THE FREE LANCE

by Tabitha M. Powledge

How to Write a Book, or a Mint is Not a Gold Mine

There were no chandeliers in the plain small classroom not far from downtown Berkeley. But if chandeliers there had been, science writers would have been swinging from them. The draw was a panel of seasoned authors collected for the Feb. 15 NASW workshop optimistically titled, "From Fuzzy Notion to Bestseller: How to Mint a Good Book." Heaven knows we are all chockablock with fuzzy notions-one of which is that it would be cool to write a bestseller.

The discussion was, as they say, wide-ranging. But two topics wove in and out: Do you need an agent? and Is there a surefire formula for a book proposal? To which the answers were, respectively, Yes and No.

Can You Sell a Book Without an Agent?

"Don't even think about it," said Laurie Garrett. We all love Laurie Garrett because she's a past president of NASW. But she is better known as a science and medical writer for Newsday; as author of Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Public Health (a nominee last year for the National Book Critics Circle award); as author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance; and, her book publicity notes, as the only writer ever to be awarded all three of the Big "Ps" of journalism: The Peabody, The Polk (twice), and The Pulitzer.

If Garrett doesn't have clout in the publishing world, who does? And yet, she reported, her agent is still arguing with her publisher about marketing of The Coming Plague, which came out in 1994. "You need an agent to get you through what's happening in the book world. Your editor can be gone, the whole division can be gone." Tell me about it. Tell far too many of us about it.

She also urged writers to jettison the fantasy that a book might make money. "That's utterly ridiculous. Most books don't make money," Garrett said. Real money, she pointed out, is made off second- and third-hand spinoffs from the book. Authors tend to focus on the upfront advance, a rational notion for those who realize that they can't write if their computers won't function, and their computers won't function unless the electric bill gets paid. But, Garrett advised, you are likely to make more from royalties, foreign rights, video rights, and the like. Read the fine print, and build in your expenses.

"Fights with your editor may arise, but it's not the editor who is your enemy, it's your publisher," she warned. All marketing-and of course all rights-must be stipulated in the contract. "If they're not in the contract, you're screwed and shouldn't sign."

Hired as copy chief at Wired, Constance Hale quickly got to work compiling a style sheet. The result was calls from editors all over country seeking Wired's take on digerati lingo. "So I thought this would be a good book idea," she said. "I wasn't a writer covering a hot story, but I felt there was a market."

Wired thought so too, and started a book division to publish it. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age did well. Hale says it was an accidental best-seller, but the decision sounds less haphazard than she implied. The book cornered the market, so much so that it had to be updated three years later. The thing no one told her was that she absolutely must have an agent because she was negotiating with a publisher who was also her boss. Her most recent book is Sin and Syntax : How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose-and it was published elsewhere.

Keay Davidson, a science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle with three books behind him and another in the oven, agreed that an agent is crucial, if only to warn you of land mines. "Also, a good one will ride on your back like a hippo and see that you actually write one." Writers often say, he noted, "It wasn't until I got an agent that I had the discipline to make it work."

Davidson is co-author (with physicist George Smoot) of Wrinkles in Time. He recounted the Smoot collaborative experience in NASW's book A Field Guide for Science Writers, edited by Deborah Blum and Mary Knudson (available through http://nasw.org/bookstore/). His second was a little book about tornado research, Twister: The Science of Tornadoes and the Making of an Adventure Movie. The quickie tie-in with the Steven Spielberg/Michael Crichton movie "was the best experience I ever had." His third, Carl Sagan: A Life, was a biography of the planetary astronomer and very public scientist, and raised questions about science as the royal road to truth. He's now at work on a biography of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science who single-handedly burdened everyday language with the long-lived buzzword "paradigm." It is his most intellectually challenging project to date, Davidson said, "for which I have no qualifications at all."

How to find a good agent? According to Hale, most agents say they are more interested in a particular author than in a particular book; they want to build a long-term relationship with a writer and sell a string of successful books. It helps to have several ideas, she noted; that showed that she was serious about writing. She looked for an agent who would be an advocate for her, and advises hopeful authors to use everybody you know to meet agents.

Yet agents have been known to blow it. John Travis, long a fixture at Science News, organized the panel with Deborah Franklin, long a fixture at Health magazine, who departed for Fortune a few months ago. Travis is now at work on a book about genetics that was suggested to him by an agent. But he was ignorant about the process, he said, which is why he's now on the hook for 75 illustrations, an expensive misery. His agent, he said ruefully, should have kept this from happening.

It's best to have an agent based in New York City, Garrett said. To find one, look at your favorite books to see if certain agents are acknowledged repeatedly. There are also "little publishing mafias-gay, feminist, young and hip, former broadcasters." It helps, she advised, to check up on the personal life of your agent and editor and find out which cliques they belong to. Also think about whether you want a young, hungry agent or an established older one who has been around the block. The young ones, she said, sometimes know the same tricks as the great masters.

Blake Edgar pointed out that some agents don't take new clients without referrals. It could also, he said, be a good strategy to shop for an editor rather than an agent. Edgar has not generated his own book ideas, but rather has specialized in collaborations with scientists. Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins, the companion volume for the Nova series on PBS, with paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, taught him a lesson learned painfully by many writers: don't count on your collaborator to do much. Collaborators apparently can reform, however. For his second with Johanson, From Lucy to Language, the work load was split 50-50, and he and his co-author traded drafts of essays. The Dawn of Human Culture, with anthropologist Richard G. Klein, is scheduled to appear in August.

And how about agent ethics? What, for example, are the chances that an agent will give your idea to another author? Davidson dismissed the worry that someone will steal your idea. Said Hale, "You have to trust people."

How to Write a Book Proposal

Garrett sought to dispose of the myth that there is a magic proposal format that will have publishers duking it out to acquire your book. She looked at lots of other proposals while trying to sell The Coming Plague, but still ended up rewriting her proposal 27 times. She succeeded eventually by studying her many rejection letters and realizing they all gave the same reason for saying no: AIDS books don't sell. All the editors had perceived the project as a book about AIDS because the first anecdote was about AIDS. She rewrote the proposal once more, this time downplaying AIDS and Africa. "And that's when it sold."

Nor can you float serenely above the dirty business of marketing. Today's publishing industry is a mess, she warned. The critical question about your book: Is this a salable idea? "The only thing on anybody's mind is sales," she observed. "You need to understand that your writing is a commodity, because the editor has to commission books that sell." (For an eyeful of the detail that goes into book marketing, take a look at www.lauriegarrett.com.)

Garrett is a rich source of horror stories and cautionary tales. With The Coming Plague, prospective editors subjected her to intensive interrogation, telling her she had no credibility and demanding a scientist co-author. She recounted how one top-level publisher whose name shall go unmentioned by me (although Garrett disclosed it with evident pleasure) stripped her name off her proposal and sent it, verbatim, to a scientist-with an invitation to write the book himself.

Edgar concurred with Garrett that there's no magic formula for a successful proposal; indeed, "Every agent and editor has a different perspective." Sometimes you can break through with only a page or so, but sometimes a successful proposal is very long. "It's a sales pitch, a query letter writ large." You must state your case, show how an area is going to unfold, explain why your book is unique and its competitors don't count, portray yourself as the perfect person to write it. Now an editor at the University of California Press, Edgar says what he wants from prospective authors is an annotated Table of Contents, but many books get sold without that.

Hale wrote the proposal for her book by the book, the book being How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen. She reported that she followed Larsen's advice exactly, including working very hard on the opening anecdote. When an editor told her it was the best book proposal he'd ever seen, she thought, "He hasn't read the Larsen book. I was really embarrassed." Her conclusion: "This is no testament to me, but a testament to the fact that most people don't do their homework." Bolster your pitch with a sales handle and a marketing survey. Especially if you are just starting out, it makes sense to write that bang-up book proposal.

In short, Hale concluded, there really are no rules for putting together a successful book proposal. Not everybody needs to write a sample chapter, although you do need to do a ton of research. Garrett advised starting with a magazine assignment, and using that to finance your research. Then attach the article to your proposal.

Must an author adhere to the outline as specified in the proposal? Edgar said he would expect the manuscript to differ somewhat from the original outline, and as an editor wouldn't hold that against an author, especially if he was warned what was coming. But, he cautioned, it pays to put a lot of work into the proposal and chapter outline.

Drive, She Said

Davidson noted that a lot of would-be authors have an idea they think about for years, but they haven't really worked out the structure of how to present the idea. One reason they can't get started is because they don't know where they're headed. "Take a weekend off and think," he urged. Or do as author and screenwriter Joan Didion advises: drive. You will be amazed, he said, at the insights that come to you when you turn off and let ideas just happen.

The problem with his Sagan book, Davidson recounted, was that the astronomer lived the lives of ten people. Davidson wanted to write a definitive biography, but that was impossible. To do biography, you must have a theory of the person who is your subject, he said. "It brought up issues for me about science writing that I was wrestling with," he recalled. "I took many Didion Drives-but perhaps not as many as I should have." He recalled waking up at three in the morning thinking he was having a stroke, when what he really needed was a bottle of Xanax. "It's important to be proud of what works, but you have to know what didn't. And then the next book will be perfection."

"Do not think this is fun," Garrett counseled. "You get through it because you have passion about the subject." You definitely must have passion in order to ride out this long process, Edgar agreed.

"What," someone in the audience wanted to know, "is so painful about writing a book?"

Garrett described the process as the loneliest exercise there is, and said an author must be able to tolerate that loneliness. It's not just that you're by yourself, it's that ultimately the information can't be shared with anybody. "When you hit a stumbling block, it's all inside of you." Garrett doesn't do Didion Drives because she lives in Brooklyn rather than Didion's haunt, Los Angeles. But she does retreat to a favorite spot under the Brooklyn Bridge. Be prepared for the fact that book gestation-and its attendant loneliness-can last a long time; her second book took only five years to write, but the first one took ten.

Edgar pointed out that it's hard to maintain momentum and really easy to procrastinate. His advice: "Allow more time than you think you need."

Hale warned against getting sucked into a romantic notion of waiting for inspiration when writing a book. "To me what worked is turning it into a job," she said. But don't do it on top of a full time job. Write from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., then go to the gym. Her Didion Drives took the form of swimming. "Things come clear in the pool. Then take a nap. It's a serious project with specific goals, a timetable, and a routine."

Sometimes the routine is imposed by circumstances. Garrett has repetitive stress injury that keeps her from using a computer. So she writes in longhand and spends a significant chunk of her advances paying people to type for her. The silver lining is that she then must keep her typists supplied with material, which imposes a schedule, a daily cycle with a built-in deadline. "My brain is too fried to write at night, but I can do editing then," she said. "There may be days where everything is garbage, but I must have a regular output, so it's best to say here's my schedule and make it."

Toward the end of the session, no one had yet asked the question that has always been central for me: How do you support yourself while you're taking a year, or five, or ten, to write that book you're so passionate about? So I asked it, pointing out that most of us can't command advances amounting to anything like a living wage, or even gas money for those Didion Drives. I'm not nearly so concerned about the pain of lonely creation as I am about the pain of going groceryless.

It may be possible to spin off some of your book research into articles, although Garrett cautioned against irking your publisher by peddling the good stuff. And even if you can sell some pieces, that's unlikely to be serious money. So on this topic of what to live on-which for me is much more basic even than finding an agent or writing a persuasive proposal-the panel was not particularly helpful.

Except, perhaps, by example. It seemed to me noteworthy that all of the panel authors had jobs. This was true even of Hale, who had advised against juggling a job and a book. Her secret: win a fellowship from the state by getting laid off. You can collect unemployment compensation-and even keep your medical insurance-while you beaver away on your book. She likes this method so much she's done it twice.

In short, none of these authors is a full-time freelance. Which seems to suggest that, if you are one, and you are truly passionate about writing a book, you must close up your home office and find a job. Even if only for long enough to qualify for unemployment.

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Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org.