Transcript – Page 5 – Dream of Travel Writing Products and Services

This week we’re gonna talk about the final parts of the book proposal, not necessarily in order, but in terms of what we’ve covered so far. And I think several of you who are on here have probably caught most of the ones that we’ve done in this series already. So if you have not, I’m gonna go back through, just so you know what the other sections are and which webinars you can find them with.

So, today we’re gonna cover what I have termed the parts of your book proposal about you and your book and why they’re actually much less important. So specifically, as we go through, obviously, we’re gonna talk about these particular parts of the book proposal that are about you and about your book. But I’m gonna begin by explaining why it is that these are the least important and what I mean by that.

And what I really mean is that they should be the least of your worries, as in these are the parts that people tend to spend quite a bit of time obsessing about, for lack of a better word, but these will not sink you in the same way that not spending due time and doing it first, spending the time on finding where you are in the marketplace, figuring out the target audience for your book, and thinking of how you could possibly market this book could potentially sink you. Those ones have a much larger effect. So those are things that you need to get clarified first.

And then what we’re gonna talk about today is kind of the gravy at the end. Those are the things that you’ve probably already been thinking quite a bit about, about what goes into your book and all that, but those come much easier. And to be honest, with a nonfiction book, as we talked about in the first webinar in this series, you’re not writing the whole thing before you’re getting paid. You’re getting an advance from a publisher before you actually dive into most of the writing of the book.

So if you’re spending too much time thinking about…whether it’s your author bio or your sample chapters, then you are doing yourself a disservice because that time might be wasted if you can’t get a buyer for your book. So I’m gonna go back through, like I said, and look at the different sections and tell you where in the webinar series you can find the ones that we have discussed in the past. And then we’re gonna move through the following four. We’re gonna look at your author bio. We’re gonna look at your chapter summaries. We’re gonna look at your sample chapters and how to put together your overview, which is actually the very first thing in your proposal.

So I’ve actually had several chats with people recently who are very much in this market. I have, about two weeks ago, been at a really lovely writer’s conference. And then I met with a friend who runs the DIY MFA program recently. So I’m also gonna loop in a couple other thought leaders, if you will, during the talk today, because that’s one of the things that I like to do in general, is to loop in perspectives of what’s going on in the industry overall. And I spend quite a bit of time in the book industry. I don’t talk about it quite so much.

So one of the great things about this series is that I’m bringing to you not just my own experience, but those of editors, agents. I had a two-hour long chat with a very, very significant agent the other day. And I recently sat down with somebody who used to be a book editor and now he’s on the agenting side, and he also helps people with their book proposals. So I’m bringing all of that together for you guys in this webinar. But we’ve got four different sections of your proposal to talk about today.

So let’s dive in. But first, how is it that the parts of your book proposal…so your book proposal, right, that are about your book and about you as the author can possibly be less important than everything else? It just seems silly, and that’s why so many authors spend so much time obsessing about their…particularly fiction authors, it will be character and plot, right. But with nonfiction authors, they’ll obsess about, you know, getting it done, writing the chapters, doing the research. But the problem is if that you haven’t lined up your idea, if you’re not very clear in your idea, if you’re not very clear that that idea has resonance in the marketplace… What that means is that there’s books that are similar but different, right?

So you want to make sure… Editors hate it when you say that there’s no other book out like this out there. That’s their least favorite thing to hear. In fact, they basically write you off immediately, editors or agents, when they see such words. Because if you think that there is no other books like this, then it either means that you haven’t done enough research and that there’s probably…in the agent or editor’s mind, they’re envisioning that there is 12 other books just like this and they probably haven’t sold very well. Or, if there is truly no other book like this out here that not even comparable… So let’s say you were the first person to do one of these meditative coloring books. I can’t imagine how hard of a sell that was.

Not only is there truly not any coloring book for adults in the market, but it’s also a weird size of a book. It’s a weird type of printing. They usually tend to have different covers. They have colors. I can’t imagine how hard of a sell that was. And I bet that book only came out because that person already had an existing online platform, or maybe because there had been self-published books that were similar beforehand. Because if there is truly no book that bears any resemblance, however remote, however tangential, however sort of cross-genre, cross-industry, or in the case of travel writing, that there’s not been a similar story in another country, or a similar story told in fiction but not nonfiction…

These are usually more the cases for us as travel writers. If that is truly the case, then publishing houses won’t touch you. And by proxy, neither will agents because they know they can’t sell your book. And that’s because if it hasn’t been done, there’s no proof that people will pay for it. And so no publishing house is gonna take on that gamble. Because it’s not just that $20,000 or $50,000 that they’re paying you upfront. It’s also the salaries of the publicist, the marketing team, the sales team, and of course, your editor and the copy editors and other people involved in editing that are also on the line for that book.

So that’s the idea. You have to have an idea that will be purchased. But you also have to know who is out there that will buy this book and if there are enough of them that it makes sense for the publisher to invest all of that money, because they will have the potential to get back later. And once you know that there are enough of those people, you also have to show the publisher that you have a plan for reaching them. Because if none of those things are there, you can have the most delightful writing, the most lovely and compelling idea, but an agent, and then by proxy, again, a publishing house won’t touch it because they don’t know how to sell it. They don’t know how to earn money on it. And at the end of the day, all of the people in this industry are in it for some amount of passion, but it is also their job. They work for somebody who is paying them to do these things.

So even though, obviously, the writing, what goes into your book, even though all of these things matter, the way to think about it is that they matter later. They matter after your book has been sold. So you need to concentrate, as we did in the earlier three webinars in this series, on the business case of your book before you have the luxury as well of thinking about all of those things. And what you’ll actually find, the really beautiful thing about working in this seemingly backwards kind of way, is that as you’ve been familiarizing yourself with the larger market of books, and what’s being published, and what that looks like, and how different authors have presented these ideas, the more specific market of who you want to reach, and what they are interested in, and where they hang out, and what else they’re interested in besides your book, and what kind of groups they congregate in, and where they live online, and then the types of places that you can find them, how you can get out in front of them, what blogs they read, what podcasts they listen to, you will have such a great and clear idea of how to present…the lens through which to present the idea for your book that you originally had, that all of these sections that we’re gonna go through today are gonna be so much easier.

So the most important thing is to remember that this is a business deal to get your book out into the market, and that in a business deal, the business case is always going ultimately be the deciding factor, okay? And that’s why as, you know, mercenary or… As I was chatting with somebody the other day, the origin of the word mercenary is actually freelance. Freelance has the same origin as mercenary in terms of being a free lance, so a lance or a knight that was not attached to a particular allegiance or liege. So it might sound a bit mercenary, but this is the way that everyone else who touches your book will work.

So if you are not also shrewdly thinking about your book’s business case and how best to position for a business deal, then you’re doing your idea a disservice because it won’t get out in the world, and it will never have the opportunity to impact other people.

So enough doom and gloom. Let’s talk about how to finish up your proposal. So these, again, are the seven sections of the book proposal. The overview, or you can think of it in a way as the introduction, as what comes first. It positions your idea. And that’s followed by the comparative titles, which position your idea in the market. And that’s followed by the target market or target audience. That speaks about the people who will be reading your book. And the marketing plan, which is the way in which you will reach them, which is followed by your author bio, which talks about where you already are, as opposed to where you’re planning to go with this book, followed by the table of contents, or the chapter summaries is another thing that people often call, and the sample chapters.

So as you’ll see here, even the way that the nonfiction book proposal is put together is, in many ways except that we skipped the overview, following what we talked about, because these are the first things that people need to read. And so as I mentioned, we skipped the overview because you wanna write this last. Comparative titles, we already talked about. We talked that in the first webinar in the series. The target market or target audience, we talked about in the second webinar in the series. And the marketing plan, we just talked about in the last webinar, which feels like it was last week. I think it was last week, the last webinar that we did in the series, so the third webinar.

So that means that this week we’re gonna be talking about the overview. But since you write this last, we’re gonna do it last today as well, and you’ll see why when we get there. And the author bio, the table of contents, and the sample chapters, so these are gonna be the things that we’re diving into today. So starting with the author bio, now, I’ve seen some very similar things to what happens with the author bio happening when you guys are writing pitches for magazine articles.

You fret quite a bit about what needs to be in there in the vein of, “Am I good enough? Is this clip important enough? Do I have enough to say here?” And when I teach you to write the about you paragraph, as we call it, for pitches, I talk about hewing very specifically to the information that is important for the particular piece at hand. So even when you’re talking about what you’ve written before, you wanna either talk about the magazines that are most relatable to the current magazine and you can throw a big one in there if you have a whopping, very impressive title in your repertoire. But most importantly you want to show the editor that you’ve written for other magazines that are similar, that you can do the work that is set out.

Then you’re gonna talk about your relationship to the particular topic. If you’re pitching a piece about throat singing in Mongolia, then it would be very beneficial if you had in fact witnessed throat singing in Mongolia, and even more so if you already talked to experts about it. So those are the kind of things that you would put in the about you portion of your author bio…or, sorry, of your pitch for a magazine. And it’s not all that different for your author bio. It’s not so much about you as a person as it is about you as a potential business partner in this potential business deal.

So what does that mean? How are you showing yourself as a potential business partner in this potential business deal? I’m gonna show you a couple dos and don’t dos from somebody who has been on both the editor and agent side of things. But the important framework to remember here is that, even as you are talking about you, you are talking about the parts of you, the aspects of you, the characteristics of you, the past history of you, the past jobs of you, the past publication credits of you that are most relevant to this specific business deal. So just like with magazines, you wanna talk about the writing that you’ve done that is most relevant to this. Not very important here, all of the writing, or writing education, or MFAs, or whatever it is that you have ever done. This is not a kitchen-sink author bio, okay. This is very important.

Now, I mentioned I had met with a friend recently who was previously an agent…or, sorry, an editor for a quite major publishing house that publishes quite big authors. And he’s recently struck out on his own and is now doing book proposal reviews for authors, and he is also agenting.So he’s also representing authors in the capacity of an agent connected with an agency. So this is something that he said on his blog that I thought was really interesting. Because, remember, I told you before that we started with all of this marketing information, the marketing plan, the competitive titles, all of these things, that we did all of that first for all these different reasons. And yet, Chad says, “Regardless of where it’s located in the proposal, I usually flip to it,” being the author bio, “right after I read the cover page, and I doubt I’m the only one.”

You know, this is so interesting because if there’s all this great information showing the business case for the book, and I’m telling you that the business case for the book is the most important part, then why is he reading the author bio first? It is absolutely not the reason that you think. It’s not because you and who you are and whatnot is the single most important thing, and that if you don’t have enough this or enough that, that he won’t read the rest of your proposal. The interesting thing here is that it’s because the author bio is typically gonna be the most poorly-written part of the book proposal in terms of showing that you are a good business partner, in terms of showing the business case for you and your book. And it sounds weird when I say it like that, and so I really wanna make sure that you guys understand this.

The author bio, even though it’s about you, says so much in this subconscious psychological way to an agent or the person who intercepts it first before you ever make it to an agent…or, sorry, to an editor or to an agent, who is who you would work with before you would ever get to an agent. The author bio says so much about how you think, how you work, how you view your work, how you understand the marketplace, how you understand your position within the marketplace, how you understand how to position yourself within the marketplace, and how you understand how you present yourself as a business case.

And this is really important because if an agent and then an editor is gonna take you on, there is quite a bit, as we talked about last week in the webinar on the marketing plan, there’s quite a bit of work that comes to you that falls to you to present yourself appropriately in the world, whether it’s speaking, or taking on yourself, organizing events, or being partners with people to do such things. So if you are not able to market yourself and you’re not able to understand how to describe something that you know much better than your book, something that’s complete and already exists in the world, unlike your book, if you are not able to describe yourself, how will you represent your book?

Now, this is not to say that where you exist in the larger market is not also important to an editor, an agent. And so this is really important because I’ve seen a lot of folks.. I just have been talking with somebody about this recently, who try to get their books going when they aren’t ready, when they would be better-served by building up what book publishing folks love to call platform. And working on your author bio last, after you’ve worked on all these other marketing materials, you will already understand where you are currently not showing up in what your platform will need to be for your book.

So if you did this first, it’s very easy to write where you are now and not see the gap, and not see how you might need to change what you do or don’t put in your bio to reflect the space between where you are now and where you will need to be, for lack of a better word, exhibiting yourself and your work down the line. So quote from same person here but from a different source, so he says, “As a publisher, I want to know that you’ve written some things that have been published.” Now, this is very vague intentionally on many levels.

So he wrote, “Some things.” He didn’t say how important the things are. He didn’t say what type of things they needed to be. He didn’t say how many, how long, what scale, what scope, what type. He didn’t say any of that. And he said, “That have been published.” He very clearly and specifically… He’s an editor, right. He cares about word choice. Did not say that you need to have been published X, Y, Z places, or that you need to have been published regularly, or that you need to have been published for a certain period of time. So this is really important to remember, that as you are writing your author bio, you are not needing to be in thousands of places.

Just like when we write our about me paragraph for a magazine editor, we are showing them that we’ve been published before, and preferably in magazines similar to theirs, simply to show them that we understand how it works and to provide this sort of, you know, what we all go to Yelp for, right, the sort of peer review of other people’s social trust to show that other people have trusted us to publish things that we have actually turned in that have come out in the marketplace before. Now, he continues to say, “I want to know where to place you within the marketplace.” And he says, “Affiliations and networks and what your platform is like.”

Now, when people in publishing say, “What your platform is like,” a few years ago, this meant how many Twitter followers you had. And in recent years, the publishing industry has realized that, A, Twitter is not the most valuable of all the social networks in the world, but, B, that engagement is more important, and even more than that, serious relationships are more important. Because the number of blog readers, or of Twitter followers you have, or of Instagram followers you have, does not directly translate into book sales. And so when Chad here says he wants to know what your platform is like, it’s not by accident that right above that he mentions your affiliations and network.

So let’s say, for instance, that you went to a university that has a very, very strong alumni culture, that has book clubs in many of its alumni chapters. This would be a network and affiliation that you can mention that is part of your platform, that you are a member of this thing, that it has a book club, and you plan to pursue promotion of your book within that book club, okay? So this is where all that work that we did with the marketing plan is important because it’s helping you to know what connections you already have that you need to be mentioning that you are a member of when you write up your bio. And these things, they change so much over time, right? So it might now be that you’re a moderator of an influential Facebook group. It might be that one of the things that you do for work besides your own writing is that you do some sort of operations admin stuff for another business owner who has a big podcast.

There are affiliations and networks that you can put in here that you might not necessarily think of until you went through all that marketing rigmarole that can be very important, because I see a really unfortunate thing happen time and time again. Sometimes it’s in article pitches, and sometimes it’s when people are, say, at conferences pitching in a speed-dating type capacity to DMOs or brands or things like that. And what happens is that there’s an interaction, and the writer comes away, and they talk about all of the reasons why the person was wrong to reject them or to not be interested in their idea or whatever it is.

In that moment is when they say all of these things about themselves. For instance, perhaps they actually have a PhD in the subject related to this idea. And during their dissertation, they talked to top specialists in this field, and so they’ve actually been studying it for six years, and it’s very close to their heart, and all these things. But they didn’t say a lick of that in their pitch or when they were talking to the person during speed dating.

Now, these are places where we’re tight on space. We’re tight on time. If it’s in-person pitching, you might be stressed out. But these are the things that you need to lead with. And so that’s why as you do your author bio, it doesn’t matter overall the size of your platform compared to the Kim Kardashians or the George R.R. Martins of the world, okay? It matters how adept your current affiliations and networks are from marketing the book that you wanna propose, and that stuff doesn’t just go in your marketing plan. It also shows up here in your bio. So when I say, “Shows up here in your bio,” what does that actually look like?

So this is something that I pulled from Chad as well. You’ll hear from him later. We’re gonna be doing a partner webinar with him on book proposals for our whole email list as well. And here are his do-not-dos for your author bio. He has quite a bit to say on this. As I mentioned, he’s quite passionate about the topic of author bios. So he does not want it to be more than 250 words, so that’s basically one page. So he doesn’t want to see anything more than one page of about you in your entire book proposal, which with your sample chapters will usually be somewhere between 20 and 60 pages, depending on what type of book it is.

Now, a bad author bio doesn’t say anything about why the author is a credible source for the book’s content. This is what I was just mentioning to you about those people who pitch something, and then when they get rejected, say all of the reasons why it was a bad idea to reject them. But they didn’t say any of those reasons in that pitch. This happens in the author bio all the time. After the length, it’s one of the very first thing that Chad harps upon. Now, this next one is really interesting. He says that, “The bio should not hide the author’s main vocational role.” And what he means by this is an author who has a day job doing something else who’s also doing this book and sort of tries to make themselves sound like they are full-time when they are actually doing something else, that looks disingenuous. And that is why it’s a no, no. It seems like, “Well, should I really put it there? It doesn’t matter. There’s only a certain amount of words.” But it’s not that hard to just say, “I’m a such and such at place and place.” And if you don’t put it in there, then it looks like you are hiding something. That’s Chad’s point.

Now, Chad also has another point in here about how he really wants you to also come across in your bio as a person. So he wants you to mention what you are passionate about, but not in more than one sentence, and not in a way that is confusing. So this ties into something he has lowered down, which is not to overdo the humor. And so the way all these things fit together is that he wants you to have a sentence in there where, as I read in one bio I was looking up when I was/ doing some research for this webinar today, you might say, for instance, that when you’re not writing, you might be found trying to make it through the 17 open tabs in your Firefox browser or walking your dog on the beach, or something like that, okay? Now, the 17 open tabs in your Firefox browser is an appropriate amount of humor. If you said that and then said or walking your dog through the swamp because you live in the bayou and there’s really no appropriate place to walk your dog, you’ve lost, like, that little chuckle, and now you’re kind of going down a different track, okay?

So a little bit of humor, a little bit of personality, a little bit of what you’re passionate about that might not be this book is important for showing that you are a well-rounded, interesting person that your agent and editor want to interact with, but you do not wanna go overboard. That’s kind of the one place where you go outside of the scope of your book, and that’s it. Now, you’ll see two more in here. “A bad bio does not refer to relevant accomplishments, and it does not refer to the author’s ability to reach readers.” And these two tie back into what we were talking about before. But it’s interesting that he has them separate.

So he says, “A bad bio says nothing about why the author is a credible source,” but then he later goes on to say, “It also doesn’t share relevant accomplishments or refer to the author’s ability to reach readers.” So this means that all of these things that we talked about in the marketing plan, like I said, you need to show how the networks and affiliations that you already have…you need to put that in the bio as well. There is no end to the number of times that you should be mentioning your ability to get your book in front of readers in this proposal. You’ll see when we talk later about the overview, every part of your proposal basically is showing how this book will be gotten to readers by you, by not just the power of your words, but also the power of your ability to market your own book and to take advantage of the network and affiliations that you already have.

Now, the last one here, I think, is quite important. And he said this in a different blog post, but I thought it was relevant here. He says that, “Your bio should not be arrogant or otherwise off-putting.” And how many of us have read those bios, whether it’s of a speaker, or of a professor, or, I don’t know, like, a president of a country, I don’t know, somebody who is quite important, and there’s something in the bio that’s just not… It’s not that it’s not fun, but it just kind of makes you not like the person, right?

There is something in the bio that just makes them seem, like, you know, they’re chiseled out of marble and they’re some figure out of history rather than a real flesh and blood actual person. They become more of an abstract. And that’s why he has these things in here about talking about your passions and about humor and things like that as well., because when you go too far with…I don’t wanna say the pomposity, but when you go too far with your accomplishments, there’s kind of an automatic psychological thing that happens where the reader is gonna want to think less of you to compensate for how well you are thinking of yourself.
So that’s something to keep in mind, but that I don’t want you guys to stress about overly. Because when he is saying, “To be arrogant or otherwise off-putting,” it’s the kind of thing where if you’re having anybody read your proposal, they will point this out to you. I would think it would be very rare for anybody that I know, anybody who follows us to be in the position where they’re sounding too arrogant or off-putting.

So on the flip side about what to do, that means we wanna spend less than a page, less than 250 words, and begin with the role that is relevant to your book. So what does that mean? It means begin with some sort of job function or life function that you have had that is relevant to your book. So it means don’t move in chronological order through everything you’ve ever done. It means launch into the thing most relevant to what’s happening with your book. You wanna make sure to also say what you do now, but then reference accomplishments that are relevant, reference your ability to reach readers, reference your affiliations and networks, and then at the end, briefly tell the agent and publisher what you’re passionate about with a tad of humor.

Or if you feel like you can’t quite nail that, you can always go with more sort of vulnerability, personability about your family. I see this come off really well with a lot of people who would otherwise come off as very…to go back to last slide, come off as rather arrogant or otherwise off-putting. I see them wrap up their very impressive-sounding bios by talking about their family and their kids in a way that really brings them down to earth.

So if that’s your bio, that’s your author part, then after… I’m not going all the way back, but if you remember when we had…or maybe I will just go back. So the structure of your book proposal, again, it’s gonna start with that overview, which we’re gonna skip and come back to last. It’s then going through the comparative titles, which is positioning in the market, your target market, your marketing plan, and then the author bio, which we just talked about. And now only finally at the very end of the proposal do we talk about the actual content of your book, okay? So the table of contents comes next, followed by the sample chapter. And as I mentioned earlier, the table of contents is also frequently what’s referred to as the chapter summaries.

Now, the chapter summaries are something that, again, you can spend so very much time laboring over. You really can. I’ve seen people do this. And it comes most often, I’ve seen, when people spend a lot of time laboring over their chapter summaries, it comes from a lack of clarity about what should be in the book in the first place. Because here again, we’re talking about nonfiction, where you have not written the book in advance, which means that you don’t yet know what’s gonna go in the book. If you’re writing fiction, you’re not putting together a book proposal in this way, and your book is already finished. So I hope you know how the book ends. But in nonfiction, you don’t have to know yet.

So what that means is you can just have this idea and have this loose framework for what can go in there, and then write up this proposal. But what that means is that if you aren’t okay with the looseness of your framework of what’s gonna go in there, you can just kill yourself with questioning and self-doubt as you work on these chapter summaries. So a good way to think about your chapter summaries, particularly if you’re already working on something and you’re trying to outline your book or you’re trying to think about, you know, how you would write it or where you would start doing research or whatever… I heard a really nice methodology for this at the conference the other day.

So the gentleman said…basically did…it’s so old school. It’s mind mapping. And he said, “There is nothing new about mind mapping except you actually sitting down and doing it,” which got quite a chuckle, but it’s so true.When was the last time that you sat down with a blank sheet of paper and a pen and made yourself some lines and circles and made a proper actual free-form mind map rather than doing something on your computer? And if you have a mind map app that you actually use, bless you. But I find that trying to do a mind map on the computer, you just, as you’re having idea after idea, you just get limited with, “How do I add a new thing here? Oh, no, I’m out of lines here.” And it’s so much better to do it on a piece of paper.

So like he said, “There is nothing new about mind mapping except for doing it.” And yet, this guy uses mind mapping like this to write books in entire weekends regularly, which sounds bonkers. But what he basically said is the average person speaks about a 100 words a minute. So if you think about it, that’s 600 words in an hour and…sorry, that’s 6,000 words an hour. Sorry, sorry, pardon my math. Six thousand words in an hour, which is actually about…let me tell you how many pages that is. It is about 24 pages. And I can tell you for a fact that when we get the transcription back for these webinars, they’re pretty much always between, say, like, absolute low-end if, God forbid, or rather unusually, I’m talking slowly, they might be 18 pages. But they’re usually up around 20, 24, 27, maybe 32 pages. So if you are talking, for instance, you can get 32 pages out in one hour, which just means it’s a matter of hours of sitting there and dictating your book.

So this guy is able to write entire books in one weekend by doing mind mapping. And here’s how it works, is that at the center of his mind map sheet, he writes a topic of his book. And then he has the different things coming off, and he just writes down everything. He writes down everything he can think of that’s important to his book. He just writes, and writes, and writes, and he just fills out everything he can think of. And then he looks at that. Now that the brainstorming faucet has emptied, he looks back at it with a pattern recognition, kind of organizational viewpoint. And he looks at it and he says “Okay, what are 7 to 14 big things here?” Now, if you already have a bunch of different ones that surpass seven, you can take those and then you just have your chapters right there, and you can go from there.

But an easier way to do it that he said is to take seven of them and think of those as more like sections, and then think of three to five rallying points underneath each of those. Again, you can mind map those, or you probably already have them on your first mind map. And then, now you have, you know, somewhere between 20 and 40 different chapters. And those chapters aren’t gonna be terribly long. They’re gonna be 1,000 or 2,000 words, which for most of us these days is a blog post or a magazine article. And then what he does is he sits down and he minds map each of those chapters, and he gets a list of points. And he organizes those into a way that make sense, and those are his subheads and then he just sits down and writes those chapters.

So this is the way he mind maps out a whole book. And the way that this relates to our chapter summaries is that if you’ve got your book idea, if you’ve done your market research, if you’ve been doing research on your book, and you know how the research you’ve done for your book intersects with what the people who would read your book want to be reading about, and what they’re interested in, and the way that they want to see information, then you sit down and you make a little mind map. Because now somewhere in your subconscious is hidden that perfect combination of what the people will want to read and what you already know about the topic, what you can write about, and you see what comes out on the page.

And from there, you will look for what are the most important things. What did you write the most things about, so and so forth, and those are your chapters. And if you’re writing the kind of book which is more prescriptive…so that means you’re teaching somebody something, or in the case of somebody actually who’s on this webinar today, hi, Tanya, if you’re writing something which is more akin to a collection of interesting places, you’ll have spilled out a bunch of names. And you can look and see what rallies there. How would you group those places together? What are the main different types of interesting places you have? And then you have your chapters.

Because one of the things about the chapter summaries is people will agonize about what to write in the summary part, but it’s the chapter titles and subtitles that matter much, much more, okay? Chapter titles and subtitles matter much more. Am I saying that you need to have clever chapters and subtitles? No. I’m not saying that they need to be clever. What really matters is the selection of them, that they…because they’re not gonna be permanent. They will change as you’re working with an editor on your book. But that they give a representation quickly, easily, succinctly, and in a way that an agent can nod their head along, whether an editor can nod their head along with to what the book will cover, which starts to fill in the picture for the agent or the editor of how your book comes to market, of who will read this book, of who will be interested in it.

So the particular things that you choose for your chapters to be about, in many ways, are much, much more important than what you write in the summary. And as you’re working on the summaries, there are some certain characteristics that, as long as you do this way, you’re fine. They should be written in present tense. They should use active voice. They should not run more than 200 words per chapter. And if you have a lot of chapters, then they should obviously be fewer words per chapter summary. And the words that you use should also be quite pithy, okay? You should use the fewest possible words. This is really important because I find that in chapter summaries tend to be the place where people lose the thread.

And when I say lose the thread here, what I mean is that it’s the place where they start to put too much information about what will happen in the eventual book in such a way that someone who’s doing sort of a skimming or a quick read job of your proposal will start to get confused. And we don’t want to confuse them. We don’t want them to think that we’re trying to do too many things in one place, because that’s where we lose that buy-in of the agent and editor that we’re a good business partner for them, because they think that we don’t have clarity of purpose and that, “If it’s like this in the short setting of the chapter summaries, what will it look like in the chapters and how difficult will it be to unravel that mess?” So you want to write them and then chop them, chop them, chop them ruthlessly until they are really just the most succinct way of saying what you’re gonna cover.

So two other tips here, one is to highlight the marketable aspects of the chapter. What do I mean by that? If you were to write sort of a bit of marketing bullets about your book and what it covers, what would those things be? What would be the big takeaways for people from reading your book? What are the most shining examples? Whatever those things are, whatever would be in the marketing takeaway of bullets from your book, those should be, for sure, in the chapter summary. And the same way that when we’re talking about the author bios people tend to leave out those things that are the best examples for their case.

Now, the thing that I had on here first but I’m actually mentioning last, oddly, is reference one narrative per chapter. And I saved that for the end because it’s kind of a hard thing, I think, sometimes to grasp when you’re working on a nonfiction book or a nonfiction book proposal that is not of a narrative nature. Now, if you’re writing a narrative book, I hope that you’ve taken some time on the side to read a bit about story arcs and creating scenes and different things like that. Paula Munier has a great book called “Plot Perfect.” And Jordan…gosh, I always blank on her last name, but she is so easy to find online. Jordan has this book, “Make a Scene,” which is all about scenes. And she’s super, super active about sharing words of wisdom on Twitter and stuff. So if you’re interested in scene work, you can follow her. But Paula has a really wonderful book about plot as well, Paula Munier, “Plot Perfect.”

So if you are writing a narrative book and you have questions about narrative, that’s a whole other topic for a much longer sort of diversion into that. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t apply to you if you are writing a not-narrative travel book. So what do I mean by that? That would be… We’ve got a gentleman who’s in the coaching program who’s got this numeric, kind of analytical way to decide what country you’re gonna go to next. He’s developed an index around this. We’ve got somebody else in coaching who’s working on a book about interesting quirky things to do. I believe it’s just in Tokyo but it might be in all of Japan. And she’s got a collection, almost, like, a guide book of interesting things that she’s working on. Now, both of these not being narrative in nature, how do you translate that in these chapter summaries to give one narrative per chapter?

What that means is that you need to think about in each chapter that you have how…like we talk about when we’re talking about narratives for feature articles of a narrative nature, how do you want the reader to be transformed at the end of this chapter? What do you want them to have learned? What do you want them to have understood? That is really the narrative arc for each chapter. So if the arc that you’re building in a particular point is, “A certain place isn’t as dangerous as people think it is,” or, “A certain place is really the most welcoming place on earth, and it will change your view of humanity to go there,” or, “If a certain place is…” I’m trying to think. “If a certain place is over-hyped but there are places in that country you can go where you will have exactly the experience you’ve always dreamed about,” whatever that is, that is your arc. That is what, over the course of a chapter, you’re trying to convince people of.

If you’re doing a book that’s really a collection-y in nature, then what you’re trying to convince people of might be something more in that same horizon-expanding vein, but about each individual thing. So if you have one chapter that’s about one thing, it might be that, “This is something that you should explore that you hadn’t thought about before,” or that, “This is a new trend that you wanna take advantage of before it’s big,” whatever that is, but it’s important even with these less-narrative nonfiction books to think about that.

Now, if you do have a narrative nonfiction book, you wanna think about, for the chapter summaries, thinking about one arc. So what that means is kind of one…they call it long line and short line in fiction writing. And so what that means is kind of the length of a narrative arc that’s happening. So a short line is a narrative that has a beginning and a middle and end which is shorter than the length of a book. And a long line is a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and an end that transcends the whole book, okay?

So if you’re writing a narrative book, then you wanna think about which piece of tension gets resolved in each chapter, or what….if it’s not a piece of tension getting resolved, what movement does the character have, what realization, what transformation, what resolution does the character have in this chapter? How does this wrap up with a nice bow for them to move on to what’s next? And that’s the one narrative per chapter that you wanna talk about in your chapter summaries. And those are things that you should be able to express without going…like I said, don’t be confusing, without going into too much detail about how that thing wraps up, by just saying, you know, “This is a chapter in which I, the protagonist, whoever the protagonist is, you know, find my place and my guides for understanding the society that I’m in and begin to feel comfortable in my own skin again,” whatever that is, okay, but it doesn’t have to go on for multiple sentences of place setting and actions and explanations. It should just be explaining the narrative arc in that particular chapter.

So speaking of chapters, we’ve got these chapter summaries, but what about the chapters you have to include in your book? Now, if you’ve gotten far enough along with your book idea and you’re not such a ballsy person that you’re like, “I have a book idea. Let me write a proposal,” which I don’t think that most of you who follow me who are super, super…considered very thoughtful and typically self-doubt-inflicted folks would have done. But your sample chapters that you might already have might still not be the ones that you want to include with your book proposal. This is really important. Even if you have done some work on your book already, you might be wanting to write a different sample chapter for your proposal, and here’s why.

If you are writing a narrative book, then you need to use the beginning chapters. If your book is not narrative, and so that’s usually in the book publishing world called prescriptive, so you’re telling people how to do something, then you do not want to use the intro, because the intro in those kind of books tends to be much more scene setting. If you’re writing a book that’s prescriptive in nature, you wanna use the strongest, meatiest chapter that will best show off of what you wanna do with this book, what you wanna include, and the types of things that you wanna showcase. So it’s a very simple binary decision. Now, unfortunately for all of those of us working on narrative books, the beginning, next to the end, is just about the hardest freaking thing to do. So I apologize for you that that’s the case.

And if you are in that position and you haven’t already thought so much about the beginning of your piece, there’s a lot of resources out there about best first pages, and good first pages, and how to bring people in, and how to do the scene setting, and how to get the action moving. There’s a lot of resources on the fiction side that are really helpful if you’re writing a narrative work. And so I apologize profusely if you are writing a narrative book of travel writing, but you do have to start with a beginning. And unfortunately the beginning is very hard, but you’ll be very happy to have a beautiful polish beginning already ready by the time you then have to sit down and write the rest your book. Because then the only thing to stress out about is the ending. But if you’re writing a prescriptive book, if you’re writing a more how-to or helpful or guide-oriented book, then you want to choose your strongest chapter.

Now, I told you it comes last and also that we were gonna talk about last, and that’s for many of reasons. The overview, you simply cannot write an overview that will serve you well if you have not done all of this other work, including the chapter summaries, including the sample chapters, including your author bio, including the marketing plan, including researching your target audience, and including doing your competitive research. You simply cannot write the overview that your book proposal needs to do it justice until you have done those things. It’s not possible, and it’s not possible because your overview needs to be the executive summary of your whole proposal. It needs to be, in brief, your entire proposal.

So if you haven’t yet done some parts of your proposal, you simply have no business doing the summary of it. So please, please, please, I left this till the absolute end of this whole proposal series because I don’t want any of you to sit there, staring at the blank page of the first page of your proposal, and thinking that you have no idea what to write, because then you will never write the proposal because you won’t know what to write in that overview on that first page of your book proposal until you’ve written the rest of it, unfortunately. So what does that mean? Let me give you a formula for what your overview needs to weave in.

First and foremost, you need to be exquisitely careful that you are not making any assumptions here about the knowledge of your reader. Now, after you have spent all of this time immersing yourself in all of this on your book proposal, that can be very difficult. So the overview is the part of your book proposal that I most recommend that you get several different pairs of eyes on to make sure that you’re not being confusing and that you’re not making assumptions. And some people will be very polite and not point out to you the things that they don’t understand, so make sure that you ask specifically, “Is there anything here where you weren’t sure what I meant or where it seems like I assumed that you knew something?” Okay?

Now, at the beginning, the beginning of the beginning, the beginning of your overview, you want to introduce not your topic. You don’t want to introduce your story. You don’t want to introduce your characters or your places or whatever. You wanna introduce your book through the lens of the relevance of your book’s topic to the world. So this can be including the numbers that we found when we were looking up our target market. This can be including sort of the positioning between other competitive books. It can take into account so many different pieces of the research that we’ve already done already. But it’s very important to introduce your book and your overview through the lens of establishing the relevance of your book’s topic to the world.

You can do this in all of the classic ways that we do leads in writing. You can do it with statistics. You can do it with shocking facts. You can do it with anecdotes. You can even do it in media res of a story if you really, really want, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that one here. But those are all the typical leads.

And then you want to migrate into why people will pay to read about this. So you’re continuing to establish the relevance to the world by establishing the size of the paying readership by discussing their need, by showing why people need this book, by showing that there isn’t a book like this in the marketplace. So that goes back to competitive research. So this is where, for sure, you’re gonna be positioning yourself between other books that are popular and other books that have done well that are already out, and pointing out what is the gap in that space and how your book will fill it.

And then that’s a natural segue into what your book will cover, because this is where we’re talking about how your book will fill it. Now, you should not talk on a chapter-by-chapter level. This is where it’s really beneficial to have thought as you’re writing your chapter summaries, “What are the bullet points that would go from marketing this book?” You can literally go back through your chapter summaries and pull what were those bullet points, what were the highlights, what were the most exciting things you mentioned are the most helpful tips, and include that here. And you can literally even do it in bullet points in that overview, just like you would do in a marketing document, okay?

And you need to say what your book is gonna cover, oriented towards marketability, oriented towards getting someone who has interest in this topic to say “Oh, I do really wanna know that.” That is what you wanna have in your overview. And then you wanna close with the expected length of the book in words, in tens of thousands of words, and how long you expect that it will take to write it. And then you will launch right into the next page, which, again, is gonna be the comparative titles, which we talked about in the first webinar, then target market and our target audience, which we talked about in the second webinar, the marketing plan, which we talked about last week, and then wrapping up with the other materials that we talked about today.

So that is what I’ve got for you for your nonfiction book proposal. Those are all of different sections that you’re ever gonna have to write. That is everything that you’re gonna need. And that means that you are ready to go on your merry way, if you haven’t already started, which I hope you have, and work on your nonfiction book proposal.

So like I said, if you’re doing in narrative piece and you don’t have experience with narrative, that’s gonna be a skill thing that you might want to scale up with first. If you are doing a prescriptive book, like a how-to book and you don’t have any publications whatsoever or any life experience whatsoever, which I doubt would be the case, but if that is the case, you’re gonna wanna do that beforehand, because otherwise your author bio will be thin.

But other than that… And if those two things are the case and you feel stuck, just get yourself a new book idea. There are so many different books that you can write. So if you get through this and you feel stuck with a particular idea that you have, you just don’t see exactly how an agent or an editor is gonna bite on it, go back to step one. Go back to finding the market. And find a new book that’s a better fit for you where you already are, where you don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to be ready to be able to sell that book.

So for those of you guys that are on the call today, thank you so much for going through this journey of book publishing with me. I’m really excited to have shared with you guys all the stuff that I’ve been learning over the last three or four years or so about book publishing. And I hope that some of you guys are already working on your proposals or that you’ll use this to put together a proposal sometime soon. And then I can have more folks in our little community that have had books come out of working with us.

So thank all of you guys so much. It’s now completely dark here because of daylight savings time, so I’m gonna wish those of you on the East Coast or Europe a good evening, and a good rest of your day to those of you on the West Coast, and I will talk to you next week. Bye.

You Are Your Non-Fiction Book’s Best Marketer: How to Make it Work Transcript

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This week, we’re gonna be talking about how to… Whoops, I forgot to change the title slide. So the actual topic of…the actual title of today’s webinars is that you are your non-fiction book’s best marketer and that’s what we’re gonna be discussing today.

And the thing about your non-fiction book’s marketing is that it’s really connected to the market as in the people who will be the perfect readers for your book. We spoke about this in last week’s webinar on knowing and finding your non-fiction book’s market. And I’m just gonna recap a little bit of that today for those of you who weren’t there. And just to kind of relay that groundwork for any of you guys who perhaps are, you know, watching them in sequence. Just to focus on what from our last webinar is gonna be built upon in the webinar that we’re doing today. And so as I talk about that, I’m also gonna just go through again quickly the different sections of the non-fiction book proposal.

And you’ll notice that there are several that we skipped in the webinars we’ve done already. And it’s because these pieces build, they really build on each other once you know what else is out there, also known as your competitors, that shows you what should be done. That’s what we did in the first webinar. And then once you know what you should be pursuing, then you can figure out who is the person that most needs that information? That’s your market.

And then that very clearly, as you’ll see as we get to the webinar, leads you into where to find those people and how to get in front of them. Which is really what your marketing plan is and so we’ll talk about how exactly to get in front of your readers where they already are. And then also what you might think of as a more advanced topic but you shouldn’t. It should be something that we all do want to focus on doing because it’s the difference between a small book or a small author that becomes a big author. And a small author or small book that remains that and may or may not get to write another book again. So we’re gonna talk about how to turn yourself, your book, your topic into news rather than just trying to figure out how to get into the news that’s already happening.

Let’s get right into it. We’ve got a lot to cover with this webinar and marketing is a big topic. And like I said, I’m really narrowing it down to a couple big takeaways that I want you guys to have. Both around getting in front of your readers where they already are as well as how to be the news rather than just try to be in the news. But first and foremost, I alluded to this earlier when I was talking about small authors who remained small authors or who ceased to be authors versus small authors who become big, big authors. And that is the difference comes down to understanding who your book helps and how to get your book in front of them.

Now, when I say that, that sounds like such a, you know, fundamental thing. “Oh, yes, of course, like, you know, there are certain people who are the right readers for my book and I want them to have my book.” It seems like something that every author should think about, every author is thinking about, every author is naturally doing. And yet it is so easy and any of you who have blogs or have had a blog in the past will also find that this resonates with you. It is so easy to get sucked into all of these specific techniques, all of these specific practices, all sorts of things that you could or should be doing and lose sight of that goal which is that as an author, you want your words to affect, not just get in front of, but affect readers, I imagine, right?

Even if your book is about, as somebody who I’m coaching is working on. Even if your book is about how to use an index and statistical information to decide where to go next. You’re looking to impact your readers very clearly. It’s not all about that statistical information and then analyses and everything that you’re writing up about each country. You want, the reason you’re writing this book is that you desire your readers to be better informed about where they’re going and you wanna impact their decisions. If, like somebody else who I know is joining us today, if you have a book about different things to explore in a certain place, you’re writing that book because these are things that people don’t already know about that they should be doing, that they might enjoy doing that you want them to know about and be able to incorporate into their trip.

If, for instance, as some other folks that I coach are doing, you’re writing a guidebook, then you want people to be, again, you know, better informed about where they’re gonna go, have guidance about choosing where they’re gonna go. But you also want them to be able to move effectively, efficiently and happily and get the most out of their trip once they’re there. And so you provide a lot of service information to that bent. If you’re working on a book which is more narrative in nature, so you’re telling a story, a story that already happened, that’s where people often get, really, a lot of questions about this.

How are you trying to affect the reader? What transformation? Just like we talk about transformations with our feature articles. What transformation are you trying to affect here if you’re writing a book?

There’s a wonderful woman who I met who, she was from the South and her book isn’t out yet so I don’t wanna spiel too much about it, so I’m gonna keep it a little brief. But she was from the South and very traditionally raised and she, one day, her husband came home and basically said he had kind of squandered all their money. I think he had also been having some affairs and they were gonna lose their house. And she had to move up north to New York, and get an apartment for herself for the first time. A big agency job was what she was looking for, she’d been working for a digital agency in her previous life. And she had to try to figure out how to create this new life for herself from scratch. And the first thing that she did was that as she was waiting to get into a course at a digital school here in New York, she started walking every square mile of Manhattan every day. And noting down her observations and putting them together on social media and on a website. And that grew into a platform and she then did the same thing in Paris. And she’s since been invited to do it in other places like New Orleans.

And so she’s written a book now but her book is not about exactly how to do it, what she just did. It’s about what she learned along the way and how things have changed for her. And it’s difficult sometimes when you’re so close to material like that to say exactly what transformation you want to have in your reader. But in her case, I know because she’s told me, she wants other people to see the things that they avoid seeing. That they avoid pointing out to themselves, that they don’t know in their own lives and see where they can expand their horizons. And I think a lot of us need to do that with our travel work. So that’s the transformation that she’s looking for. So what that means then is her market is people who are open to that, who are looking for having their horizons expanded, right, but you might not just think about that. She might think, “Oh, okay, well, you know, I’m a woman of a certain age or, you know, I’m from the South and I really have a lot of these revelations. I should look at people with similar demographics.”

But the question, or the term actually to use here is more psychographics. So what motivates these people, what unites them psychologically. And that’s people who are open to having these revelations about themselves having these different experiences. And if she narrows that to be her market, it becomes so much clearer where she can reach out to get in front of those people who will be naturally receptive to her book. But if she’s not thinking about that, for instance, if an author isn’t thinking about that if they’re thinking, “Oh, I have to do a tour, I have to do social media, I have to do this.” And you get drowned in tactics, then you’ve skipped the most important step which is seeing where and how to apply those tactics.

So I will get to talking to you guys about tactics. But I just wanna take a second to reiterate this stuff about who your market is because we all want our words to reach the most people possible. And if you want to get a book deal, then you need to show in your proposal that you are going to reach the most people possible in order to get that deal in the first place. Because publishers might wanna change lives, well, editors wanna change lives, but publishers are in it for the money, right? So we need to show publishers that we are going to touch as many lives as possible that will get them the money that they are looking for. And that’s why we have to be super clear in our book proposal that we know who our market is and we know who we’re gonna reach and we know exactly how to reach them.

So we talked last week in the webinar about who your market is, about peeling back those different layers. And it was really interesting. I’ve mentioned to a few of you that over the weekend, I was at a conference for writers, a lot of authors, in fact. And there was this guy who talked about going four levels deep. And he talked about it from the viewpoint of… Let’s take what I do, for instance. I don’t just help freelancer travel… Sorry. I don’t just help freelance writers, that’s level one, or, you know, you can even say “writers.” I don’t just help writers, that’s level one. I don’t just help freelance writers, that’s level two. And I don’t just help freelance travel writers, level three. I help four levels down, freelance travel writers or aspiring freelance travel writers who want to earn a good living from what they do. And if I didn’t go down that far, I’d be trying to serve people who had too many different needs.

We get a lot of people who reach out to us who are just looking to know where they should start or what they should do or something like that. And I’ve put together a whole book to help people with that but that’s not where my interest lies, that’s not what I wanna spend all day talking about. I wanna spend time talking about how people can really use techniques and tactics that I capture from all over the world to up their game. To build a business not only that they love in the realm of travel as a freelancer but that supports whatever financial dreams and goals they have. And because I know that, that really helps me know where to go and who to put our things in front of. And it also helps me know if people come to us and they have questions and I’m just like, “Oh, gosh, you’re just, you seem like you don’t get it.” It helps me to see why. And it’s the same thing with your book, the more people who are four levels deep, who are the very much right people that you put your book in front of, as a writer, as an author, the more super fans you’re gonna have. And the more they will disseminate your message to more of the right people for you.

And so I just gave one example of what those four levels look like, but here’s what we talked about last week. And we talked about this as spheres because of this idea that there’s a target. And that fourth level deep like I was talking about is all the way in the middle. But there’s the other spheres that go kind of…I realize I’m moving my mouse around these spheres but you don’t see them. But there’s that, where you see the little British flag bull’s eye in the middle. And then around that, there’s these other spheres which also have a certain number of points attached to them. But not as many points because they’re not as valuable for you and your marketing is hitting the middle.

And so some ways to think about those spheres outside of what I was just talking about, about the four levels deep are, who needs this book? Who has a question or a need that this book answers? Who is already spending money to follow their interest in this book? Who is interested in this topic and joining groups, so showing sustained interest to pursue that interest? And who’s already buying books about this topic? And then what we’re gonna focus on today is also what other interests overlap with this topic out in the world? Because I’m gonna talk about places for you to start finding your correct readers, your right readers, your impassioned readers that already exist.

Before we get into that, I just wanna recap a little bit. I know I’m going through a lot of information quite fast here at the beginning but it’s because I’m recapping some things we talked about in the prior webinar. So the sections of your non-fiction book proposal… I wanna see if I can make this work. Okay, there’s a little whiteboard feature here that I don’t usually use, but we’re gonna give it a go today. So the sections that we have already looked at are, first, we talked about this concept of the comparative titles. I don’t know if this is actually happening. I’m trying to make a circle here. I’m not sure if you can see it, wow, that looks horrible so let’s not do that. Okay, so first we talked about this idea of the comparative titles. I hope you can see that.

And that was when we were talking about looking through Publishers Marketplace. Which is somewhere where you can see all of the different deals that are being done, as in what books agents are selling to publication houses, so which authors are getting a book deal. And you can see what books are already on their way to coming into fruition and what books have come into fruition. And how much those authors have received for those books as well. And so as you’re doing that, you’re seeing what is happening in the marketplace and where the marketplace is going. So we talked about that in the first webinar. And then last week, we talked about, again, hoping you can see this. We talked about this third one here, the idea of the target market or target audience, okay. And this week, we’re talking about this idea of the marketing plan. Now, there’s a couple other ones on here you’ll notice that we skipped, notably the overview, we skipped. And we haven’t yet gotten to author bio, table of contents and sample chapters, and we’ll be covering all of those in the last webinar in this series which is next week. All right, so let me get out of this weird whiteboard view.

So let’s get into it now, so let’s get into talking about this marketing plan. When you think about marketing plan, I wonder in terms of books, what exactly you’re thinking about in terms of book marketing. Are you thinking about your, let’s call it “owned,” as in it belongs to your platform, which is the social media you already have, the blog that you already have? Are you thinking about things that you could create like a podcast you could create from scratch that would go along with your book? Or a new blog that would go along with your book.

Or perhaps other things you could create like a new social media, like a new Instagram in line with your book. Or an event that would go along with your book. Or perhaps a speaking tour of some kind that would go along with your book. Or are you thinking about tapping into the things that are already out there? Or someone else has already done the hard work of marketing the bejesus out of that thing, which, you know, that’s a lot of hard work, it takes years, to get a critical and hungry audience looking for information on a certain topic. Because it is such a better use of your time as an author to piggyback on those things than to build from scratch a brand new website, podcast, social media, whatever it is, specifically about your book.

Now, there are some publishing houses, some agents, I think, less so today but more so back in the day who don’t get this. And who would basically tell people, “Oh, well, you know, as you’re working on that, you got to start a blog about it right now, you got to start a blog on, you know, the science of happiness or whatever it is right now so by the time your book comes out, there’s readers who are ready for it.” But that’s bollocks because starting a blog or starting a podcast and building up the audience for that is a whole job. It’s an entire job which is completely separate from the writing of your books. And unless you have a passion for that that will not take away from working on your book, then it is something that you should not only leave to other people but realize it that in leaving it to other people, you’re able to capitalize on many blogs and many podcasts rather than the one that you would build yourself.

Now, you’ll notice there’s a big disparity here between the number of blogs that exist and the number of podcasts that exist. So if we were to just say, quite superficially, what that means in terms of when, where you should spend your time, it seems like you’re more likely to get ears in an exclusive type way by being on a podcast, quite superficially, right? And I would say that that’s also true, podcasts also touch people very differently than blogs do.

Now, I won’t say that you should neglect guest blogging or appearing on other blogs, however, I wanted to put this up here to show you guys about where you should spend your time. So if you think about putting together a plan for the marketing of your book, especially because so many of us come from these online media backgrounds, that focuses on you writing content specifically for other sites that will appear on other sites to promote your book, you’ll see that there are so many places that you could do that but at the same time, the impact of your time can be a bit less in terms of how it hits people than appearing on podcasts. Which probably will take you less time in the long run. So that means that as you’re looking at your marketing plan, you don’t wanna focus it on the things that are gonna take a ton of time from you. You wanna focus on high-value things and podcasts are among them.

But there’s a lot of different things that you can do to appear in places that already exist. And I gave you kind of an example earlier about this woman with her book. Which is kind of in the form of a memoir about her walking around New York, and Paris and these different places and also just the transformation for her, of moving from the South, as someone being raised in the South up to New York, and how that opened her eyes. And we talked about how her audience would be people who are interested in having their horizons expanded as well. So let’s think about how that would shake out in these different things.

So here are five different methods that you can use to get on platforms that already exist. And I’m gonna come back to this later on one of the later slides, but I wanna touch on it now as well just to kind of prepare the groundwork for that.

So what we’re talking about today is the marketing plan for your book proposal. And right now I’m talking about kind of big-picture marketing what you could do. And, like I said, I’ll circle back to this again at the end but I just wanna say how this ties into your book proposal, it’s in several ways. So in your book proposal, if you are not already Kim Kardashian, then you do not have what publishers call, refer to as a platform. Now, is that necessarily gonna kill you? Not entirely but it’s one of the really big things that people use as a way, both agents and publishing houses, editors to dismiss you out of hand. To say, “Well, that’s a good idea but I don’t know how we would market it, your platform isn’t big enough and I don’t have any ideas here.”

So by thinking about these things and also researching these things, researching the different places where our book can be marketing…marketed and showing agents, editors and publishers where that marketing can happen and how many people are already present in those places where we plan to do our marketing helps allay that obstacle, helps allay that very common objection that agents and editors are gonna lobby at you. Which is that they don’t know how they can get this book out in the world no matter how much they may or may not like that idea.

So that’s why we wanna both think about this and research it and pull up numbers and names and specifics. And then put all of that in black and white in as much detail and information as we can gather into our marketing plan. Because if we do not do this, if we do not do that work for them of showing what, not just the size of our market which we talked about last week. But of how specifically to reach and get in front of that large number of people to get them interested in buying our book. If we don’t do that, it’s way too easy for you to lose out on getting your book out in the world. So it may feel like isn’t that someone else’s job? Isn’t the publisher’s job? But today in this day and age, it’s not, it’s yours. And if you don’t do that part of your job, then it’s not shame on them for passing on your wonderful idea, its shame on you for not giving your idea its best chance, okay.

So let’s look at these five different ways and then we’ll also use this author as an example to talk about them. So, way number one, who do you already know that has a large following?

So let’s say that your social media platform is of a certain size, but it’s not the six-figure social media platform that a publisher might be looking for. Don’t worry about it. I know you guys all know other writers, other bloggers, other people who are online. Go through the list of people who are your online friends and check all of their numbers. How many Instagram followers does this person have, that person have, that person, that person? How many Twitter followers?

Write all of those in a list. Write their names, write their handles, write their number of followers. And then pull an aggregate number and say, “I plan to tap the power of my network to the tune of, you know, 1.2 million followers to promote this book.” Because if you don’t say that and they just look at your small platform, they just don’t know. They don’t know that you know so many other folks from online who can promote this book for you as well. They just don’t know that if they just look at your follower account, they don’t know the power of your network, okay. So use an aggregate number. Say, “The promotion of this book will reach these many people,” okay.

Now, we talked before about guest posting and there are so many blogs, especially in travel, there are so many blogs out there. And the time that you wanna spend guest posting, like what I was saying about aggregate numbers, for the purposes of your book proposal, okay, it can change down the line. But for the purposes of your book proposal needs to be the biggest possible numbers. So who do you know that has a massive site that accepts guest posts? It can be people that you know in person, that you know online, that you know of. See who has huge numbers and accepts guest posts, okay, if you don’t know their numbers, go on Alexa, go on BloggerBridge, go on any number of places and get those numbers and put those numbers in your proposal.

Now, outside of blogs, where are you going to pitch articles?

To the places where people who are already interested in your topic go to learn. Now, there’s two things here, if you don’t already know where the people that you are interested in, your target market, if you don’t even know where they go online to read about these things, then you wanna do that research first.

You wanna find somebody who is your ideal reader and just shoot them a quick e-mail and say, “Hey, Susan, could you let me know five websites where you’re already going to read about this?” “Hey, Tom, could you let me know five websites you’re already going to read about this?” “Hey, Alice, I don’t know if you know, I’m working on a book around X. topic, I know that that’s of interest to you. Could you let me know where you’re already reading about this online? I wanna check out some websites.” Okay, just shoot those e-mails out, get a list of websites, see how to contribute to them. Get their circulation numbers which you’ll find on their advertising page and put that in your proposal. “I plan to pitch, you know, either excerpts from my book or topics in line with what is being published on blah, blah and blah websites to promote the book. The readership of these websites are da-da-da. Here’s the total number of readers those articles will appear in front of.” And don’t just list all the individual names, give that aggregate number at the end, okay.

Podcasts, I touched on this before and even I was shocked that there are 550,000 podcasts out there. Because when I look at how many podcasts are going in travel, it often doesn’t feel like a lot. And I’ll talk about this when I go through the example with that memoir book that I was telling you about. But we wanna be thinking, when we think about podcasts, not just about where people are already going to learn about the information that you’re gonna be putting out in your book. But about the types of things that people who are interested in your book, the types of things that they listen to about on podcasts because they’re not always gonna be the same thing, right?

So if you have a book, for instance, a book just, or rather finally came out with somebody that I know who is in a mastermind group with some other friends of mine. And he has kind of been speaking for years and years and years but hasn’t developed quite a business model yet. He finally had a book come out and it’s being written up in a lot of places because he knows a lot of people. And his book is about habits, I believe it’s called “Power Habits” or “Powerful Habits” or something like that. Now, do you think there’s a lot of podcasts out there that are specifically on a regular basis about habits if that’s the topic of the show?

I doubt it. I mean, just as terms of like such a singular focus. I’m sure there’s tons of podcasts about productivity. I’m sure there’s tons of podcasts about kind of like improving your life for the better, so like about change. I’m sure there’s tons of podcasts that are sort of quick tips. But I don’t know that there’s one specifically about habits. So how that would translate in our space, and, you know, I chatted with, I mentioned earlier that somebody that I coached has a book coming out about kind of a data-driven approach to deciding where to go next. So in the case of his book, for example, we discussed, okay, so these are people who travel a good deal, who have an interest in, you know, not just seeing the bucket list things that are happening in different places because they’re looking for where to go next, they feel like they’ve already kind of seen a lot of things and they are interested and open to a data-driven approach to figuring that out.

So some subsets of people that might be like that, I think, would be people who perhaps are business people of a sort of analytical nature. So perhaps those Wall Street types or quants as they call them or brokers, different things like that. Perhaps also people in financial services or real estate. Perhaps also people who work in tech, especially executives who probably travel quite a lot. And then we started brainstorming what type of podcast those people are already listening to. So these might be podcasts for CEOs, right? In his case. This might be a place where he can get on a podcast for a CEO about how to plan your next family trip with the most minimal hassle to save you time, keep your family happy and have the best experience all around, right? So you wanna think with the podcasts more about going sideways, think about using podcasts to get in front of a different kind of audience than who you’re already speaking to.

Now, this next one is a particular suggestion that I got from an author who had a very, very big book launch. And I believe she got herself on “Inc.” or “Entrepreneur’s” list of top 10 business books for the year or something like that. A lovely woman, the book is called “Captivate.” So Vanessa Van Edwards was sharing about what was most impactful for her when her book came out, was, it wasn’t doing partner webinars, it wasn’t doing podcasts, it wasn’t being featured on other people’s sites and it wasn’t even being featured in other people’s newsletters. But it was doing a takeover of someone’s newsletter where she was curating that person’s newsletter. So basically she wasn’t giving information about herself, she wasn’t giving information about her book, but she was like the guest editor for someone else’s newsletter for the week. And so it allowed her to kind of show herself and her personality to these people without being more direct about the marketing.

That’s a neat, not so often done thing. People probably aren’t getting a lot of requests for that. Instagram takeovers are a little more common but newsletter takeovers are not something that I hear a lot of people talking about. So that could be a really cool way for you to get in front of some other people’s audiences. Unlike doing guest posts that could be more impactful in the long-term, e-mail tends to be more impactful.

So, like I said, I wanna go through a sample book for these so that you guys can also see in our space how each of these would shake out. So, for instance, this woman that I was talking about with the memoir. She is in digital media, she has her own website, she’s been online for a bit. And so she would just go through her list of followers and see who is already following her that has a big platform, particularly the people who are already following her who tend to retweet a lot of things she does or who she knows personally that would be amenable to her asking them for these kinds of things.

But also what you can do here, and we’re gonna talk about this on one of the next slides, is that you can look at cultivating those relationships where they aren’t already there. So I, for instance, met this woman at a literary conference that was here in New York. And she put herself out there with a group of folks to talk about what her book was about and it immediately resonated with a lot of people who were like, “Yes, I would love to help you get this project out into the world.” So even if you don’t feel like you are already connected to people with large followings, you can do things now to get connected to them. So that by the time you need their help with your book, they are ready.

Now, what about guest posting?

We talked about how her book touches on a lot of different things. New York, Paris, New Orleans. It talks about being from the South and moving to New York. It talks about coming in contact with things that she never experienced in her youth. You know, we could talk about not necessarily South or North but we could talk about culture shock in other places. And it talked about being a woman of a certain age who has to start her life over from scratch. It also goes into the concept of what happens when you are doing that not necessarily because of an unforeseen loss but because of something in your marital life that’s gone off. So all of those different topics that I just mentioned, whether it’s blogs run by Southerners who’ve moved to New York. Or not just New York but to other big cities, like I see this in London, there are some folks who do things like this, okay.

Whether it is people who want to better get to know any city or people who want to get to know New York, or people who want to get to know Paris. Whether it’s women of a certain age who are going through a change, there are boatloads of blogs that already exist about each of these subjects. And it’s a function of listing what those subjects are and then going through them one by one and finding the blogs that go underneath those, looking at that blog, checking it out and what is the best way for you to be featured on that site.

Is it to do a guest post? Is it to offer the author a book to do as a giveaway on that person’s site? Is it simply to put an ad up on the site or a sponsor post or something of that nature? Is it to do a collaborative blog post? Is it to ask to be interviewed? Okay, so you wanna list with the blogs, you wanna list by topic, so by each of those different types of people who could really be served by your book, check out the appropriate blogs and then for each of those, figure out how best to get featured there. And poll the number of readers for that blog and incorporate all of that information into your book proposal.

Now, what about already developed…oh, sorry, the next one is where to pitch articles.

Now, in her case, she’s already got her book written so she can start using excerpts of that as essays to pitch to quite a few different places. Now, again, it’s gonna be similar here to what we were talking about in terms of blogs of where those articles can go. And in her case, there’s a lot of opportunities for first-person features of this nature with women’s magazines that are both well paying and very well distributed markets. So for her, that’s a very easy one and she wants to not only say that she’s going to pitch those but, again, we’ll get to this more on the next slide. But she wants to start pitching those editors and start getting in with those editors now. So by the time she gets that book deal, she can say to the publisher, “Oh, yes, I do have a relationship with those people, I can get an excerpt in that book, that will be no problem.”

Now, with the podcasts, the same titles that, or the same topics, rather, that we talked about that might work for her for a blog will maybe work for podcasts but not so much. I think it’ll be a little different because, you know, she could go on a podcast which is specifically about Paris. But she was there a bit ago so it’s a little harder for her to sort of talk about that. She could talk about how it’s incorporated into her book, you know, what were her favorite things about it and things like that.

But she would probably be better served by getting herself on podcasts of that nature of women who are in transition, also of writers who are in transition. Or of people who have podcasts based on what sort of business or what sort of blog, or what sort of platform can you build with digital media today? Because that’s something that she did when she came here and she built up this book of business for herself just by starting to walk each square mile of New York and talking about it. So podcasts serve people a bit differently than blogs and the way she would need to think about pitching herself to podcasts would be a little different as a result.

Now, in terms of whose newsletter or Instagram could she take over to highlight the topic of her book, there’s a lot of really ripe and rich opportunities there, going back to those different types of audiences that we talked about, for the guest post and also a little bit for the podcast. So she can do location oriented ones, she can do takeovers not only of individual Instagrams, for instance, of people who are based in New York, but also perhaps of companies that are really New York-centric. She can even look at reaching out to NYC & Co., the tourism body…the tourism promotion body, rather, for the city of New York and see if that would make sense for them. So I hope that you kind of see how these five different things that I was talking about, how they shake out for an actual situation of an actual book. And I also mentioned the other gentleman’s book along the way.

So something that you heard me mention that I’m gonna start to dig into a little bit now is this concept of doing the planning now, keeping in mind that critical thing of who is your four levels deep market? And where they are already going for this information? Where they are already existing in a group setting? Where are they already spending their time? And what are they already spending their money on to learn about this product or topic, rather? And getting in front of them where they already are. And how you’re gonna make the plan as you’re working on your book proposal.

But then even before you get an agent and even before that agent gets you a book deal, you’re gonna start to put that plan in motion. Because you can put it in your proposal and feel to yourself like, well, I mean, I’m putting this here but, you know, “I don’t really know an editor at ‘O Magazine’ and I know that’s really hard to get into so I doubt I’m ever gonna have a story there.” But if you sit there on Twitter and every day in your 15 minutes on Twitter or whatever it is, you chip away at tweeting regularly and usefully the editors of “O Magazine” all sorts of different things.

And every month you send them a pitch and two weeks after that you follow up on that pitch. And the next month you send them a new pitch. If you chip away at that, you will get yourself in “O.” I’ve seen people with what seems like a low round of rejections, when you think about it, with just seven rounds of pitching get themselves into “The Economist,” for God’s sake. You can get yourself to appear anywhere if you are focused about how you go after it and you put in the time.

So you can make anything no matter how pie in the sky that you put in that book proposal happen. So don’t sell yourself short as you put together this marketing plan in terms of what is gonna go into it. Don’t tell yourself, “Oh, I mean, that person is never getting back to me.” “Oh, I mean, I can’t make that happen.” Put it there, make the plan, and roll through getting it done. Because I promise you, if this weekend, for instance, you start digging into this research and you start working on your marketing plan. And then you set up that Twitter list and you start, you know, pinging away at those people and you set up that list of places to pitch and you start pitching them every month. Even by the time you have an agent and your agent is reaching out to editors, these things will already have started coming true, okay.

So don’t sell yourself short on what you’re gonna put in there. Start building those relationships now and then they will not only be there when you need them, but they will even be there if your idea has changed along the way whether of your own volition or something that happened to you that causes things to change. If your editor wants to go with a different book idea you have, whatever. Those relationships will be there when you need them. And the thing is that those relationships will serve you, like I said, if things change. And those relationships will serve to help you…I’ve alluded to this earlier but they will help you to be the news rather than report on it, okay. And I wanna explain a little bit more about what I mean by that and how you can do it no matter what your book idea is.

So as all of us are working on whatever it is, our book or a project, even if it’s of a narrative nature. But particularly if it’s not, if it’s more of a how-to kind of book or something more, they call it prescriptive in the publishing world. But if it’s something more guide or informationally oriented, you are without realizing it gathering tons of information as you put that book together. And you aren’t, however, though, putting this information in a spreadsheet in numeric forms. You aren’t looking at how many cat cafes are there per city and how the demographics of the city affect the number of cat cafes there are, for instance. You’re not thinking about that as you’re writing that book, but you are just by virtue of writing that book up accumulating this data without realizing it.

Now, this is something that you can use along the way as you’re building those relationships and that you can use as your book is coming out to help not only get excitement around your idea because you are telling something new that people haven’t known about before because there wasn’t this look at it. But this is also something that can get you separate press just based on the fact that you have done this investigation. For instance, there’s a woman who has a new book out now, but her previous book was called “Primates of Park Avenue.” And it was quite, in writing style, it was very first-person and it was very memoir-oriented. But she took the slant of incorporating herself into the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York with the lens of studying it like an anthropologist. And different chapters were about different habits of this new species that she was studying, okay. And that’s a very different take and that drew a lot of interesting media attention, okay. And in part, because she was able to make these sort of almost statistical in nature judgments about women, you know, who work from home or didn’t work from home or who were onboards or who weren’t onboards in their habits and things like that, okay.

Now, that’s what happens if you have a book where you can kind of be pulling things from your book together in aggregate and then looking for patterns. Now, something that you can apply if that’s the case and even, and especially if it is not, is something in the vein of a publicist stunt, which I hate that word. So let me kind of explain what I mean by that and I think I have another slide where I’m gonna mention this but I’ll just mention it now. So there’s somebody that I met recently, I met him at the TravelCon event actually and he worked on that book “Captivate” by Vanessa Van Edwards that I mentioned to you guys earlier as well. And he really specializes in author mark-…I can’t say the word, author marketing. And particularly marketing for big authors who have great, big launches and are very successful.

And one of the ways that he goes about doing that is something that you might think of as a publicity stunt. And so what that means is that he will do something, like something he bought, right, and he did recently, which is buy a ghost town in the middle of nowhere with a group of investors. Or he will put up on Amazon, a book which is just a picture of the under-sole of his foot that I think says, it was called “Stomp It” or something, it’s since been pulled down, just to show that you can put up a book of pictures of the underside of your foot and still hit the Best Seller list on Amazon if you do the right things. So he does these sort of stunts but the better way to think of them is that he does actions that are designed to catch the eye of the news. And to catch interest to draw attention to something else that he wants to talk about.

So I mentioned how his firm specializes in marketing authors. So he does this, you know, action stunt, if you will, of getting a book which is just pictures of the underside of his feet onto the Amazon Best Seller list in order to promote the fact that he knows how to do this. So how does this work for your book, right? Say you are this woman that I mentioned before who has this memoir about coming to New York and walking each square mile. She could organize a group of people who aren’t just her but who, say it’s 30, 40, 200 people who are gonna go out and do this every day for a month. And that’s a whole month of publicity. She can be talking to local news stations, she can be talking to radio. She can get all sorts of different folks cover the fact that there’s a pack of 30 to 200 people out there walking every square mile of Manhattan for a month. And it doesn’t matter that she’s already done in the past, it matters that she’s doing something now which is newsworthy, which is interesting.

You know, reporters with their little television cameras are gonna come out and say, “Why are you doing this, people? Like how come you decided to join this? Have you actually been doing this every day? How many days have you, how did you get off work to do this?” Reporters are gonna wanna ask people why they’re all doing this weird thing, okay. And she already did it in her book but by organizing action now, she is promoting her book in a novel way that is newsworthy.

So the thing is that it can be a little hard when I just tell you about these kinds of, you know, big stunty things that some other people did to think about what you can do that is newsworthy. So I pulled up actually… Let me switch over the tab for a second. I pulled up a couple examples, and I’m gonna drop them in the chat box as well, of how even something that seems really simple, that is, a book tour, can be something that becomes newsworthy. Now, let me see if I can… There we go, all right. Oops. My computer is in the shop, aka the Apple Store, so I’m using an unfamiliar computer here to do this for you guys.

So a book tour is something that we think of as, you know, very normal for an author to do. So how do you do something with a book tour that makes it so novel and so interesting that you get yourself and your book tour in “The New York Times”? That sounds like it would really take a lot. So I’ve shown you two different examples here. So I wanna start with the one that seems over the top and out of our league so that we can close with the one that seems closer to you. So that you can have some different ideas for options but leave this portion of the webinar not feeling like it’s something you can’t do.

But I’m gonna give you two different concepts.

One here is a book tour that seems like it is, I don’t even know, like a Beatles revival tour or something that seems like the music event of the millennium. And another one, also a “New York Times” article, which is about somebody who organized a DIY book tour that seems more couchsurfing than, you know, literati book circles at a bookstore, okay.

So this is a very recent piece. Michelle Obama has a book coming out and this details quite, with a lot of numbers and journalistic details we’ve been talking about in recent webinars, the level of commerciality and basically the size of splash that is going into her book tour. So we begin, “The fifth-row seat at the Barclays Center goes for $1,256. A seat in the fifth-row, with a ‘meet & greet package’ thrown in… A seat in the front row, with a ‘meet & greet package’ thrown in, will cost you $3,000.” And it says, “While other authors typically follow a circuit that may include podcast interviews and stops at the 92nd Street Y in New York and Powell’s Books in Portland, Mrs. Obama is set to embark on a 10-city tour put together by Live Nation, the world’s largest concert producer.” The venues will be 23,000 people, 19,000 people, whereas, for instance, Anthony Bourdain’s last tour drew 2,000 or 3,000 and even Hillary’s was 3,800 or 1,800, so… And this news is all about the size and the scale of Michelle Obama’s book tour.

But this other piece that I’ve seen, and this is actually the first one that I dropped in, I believe, is about a book tour that was newsworthy in an entirely different way. So this gentleman is talking about how he’s been promoting his book, “The Adderall Diaries” which I believe is a narrative non-fiction, first-person type piece. And he’s talking about how he doesn’t know what to expect. But he’s early and he has arrived at a town which makes people’s faces go sour. I’m gonna make sure you’re still seeing it, yep. And 19 of the host’s friends show up. The host is a nurse at a nearby hospital. She moved the furniture around and there wasn’t very much so they just have 20 white folding chairs. And most of the people who showed up to this book stop worked at the hospital. One was a professional jujitsu fighter and personal trainer, another, a real estate agent.

And what interested him was that some of them had never been to a literary event. Some told him that they were big readers, reading at least a book a week. And this was part of his 33-city book tour that he organized himself after his publisher started planning a standard book tour for him at bookstores in five large coastal cities. And he then decided that because he’s not famous that he wanted to do a bookstore that was more his speed. He said he didn’t wanna…or sorry, not a bookstore, a book tour. He said he didn’t wanna travel tens of thousands of miles to just read to 10 people, sell 4 books and spend the night in a cheap hotel before flying home.

So he decided to set up a lending library to allow anyone to receive a free review copy of his book on the condition that they forward it in one week to the next reader. And as he was doing that, he asked the people who were doing that if they would allow him to set up an event in their home. So he wasn’t even going around and setting up events where he had to rent a venue, he had to figure out how to feed people, things like that. He simply reached out to people who were already reading his book and asked if they would like to have him come and do an event for their friends, family, whoever, in their home. And he would sleep on their couch, okay. And this became a “New York Times” piece about his book tour, okay.

So this is a really great piece I like in terms of the instructional nature of how to set up your own DIY book tour. But I wanted to give you those two polar opposite ways of looking at it to introduce the idea that events can be whatever you want them to be. People love in-person things. I can’t even tell you, the author conference that I was just at this weekend, there were several folks that got up that I’ve had their books on my Kindle for ages. And I hadn’t read them yet and now that I’ve seen that author in person and heard their words, I can’t wait to read their book next. It has a huge impact to see the author and get to know them. To then go and read the book and hear it in their voice because you know their voice and you know them and you can imagine them saying things just like this. So that’s how you can put together own DIY book tour.

Another variation of this is to go clubbing, book clubbing, that is, where you look at book clubs that already exist that are on different topics and figure out who to e-mail, how to e-mail, what to say to get your book featured for that book club. And there are an astounding number of book clubs. I think that there are even more now that the internet has flourished even though people say that books are dead. There are so many ways for people to find book clubs. People can have book clubs all on Zoom that there’s great ways for you to get involved with book clubs even without having to travel.

Now, I joked about “go clubbing,” and I meant “go book clubbing.” But depending on what your book is about, you can actually look at parties that are currently going, that already exist. And when I say “parties,” I mean parties, I mean events where there are schwag bags, okay. And there are way more of these than you would expect, for instance, the big schwag bag at the Oscars is famous for having free giveaways of cruises and hotel nights and all sorts of things in there. See what party planners you can find online and get in touch with and ask them what events they’ve got coming up that might make sense to include your book in the schwag bag, okay.

There’s, if you are interested in speaking, some of you are not, I totally get that. A sort of more, perhaps stress-inducing area is conferences that you can look at. But perhaps less so is this idea of what classes that are happening, whether at a university or just at some sort of adult continuing education institute near you, where the class could benefit from hearing you talk even just for half an hour about your area of expertise. Because when you do something like that, whether it’s a conference or you’re speaking at an institution, you are not just kind of getting in front of people, getting an opportunity to practice speaking about your topic, maybe sign some books. But you are also getting your name and a backlink to you and your book on the website of a prestigious institution, okay.

So I talked a little bit about getting your book into schwag bags. But you can also look at places where a non-profit is having an event where your book could be included in the ticket price, where your book can be a giveaway item. There’s all sort of different things that you can incorporate once you start going down that giveaway route which we also talked about with book clubs as well.

And then we also wanna look at, as we talked about with the podcast, in particular, this idea of where the topic of your book coalesces with other interests of your readers in cool ways. Now, this is not quite exactly a book-related example, it’s somewhere between publicity stunt and book. But there is a multiple “New York Times” bestselling author that I know, Chris Guillebeau, who runs the World Domination Summit. And the World Domination Summit itself is an event that kind of centers around other interests of people who read Chris’s books or are involved in Chris’s community. But he found a really cool thing that’s another interest to those people that I wanted to put this bug in your ear to get this out there.

So for many past years at this event, the day before the event, for anyone who’s interested, local or attending the event, they offer an opportunity to participate in breaking a world record. And they fly in observers from the “Guinness Book of World Records,” they do all the things that they need to do. And afterwards, you get the certificate that you have been involved in breaking a world record. Now, what a neat, novel thing is that to do as an event that touches on some other interest that those people have, but that isn’t really explicitly about his books.

Something similar that I’ve seen is that somebody that I know has a business which is around Bollywood dancing. And in terms of Bollywood dancing, he teaches classes and he also does weddings and parties. And he can just DJ but he can also do songs and kind of, you know, show the dance moves to the audience. And get everybody doing Bollywood dancing who didn’t think that they could do it. But he also has his own nights at different clubs in San Francisco and Portland and Seattle where he just kind of plays music and has different stuff.

But he partners with people. So he’s already running these events, he’s already doing them, he’s already putting up the money, all these things. And then he partners with people to come in and do other interesting things. So he partners with tarot card readers. He partners with people who do henna on people’s hands or people who do makeup or do people’s hair.

So there’s also opportunities to find people who are already doing a cool event and suggest to be the one that brings in that other interest to them as well. So the key here is not just to do any of these individual things, whether it’s the research or being the news rather than trying to get into the news. It’s to look at each individual marketing opportunity that you outline in your proposal and how you can level that up into something else. And that’s really the crux of this being the news is that you do one thing and then as a result of doing that thing, how many other places can you pitch, can you get in front of to have them talk about that you did this thing? And then you can tell a bigger outlet that this smaller wrote about it and don’t they also wanna write about it and do an exclusive interview with you.

So we’ve gone full circle from starting out feeling like you don’t know what you can possibly put in that book proposal to figuring out who are the people that you wanna get in front of? Where exactly are they already in all sorts of different dimensions, whether it’s podcasts or blog posts or what they’re reading or newsletters they’re reading.

Thinking about what you can do, what sort of, whether it’s an action, something you can write to get yourself there, to get yourself in front of those opportunities, to start building those relationships now. And then the final step is but once you’re doing those things, you’re gonna level those up and you’re gonna pitch the fact that you have this publicity. The fact that you have done this cool party partnering with somebody, you know, who has a DJ night that’s all devoted to Japanese anime, whatever it is, that you’re then going to pitch those on to bigger and better and more mainstream news outlets. So that’s like the icing on the cake or the cherry on top of the sundae of what you put in that marketing plan.

So as you’re writing these things up in your marketing plan, make sure that you are being specific about exactly where, with the name and the audience numbers, you see these things taking place, exactly what you plan on doing with them. And start now in terms of reaching out and building those relationships.

So that’s what I’ve got for you today. So thank you, guys, so much for joining me today, I was really excited to talk about this with you guys. And I hope you got a lot of ideas and we’ll talk about the last stage in finishing your book proposal next week.

Annual Review Collection Transcripts

Annual Review Part 1: What is Standing Between You and Your Travel Writing Goals

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Annual Review 2: How to Clearly Catalog the Work and Opportunities You Have Now to See Where You Need to Go

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Annual Review 3: Taking Stock of the Past Year – How to SWOT Yourself Into Shape

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Annual Review 4: Getting Clear on What You’ll Accomplish Next Year

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Annual Review 5: Mapping Out Your Step-by-Step Plan for Success in the Year Ahead

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Know Your Non-Fiction Book’s Market to Make Its Business Case Transcript

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This week we are gonna talk about a couple things but under the auspices of “Know Your Non-fiction Book’s Market to Make its Business Case.”

For those of you who are joining us live, if your hands are free, let us know in the chat box if you caught last week’s Webinar, which was or maybe it was two weeks ago, but the first webinar in this series on non-fiction book marketing in which we looked at publisher’s marketplace, which is a really great and shockingly inexpensive tool that allows you to see every single book deal that is happening in the world as it happens and how much people are getting paid for these book deals. And we talked about the idea of figuring out if your book makes sense. If your book is in line with what buyers, as in, you know, editors at book publishing houses publishers are buying right now because they think that book buyers will be buying those books by looking at what other books are coming out.

And the thing that we talked about last week as well was that there are just so many non-fiction books coming out all the time. It really easy as readers for us to think about fiction books or maybe really specifically about narrative books, whether they’re fiction or non-fiction, and even then, we can think about so many new fiction books that are coming out every year.

But to be honest, fiction is a much smaller portion of the marketplace. Actually, non-fiction books take up a big part of it. And I’ve spoken with several of you on coaching calls already since last webinar who maybe hadn’t thought about doing books, or who in the back of your mind if I had a book that you wanted to work on and it hasn’t really come to the front of your mind into a place where it really makes sense to work on, or maybe you do have an idea that you have been working on.

And a lot of people told me that they were really inspired by the possibilities that we talked about in the last webinar about different ways to make books work today. So, what we’re gonna look at this week is we’re gonna start going from possibility into practice, possibility into reality. And looking at how you do that, how do you take those ideas? How do you take those possibilities and how do you turn them not only into words on a page that can end up in the inbox of an agent to get this process started, but what are the words that they’re expecting, and how do you choose the words that will most make an impact, that will most prove your case, that this is a book that should exist in the market and that somebody should pay you for it?

So, for those of you who weren’t there last week, I’ll go back just a little bit and talk about this agent editor process and what exactly that means. But aside from that, the flow of what we’re gonna look at today is that on this webinar, we’ve only got four in this series, but in this webinar I’m gonna go through from top to bottom all of the things that need to be in your non-fiction book proposal. So I’ll explain also what the idea of the proposal is, why do we do it, and in that time I’ll also talk about agents and editors and how it works for you as the writer to get your book into market. And then we’ll look at how this idea of the market, which is what we’re talking about today, right? As we talk about how to know your non-fiction book’s market to make its business case.

So the idea of the market, which is the market in terms of people, in terms of readers, how many readers are there potentially? Knowing that and being super clear on that and making sure that your communications to agents and editors are super clear on that is not only fundamental for getting somebody to pay you to create this book, but it also allows you to know very quickly and very easily if this book idea is even something that you should be spending so much time thinking about, if you should really move forward with it. And then we’ll look at what works outside of your head when you’re talking to agents and publishers. What works to establish that business case, what works in terms of the types of statistics, where you should pull them from, how we really establish in numbers that are believable and believable to people who see these things all the time, the size of your books market, the size of your books potential reading audience.

And then I’ll give you an idea, kind of an exercise, kind of like a visual tool, what have you, for you to think about the circles of people who make up that market for your book. So, I had a chat with somebody who is in the coaching program who has a book that she’s working on and she has a book idea that I’ll kind of change a little bit but that we can use as an example today as we go through some of these exercises.

So, I talked about this a little bit last week and I just wanted to say it again, which is that non-fiction books, in general, the writing of books has not been seen or publicized or, you know, popularly discussed ever in the history. I think of the craft as a way to make money. However, it is. And that’s why in a website where we focus on how to help you build a six-figure income as a freelance travel writer, I’m talking to you about how to write books because this is an opportunity for you to, in one place, get a five-figure cheque that many of you are overlooking.

And it’s not just that when you write that book you get that five-figure cheque, but that it also helps to establish you to get more assignments, whether as an individual writer for a magazine or as a contributing writer where you’re on contract write regularly for a magazine, or even if you want to be writing for tourism boards and travel companies. Having a book under your belt immediately puts you into a different bracket in the minds of the people who are hiring you for all sorts of different writing work. So, I promised that I would recap a little bit about this process of, how do you as the writer go from I have an idea for a book about cat cafes to actually having that book in your hand, that cheque in your pocket, and seeing that book also in the bookstore or having your grandmother write you very excitedly that she’s seen it and she’s so proud of you.

So the first, first, first step in that process obviously is for you to have the idea and work out all that content, and that’s what we’re gonna be talking about in this webinar series. But the other thing is that I want to explain to you the other side of that, the flipside of it, so that we understand how all of these things that we’re writing, that we’re working on, they come first, what happens when they go into this pipeline.

So non-fiction books, whether you are writing something which is narrative, and by that I mean we could call, “Eat, Pray, Love,” kind of the quintessential modern travel narrative book, right? There’s this story that she’s telling it unfolds across different continents and chapters, but there’s a thread that moves the storyline through all of these different experiences, right? And then there’s books which are more like, for instance, Nomadic Matt’s, “How to Travel the World on $50 a Day.”

This is a book that if it was a magazine article, we would call it service. It’s something that’s how-to oriented. And this is not something that has a plot that weaves through every single page and conversation and sentence and chapter. This is something where you can read just the chapter that appeals to you, just the chapter that’s useful. So that’s the difference between narrative non-fiction books and more of just general non-fiction books.

Now, both of these categories are so easy to get a book going on as opposed to fiction and here’s why. When you write or when you seek as a writer to publish a non-fiction book, you don’t actually have to write the whole book before you approach an agent to publish that book. When you write a work of fiction, when you write a novel, a mystery, whatever that is, you need to have the whole thing completed and beautiful and amazing before anybody will give you the time of day. And because they need to read your whole long, beautiful, amazing book to decide to work with you, it also takes a lot longer for them to decide to work with you.

Now, the way that it works in non-fiction is that we write a proposal. So you wanna think about the proposal for non-fiction book as being the non-fiction book version of the pitches that we write to editors. We don’t wanna be writing pieces that we have to submit on speculation with no article assignment when we have to do the whole piece in a vacuum without working with an editor, we want to write a pitch and get an editor interested in that idea and agree to pay us money for it before we write the piece. Non-fiction books are the same way. We want to write a proposal that outlines our idea, explains why it needs to be published, and other things that we’ll talk about in a second, and then get somebody to agree to give us money for that. Now what happens with books is that they give you money before you even begin writing? So much better than articles, right?

And they give you thousands of dollars. So the trajectory is that for us as writers, we write a pitch email. They typically call it queries in the book world, but we write, say, like a three, four-paragraph email and that goes to an agent. So this is our first step as writers. You don’t go directly to editors like we do with magazine publishing. First, we go to agents. And there’s several different reasons for this and I spoke more about it in the last webinar, so I recommend catching up on that if you missed it. But we first pitch an agent. And then an agent will check out our idea. They’ll check us out, they’ll have a chat with us. They might have some ideas for changing our idea as well for the better to make it more marketable. And then they will agree to represent us, our interest, our book, our future books to publishers. And then what happens is that you work with that agent to perfect your proposal, which is what we’re gonna talk about today, and then your agent pitches and brings that proposal to different editors at different publishing houses who then offer different amounts of money in order to be able to publish your book.

Once somebody signs you…once a publishing house signs a contract with you, then you receive an amount of money in advance before you start writing the book. You receive a certain amount of money when you submit a draft. You receive a certain amount of money when the book comes out. And even the absolute tiny teeny-weeny smallest of advances are not less than $5000. Even $10,000 is a small advance. If your book seems like it has a good market, $50,000 is a small advance.

So that first cheque that you’re looking at getting, it’s gonna be a couple thousand dollars, it’s gonna be a few thousand dollars, or it might be tens of thousands of dollars just for you to get started on having the time to work on that book. So that is where the money comes in and that is the timeline of how these things happen. Now, I asked recently a very big deal editor friend of mine about the timelines for these things and she said that sometimes they are turning them around in a day, that they will see a proposal come in and they want it so much that they’re rushing you to contract over to the writer’s agent that very same day.

So, if you have a good idea, these things can happen very fast. And so that’s why it makes sense for you, if you’ve already got an idea and process, to at least start going through these steps that we talked about last week, that we’ll talk more about this week about figuring out if there is a market for your book if your book touches on something that’s really fresh and interesting right now. Because you can get this book contract going very, very quickly. The only thing that stands between your idea and having that happen is your proposal. So let’s take a look at that. So the proposal is a document and when I say document, I mean it’s usually gonna be a word document that ranges somewhere from 20 to 60 pages. Now I know people who have told me that they have seen proposals that are much shorter.

Those tend to come from published authors. So, if any of you guys have heard of the…I think it’s in a museum somewhere, that kind of letter that George R.R Martin wrote outlining “Game of Thrones,” that was basically his whole book proposal right there. So even though I just told you that fiction authors don’t get to do proposals, they have to write the whole book first. If you become a famous non-fiction author, you too can sell your books and proposals alone and very simple proposals with that. But we are not yet famous authors, so we have to do a proper complete proposal. And here’s what that looks like. So, your proposal begins with an overview which outlines not what your book is about. This is very important. Your overview is more of an overview to your proposal which represents the business case for your book than it is an overview to your specific individual book.

This is really important to remember, and this is also why I do not want you to even think about this overview. We won’t even talk about it until the last webinar in this series because it is something you should write absolutely last, when you know what are all of the most important, best, juiciest, most salable things about your book. And the overview can be two or three pages and it’s really…a good way to think about it is as an executive summary to the rest of the document, which is your proposal.

Now, the other things that are in your proposal are something called comparative titles, often abbreviated as comps. Any of you guys who have ever sold a house have probably also come up with this idea of a comp or a comparable, and it’s, in fact, very similar to real estate. The idea of the comparable is that you want to outline other books that are similar, that have sold well because you’re trying to show to the publisher reading this document or to the agent who reads it first that your book, they say has legs, but that your book has something in it that already appeals to the marketplace, that people are already paying money for.

Now it’s very, very common in book publishing for people to say, “Oh, I have this idea. No one’s ever done anything like this before. So it absolutely needs to be a book.” Now, the problem is that can work really well in editorial. It can work really well when we’re pitching magazines, but it does not work so well when you are pitching books because a publisher is not only paying you the $50,000 that they pay upfront, but they’re paying for the staff time, for the editor, for the salespeople, for the marketing people, for the graphic designers, for the publicists who are also working on your book. And before they spend that kind of money, they need to know that there is some indication that somebody somewhere is going to pay, and more than one somebody, by the way, is gonna pay for this book and they are gonna make their investment back.

So the comparative or competitive, it’s also called titles, are very important and people don’t always take them quite as seriously as they should. We’re gonna talk more about this down the line, but I just want to give you a couple of tips here because it ties back into what we looked at last week with Publishers Marketplace, that website that you can subscribe to for 25 bucks a month and get access to every book being published for your competitive or comparative titles. You don’t need to just say things that are quite exactly like your book, right? So, for instance, my book is called “My 15 Big Fat Indian Weddings,” so I don’t need to just compare to things like…you know, it’s actually a movie so you can question how close that is, but monsoon wedding, which is about weddings in India or the second best exotic Marigold Hotel, which is also about weddings in India.

I can compare it to other books about wedding. I can compare it to “Crazy Rich Asians.” I can compare it to other books about India. But the thing is that you want to make sure that the books are comparing to are, A, successful, B, not unicorns. This is a big thing publishers hate when your book is being compared to unicorn. So don’t say it’s “Game of Thrones” meets “Hamilton” for instance. Okay? And see that those books have happened recently. Because the market changes and they wanna see that people will still be interested in buying your book in a couple of years. Now the next thing, this is what we’re gonna talk about a lot about this week, is the target market or target audience, so stay tuned because we will get to that in the next couple of slides. After that, and this is what we’re gonna talk about in the next webinar in this series, is the marketing plan.

Now, the marketing plan has several different aspects and we’ll talk, like I said, all about this next week, but the most important thing is that it is believable and impressive, and we’ll look through how to do that. Even if you feel like you don’t have any resources at your disposal in terms of marketing your book project right now, believe me next week, you will be literally overflowing with ideas. Now these next couple of things on the bottom, we’re gonna talk about all of these in the very last webinar in this series, and that’s for a reason. Because they look really important, the bio about you, the table of contents of what’s in your book, the samples of your writing, but they’re not important. The most important thing is your idea and the business case that proves that your idea can make money.

Because all of this other stuff can change, even your author bio. You can be published in some great, wonderful outlets before your book comes out that totally changes your author bio. You could get a master’s that makes you sound more impressive before your book comes out. There’s so many things that can be done with your author bio as well as different ways that you can represent yourself and why you should be writing this book.

Same with the table of contents. Table of contents absolutely can and most definitely will change between this proposal and the time that the book comes out. Once it gets massaged by people who understand these things very well, and spend their entire days thinking about them, which are those people are your agent and your editor, and also probably other people associated with your editor. And the same with your sample chapters. So, what we’re doing here with this proposal, the most important thing to remember is that it’s all about showing them the beginning, showing them that this is a platform and them here, it means agents, editors. That this is a platform, as in that your idea is a basis upon which they can build something beautiful.

They can build something that fits in the marketplace that they can make money on. It all comes back to that. So this is why the most important thing in each and every section of your proposal is to show that this project has the ability to make money. That your writing is beautiful, is a great thing to have. But to the actual publishers who decide these things, that is really secondary. It’s about having an idea that people for sure are going to buy in. And to be honest, it’s interesting how much that sounds quite a bit like the act of pitching editors where I love the editor of 50 to 80. The Denver City magazine said a while back at a conference that he can bring the writing home. That’s what he does. He can help you with the writing as long as the idea’s good enough. And it’s interesting because if you’ve worked with me at all or if you watch the webinars on how we pitch content marketing gigs, you’ll see interestingly that this is quite similar in certain ways that we have this, you know, the overview is that first line where we build connection to the present we’re pitching.

But then we go right into case studies and anecdotes and statistics that build the business case about the importance of what it is that you’re pitching them, right? Because that’s the thing that these people who are looking to outlay money on these things, that’s what they care about most. Now very pro tip here.

If you have been listening to this series or just this webinar and thinking, “Yeah, I had this book idea, but I think I’m just gonna self-publish it.” I say, “I think I’m just gonna self-publish it in that way,” because I tend to hear that people who are deciding to do self-publishing as opposed to traditional publishing because it seems like an easier avenue. So, what I hope you’ve noticed as I’ve been talking about this is that every single aspect of this process, every single thing that I’ve mentioned about showing the market for your book, about deciding the marketing plans, about figuring out whether it’s how you’re going to position your author bio over the time or what’s most attractive about your author bio now, every aspect of this process ties into things that you would also need to know how to do, or also need to think about if you’re self-publishing your book.

So if you are planning to forego the traditional publishing process and the thousands of dollars that they will pay you before you write that book, just in order for you to get it done, you just can’t forget or overlook doing these things. Unfortunately, I tell you this because I know it seems like a lot of work, but if you skip these steps, if you skip checking out the comparable titles and seeing what they do that your book does not do, and not incorporating those plus sides or finding out what interesting things that a reader would want to know, they’ve left on the table that you should incorporate into your book. If you skip those steps, you are handicapping your book down the line, whether you publish with a traditional publisher or whether you self-publish.

So this whole process that we’re outlining, all of these different things that we’re talking about are really fundamental things about how books go to readers regardless of who actually prints the paper or who decides on the cover design and all of those different things. So, we’ve talked about the different steps of book proposal. And I’ve told you, I’ll just go back one slide, I’ve told you already we’re gonna be talking about next week. We’re gonna be talking all about the marketing plan and I promise you that you’re just going to be overwhelmed with ideas because it’s so, so easy to put these things together once you get the hang of it. And the last week we’re gonna be talking about these things that are less important because they really change once you start talking to agents and editors.

So we’re gonna talk about those all at once, and we’re gonna talk about the do’s and don’ts for those. So now I wanna get into your target market. Now I mentioned that there’s somebody I coach who has a book idea and I’m gonna use sort of an adapted version of her book idea to workshop some of the things that we’re gonna look at today. So let’s say, for instance, that you…I’m actually going to take a different one just to start. Let’s say, for instance, that you have a book that you want to do which is a Civil War road trip. So it is oriented for the independent traveler who would be traveling on his or her own through the south and maybe parts of the north to take in different sites of different battles or otherwise important civil war history. Perhaps it could be sites of speeches, it could be sites of battles, it could be sites even where, you know, important decision makers were.

But you wanna kind of set it up like a road trip. You wanna have service that is like how-to information. And you wanna also have background historical information and who knows, maybe you’ll actually also do some interviews along the way or maybe you’ll just suggest different tours or maybe you’ll suggest different places to stay, things like that. How do you show your potential agent, editors or just yourself as the publisher, how big the potential market is for this idea?

So we’re talking about the Civil War and about road trips, right? About people who are interested in history. So these are from janefriedman.com. Jane Friedman is a lovely, lovely person who also offers non-fiction book proposal critique services. I think they cost like 800 bucks. But honestly, I think for what she does that’s an incredible bargain. So if you are interested in having your entire non-fiction book proposal critiqued by somebody, I threw some Jane Friedman in here because she’s really just a wonderful super in touch with the industry person. And so I wanted to offer you some of her suggestions as well.

So what Jane has said here, that I just cut and paste over here for us to see, is a selection of statements that are way too general to convince any people who hope her strings that your idea has a market. Some examples that she gave are a google search result on topic, turns up more than 10 million hits. A U.S. census shows more than 20 million people in this demographic, and an Amazon search turns up more than 10,000 books with dog in the title. So what’s wrong with these things? So first of all, something that’s lacking here is that these are showing interest in something without necessarily qualifying that there are purchases happening, that there’s business happening here. That’s one issue, right? A second thing is that she’s showing that things exist, but not necessarily much past that. Now, what I mean by that is showing that there’s 20 million people in this demographic or that there’s 10,000 books on a dog or that there are 10 million websites that talk about something.
Yes, these things exist, but what does that say about these people’s interest in books? Or these people’s necessarily interest in buying books on this topic. Now, a third thing actually is that all of these ways of pulling up statistics that have been implemented here are quite general. And I would say apart from the U.S. census, I wouldn’t even necessarily call them super trustworthy. So let’s look at a couple better ones. And actually, well, first, I’m gonna give you some bad examples for the Civil War book idea that we’re talking about and then we’ll give some good ones.

So we’ve got our Civil War road trip idea, right? So let’s say that I went on the U.S. Department of Transportation website and I pulled like and meticulously added together statistics on how many people are taking road trips in the states that would be covered in my book. Now, that’s sort of useful because it’s about road trips and you know there’s a chance that some of those people taking road trips might also be interested in the civil war or stopping to see things associated with the civil war.

But if they would be interested in planning a whole trip around the Civil War, that’s one thing, and if they’d be interested in buying a book about a trip planning around the Civil War, that is not necessarily shown by these statements. Another example would be, what if I took that and added together, again, meticulously, of course, because we love to do too much work in the wrong direction when we’re getting really excited to project. What if I added together meticulously the number of Civil War re-enactors at all of the different sites along this tour that I’m envisioning. So what if I looked at all the different battlefields that we were thinking about visiting on this road trip tour and I said, this is the total number of people every single year who come out to perform Civil War reenactments. That stat seems pretty good, right?

What’s wrong with this? So it does definitely establish a number of people who are not only interested in spending money on this activity, but who are also, hopefully, it seems traveling to do so. From that perspective, it’s pretty good, right? However, it doesn’t on its own, it might combine with some other things. But it doesn’t on its own. Let me know that these people plan any other travel aside from this one reenactment around the Civil War. So that’s what we might call a very potential market, but it’s a market where you would need to do some marketing to convince them of your case. Now, if I said, you know, XYZ number of people participate in Civil War reenactment every year, and an anecdotal study interviewing participants in Civil War reenactments showed that on average re-enactors travel to 3.5 or more reenactments every year, then we would be getting somewhere.

So let’s look at what are some better statements. All right. So here’s what Jane says. Media surveys indicate that at least 50% of quilters plan to spend $1000 on their hobby this year, and 60% indicated that they buy books on quilting. Great. This is one of those combined things, like I just offered you, that addresses a couple different things. So we’ve established that quilters, which assumingely is a market for this book in this made up statistic, that quilters spend money on their hobby, although it’d be great to have as a company, of course, by a number of outlining the number of quilters in, you know, a country or something like that. But she’s also included how many buy books. Now this next one is really interesting. Recent reviewers of X books complained that they are not keeping up with new information and trends.

So what she’s saying here in this statistic is that the books that already exist on a certain topic are too outdated. So that there are people who are paying for these books and buying these books and want to instead buy books that are more up to date about a certain topic. So there’s not a number here showing the size of this market, but it’s showing that people who are vocal and active and who honestly control the opinions of other people, right, because they’re reading Amazon reviews, are looking for the type of book that this made up statistic would be proposing in this proposal. Now look at the next one. “The New York Times” recently wrote about the increased interest in military memoirs, X and Y media outlets regularly profile soldiers who’ve written books about their experience. So this is another double whammy. So we’ve got a trend here.

We’ve got that “The New York Times” has commented on a trend about not the publication of military memoirs. This is what we saw a lot up here, that there’s a lot of publications, whether book form or website form on these topics. “The New York Times” commented on the interest, as in, the reader interest in military memoirs. And they’ve also showed that magazines which clearly have to publish things that people want to buy or they wouldn’t be in business are also profiling soldiers who’ve written books about their experience. So this is actually like a whole other double whammy because not only are they including two things here, but the second one is a double whammy where they’re showing that there’s interest that people are reading about this topic and things that they have to pay for. And it also indicates that this fictional author here probably hopes to get themselves profiled by X and Y media outlets because of the fact that they are writing a book.

So, how would we take our Civil War road trip idea and make that fit into these three different types of useful statistics? So here we can say, media surveys and, of course, you would want to say where these surveys came from? You’d want to be more specific, but these are made up statistics that Jane did. So you would wanna say, you know, a survey by, you know, BBC world history or a survey by, what is it called here, The History Channel or something like that indicates 50% of Civil War enthusiasts plan to travel to pursue their hobby this year, and 45% will buy books to support that trip. That would be one. We’d have to find that. Right. And then also I didn’t quite give a number, but maybe they’ll spend, you know, maybe enthusiasts crazy. So maybe they’ll spend $10,000 on their hobby this year, including travel.

So then what if we said, recent reviewers of Civil War site or Civil War guidebooks or Civil War…I’m trying to think of some other similar kind of books here, but, you know, it would basically be guidebooks on Civil War sites, right, complain that they are not keeping up with new information on trends or complain that, well, there is much historical information contained in the guides. The information on how exactly to visit these sites is lacking. Right. Another one here, the New York Times recently wrote about the increased interest in military memoirs.

I think this is the kind of thing where whatever it is you wanna write about… I just found a great piece the other day and I want to say it was the San Francisco Chronicle, there was an enormous, enormous weddings piece that was all about this wedding between an Indian guy and a white woman that went on and on and on, it was very clear that there was a large interest in this topic.

So on the topics of the Civil War guidebook that we’re fictionally writing here, we could say, you know, that the Chicago Tribune or, you know, let’s go to the south, right? “The Washington Post” recently wrote about the drastic uptick in Civil War related travel due to the, you know, there was an anniversary that just took place and illustrated that has been sustained following the 150th anniversary. Media outlets regularly include information on how to visit these sites, something like that. Media outlets including X, Y, and Z. So I wanted to give you these and I pulled them from Jane’s sites because she spends a lot of time reviewing people’s proposals and she also is very in touch with the industry. So she really knows that these are the type of things that are going to be swaying the people who are looking at your proposals.

So I wanted to give you these three and also these other three bad ones as templates, right? And that’s why I talked about each of them in a lot of detail because I want you to see as you are thinking or explicitly writing these out or just testing an idea, just looking through Google or Amazon or the U.S. census or rather not those things, but perhaps media outlets and whatnot, to see if your book idea has legs and deciding what of those interesting factors will go into this proposal that I’m hoping you guys at the end of this all put together a proposal just in a weekend, just to get something out there and circulating.

So, I want you to see some templates that you can really easily follow or not follow in the case of the bad ones. How to improve, if you do write one that’s bad, what you need to add to it, and basically how to understand the levers that really make the people who buy these books, the people who will write you these five figure checks right off the bat.

Just write your book how these people think. Now, literally million dollar question because, you know, we all want to show that millions of dollars are already being spent on whatever we wanna write a book about, is where do you find these statistics? I actually have gotten this question in a couple different forums, both in coaching calls and on a webinar earlier today, or not a webinar or rather a podcast interview, is about where to find statistics. Now this is a really interesting question. Now, when a writer asked me ever for any reason on any website of any kind about anything where to find something, I get a little nervous because if you are having trouble finding something that is, you know, in the FAQ, googleable, on somebody’s About page, what is that telling me with my editor hat on about your research skills? So it’s very important as we think about putting together not just our whole proposal but particularly this business case part that we are showing our ability to get interesting statistics.

We are showing our research abilities by what we find and what we include in this section. So if you are pitching a book as pretty much every book does, even if it’s about something that you’ve experienced that involves research, you wanna nail this. So, where do we find these cool stats? I’ve given you a couple examples in these examples from Jane. We’ve got some, you know, media outlets surveys, so you can put survey about Civil War road trips, survey about Civil War travel, survey about visiting Civil War sites, survey about spending on Civil War travel, survey about spending on Civil War interest, survey about spending by Civil War enthusiast. You want to take any of these initial things, right? So, you know, reviewers of Civil War books, whatever that, we can just go on Amazon, right?

Increased interest in Civil War travel guides, any of these phrases that we see here, you wanna not just take them and drop them into Google, but drop them into Google with a lot of variations because it’s so common today that whatever you need can be found, but that the act of finding it is the really, really grueling part. And I often see when it pays off, when people have gone that mile to get just that right thing versus when people have stopped on something earlier and it’s interesting because it’s not.

I’m definitely not saying that it’s a factor of laziness by any stretch of the imagination. I wanna be really clear on this. It’s a factor of working smartly, working smart. I’m not quite sure which of those is correct. It’s a factor of not putting in one search term Civil War travel statistics and going through 20 pages of random search results. It’s a factor of trying different things from the beginning, finding the one that is getting you the most traction and then going down that path. So as you’re looking for statistics, there are many Google searches you can run, there is, depending on what you’re looking for, there is any number of government agencies or nonprofits that put out reports on these different things. There are for profits that are doing white papers that are doing, you know, data mining of the data that they have as companies.

There are so many different things that are out there and being published online. What really matters for you is what is turning up the most useful data. So what that means is it’s less about where to find the statistics then making sure you are gravitating towards good statistics and turning away or trying something else. When you are seeing these more flaccid statistics that don’t show spending, they don’t show specific audience and they don’t show spending also specifically on books.

So I have one more thing that I want to chat about, which is this idea of the concentric circles of who is interested in your books. Now the thing about these circles as they begin with every agent and editor’s favorite question. Now, for those of you who are able to see the slides, you would’ve read the question, but for those of you who are just listening, the question is, who needs this book?

Now in the example that I gave you about this Civil War road trip, as you do your market research, you will start to see that there are some people somewhere spending money on this interest, specifically the road trip part and the Civil War part. That money is already being spent on it. Now, the important thing here is that if you do not find that, if you do not find that people so need this thing that they’re already paying for it, it means that an agent and a publishing house will also find that lack and if they will not be interested in your book. So if you aren’t finding it, you either need to dig deeper or you need to move on to something else. Because if you can’t answer this question, who needs to have this book in their life, who will buy it the second that they hear about it, you’re in trouble.

So this brings to mind a book that got so much press in Britain when it came out. It was called “Unmentionable,” the…I wanna say, the 18th, 19th, the some century ladies guide to, you know, sex and public discourse and something else. Now, it was a book that was written quite interestingly and unusually in second person. To you, my dear darling reader, who has gone back in time to the era of Jane Austen to live as our favorite romantic heroines did. And in order to do that, you need to understand that quite a few things are different back then. For instance, the way that bathing works is entirely different. Even the way that you get dressed in the morning or somebody dresses you as the case may be entirely different. The order in which you eat your foods or the time of days at which you eat or when and what is acceptable to eat.

The way that you move your parasol as you’re out for a walk with a gentleman and what that secretly signals to him. So this book, very service, how-to oriented about a very specific topic, which is how to actually live as a woman in the time of the romantic Jane Austen dating lives. Now, who needs that book? If you think about it, who needs that book?

First and foremost, is it every single person who reads and loves Jane Austen? Is it people who have watched the movie? There’s like a Jane Austen fan club movie or something like that, which is around the idea of people going on these weekend retreats where there are men there that act like, you know, these characters out of these heavy books like you know the Mr. Darcy’s and whatnot, and you get to play act along that you’re one of these heroines.

Is it for those people? Is it for people perhaps who go themselves to these events if they actually happen? Who needs this book? I would say it’s the people who are actually physically going somewhere to have those kinds of Jane Austen experience. They need this book. They need to know how to dress up in this way. They need to know how to use their parasol. All of those things, right? That is the answer to the question, who needs this book. So that is the first concentric circle. Now, because the text didn’t fit very well on circles, I’ve got them sort of lined up here, but you want to imagine that there’s a circle with another circle around it with another circle around it and another circle around it and that each of these stages here are the stages of the circles. But the text not too small when I did that, so I have them here for you in order.

So we want our very core base, the people that we for sure need to find statistics about and put that in our target market, target audience section of our proposal in order to know that this is a valid topic that needs to be the people who absolutely need this book to answer a burning question in their life that needs to be answered. That is our inner circle, our core foundation, the molten magma core of the planet of our book’s audience.

Now the question after that is, who is already spending money to follow their interest in this topic? Now, obviously, the people who are already going to these Jane Austen kind of, you know, life live along camps or everyone call it living history camps are spending money on it, but those are the die-hard hardcore people who need this book. This next category is more those people who are going to see that film, which is about this sort of experience, right?

Or it might be people who are buying outfits for this type of thing or who are going to parties that do this kind of living history thing if not for a whole weekend. These are people who are already spending money to follow their interest in this topic. And then the next step out from that are people who are spending time on this but maybe not so much clear connection in terms of how they’re spending money. So this would be in people who are in groups to pursue that interest. So in the case of our Jane Austen idea, this would be perhaps people who are in book clubs that read books from that era or discussion groups or who maybe hang out in, you know, a Jane Austen Fan Club on Facebook or something to that extent.

Now the next one is, who is already buying books about this topic? Now you can see as I’ve talked about the really fervent sort of core layers, the buildup, the planet that is our planet of readers here, that this is gonna feel less attached. If I say anybody who we use Jane Austen versus the people who pay to go to these live experiences, you can already see that we’re getting further away from the idea of people who absolutely need this book.

And that’s really important to remember. It’s important to remember that leap that we’ve made, which has several different steps in between from people who are actually going to these live living history, you know, romantic, whatever, Jane Austen things to people who have just bought Jane Austen. There’s a big gap there. And as you are pulling together the statistics for your target audience section of your book, that gap matters. If you have not filled in appropriately these other sections, this alone and the ones beneath that are not gonna work for you. Now the next further step out is people who have overlapping interest in this topic. So this is gonna be maybe people who don’t read like the Bronte and Jane Austen type books, but maybe they’re reading other things from a similar era like a Charles Dickens or something more of that variety. But as you can see, these are weaker ties.

It’s less obviously clear that those people are going to buy your book. The most important thing is to show who is already spending money on exactly what your book is about, so much so that they need your book in order to guide them to make their lives better, and then to build out from there.

I look forward to chatting with you guys next week. Bye.

Creating Ambiance with Journalistic Detail Transcript

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So, today is the last webinar in our series on journalistic detail. And in so many ways, it’s the most important. Often when we do series, they are really informational, in terms of, each webinar built on the previous one. Or like when we did the several month-long article Nuts and Bolts series. Each webinar stands alone in a way in terms of what it covers. It really covers the different piece of a larger picture, in which you don’t need to have all the pieces, you pick and choose which pieces apply to you personally.

So, this week as we talk about creating ambiance, it’s not just that ambiance is something that’s easier to understand, building upon what we’ve talked about with journalistic detail in the last couple weeks, it’s also that creating ambiance is really one of those higher level goals more generally, of what you want your writing, your words, and especially your travel writing, period, to achieve, right?

I have a slide on this specifically. But if we think about what we want to do with travel writing, so often people use this idea of creating a sense of place. How often have you heard of sense place? Sense of place. You need a sense of place. I write with a sense of place, my books exemplify a sense of place, right? That seems to be the be-all-end-all of what we would like to do with our travel writing, and when you really get down to it, that’s ambiance.

And I’m using the word ambiance instead of sense of place, because I find like angle, like, you know, why did we start using journalistic detail instead of specifics? Like, so many of these words, sense of place, is used so often, in so many places, by so many people, with so many different ideas of what that means, that it, kind of, ceases to mean anything at all, because it means so many different things to different people.

That as we say it, it’s not actually communicating anything that we intend to the recipient, it’s only meaning a layer of different values they already have attached to that word. And obviously, that’s the case with all words, but I’m trying to take ambiance, which is a little new in this setting, and use it to recreate our sense of how we build up that sense.

So, today we’re gonna follow the same format that we’ve been following, both in these more recent journalistic detail webinars, as well as in the earlier article, Nuts and Bolts webinars. I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about, if you wanna call it the theory and practice behind this idea, and then we’re gonna move into looking at some specific examples.

And I’ve got some really interesting things cued up for you today. One, I’m really excited to share, because it comes from an exercise that I did, and, in fact, an exercise that was timed, so it’s really easy for you guys to do it yourself. And I’ll explain how that exercise works so that you can test it as well on your own at home, or with another writing friend, or with a non-writing friend even, you just need somebody to interview in order to accomplish this.

And then, I’m also gonna share with you a relatively long piece, it’s a feature from outside, we’re not gonna read through the whole piece, but I chose it and I chose to focus on it in this webinar. And not necessarily just because of its timeliness, and you’ll see what I mean about that when we get there, but also just because of how incredibly tied everything in the story is into this ambiance. And the fact that the story itself, theoretically, seems to be about one thing, but it’s really about this ambiance that it’s creating, and that’s what I wanna encourage all of you guys to do as well.

So, enough about us, let’s talk about your writing. I mentioned before that I’m using this word “Ambience,” rather than “Sense of place,” or even “Atmosphere,” or a lot of other words that can be used. And I wanted to, just because it’s always interesting, I wanted to dig into the official definition of that. But first, I wanted to explain a little bit of why, why we’re talking about ambiance, and why ambiance ties into journalistic detail.

And that’s because of something that you have probably heard when you were young, or you’ve probably heard, it’s a trite thing that people are told, or you’ve heard it from me when I look at your pitches. But “Show, don’t tell,” is so real. “Show, don’t tell,” is the most fundamental thing in all forms of communication at all times that causes something to fall flat.

I see it again and again, whether I’m putting my reader hat on, or particularly when I put my editor, who receives 200 pitches a week, and I’m very harried and I don’t have time for this, but I’m looking for one specific thing I need and that’s why I’ve even opened up these unsolicited pitches in the first place, hat on, and I look at people’s pitches. I’m not grabbed by things, you feel it when you’re grabbed.

For those of you who are very into wine, or beer, or some type of food, whether it’s cupcakes, or maybe you really like dog videos, you know in that thing that you know well and you love, or that you’re just very often exposed to, whether it’s your kids tantrums or what, you know when there is an outlier. You know when there is something that stands above the rest, when it has some quality that makes it different and important.

And in writing, that’s writing that goes beyond the words and creates pictures. Now, this is really more the, sort of, science side, if you will, behind “Show, don’t tell.” It’s that, as we see with so much visual marketing, and as photographic or static, visual marketing is moving so much into video. And as video marketing is moving into more episodic, almost fictional content, as opposed to straight non-fiction content, i.e. movies being used to promote destinations like Rio, what do you think that’s about?

How do you think that happened? Right? So, it’s because of the showing, it’s because that is so much more powerful than straight telling. I mean, just a very simple statistic, for instance, is that, people retain 95% of what they hear in a video message or what the message is in a video, as opposed to 10% of the message in a block of text. And no judgments on the block, or the text, or whatnot there, that’s just a general statistic, okay?

So, another example here is, I’m not sure how many of you guys are familiar with Rosetta Stone, it’s a language learning software. I’m not really sure how they’ve evolved with the times, in the app-based world of Duolingo and things like that, but for a very long time they were really the preeminent, and very expensive to boot, way to learn a new language. And the way they did it was by tying your acquisition of new words in a language entirely into images.

So, if you’re learning German, you don’t see B-O-A-T and then the German word for boat, you see a boat, and the app speaks the German word for boat to you. So, you are associating the visual with the word. There’s another thing a lot of people, our savvy language learners do, where they put posted notes around their homes of the new word that they’re trying to learn in a different language on their mirror.

They’ll put the word “Specchio,” for instance, is the Italian word for mirror, right? And they’ll put that everywhere, they’ll put “cama” on their bed if they’re learning Spanish, things like that. But this still introduces that, you’re seeing the letters in your mind translate into the word. The best way to understand anything is to see the picture and have that picture speak directly to the part of your brain that processes that picture into something.

And so, that’s why as writers, ironically, even though there’s often photography along with our pieces, we are trying to paint word pictures. That’s what we do, we paint word pictures. We say things that jump off the page, into the reader’s mind, and do something there. But the most important thing in all communications, whether you’re trying to get your husband to pick up your kid from water polo practice in the morning, so that even though you have to get up at 5:00 to drive them there, you can go home and do something else, you don’t have to sit there and wait in your cold, cold car for two hours, from 5:00 to 7:00

So, when you are trying to affect something in a reader, what you’re trying to affect is emotion. And these visuals, showing things, do that so much better than telling somebody. You know, how often have you been in a disagreement with a family member, or a significant other, something like that? And they say, you know, “You shouldn’t be annoyed at me right now.” Or, “Don’t take it that way.” How often do people actually feel the way that you tell them to feel? Not very often, right?

You need to create something that causes them to feel. And so, that’s really what we’re doing with “ambiance.” And that’s why I’m not using the word “atmosphere,” which is very related, because “ambiance,” goes more to the feeling or mood associated with a particular place, person, or thing, right? So, if we are talking about the ambiance of a restaurant, it might be romantic, it might be trendy, it might be…I don’t know, what would be the appropriate word for family-friendly. Let’s say, energetic, or young, or something like that, right?

So, an ambiance is this sense that you get about things, and you often feel it before you even think to describe it, right? I think that happens really often, and you can think about it, especially if you are a female who travels by herself on occasion or often, you often get these feelings of perhaps not feeling so safe somewhere, or feeling like you need to watch out without knowing why. There’s all sorts of things that our brain does to cause this, to cause us to be aware of those things that we might not be consciously aware of.

Our attention is constantly going from the focus of what we’re actually looking at, to what’s going on around us. There’s this constant, kind of, widening and narrowing going on that we’re really not aware of. But that’s what creates these sensations. So, your brain is spending almost 50% of the time on creating that ambiance, on subconsciously taking in information that’s giving you a feeling or mood about a place, completely separated from facts.

Now, it’s interesting because, I know we’ve spent so much of this journalistic detail series talking about facts, and how you use different facts, and different things that you observe, and different pieces of that data collection, that is taking notes, and being in a destination, or other online research, how you use those different things strategically to get the point of your story across.

So, now we’re taking it to the next level. Your story may be about solo female travel, but is it exuberant? Is it wary? Is it confident? Is it conservative? How does your story feel? Or it might not feel like it yet. How do you want your story to feel? How do you want someone to feel after they’ve read your story?

Because you cannot tell them, if you’re writing super cheap content for a super cheap content site, if you really want you can, but I really don’t recommend that you do that even in those settings, because you wanna be practicing your best writing at all times. You wanna use every time you’re being paid to put words on the page as an excuse to be paid to practice, really, right?

So, you don’t wanna tell someone, “This is a place where your whole family will feel at home.” Unless you have had a bunch of words before that, that set that stage, that create that ambiance, that have that reader nodding along and feeling like, “Yeah. They’ve got something for my kids. Oh my God, my mother-in-law would just love that Jacuzzi.”

Unless they already feel all of those things, when you tell them this is where their whole family can feel at home, they’re gonna be like, “I don’t think so.” It’s a great way to incite mental pushback in your readers, is to tell them what to feel. So, that’s where this ambiance comes in, is that we’ve been using all of these journalistic details in different ways, whether it’s to describe a place, to describe a person, by putting them into a very, very short space, very strategically, to get across what we want people to understand from our story.

But we have to first think about, and then craft, that thing that we want people to understand in our heads. We have to understand it for ourselves, about how we feel about this topic, how we feel about this destination, how we feel about this experience that we’ve had, or how we feel the interviewee that we’re gonna be writing about, how they feel about the topic that you’re gonna be writing, what emotion is coming across there.

So, I was thinking about this, particularly in the case of interviews, because the example that I’m gonna give you of this exercise comes from an interview-oriented setting. Now, when you’re interviewing someone, it can be, in many ways, significantly easier for you to capture…let’s call it, you know, what’s going on in their head…what’s going on in their body, I think, is a better way to do it.

Are they speaking very fast? I’m told often that I’m known for doing this, I do it a lot at conferences, because I’m trying to keep the excitement in the room up, the excitement but the topic, the excitement about this talk, the excitement about this conference, and particularly, a sense that we can go out and do this stuff that I’m talking about. I’m giving people very specific tactics, and I want them to feel excited.

So, I am excited, I am energetic, and I put my content across in that way, in hopes that they catch that vibe as well. But the thing is, when we are interviewing people, how often are you writing down, or even noticing, in the first place, the tone the person is using when they say things to you. How that tone changes from one thing to another, what parts do they get excited about, what parts do they sound less excited about, right? That’s actually more important, isn’t it?

And I think in particular there, something that I tend to notice a lot, is when I am with groups doing these different events that we do, where we go out to different destinations and we interview folks, I will often see a very clear shift in someone that we’re interviewing. For instance, I see somebody ask a question, that I know the person being interviewed, that it’s, like, not their subject matter area, by how they respond.

I see that they, maybe, get shifty, that they change their enthusiasm level, that they perhaps seem standoffish or something. And the person, the interviewer, quite often takes that to be about them, and about how they’re presenting the material, whereas it’s really just a signaling mechanism that the person doesn’t feel comfortable. On the flip side, I’ve often seen that really great interviews and really great article ideas particularly come from this idea of looking at when somebody lights up, when someone that you’re interviewing starts to really talk faster, and give you more, and not allow you to interject, and they just, like, their eyes light up and they just keep telling you things, and things, and things.

That’s when they’re excited about something. And the thing is that, there are stories where there’s places for both, you’ll see that in the story that I’m gonna show you. But the important thing is that you have to notice that early. You have to notice it in the people you’re interviewing, and you have to notice it in yourself. If you are the main protagonist in the story, if you are writing a first-person narrative piece about something and you don’t know how you feel about that thing, or if you are coming across very clearly in the writing and how you feel, but you’re fighting it with the words that you’re choosing to put on the page, that comes across, and that creates a disturbance in the ambiance of your story.

So, like I said, this is layering on so many of the other things that we’ve spoken about in this journalistic detail series, in terms of figuring out what your story is about, what point you wanna get across, making sure every single, single, single thing, every detail in your story ties into that, and this is one more layer. But this is the layer that will take your stories from good to great, this is the layer that creates award-winning stories, as opposed to just features that run in AFAR.

And yes, I know that features that run in AFAR sound fantastic, but if you don’t already have a relationship with AFAR, you need to be sending them award-winning-level writing to get their… This idea of creating ambiance, like I said, it has so much to do with listening, listening to yourself, listening to people in the destination, listening to a person that you’re interviewing. And so, it’s something that you need to, if not capture in the moment, then you need to be capturing upon recollection.

So, Tim Cahill is a really compulsive note-taker. If you don’t know who Tim Cahill is, he’s one of the founding editors of “Outside magazine,” he was formerly at “Rolling Stone,” he’s written boatloads of books, he is very acclaimed. And he is very big on note-taking, but he says it’s much more important to get how you feel in the moment than how something looks, or other sensory details. How you feel is the most important thing, and you can never get that back, it evolves over time.

Now, this exercise that I wanted to tell you guys about that you can also practice at home that we did, was focused on eliciting emotions from other people. And we were supposed to ask them either about their hometown or a place that they had been. And at the end, we were supposed to write only a couple of sentences. So, we really needed to get something really juicy and something impactful, as in, we needed to get some, whether it was a fact or an actual quote, from this person, that was gonna really make an impact in our “story” which would be like a short, little thing that we wrote afterwards.

And to my personal dismay, they did not allow us to take any notes whatsoever during this exercise. So, I was just sitting there trying to hold different things in my head as the person was talking, but I really loved it. And I’m not saying do this all the time, notes are very important, but I really loved that it forced me to focus on the bigger picture thing of, “What is the takeaway here?”

And I’m gonna show you this little thing that I wrote which is…I think it gets away with being four sentences, and it looks a little bit long, but I’m gonna show it to you in a second. But what I wanted to make sure that you understand here is that, we talk a lot about how I can show you…or different tools to…or different strategies to extract many, many stories from each destination. And not every story is going to have such a deep emotional component. But when you feel this emotional component, there is always a story there, and you have to follow the emotion to figure out what’s going on.

So, Don George, for instance, who is the editor of all the Lonely Planet anthologies, he wrote Lonely Planet’s book on, sort of, how to write as a travel writer. He has this whole thing where he just writes one story for every destination, no matter how much time he spends there. And he feels like once he’s done that story, the destination is spent in his mind. But it’s because he focuses only on the most impactful, emotional experience that he had in that trip.

And like I said, sometimes there is just one, and it stands out to you so much, there’s nothing else that you can remember from that entire trip. But there’s often one per day, sometimes there’s one per hour, and if you take notes about how you feel as you’re there, you can capture those and reflect on them and remember them for later. So, in this exercise that we did, I interviewed this woman and I interviewed her about China, where she goes relatively regularly for work.

So, this wasn’t necessarily a place where she hadn’t been before, it wasn’t striking her that the destination was new, but she had a very interesting feeling, that as I listened to her and didn’t take notes, continually emerged. So, here was what I wrote about that interview. “Trapped and stymied, seasoned ESL instructor, Liz Fonseca, punctuated every sentence with, as if the phrase and the feeling were as normal as a period.

During a teacher training in Huain’an in China, even though she spent time in other communist countries, and she spent her entire days and evenings with her outwardly hospitable host, she couldn’t shake them, or the feeling that they may have been handling her. We were having this conversation on WeChat, which had a translate feature, so we could see the conversation our guide had with his boss. ‘The foreign ladies want to go on the boat trip.’ ‘No. No. Security risk,’” she explained, lingering on the last phrase, “Security risk.”

As she narrowed her eyes and gave a quick flash of a glance to her side, as if suddenly feeling that constant presence, again, of someone over her shoulder. Was she the security risk? Or was the risk to her own security?” I think they really only gave about two minutes to actually write this up, and maybe five minutes to do the interview, or something like that, maybe they had five minutes, maybe I’m not being generous. But we had very little time to write this up, and I actually wrote a totally different version and then I switched it around to this at the end.

But, when I wrote it the first time, I’ve got my version’s over here that I’m looking at, I realized that all these different things that I was trying to get down were exposition, they were… When I asked her about her trip, or, you know, her giving the background of the trip itself, or different things like that, or her saying, you know, trying to get to the heart of why those experiences bother her so much, or what experiences happened. All of those, they were all background to this more important thing. And so, I cut all of that out, and this last slide here that I’ve stayed on, I actually have a little bit of an observation of her that shows how she was feeling as she gave me this little story about WeChat, that she actually, kind of, like, looked worried and looked over her shoulder again, reflexively.

So, as you’re doing this, I wanna pop over and look at this other story as well. As you are doing this yourself, like I said, if the story is about you, it’s so important to figure out how you feel as well, okay? In this situation.

So, this story, like I said, this ran in “Outside Magazine.” I believe they named it one of their top travel stories for the year, in the year that it appeared, and it appeared in 2017. Now, I wanna just read you this particular passage from it before I give you too much background on what the story is about. This is from… For the length of this story, we could say this is around the nut graph.

So, this is about the part where she’s telling us, kind of, her stories about. So, she says, “Heading north from Springer Mountain in Georgia, the Appalachian Trail class of 2017 would have to walk 670 miles before reaching the first county that did not vote for Donald Trump. The average percentage of voters who did vote for Trump, a xenophobic a candidate who was supported by David Duke, in those miles? Seventy-six. Approximately 30 miles further away, they’d come to a hiker hostel that proudly flies a Confederate flag.

Later, they would reach the Lewis Mountain campground in Shenandoah National Park, created in Virginia in 1935 during the Jim Crow era, and read plaques acknowledging its former history as the segregated Lewis Mountain Negro Area. The campsite was swarming with our RVs flying Confederate flags when I hiked through. This flag would haunt the hikers all the way to Mount Katahdin, the trail’s endpoint in northern Maine. They would see it in every state, feeling the tendrils of hatred that rooted it to the land they walked upon.”

So, first of all, wow, right? You can see why she got such accolades and how she got this story in “Outside” in the first place. Now, this is a story of somebody who is a relatively solo female traveler, but she was in, and she describes, the Class of 2017. So, there is a group of people who walk the Appalachian Trail every year, more or less. And so, that’s why she was calling it the class of 2017. But her story ended up being probably much more racially motivated than she was expecting when she set out on this journey.

I don’t know if she set out on it with, kind of, Cheryl Strayed wild views of what she was gonna experience, I don’t know if she set out with anything in particular at all, but this was the feeling that she had consistently. Throughout her trip, she was struck by this feeling that she shouldn’t be there, or that she was somehow negated by this land that she was passing through. And even as I tell you, I hate to tell you what it was that she felt because she shows it so beautifully in the piece, which is why I provided that link there.

But this bit that I just read you is really going through these journalistic details to create this ambiance in a lovely way, right? She’s giving you facts, she’s giving you… “Have to walk 670 miles.” Right? What a great specific fact, what a great journalistic detail she has there. Talking about, 30 miles further, they’d come to a hiker hostel with the Confederate flag. Then she talks about this campground, okay?

And even the way that she describes Trump is quite specific. And so, she’s got these numbers, she’s got these references, she’s got these specific place names, she’s got these years, she’s got all this specificity that helps to ground this ambiance that she’s creating, that she’s telling you about. And so, by not telling you what she wants you to feel, which is, frankly, I think, clearly to be bothered by this as much as she would have been if she knew this maybe before she set out. She shows it to us, she creates that sense.

So, she also…Just before that bit that I just read you, there is a little exchange with a man that sets the scene for that, that I just wanted to share with you as well. So, a day hiker… So, this is a hiker, but a local, right? She’s put in something much further along in her trip. So, she is on the Tennessee-Virginia border, okay? And the day hiker says, “Where are you from?” She says, “Miami.” And he says, “No. But really, where are you from?” “He mentioned something about my features, my thin nose, and then trails off. I tell him my family is from Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa, next to Ethiopia.”

He looks relieved. “I knew it,” he says, “You’re not black.” I say that, “Of course I am, none more than black,” I weakly joke. “Not really,” he says, “You’re African, not black-black. Blacks don’t hike.” She says, “I’m tired of this man, his from-froms and black-blacks. He wishes me good luck and leaves, he means it too, he isn’t malicious. To him, there’s nothing abnormal about our conversation. He has characterized me, and the world makes sense again. Not black-black. I hike the remaining miles to my tent and don’t emerge for hours.”

Now, it would be very easy, I think, to almost diminutively,…But for sure I would say that this probably happens in the heads of some people who read this, to think, “Well, what a great, and deep, and impactful story she has, of course, the story is so great. This wrestles with large issues, okay? Like, here, you know what? I didn’t even know that you saw this in America, I’ve seen it in Europe quite a bit.

But she says she’s about to leave town when she sees blackface soap, a joke item that will supposedly turn a white person black if you trick them into using it. “I’m in a general store outside the Nantahala Outdoor Center, the soap is in a discount bin next to the cash register. I popped in to buy chocolate milk and was instead reminded of a line from Claudia Rankine’s book ‘Citizen.’ ‘The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.’”

She fumbles to take a photo of the carton white woman on the packaging standing in front of the sink. She can’t believe it, how could this happen? Her hands and face are black, she scrubs to no avail. And then she moves on, she doesn’t tell you how to feel about this, she’s not even actually telling you how she feels, she’s showing you details that create feelings. This is the really important thing here.

So, she’s saying that she sees it, she’s saying where she sees it, she says it’s in a discount bin next to the cash register. She even told you what brought her to the store. And then this is the closest line she says to telling you exactly what she feels, she shows you with this line, okay? And then she explains that she has to run but she’s struck by this, and she talks with the picture on the packaging, okay? So, this is a good, like, 10, 12 lines on this blackface soap moment here, you know?

And that’s the kind of thing that I often see in stories, that somebody might just write, “I couldn’t believe that they actually sold blackface soap in these stores,” or something like that. But by showing it in this kind of detail, and by showing you her thoughts without exactly telling you what they were, she’s creating that impact on the reader, she’s creating that ambiance of unease, of shock. She’s creating all those things with what she’s choosing to share with you there, okay?

So, again, here’s the link to that story. I really love it, I feel like it’s very specific…specifically this story, it’s just flush with all the things that I wanted to talk to you about in this webinar. But it goes on for quite, quite, quite, quite a bit.

Weaving Journalistic Detail into Short Articles Transcript

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So we’re diving this month into this idea of journalistic detail, and I spoke about what journalistic detail is and why it’s important to you in the first webinar in this series, and I will dive more into that as well this week just to recap for those of you who weren’t on the first call or haven’t listened to it yet, we’re going to be uploading it to the webinar library soon. And so today, we’re going to look specifically about how journalistic detail works in short articles.

This is a question that comes up a lot when I tell people even in their pitches because in a way, you can think of a pitch kind of as a short article in certain ways, right? That I tell people they need to expand something more or they need to be more specific or they need to give more specifics. So they need to give more detail. They’re like, “Well, you already told me it’s too long, I don’t understand.”

And the reason that it can be difficult to incorporate journalistic detail into short articles is not just because you’re tight on the word count, but often because there’s a lot of things that you want to include that don’t need to be there. And so thinking about how to use journalistic detail in short articles also helps us to get a lot of clarity around what we really need to have in those articles and what’s really important. So as we go through this today, we’re going to look…like I said, I’m going to do a little recap on what journalistic detail is and what it can do for you, and we’re going to look at what makes it hard especially with short articles to incorporate this. And then I’m going to do a little exercise, and if you’re on the call today but you’re kind of listening from somewhere and you can’t write it up on your computer, you can’t join in, that’s fine. For those of you listening on the recording, I encourage you to do this as well.

What we’ll do is I’ll have you read something and then we’ll go through the little piece that you read and we’ll point out different parts of different types of detail that they use, how they use in the article, where it shows up in the article, and what that tells us about what the writer is trying to do. And then we’re going to…not so much having you have the time to read it, then think about it, but we’ll all go through line by line of some other short articles for you to see how they’ve implemented those things that we talked about with the exercise.

Like I said, before we get started today, I just want to do a little recap for those of you who haven’t heard yet the first webinar in this series on journalistic detail about what I mean when I say journalistic detail. These two words are important because we can think about details and including details in our piece, and sometimes, that goes into the realm of description. Sometimes it goes into the realm of background or history. Sometimes that goes into the realm of like explaining amenities that they have in a certain place, but that qualifier of journalistic is really important here, and this is why I like to use this term rather than just kind of saying the more abstract you need to add specifics to your piece or use specifics in your piece or your pieces need to be more detailed.

Because the thing about journalistic detail is that we’re really being mindful about what we choose to include in the piece. And what I mean by that is anytime you’re writing in a print setting, sometimes with the web, but much more so with print, words are at a premium. They mean physical space. They’re a physical space that’s going to your article rather than an advertisement that someone’s paying for.

And so it’s very important to be not so much brief as in short but succinct. So when you look at especially the short articles in the front of book of a number of magazines, it’s interesting because they may be talking about something that feels like a very thin slice of a larger topic, but they talk about it in a lot of detail. They accomplish quite a lot in a very small amount of space, and that’s a very important skill to have not just as a writer but particularly as a writer who’s interested in working with magazines. And the way that they go about accomplishing so much in such a small space is being incredibly clear on what they need to say to the point where like we did in our “Article Nuts and Bolts” series, you know exactly what lines need to go into that piece and what pieces of information you need to get in order to fill those in.

So what makes those sentences, those lines that you do choose to include in the very small amount of space, what makes them deliver, what makes them paint a very complete picture even in a small amount of time and space is this journalistic detail. So it’s choosing things that fit the overall purpose of your piece, what it is that you need to say, that are highly illustrative that really do a lot of showing rather than telling.

So an example that came up yesterday at a workshop that I was attending, somebody was saying that she has this fashion brand and it has previously been…it was previously sold out in a month and a half in major retailers in New York, LA, and a couple other markets. And my immediate question was like, “Great for sold out in a month and a half, great and saying exactly which markets that was, but why don’t we get to know the name of the stores? Like why aren’t you telling us the name of those retailers?” Because to me, she actually use a different word than major which kind of like set off some weird bells for me, but to me, like not saying the names of those stores when she’s being specific about those other things immediately makes me wonder, “Well, maybe they’re not such big names.”

And the thing about being what I sometimes call vague, you can also call it general, or you could just call it being nonspecific when you are describing things is that we don’t always necessarily think about it, but for the reader, that lack of painting a picture is saying something to them and especially when your reader is an editor. To an editor or like when I have my editor hat on, when I see that lack of specificity, it either says to me that this writer is too lazy to find out. That’s one big thing that editors think when they see nonspecific details, that the writer is too lazy to find out or that the writer doesn’t really know which means that the writer did a sloppy job in their reporting. Or that maybe this detail is really just not even that important and we shouldn’t even mention it. If we can’t get specific, what else can we put in there that we can get specific and illustrative about?

So that’s just kind of a small recap on what journalistic detail is, but I also really want to emphasize what journalistic detail can do for you. So one of the most important things goes back to what I just said editors think or that I think when I look at pitches and I have my editor hat on, which is if something is nonspecific, editors will think this person is lazy or they didn’t do their reporting well. But if you are wonderfully specific, if the details that you choose to use do speak volumes and paint pictures in the reader’s mind, that says something to an editor. That says something about your skill, that says something about your craft, and that says something about how they can rely on you as somebody that they’ve never worked with before.

And I touched on this earlier, but the really wonderful thing about being clear on journalistic details and understanding how to use them is that you never have to sit and stare at that blank page and wonder what to do again. You know, say you have a very short thing that you want to write about, explaining why somebody should go say to a destination or perhaps to a particular hotel. So let’s say it’s a particular hotel. Let’s say you have to write a very short thing, 100 words, maybe 150 words, about a short hotel.

What could you write? There are so many things. You can write about when the hotel was founded. You can write about what they’re doing that’s new, what activities they have for families. You could write about how many rooms they have. You could write about what the rooms look like. There’s just so many different places that you can go with that.

And once you get specific on what the point of your piece needs to be, then those details that you need to include all fall into place. So let’s say you are writing about this hotel that’s new in the Caribbean and the audience is American Way. So these are people who fly American Airlines. This is the American Way inflight magazine. And the kind of assumption there is that these people might already go to the Caribbean somewhat frequently or it’s an easy flight for them. These people might, typically, if you look at the demographics of the magazine, they might typically be kind of working professionals with families. And so you’re looking at describing not just why this restaurant or this hotel is new and interesting, but why it is a place that these particular people should go to. So you need to say why it’s different, why it should be on their radar. That’s what you really need to start with because otherwise, why are they reading it? It’s just one more new hotel.

So you need to open with what’s new and different about it, but new and different that applies to that audience. So they maybe don’t care that you have a chef from a James Beard award-winning restaurant, but they might care that there is an innovative new type of waterpark included in the hotel that’s not just really interesting for families but a place where their kids can sort of play on their own without the parents having to be involved.

And then what details do you include? Well, what else does a person need to know to know if this hotel is for them? Do they need to know the rates? Do they need to know what the rooms are like? Do they need to know how they get there? And as you start to put your head in the mindset of this reader and what does the reader need to know exactly about this thing, those details of what you should include just jump out to you and they’re very easy to get.

So this process of focusing on the journalistic detail makes that easier, but like I talked about earlier, as you’re introducing journalistic detail into these short, super short, we’re talking 100, 150, 250, 350 word articles, there is this natural challenge which is that every word is competing for space. And so you run up against this, how do I justify not just saying that there is a pool or saying that there are seven pools with saying that there are seven pools and one is this many feet deep and perfect for children of these ages and one has this whirlpool and one has this…? How can you justify adding more when I’ve just said 15 of our 100 words right there?

So tying back into this idea of when you’re clear on journalistic detail, you don’t have to wonder about what to write, you also don’t have to wonder about whether it makes sense or whether it’s correct to expand on a particular detail when you’re hyper clear about your story concept. And so what that means and with this example of the potential short hotel front of book piece that I just described fictionally for American Airlines, the idea is that I’ve gotten hyper clear on the concept that this hotel is new but that it’s new and important for families to know about because they have the special waterpark that’s not just fun for everybody but people can feel really safe in letting their kids go through it on their own because there’s attendance at these certain places and maybe there’s cameras that parents can monitor their kids as they go through the park, whatever that is, that’s really the point. That’s why these particular people want to know about this park.

And so that means that the details that I choose to include need to be around exactly that, why this hotel and its internal waterpark are important, useful to these people in a place that they want to go. But if you don’t have that, if you don’t have that hyper clear story concept, it’s really easy to wander off into all of the different details about this hotel that one could potentially include. And in a longer piece, you might have time but not in a shorter piece.

So I want to spend a lot of time looking at articles today, and so this brings us to this exercise that I talked about. So I’m going to pull up an article and we’re going to use an article from Delta Sky. Delta Sky has a lot of front of book sections that really pack a lot of things in. So we’ll use that for some of the example that we’re going to do today. And so as I said, I’m going to put the article up here on the screen and our focus really is on the details because remember when we were talking about like how do you justify the word count? What’s really important here is this is a published piece. So the details that we see are the details not just that the writer thought about including, but that the editor approved, that the editor said yes, we must have these words in here in order to get the point of this piece across.

So what that means is that I want you to very much skim, okay? I don’t want you to even like necessarily think about reading the article. I want you to, almost with your eyes, like have a highlighter that only lingers on things that are pieces of detail. And I want you to focus on how many words the writer uses to get that detail across. And then as a collection, what those details say about this story concept, about the point of the piece. How now in retrospect looking at the details that this author has chosen, this writer has chosen to include, how those informed us what the importance of the piece is.

Now, usually as a reader, you’re being almost subliminally influenced by those details in terms of what the point of the piece is, but I want us to look at those details and derive from that what the writer is trying to get across to us so that we can understand how you use those journalistic details to do that in your own pieces. So let me switch the screen now over to Delta Sky and this piece that I pulled up for you. And once I see how it looks on the screen, I’ll make it big enough so that you guys can hopefully read it to the best of your abilities.

So I’m going to make it just a little bit bigger. The layout is a little difficult. All right, I think that’s the biggest that we can make it. So as you’ll see, this section is…the section of this is called Trending. So this is a section that Delta does where they’re talking about a city and they’re usually talking about a specific neighborhood in a city. In this case, it looks like they’re talking a little bit more about a whole city, but they’re talking about a specific neighborhood or a smaller city where the city is kind of really coming on the map. And so on a more high-level, the point of any piece that takes place in Trending is that this is a city that you want to go to now or that you at least need to know about, that things are happening in the city that it is becoming a cultural capital that there’s stuff going on. So that’s the high level thing.

What we want to look for here is what is going on, and yeah, I’ll see if I can make it a little bigger, what is going on in Johannesburg specifically that shows that? How is the writer showing us? What details is the writer choosing to include that particularly show us…I think that you can see the whole article now, that particularly show us that this is the case in Johannesburg at this moment? So again, I’m going to give you a couple minutes and I want you to really skim the article really, don’t start reading all of this stuff unless you’re a speed reader. If you’re a speed reader, be my guest, but we want to look for these details, these adjectives or these facts.

So we’ve got crime-ridden. What else do we have here? We’ve got a renovated textile factory celebrating gold-mining past, these kind of things. So I want you to hone in on the details. I don’t want to give you too many now. Hone in on the details, and remember, we’re looking for the details, how many words they use to get that detail across in these short articles. It’s going to be a lot smaller. This is probably like a 250 word article right here maximum. So how many words they use to get those details across, and then what on the whole, this choice of details are telling us?

So that was two minutes. I was able to read the piece again from beginning to end. So hopefully, you guys were able to get through it. So first and foremost, we wanted to identify where they use details. So the first one that jumps out to me here is a drab industrial complex. Going through, we find here that there’s a lot of paucity of details. It’s a short piece. They’re not going into a lot of detail on a lot of things. We’ve got this renovated textile factory, celebrates Joburg’s gold-mining past. And they say artist-designed rooms evoking a different decade. So they go into a little bit of detail on this one hotel in terms of the design of it. They don’t go into so much detail here about the food stalls and everything, but they do tell you this print workshop has…they say in parentheses, fine-art prints. And then this other print workshop has etchings, linocuts, or monotypes.

Moving on, the next real detail that we get is a little bit here, you can almost call this a detail about Bioscope as an indie cinema showing productions not available elsewhere in the country. But then here, this last bit, they go into quite a bit of details. They say it’s a 1950-style diner vibe with jam-jar cocktails and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. And then for something more home style, you can go to this other place for a type of barbecue where you choose your own steak chops or sausage for flame-grilling.

So the things that they go into detail on here, you could almost look at it that they’ve chosen a few attractions that they’ve gone…that they’ve explained to us a little more about that, and some are, to go to the next point that I asked you to look at which is the length, some are quite short. We’ve got fine-art prints, etching, linocuts, or monotypes. They spend a little bit more time here on the art hotel but still, all we get is art-designed rooms, renovated textile factory, celebrates gold-mining past, very short sentences there. Here at the end as I was saying, they spend a little more time, 1950-style diner vibe with jam-jar cocktails and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. That’s kind of the most detail that we get in this whole piece.

So if you were to take all of those things together on the whole and keeping in mind these little descriptors they’ve given us early on, crime-ridden past, drab industrial complex, you can see that they’ve set the scene. They’ve set this sort of before-and-after. So in the beginning, things are drab, you know, there’s crime, and then what do they show us? Then they show us things that are multicultural, this is on the one hand, and things that are blends of different…sometimes it’s different cultures and sometimes it’s just different inspiration points.

So this idea of Pata Pata which has…it’s got a 1950s diner but very modern jam-jar cocktails with an Afro-Caribbean rhythms. So by having those three very disparate things, we can triangulate within it this idea, and someone I know who has recently gone to Johannesburg was telling me about how cool it is and how there’s all these places. But to just tell somebody like, “Oh, you know, you would love Johannesburg. You should go there. There’s just a really cool culture there going on right now.” Versus saying, “Oh, yeah, there’s this place, Pata Pata, and they’ve got like a 1950 style diner vibe but they’ve got jam-jar cocktails, but then the music is Afro-Caribbean.” That is painting the picture and that’s why I think this one here where we get the most detail, it’s because in many ways, it’s the most illustrative of what the writer is trying to get across here. So we have a little that they go into on this 12 decades art hotel.

So 12 decades from the name, we get some kind of sense of time, and they explain that by saying that there’s 12 artist-designed rooms each invoking a different decade. So it’s got this sense already of mashup there because each of the rooms is a different decade, but I don’t find that as illustrative because they don’t really tell us what it looks like. They don’t say, for instance, the 1950s rooms has this, the 1970s room has that, and it’s because it’s not important. It’s not important in the same way that this more lengthy detail on Pata Pata is for showing us, really visually showing us how those mashups work. The things that they do show us a little more about the hotel is that it’s a renovated textile factory which ties into the gold-mining past. And then I thought it was interesting because I was thinking to myself, “Well, how do textiles tie into gold-mining?” And they didn’t explain that. They didn’t go into it.

So what they do say though is that they create the sense that they explored more here in the beginning of what it used to be, a drab industrial complex, and how people are now not obscuring that history, but celebrating it but in artistic ways. And then that leads into…you’ll notice when they talk about this market that they have, the Market on Main, at Arts on Main. This market, they say, it has cool street food stalls, fashion, and quirky design, but they do not tell you at all about the food styles or food stalls or the fashion. They give you examples of two local art shops that you can go to.

Now, this is really interesting because street foods are really hip. Most people would say here, they would dive into the street food, but instead, they save talking about food for the things that are very illustrative. They show this is what’s new but you can still get things that are more home-style. So here, rather than talk about the street food, there’s a flow. They’ve chosen to start with this hotel and that shows the art scene that’s going on. And then that runs into how you can get a taste of the art scene at this Market on Main, but for even more depth, they recommend the specific place and they tell you the type of art that’s being created there.

So this is the type of thing, again, where they could go into so much more detail on all of these things. So by seeing which things they have chosen to actually spend time going into detail on, that’s so important for us as writers to understand this especially in short pieces because there’s a reason that they’ve only gone into detail on some of these things and it’s because those things are the best illustrators of what they want to get across in their piece. And like I was mentioning earlier, I’m going to zoom out and take us to another article. But like I was mentioning earlier, this is really the answer to this struggle of what words do I put on the page? I say this occasionally, but there’s this idea that people take either 15 minutes to write a pitch or they take 2 hours. And the people who are taking two hours are spending a lot of that time figuring out what they should be writing rather than writing.

So if you can get over that hurdle of spending all that time figuring out what you should be writing by knowing because you know what your story is about before you even sit down to write that pitch, you save yourself not just time but also a lot of feelings of self-doubt, feeling like maybe this article isn’t going to work, all of these things. Actually, sorry, this wasn’t the one that I wanted to go into next. So after this, I want to go and have a look both in this magazine and I have a couple other magazines pulled up for us. It’s some other short articles.

Now, this is a section that we’ve looked at in the past, we’ve looked at this when we were talking about roundup sections. And so I want to show you this because it’s super-duper short. So it’s a really great example here, and this section is called My Bag, and you’ll see the down here at the bottom, she has details about or there’s more sort of textual information to line up to these images up here, but it’s inherently a roundup of what this particular person travels with. And it’s interesting because this top of the roundup, this intro that I’m trying to kind of highlight for you in a hopefully readable text size, this intro has to encompass so much.

So to go back to that idea of getting clear on what the article is about, what does this intro need to be? This intro needs to primarily tell us who this person is, why we care, and why we care about how she travels, maybe even why she travels so much, okay? So let’s have a look at it together. So Amanda Shires wrote most of her new album in her bedroom closet, piecing together lyric ideas taped to the walls. “I tried to write the songs in my study, but my two and a half year old daughter would hear me playing and wanted to play,” says shires. “I wasn’t getting a lot of work done.” Listening to ‘To the Sunset,’ out this month, one would never know it. The record blends Nashville soul with an edgy guitar and Shires’ poetic rhyme told from the female perspective. “I was able to communicate exactly what I wanted to say and accept myself more in the process,” says Shires, who is touring this fall.

So you’ll notice here, they didn’t go very deep on her relationship with travel, they’ve just shown it at the end, that she’s touring this fall. Now, with some people in this section, if for instance, for My Bag, they were doing maybe somebody who’s like a blogger who writes about the aviation industry, they’re probably going to focus more on that person traveling a lot, but in this case, because she has an album coming out, why you want to read this, they were focused much more on that in terms of why you care about this person.

It’s because not only does she have this new album and the album is great, but the album perhaps speaks to people who are in similar situations. So I think that quote about writing the songs in her study is really interesting because that goes back to that point that I was talking about, is why do we care about her? Why do we care about one more new album coming out? Why do we care what this person packs? You need to show her as a person as well to show why we care what she packs.

And so she paints this great picture, or rather, Matt paints this great picture with this quote of how she may be a singer/songwriter, but she’s still a mom with a young daughter who just like the rest of us can’t figure out always how to get their work done with family around. And so she literally had to lock herself in her bedroom closet to get it done. And then she kind of takes it further. Like let’s say you’re not a mom or let’s say you’re not a parent and that that doesn’t necessarily jive with you, then he goes deeper onto this idea of the female perspective. He doesn’t say the female respective on what though, which is interesting, and you could say in a certain way that it doesn’t matter because this next quote can endear her to the audience in a way where it doesn’t necessarily matter what it is about, it matters what her lyrics will do for the reader, and that’s illustrated by this quote which says what the lyrics do for her. She was able to communicate exactly what she wanted to say and accept herself more in the process.

So these are the things that the writer chose to include in this small space to get the point across and some of them we can think of as details, right? The bedroom closet, particularly this piecing together lyric ideas taped to the walls. That’s a number of words that I’m surprised, honestly, it’s still in here, but it paints this picture for you of this person in her closet like trying to figure out how her song works. It creates immediately an image for you that’s not your typical idea of the singer/songwriter. And then he expands on that in the piece.

And then what other details does he have in here? The record blends Nashville soul with an edgy guitar and Shires’ poetic rhyme. So that creates an image or I guess you could say a sound in your head of what she sounds like which also goes to show the same point, she isn’t your average singer/songwriter. And let’s look at the bottom here because I think this piece, since it’s touching very quickly on a lot of different products, is a really interesting way to look at how he’s shown details. And I know that I had to make it small to kind of fit the whole thing in the frame, so you might not see it quite as well.

So in this piece, they have an interesting way where they say the details on these kind of collection of items here which is that they sometimes use quotes and sometimes the writer out-and-out describes it. So let’s take a look here. So number one, her airport indulgence. I always have to get an Auntie Anne’s pretzel, the pretzel nuggets and the lemonade. Two, travel essential. Shout wipes. They’ll take everything from mustard to wine out of your clothes. Number three, inflight music. Petit Biscuit, Father John Misty, and Damien Jurado. Four, inflight reading. One book I’ve read recently is “Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel by George Saunders.” Five, favorite hotel. Soniat Hotel in New Orleans. The breakfast they bring you has homemade biscuits and preserves. Those biscuits are to die for.

Preferred outfit. I wear the Elizabeth cut Imogene plus Willie jeans, some kind of t-shirt and my Rick Owens leather biker jacket. Seven, inflight entertainment. I like to download shows on Netflix, and I recently watched “Minehunter.” Eight, unique travel item. A Microfleur, a microwave flower press. That just sounds really cool if you ask me. I get flowers and put them in this flower press and microwave it, and I glue them into my journal. Nine, favorite Nashville spot. 1892 restaurant in Leiper’s Fork, outside of Nashville. It’s warm and inviting.

So you’ll see here, as I was reading it, that much more so than up at the top, this is where they get really juicy and illustrative with details. So airport indulgence, she says she always has to have the pretzel, but then they add the pretzel nuggets and the lemonade. And so that’s the kind of thing where they could just say, “I always have to have an Auntie Anne’s pretzel,” but by being specific about her order and using that em dash, and saying, “And the lemonade,” that gets something across about her. Now, in the next one, there’s this really nice detail. They’ll take everything from mustard to wine out of your clothes. She can just say shout wipes, they take everything out of your clothes, but saying they take everything from mustard to wine out of your clothes, that is also showing a little bit about what this person eats, what this person thinks ends up on her clothes.

I really like this next one on number five as well where she’s talking about the hotel. She says that the breakfast that they bring you has homemade biscuits and preserves. So it’s not jam, it’s not just biscuits, it’s homemade and preserves. And then the next one about what she wears is very detailed. It is where the jeans come from, it’s not super clear on the t-shirt, but then it sounds like that’s because she’s not super clear on the t-shirt. And then exactly which biker jacket she is wearing. And then the unique travel item, I like this as well because she could just say a Microfleur microwavable flower press, but she doesn’t just tell you how it works. There’s also this detail here of she glues them into her journal and that also paints a picture for you of how this person travels and what this person is like.

So I feel like we should move from Delta Sky over into a different magazine just to give you kind of a taste of something different, but I want to just take a quick look. This section in Delta is called Time Out and it’s kind of a day-trip style thing. And if you’ll see, it’s very food-focused. And so I just want to take a relatively quick look through this one or at least the photos seem very food-focused. I want to take a quick look through this one because this particular thing in Delta Sky is always a really great example because if you’ll see here on the side, they’re shoving like four or five different places to visit into each of these tiny sections. So seeing what details they actually expand upon in this piece, I always find really illustrating.

So I just want to read the intro here, not necessarily because they use as many details here, but just so that we can see where they want to go in the piece. So the subhead here is you’ve got an extra day to check out the Evolving City, here’s what you do. More than Gangnam Style and DMZ trips, Seoul, South Korea, is a city of layers that’s celebrating its official 70th birthday this month. After all, this centuries-old metropolis only got its current name on August 15, 1948, the third anniversary of Korea’s National Liberation Day. From afar, Seoul is all plastic surgery clinics, Korean barbecue, and struggles with his northern brother. Scratch the surface, however, and there’s a city rediscovering its own history, questioning its gender roles, and serving up some incredibly delicious eats. An extra day in Seoul won’t get you to the core, but you can take the opportunity to peel away another layer.

Now, we’ll see that they did get into a little bit of…they did drop a couple details here. They included this interesting trifecta of plastic surgery, Korean barbecue, and struggles with its northern neighbor. Again, this trio of things here helps you triangulate interestingly between those things, but these are the parts that I’m going to zoom in here more so that they’re easier to see. These are the parts that I really want to dive into with you. This is where they really get some interesting detail.

Now, you notice they did say earlier about wrestling with gender roles and that seems to come up here in the bathhouse. I have no idea how to pronounce this, by the way. So start your day off clean with a trip to the jjimjilbang. Made famous in the West by Conan O’Brien, these Korean bathhouses are gender segregated and have changing stalls, showers, steam rooms, and baths of various temperatures. Siloam Sauna, near Seoul Station, is the city’s most conveniently located, and Dragon Hill Spa in Yongsan is likely the most beginner-friendly, but women should check out the female-only Spa Lei near Sinsa for the most high-end experience.

So you’ll see here, they didn’t give you a lot of details to show what’s different between these. They wanted to include different things and they’re very terse to let you know about why each of these is included. So this one is the most conveniently located, and this is the most beginner-friendly, and this is the most high-end experience. They don’t show you how because in a way, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re going to go to a bathhouse and you have no idea, they could give you the pros and the cons. You’re probably going to look it up yourself. But in the end, they’re kind of telling you, “This is an experience you should have, and these are what to go if you’re looking for different things,” but they’re not trying to sell you on any one particular type of experience. They go more into detail when they’re explaining what the bathhouses are like, that they’re gender-segregated and these are all of the different things that they include.

So let’s look at eat. Any Seoulite can tell you that the city’s best eats are found at downtown watering hole in the wall joints, or at downtown hole…I think there’s something weird with this sentence. Any Seoulite can tell you that the city’s best eats are found at downtown hole-in-the-wall joints, hole-in-the-wall joints. There should be dashes there. Spicy kimchi stew lovers can check out Gwanghwamun Jip, a spot that dates back to the 1980s, while cold noodle fans can put mul-naengmyun (buckwheat noodles in chilled broth) to the test at Eulji Myeonok. If you’re feeling extra adventurous, try getting a seat at Seoul’s most famous pork-back stew restaurant, Dongwon Jip.

So you can see here this interesting dichotomy between here and the second one here. They said if you’re feeling extra adventurous, you can try this, but they don’t give you too much detail on what it’s going to be like. Why is that? I think that as they put out there that this is something you need to be adventurous to eat, and so they don’t feel the need to convince you any further. If you’re adventurous, you might try it, if not, don’t worry about it. What they do go into more detail on here though is the kimchi stew and what the cold noodles are, and it’s interesting because you’ll notice that they say noodles here twice in one sentence which I find interesting. They say, well, cold noodle fans can try these at this place, and they give the Korean name, and then they also explain what they are.

And so I think that bit of detail is kind of telling and that they think that this is something that’s important to people coming to Korea, this is what they think people are going to be looking for, and so that’s why they particularly recommend these things, but you’ll notice even though these are hole-in-the-wall places, they don’t tell you how to find them also. For this piece which is all about suggesting things for you to do, it’s not important to give that level of service information.

Explore. After chowing down, explore some of Seoul’s hanok, a traditional Korean house, alleyways. A favorite tourist spot is Bukchon Hanok Village, but you can also find hanoks in the quiet, off-the-beaten-track neighborhoods like Naeja-dong. Have a coffee at a hanok/café Namusairo, sip on a drink at whiskey and cocktail bar at Cobbler, or try out Korean craft beer at The Hand and Malt Brewing Company taproom. If you take any one image of Seoul, it should be of the soft glow of a hanok at night.

I actually read a super-long article on the architecture of these hanoks and how they’re changing over time recently. So I happen to know what a hanok is, but it’s interesting because they don’t tell you. They don’t tell you here what it looks like, and I’m not even sure. They kind of have the edge of one here in this picture but they really don’t go into a lot of detail about what a hanok is and why you should care as they’re telling you all these places to go, but they do just tell you at the end that if there’s one image of Seoul you want to have, it’s of a hanok.

So like I said, the point of this piece is really to give you places to go and that’s why it’s interesting that they’re so sparing on details and where they choose to include them. They don’t explain to you at all what a hanok is, what it looks like, any of these things, but they do go I guess you could say kind of into detail about the fact that hanoks are into the quiet, off-the-beaten-track neighborhoods, but that’s really it here and that’s really illustrative that they don’t feel the need here to be descriptive about this. And this is important because I often see especially when people are working really hard in their writing on bridging that gap between being tight for magazines especially for short pieces in magazines and the way that they’ve written previously is a lot of sense of needing to explain these things. And sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. And so I really like this little miniature section here on being an example of the place where you don’t need to explain.

So there’s one more here and then I’ll just pop over to another magazine for us. So this is the party section. So dive into Itaewon’s nightlife scene where some of the world’s hottest clubs compete to throw the fiercest party. Three in vogue institutions: Cake Shop, Soap Seoul, and Contra, are guaranteed to show you a high time Thursday to Saturday, while B1 Lounge Club rages five nights a week.

Now, did they tell you here that Seoul is a place to experience the best clubs in the world? Did they tell you the type of musicians that are there, the DJ’s that are there rather? No. The details that they gave you are really just that they compete to throw the fiercest party, and that’s all you have to go on to create this whole picture in your head of what the parties at all of these different places are going to look like. So this, again, is why I really like the section, and I’ll tell you the name again. It’s called Time Out. This is why I really like this section for Time Out in terms of really showing you what you need to be mindful of in terms of…I’m going to switch over to Hemispheres now in the background as well, but what you need to be mindful of in terms of where you do use journalistic details and where you really shouldn’t because adding those extra things into those short pieces is not something that’s going to add to your space. It’s not going to add to what you have to do there.

So this is what I was talking about before, it’s a really interesting line in those short pieces of where do you expand and where do you not? And you have to choose. If you’re going to give a level of detail on any particular thing, that level of detail needs to tie into the point. It needs to tie into what you are trying to say in this piece. So I just want to give you…because we’re close to the end of our time, I just want to give you one example from Hemispheres. So I had a couple from here, but let’s look at these. Let’s look at this first one that I pulled up there and then we’re also going to come down and look at this Fountain Square in Indianapolis.

So this first one you’ll see here, it’s a section called The Shot. And so it’s really more about this photograph. So you can see that the shot goes on two pages so that we’re not necessarily seeing all of it in one frame and you also notice, this may or may not be a sponsored thing from this little California stamp here. So I’m going to make this a little bigger, and hopefully, you guys can see it and I’ll read it out as well.

So here at The Shot, they’re talking about the Perseids meteor showers light up the sky over California’s Anza-Borrego Desert. Every summer, as Earth passes through the trail of debris left behind by the Comet Swift-Tuttle, the spectacular Perseids meteor showers streak across the sky. During this year’s peak, on the night of August 12th, stargazers can expect to see as many as 50 to 100 meteors per hour. To create this dazzling composite image of the 2016 shower, photographer Everett Bloom spent the night in Borrego Springs, an International Dark-Sky Association-certified Dark Sky Community in Southern California’s Anza-Borrego Desert.

“I left the camera running all night to capture as many meteors as I could,” Bloom says. “The editing process took hours.” Adding to the landscape’s primordial feel are 130 giant metal sculptures by artist Ricardo Breceda, including this locust and scorpion, scattered throughout the area, near Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The Perseids are known for their “fireballs,” which last longer and burn brighter than a typical meteor strike, and this year’s shower is predicted to be particularly intense because it will occur near a new moon, meaning darker skies and brighter shooting stars.

So you’ll hear there was a lot of specificity in here. So they said that…they told you about why this happens in the beginning. They gave you the name of the comet and they told you that we’re going through to the debris left by this comet, and they told you how many meteors per hour you can expect to see during this year’s shower, and of course, what day it’s going to be. And then, like I said, this column is called The Shot.

So then as they talked about the shot, they say it’s a dazzling composite image. They say what year it is. They say the name of the photographer. And they say that in order to get it, he not just spent the night at this place, but they said in Borrego Springs, an International Dark-Sky Association-certified Dark Sky Community, and where it is, in Southern California’s Anza-Borrego Desert. That’s a lot of words there. That’s like two and a half lines just to tell you where this is.

And so why did they choose to go into all that detail? Just to show that having the dark sky is important and that you too can probably find a Dark Sky Association-certified Dark Sky Community. And then they’ve got a quote about how he got the shot which is quite short. He left the camera running all night, the editing process took hours, that’s it. That’s all we hear from the photographer, but how he got the shot. But then they go into more detail about these sculptures, and I’m not surprised because these sculptures are really interesting.

So they say there’s 130 of them and they’re giant, but notice, they don’t say how big, and why is that? Probably because they’d have to say like they range up to this or they go from this to this or some may be this. And those words aren’t important. They just need to say that there’s 130 of them and that they’re giant. And they tell you that what you’re seeing is a locust and a scorpion. And then again, they talk about where it is that you’re seeing them in case you are a person who wants to go and find them. And then they go back to more service element.

They say the Perseids are known for their fireballs. So they use the name here and they explain to you what that means, and they say also that this year’s shower will be particularly intense because it’ll occur near a new moon. And then they open up to what that means, meaning darker skies and brighter shooting stars.

So in this tiny bit which is definitely less than 200 words, they’ve gone through why the meteor shower happens, why it will be best this year, what you can expect to see this year, recommendations of where to see it, telling you how somebody got this particular shot, telling you what are some other benefits of going and seeing it in this particular place. They’ve accomplished a lot. But as I just went through and told you what each of these sentences did, I hope that you can see how you knowing that you want to cover those things, can yourself put together these sentences and see exactly which details you need to expand upon there.

So I don’t think we quite have time to go through the next one, but I’ll just tell you which issue of Hemispheres this is so that you can look back at that, and I’ll also tell you which issue of Delta Sky that we looked at. So this issue of Hemispheres that we looked at, this is the August 2018 issue, and the Delta Sky that we looked at is also the August 2018 issue. And I downloaded both of these online and you can find in the Travel Magazine database a direct link to read full issues online for any of these magazines or other magazines that we have as well.