American women attorneys in legal thrillers, sought feedback from a friend, who said her work lacked structure. For the next three years she took writing courses and worked on her craft.

And then there’s pure luck. Charla Krupp was executive editor of the magazine Shop Etc. when a book packager, an independent liaison between writers and publishers, caught a TV segment she did on jeans for Today. “I wasn’t planning to write a book,” Krupp admits. The two of them brainstormed and decided that a book on looking 10 years younger was just what the market needed. The end result? A best-selling style guide, How Not to Look Old (Springboard Press, 2008).

Krupp’s experience highlights the one near-certainty in getting published today: the need for a representative working on your behalf – usually a literary agent. Most of the major publishers will refuse manuscripts that don’t come from an agency. More importantly, an agent can help get your book in shape for publication and will know which publishers are likely to be interested.

To find the right match, literary agent Jennifer Joel of the ICM talent agency recommends reading the acknowledgements pages of books that are similar to yours. “If the writer had a good experience, she’ll thank her agent on that page,” she says. The next step: a well-written query letter that makes the case for your project. Once the agent agrees to accept you – no small achievement – she will help prepare a book proposal and send it to publishers. She’ll also negotiate an advance – money received up front from forthcoming royalties, or share of sales – which can range from five figures to half a million dollars.

Samuels-Young got rejections from at least 12 agents until an excerpt from her book won a fiction contest, after which three agents saw potential. One ultimately sold the manuscript to an imprint that’s now part of Harlequin Books. Walls’s agent, who had sold her earlier book on celebrity gossip, loved her memoir and pitched it to two publishers. The first print run was about 40,000, but good buzz propelled sales to more than 2 million. Krupp, excited by the unexpected interest from her book packager, wrote a 65-page proposal over the course of a year. “We sent it to 12 publishers,” she says. “Eleven made offers.” Krupp’s packager, acting as an agent, landed her a six-figure advance.

Show me the Money… Maybe


It’s true that a select few authors strike it rich right away. “My agent quadrupled my original offer from my publisher,” says Reichs, who reportedly got a $1.2 million advance for a two-book deal. Others – indeed, most – have to pan for the gold.
 â€¨”I got a two-book deal for $12,000,” Samuels-Young says. “It sounds low, but I’ve met other writers who got even less.” She helped push sales of her books (more than 10,000 to date) by marketing them herself to book  clubs and even staging a reading in a bar. Similarly, Krupp listed 400 hair salons in the back of How Not to Look Old, and many of them now carry the book. “It definitely helps to have marketing connections,” she says.
Royalties range from 10 to 15 percent for hardbacks, so if a book costs $25 and the publisher sells 20,000, the writer receives up to $75,000 over the life of the book, less the amount of the advance. And that’s being optimistic. “More likely, we’d sell ten to fifteen thousand copies for a new [fiction] writer,” says Random House’s Medina. Not a huge return for a project that could consume years of your life.


But despite all the caveats, there is still room for new books – and aspiring writers with the drive to break through. “The odds can be stacked up against the new writer,” says Jennifer Joel, “but one of the greatest thrills for me is discovering someone new and enticing.”
Friedman, the CEO of HarperCollins, agrees. “We’re always looking for good books. Reading for pleasure is an old pastime. It has always been a part of life and always will be.”
 


Get writing! Still have that half-finished novel in your desk drawer? Writers and publishers offer these four tips for getting it finished.

Write for a designated length of time every day. “I don’t believe in writer’s block,” says Kathy Reichs, author of Devil Bones. “You have to sit there and write for that three-hour period every day.”

Get honest feedback. “Make sure your book is as good as you think it is,” says Pamela Samuels-Young, author of In Firm Pursuit, who sent hers to book clubs and friends for feedback. “You don’t just want to hear, ‘I liked it.’ I’m listening for ‘I couldn’t put it down.'”

Read the book aloud yourself. Kate Medina, associate publisher for Random House, says you’ll hear false notes and repetitions when you read your work out loud. “A lot of writers I work with do this. Listen to your heart and work with your natural voice.”

Revise, revise, revise. Writing is a skill, advises literary agent Jennifer Joel, so keep writing and rewriting. “Some writers don’t think as much as they should about the reader’s experience [when reading their work],” she says.

This article originally appeared in the July.August 2008 issue of PINK Magazine.